home / subscribe / about us / books /events / archives / search / links /

Today's Stories July 31, 2007 Kathy Kelly Dancing in the Darkness: the Story of Abu Mahmoud Joe DeRaymond The Republic of Death? Ramzy Baroud Bush's Real Agenda in Palestine   July 30, 2007 Marjorie Cohn: Independent Counsel Time Patrick Cockburn Four Million Iraqis on the Run Peter Quinn Irish in America Uri Avnery A Warning to Tony Blair John Ross Zapatista Intergalatica Lands on Earth Ron Jacobs Free the San Francisco 8 David Vest Farewell, Old Friend: Another Legend of the Blues is Gone Jeffrey St. Clair T99 Nelson: Seduced by a Legend of the Blues Website of the Day Collateral Repair Project   July 28 / 29, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Now the NYT is Selling "Bloodbath" as a Rationale to Stay in Iraq Ralph Nader Rotten Justice Robert Fantina American Lies and Iraqi Nationalism Fred Gardner Prohibitionists Attack, Reformers Fundraise   Yves Engler Handwashing and the Bottomline   July 27, 2007 John Ross Bombing Pemex--or Not? Arthur Neslen Gaza was a Gas for Blair Dave Lindorff Declaring the US a Battlefield: Martial Law is Now a Real Threat Julene Blair The Environmentalist Within Christopher Brauchli Bush Uses Children as Shock Troops in His War on Socialized Medicine Jesse Hagopian Fund the Wounded, Not the War Charles Modiano Manufacturing a Villain: Sports Illustrated's Vilification of Barry Bonds Bill Day The Hollow Environmentalism of Leonardo DiCaprio Walter Brasch Leaders Afraid to Lead M.D. Mitchell Farm Based Camps Website of the Day Fighting Sarcoma   July 26, 2007 Kathleen Christison The Siren Song of Elliot Abrams Andy Worthington Why the Pentagon's Gitmo Study is a Joke Clancy Chassay How the Bush White House Seeks to Destroy Lebanon Marjorie Cohn Showdown Over Executive Privilege Susie Day Apartheid Americana David Price Tour de Witch Hunt: Drugs, Diaries and Purges Marie Trigona Argentina's "Dirty War" Crimes Trial: The Torturer Priest Norman Solomon Media Spin on Iraq: We're Leaving (Sort Of) William S. Lind How to Win in Iraq Natsu Saito Ward Churchill and the Regents at the University of Colorado John Stauber Netroots and the Iraq War: Does Ending It Matter to Them Anymore? Website of the Day Sticking It to the Man   July 25, 2007 Andy Worthington Gains and Losses at Gitmo Gary Leupp Bush Speechwriter, Michael Gerson, Calls for Attack on Syria Ray McGovern The Sad Decline of John Conyers Dr. Susan Block Bonobo Bashing in the New Yorker Joshua Frank Hillary's Neocon: the Imperial Vision of Richard Holbrooke Tina Richards What Harry Reid Doesn't Know About His Own Bill Ben Terrall Indonesia's Bloody Brand of CounterTerrorism Farzana Versey God Acquitted!: Lessons from the Case of Darwood Ibrahim Mohammad Ali Salih A Bomb in My Briefcase? Laura Carlsen A Strange Homecoming: Reflections on the First US Social Forum Ron Jacobs Come to Kennebunkport! Sunsara Taylor Knocked Up is F**ked Up Website of the Day Wal-Mart's Flip Flops: Feet Killers July 24, 2007 Saul Landau How to Walk in Bushtime Kathy Kelly The Plight of Iraqi Refugees in Jordan Russell Mokhiber The Michael Vick / George Bush Thing M. Shahid Alam Islam Now, China Then Patrick Cockburn and Anne Penketh Meeting in Baghdad Dave Lindorff Overcoming John Conyers Binoy Kampmark You Tube You Can't: Failure of a Medium Richard Neville Murdoch's Transplant: a Warning to the Wall Street Journal Cindy Sheehan We Must Move Beyond Politics as Usual Evelyn Pringle Anti-Depressants and Birth Defects: Why is the CDC Downplaying the Risks? Norman Solomon Media Corrections We'd Like to See CP Newswire Reading Harry Potter Not Sinful Website of the Day Sea Islands Black Heritage Festival   July 23, 2007 Andy Worthington Narcolepsy on Gitmo Detainees Uri Avnery A Trap for Fools Patrick Cockburn Turkish Prime Minister Threatens to Invade Northern Iraq Sousan Hammad The Children Without a Title John Walsh Todd Gitlin's Nader Fixation Harvey Wasserman Spinning Kashiwazaki: PR Flacks Rush to Aid of Crippled Nuke Martha Rosenberg The Life and Times of a Hog-Hanging Farmer Collin Baber Here Come the MRAPs: Resurrecting Apartheid Armor for Iraq Reza Fiyouzat Iran's Forgotten Anti-Nuke Movement Stephen Lendman Saving a President: Scare-Mongering and Executive Orders Website of the Day The Port Huron Project   July 21 / 22, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Giuliani and the Dogs of War Werther How to Read a National Intelligence Estimate Ralph Nader Atomic Blowback David Keen Buy Hard: How to Sell an Endless War Fred Gardner Karl Rove, Pothead: When Good Drugs Happen to Bad People Gary Leupp Edelman's Edict: Is Hillary "Reinforcing Enemy Propaganda?" Robert Fantina Fear in Iraq Saker The Future of Palestine: an Interview with Jonathan Cook Rannie Amiri Nasrallah in the Crosshairs: How will the Third Lebanon War Start? Mike Whitney The Crisis in Hedgistan Dr. Susan Rosenthal, MD The Hidden Injuries of Powerlessness: Linking Alienation and Dissociation Monica Benderman Facing the Truth Dan Bacher Deltagate: the Politics of Fish Kills Michael Baney Fujimori's Long Race From Justice Missy Beattie Here, There and Everywhere Ron Jacobs Tremble, Tyrants Adam Engel Radical Language: an Introduction Thomas Naylor California Split: an Open Letter to Schwarzenegger Poets' Basement Landau, Ford and Engel Website of the Weekend Surge in Action   July 20, 2007 Eliza Szabo Fatal Neglect: Civilian Casualties in Afghanistan Pam Martens Doctoring the News: CNN's Sanjay Gupta, Laura Bush and Merck Alan Farago Winners and Losers in the Housing Market Crash Harvey Wasserman Lies and Leaks: The Earthquake That Screamed "No Nukes!" Marjorie Cohn Iraqis will be the Deciders Dave Zirin White Noise and the Black Athlete Anthony DiMaggio American Public Opinion and Israel Scott Liebertz Oaxaca on Edge Linn Washington, Jr. British Cops Assault Rape Allegations Bill Piper / Anthony Papa Flying High?: The Political Junkets of Bush's Drug Czar Ramzy Baroud Bush's War Policy: When Time Heals Nothing Website of the Day The Prankster Art of Mark Jenkins   July 19, 2007 Patrick Cockburn The Next Invasion of Iraq Remi Kanazi Is This Ben Gurion or Hell?: a Palestinian Adventure Through Israel's Largest Airport Winslow T. Wheeler The Surging Costs of the Iraq War Sharon Smith Democrats and Health Care: Behind the Rhetoric Dave Lindorff Killing Cabbies in Iraq Conn Hallinan Have Gun, Will Travel: Mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan D. K. Wilson The Michael Vick Case Pulls Back the Veil on Who We Really Are Joshua Frank Democrats as Leviathan: Another Step Toward War with Iran Norman Solomon The Ghost of Wayne Morse Russell Hoffman Rattling the Reactor: Quakes, Fires and Leaks at the World's Largest Nuke Ray McGovern Bush's Wooden Headedness Kills Website of the Day Protesting Power July 18, 2007 Brenda Norrell Spy Towers on the US Border Col. Dan Smith How the US Could "Lose" Saudi Arabia Martha Rosenberg Lord of Crookharbour: the Trial of Conrad Black Conn Hallinan Bombing and Spraying Afghanistan Binoy Kampmark The SIM Card Terror Case Patrick Bond / Rehana Dada Who Killed Sajida Khan? Tom Johnson The Long Road ... to Nowhere Paul Craig Roberts A Free Press or a Ministry of Truth? Bob Quellos Pushing the Poor Out of House and Home Felice Pace Falling for Lieberman's Iran Resolution Robert Weissman National Health Insurance: More Humane and More Efficient CP Newswire Shocking Report Showing Involvement of US Psychologists in Torture Website of the Day Gilad Atzmon Live!   July 17, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Just Another Day in Iraq: 100 Fathers, Mothers and Children Killed Marjorie Cohn Out of Control: Executive Power Plays Evelyn Pringle Inside Bush's FDA David Rosen Moral Hypocrisy on the Hill: the Christian Right, Sexual Scandal and the Pleasures of the Courtesan Susan Miller Width Matters: Displacement and Israel's Wall Franklin Lamb Did the UN Cave to Israel on Lebanon's Shabaa Farms? Don Monkerud Considering Victory in Iraq Harvey Wasserman Nuclear Surge Russell Hoffman Japan Dodges a Radioactive Bullet Dave Lindorff Feingold Turns to Dross Dave Zirin Reclaiming Sports as True Fiction Website of the Day Che at the UN: 1964   July 16, 2007 Gary Leupp Cheney Urges Bush to Strike Iran Ellen Cantarow The Untold Story of Iraqi Women Paul Craig Roberts Impeach Now Allan J. Lichtman The D.C. Madam's Public Service Dan Bacher Cheney and the Klamath: Was the Veep Behind the Nation's Worst Salmon Kill? Patrick Cockburn The Killing of Khalid W. Hassan Manuel Garcia, Jr. Property is Racism James Brooks AIPAC and Mahmoud Abbas: the Undemocratic Road to Defeat Liaquat Ali Khan The Judicial Crisis in Pakistan Julie Flint Suleiman Jamous in Limbo Website of the Day Free Suleiman Jamous!   July 14 / 15. 2007 Alexander Cockburn Support Their Troops? Andy Worthington Gitmo's Tangled Web: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Majhid Khan, Dubious US Convictions and a Dying Man Ralph Nader Lawlessness, Waste and Incompetence Robert Fantina The Illegalities of the Iraq War Ron Jacobs Architecture as Military Strategy Joshua Frank Eat, Fight, Screw, Pray: An Interview with Joe Bageant Conn Hallinan Guns, Foundations and Free Trade: How the Right Targets Africa Dr. Susan Rosenthal, MD War and Dissociation John Ross No En Nuestro Nombre!: a Letter to the Mexican Antiwar Movement Fred Gardner Who's Afraid of Cannabidiol? Rannie Amiri A Primer on Israeli Doublespeak Charles Modiano ESPN's Rap Sheet: Pacman as Black Man Anthony DiMaggio America's Parochial Press China Hand Executive Orders and Coercive Diplomacy Missy Comley Beattie Reprobate Rhetoricians Dr. James J. Murtagh, Jr. Harry Potter Battles Big Brother Kenneth Rexroth On Thomas More's "Utopia" Poets' Basement Engel, Davies and Orloski Website of the Weekend GOP Sex Hypocrites: a Slideshow

July 31, 2007 ARENA's New Crackdown on Dissent in El Salvador Return to the Republic of Death? By JOE DeRAYMOND On July 2, the Salvadoran organization CRIPDES (Association of Rural Communities for the Development of El Salvador) planned a demonstration in Suchitoto, El Salvador, to protest a proposed privatization of the national water system. As some of the group’s leaders were approaching the town before the start of the demo, they were pulled over by a truck full of police, put to the ground and arrested. Soon, the protesters who had gathered with their signs, banners and hopes were assaulted by police in riot gear - rubber bullets and tear gas were fired into the crowd, and the streets of Suchitoto became toxic, chaotic, militarized with jeeps and the sound of helicopters. (There are You Tube videos online that document the brutality and arbitrary nature of the police violence.) In all, 14 people were arrested. They were not brought before a normal Salvadoran Judge, however. The Salvadoran government used the Special Law Against Acts of Terrorism, passed in September 2006, to prosecute the protesters. They were brought before a Special Tribunal Court, created by the Special Law, on July 7, and 13 of the 14 were ordered held for up to 90 days while they are being investigated for crimes of terror. The 13 were released as of July 26, on the conditions that they not leave the country or change their residence. They must report to the Tribunal every 15 days. The ironies of this type of criminal prosecution are profound. For the Salvadoran government to cite civilian protesters for acts of terrorism in planning and holding a water privatization demonstration is the height of opportunism and cynicism. This is a government that has prospered on State terrorism for decades, and is still ruled by a political party based on the use of terror. I visited El Salvador in March of this year, to participate in the Rutilio Grande Delegation sponsored by the Center for Exchange and Solidarity (CIS). The focus of the delegation was to join with Salvadorans to commemorate the assassination of Rutilio Grande, which occurred March 8, 1977. Rutilio was a Catholic priest, a mentor and friend of Archbishop Oscar Romero. He was shot down with two friends on a road between Aguilares and El Paisnal, one of a series of assassinations of priests who were working with the poor and for social justice in the spirit of Medellin 1968. In March of 1980, the Archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Romero, was assassinated by a hitman hired by rightwing leaders including Roberto D’Aubuisson. In Romero’s last homily, he made this famous call for an end to institutionalized violence, which sealed his fate, "In the name of God, in the name of this long-suffering people whose ever more tumultuous cries go up to the Heavens, I call on you, I beg you, I order you to stop the repression." The decade of the 70’s in El Salvador was marked by demands by the poor and the middle class for fair elections, economic justice and an end to the military rule of an oligarchy that had held absolute power since the independence of the nation. Romero was a leader who stood up for the poor, and admonished the ruling class to accept social change. He was a leader who could have brought together a nation on the verge of total conflict. Instead, his death brought the conflagration of civil war and a wave of violence difficult to imagine. In the four years surrounding Romero’s death, 1979 – 1983, 40,000 Salvadorans were murdered by death squads, and in the decade from 1979-1989, 80,000 in total were killed, in a nation with a population of about 5 million. The architects of this massacre were the founders of the ARENA Party, (Alianza Republicana Nacionalista) formed in 1979 to provide political cover for a death squad program. To this day, ARENA controls the economy and the government of El Salvador. Death squads were formed out of military units, dressed as civilians and kidnapped, tortured, disappeared, not just individuals, but in massacres. Roberto D’Aubuisson was the leader, the face of ARENA, but there were other founders, such as David Ernesto Panamá Sandoval, who served as the Salvadoran Ambassador to Paraguay. (A web search shows that Panamá values highly a signed autograph from General Alfredo Stroesner to himself and his good friend Roberto D’Aubuisson. He was in a car with Somoza just 12 hours before it was blown to smithereens with the dictator inside.) ARENA is very much a creature of Reagan anti-communism. The ARENA Party even named itself after Reagan’s Republican Party, in honor of their shared struggle against communism at any cost to humanity. The death squad policy of ARENA was an open secret in Washington and was carried out with the knowledge and cooperation of the highest levels of the United States government. The Reagan State Department routinely certified the human rights behavior of murderers and torturers. Reagan appointees and surrogates, including staffers John Carbaugh and Christopher Manion in the office of Jesse Helms, and Margo Carlisle of the office of Senator James McClure maintained close contact with death squad leader Roberto D’Aubuisson. These policies were brought to the attention of the United States press and public. Journalists like Allen Nairn in the Progressive, Christopher Dickey in The New Republic, Craig Pyes in the Albequerque Journal and many others brought the reality of the death squads to light in comprehensive fashion. Today, these articles are still being published in El Salvador, in a widely available book titled simply, “Death Squads”. D’Aubuisson died in 1992, of esophogeal cancer, but his legacy is front and center in El Salvador. ARENA sustains an official cult of this murderer. His picture is diplayed proudly at all ARENA functions, and recently a monument was erected to him in Antiguo Cuscutlan, the oldest part of San Salvador. In 2006, the ARENA majority in the National Assembly tried to have the leader of the death squads named an “hijo meritisimo”, the highest honor that can be granted by the government to an individual. The proposal drew such protest that it had to be withdrawn. As the murderous decade of the 80’s is glorified by the ARENA government, the killing in El Salvador continues. During the the 1990’s, there were more deaths than during the war years of the 1980’s, as the rate of homicides per 100,000 stayed above 100 and reached 140 in the middle part of the decade. In 2005, the homicide rate was 59 per 100,000, an epidemic of murder. Last year, I followed a blog, called “100 Diás en la Republica de la Muerte” (100 Days in the Republic of Death). Each day for 100 days, from September 1 to December 10, Mayra Barraza collected the day’s news stream of murder and wrote a meditation and remembrance on that day. It is a moving document to reality, a recognition that policies of murder still exist in El Salvador. The murder rate, this year, in La Libertad (a city on the Pacific Coast known for its superb surfing) is 83 per 100,000; in the Capital, San Salvador, 65 per 100,000, according to a March 18, 2007 article in La Prensa Grafica, “La Libertad Surpasses Sonsonate in Homicides”. The country is awash with weaponry and has extremely lax requirements for purchasing guns. It is one of the largest importers of pistols from the United States. When did the war end? The simple answer is that it did not end. Murder and crime permeate the society, and impunity still reigns, as very few crimes are ever solved and brought to justice, as was the case during the years of the death squads, when the United States was pouring $1 million a day into the military that was committing massacres such as El Mozote. In May of this year, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) released a report, “The Police, Prosecutorial, and Judicial Defiencies Responsible for Impunity in Investigation and Trial”. The UN group studied 1020 homicides in 2005, of which only 145 reached the court system, and in only 39 of these cases was any one brought to justice. Within this wave of crime, generated by the availability of weapons, unemployment, poverty, the consequences of a culture steeped in the violence of the civil war and the death squad years, there exists the structures of the death squads and the political impetus that created them. Political assassinations are still occurring, as happened with the torture and murders, in Suchitoto one year ago, of the parents of Marina Manzanares, known as “Mariposa (Butterfly)”, a voice of Radio Venceremos and a founder of the Museum of the Image and Word. Another suspected political assassination occurred in September of 2006, the brutal killing of Catholic priest Ricardo Antonio Romero, found bludgeoned to death on a roadway 40 miles west of San Salvador. The ARENA government of 2007 aligns itself completely with the Bush agenda, both economically and in the War against Terror. El Salvador adopted the dollar in 2001, despite the cost to the economy as it dealt with two earthquakes that ravaged the poor population. The architect of this “dollarization” was Juan José Daboub, who later became a key aide to Paul Wolfowitz during his abbreviated tenure at the World Bank. El Salvador adopted CAFTA, and in the first year of its implementation it has cost this poor nation 70,000 small farmers. ARENA President Tony Saca sends about 400 soldiers to fight in the war and occupation in Iraq, where several have died. ARENA has donated the sovereignty of a nation to the United States, and the result is not surprising. About 700 people a day flee El Salvador, the ravaged economy, the crime, the murder, and join the great emigration to the United States. And now, CRIPDES demonstraters have been deemed “terrorists” for organizing, peacefully, in a way that should be acceptable in a democracy, against the theft of water from the population. President Tony Saca leads this small nation in the footsteps of Bush. He is an architect of the “mano dura” approach to crime, which results in attacks against gang members, youth with tattoos, as assassins walk free. He allows demonstraters to be arrested as terrorists, using extraordinary powers granted the State under the guise of a war against terror, while the real terror has been institutionalized in his own party. The Interamerican Court of Human Rights has made rulings that ARENA must atone for specific, individual crimes, such as the murder of Romero, and the murders of Ernestina y Erlinda Serrano Cruz. Saca’s government responds with moves to canonize the murderers, rather than bring justice to victims. In El Salvador, the War against Terror has been a war against a civilian population for decades. The opposition FMLN (Frente Faribundo Marti para la Liberación Nacional) is building toward the 2009 elections, when it is likely that popular television journalist Mauricio Funes will be their candidate for President. ARENA has managed to manipulate the Supreme Electoral Tribunal to separate the municipal and presidential elections, which will present difficulties for the opposition, since it means that there will be 2 campaigns, one in January and another in March, instead of one combined election in March. ARENA’s unlimited ability to spend money gives them a big advantage in this scenario. Salvadoran civil society needs the support of the international community to demand accontability and justice from the ARENA government. As Leslie Schuld, Director of the CIS, states, “The situation with the Suchitoto arrests is worrisome because basic human rights are being violated, and this was one of the causes of the armed conflict, the civil war. No space was being provided for peaceful and democratic change. People are standing up for their rights, and deserve the space to legitimately protest government policies.” Joe DeRaymond, who writes from the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, on the website Lehigh Valley Independent Press, www.lvindependent.org, can be reached at jderaymond@rcn.com

New FromCounterPunch Books HOW THE IRISH INVENTED SLANG By Daniel Cassidy   Now Available! How the Press Failed The Gang's All Here: Judy Miller, Bob Woodward, Jeffrey Goldberg, Rupert Murdoch, Bill O'Reilly...End Times Leaves No Reputation Unstained! Buy End Times Now! Now Available from CounterPunch Books! Saul Landau's Bush and Botox World with a Foreword by Gore Vidal Click Here to Order! The Case Against Israel By Michael Neumann Click Here to Order Michael Neumann's Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair