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Today's Stories

November 18 / 19, 2006
Weekend Edition

Alexander Cockburn
Top Dems to Voters: "Shut Up! We've Got a War to Run!"

November 17, 2006

Greg Grandin
The Road from Serfdom: Milton Friedman and the Economics of Empire

Joseph Massad
Pinochet in Palestine: Fateh's Unholy Alliance

Kevin Zeese
George McGovern's Return to Capitol Hill: "A Down-to-Earth Disengagement Plan"

Gideon Levy
After the Rain of Death

Bill Quigley
WMDs Protected!: Blood-Pouring Anti-Nuke Clowns Sent to Prison

David Swanson
Last Chance for the Democrats?: a Tale of Two Conyers

Sherry Wolf
Gay Rights: When Will the US Catch Up with Africa?

Jerry Beisler
What James Webb Knows

Website of the Day
Thanks for the False Memories!

 

November 16, 2006

Kathy Kelly
Sources of Violence

Col. Douglas MacGregor
Was It Only Rumsfeld?

Norman Solomon
Operation Last Resort: the Media Offensive to Prolong the Iraq War

Nikki Thanos
From Oaxaca to Portland

Cindy Sheehan
Impeachment Proceedings

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Jimmy Carter and the "A" Word: Will the Democrats Listen to Carter on Palestine?

Gloria La Riva
Where is the Justice? Anti-Castro Terrorist Gets Only 4 Years

Pat Williams
How the Democrats Won the West

Kerry Joyce
From Rummy to Rahmmy: Bob Novak's New Source

CP News Service
Wal-Mart Charged with Selling Non-Organic Food as "Organic"

David Letterman
Top 10 Slogans for Wal-Mart Wine

James Ridgeway
Did Robert Gates' Planning Help Bring Black Hawk Down?

Website of the Day
A Conversation with West Point Grads Against the War

 

November 15, 2006

Jennifer Loewenstein
Alice in Erez: the Gaza Crossing

David Rosen
Rev. Ted Haggard and the Eclipse of Evangelical Fury

Ashley Smith
A Socialist in the Senate?

Landau / Hassen
Talking Tough on Iraq Isn't Courageous

Walden Bello
Iraq After November 7: New Challenges for the AntiWar Movement

Sibel Edmonds
The Highjacking of a Nation

Austin / Bernstein
Why Bill Cosby is Wrong to Link Black Culture to Economic Decline

Yitzhak Laor
This Merchandise, Security

James Rothenberg
Unimpeachable: a Brief Argument Why

Gail Dines
"Borat": It's a Guy Thing

Website of the Day
Kakistocracy


November 14, 2006

Werther
Beltway Bromo-Seltzer: a Sneak Peak at the Baker Report

Ray McGovern
Benching Scowcroft

John Walsh
Korea, Vietnam and Iraq Syndrome: Alive, Well and Gaining Strength

David MacMichael
Gates to the Pentagon

William S. Lind
Lose a War, Lose an Election

Sharon Smith
Democrats, Born to Compromise

Laura Carlsen
Oaxaca Fights Back

Ron Jacobs
The Perishing Republic

Peter Rost, MD
Whistleblowers: Who Are They?

Carol Norris
Post-Campaign Ad Stress Disorder?

Website of the Day
A Map of the US Nuclear Arsenal

 

 

November 13, 2006

Kathleen and Bill Christison
Screw the Palestinians, Full Steam Ahead

Bill Quigley
Robin Hood in Reverse: the Corporate Looting of the Gulf Coast

Paul Craig Roberts
The Democrats and Civil Liberties: Will They Turn a Blind Eye?

Uri Avnery
Call It What It Is: a Massacre!

Joe DeRaymond
The Strange Return of Daniel Ortega

Norman Finkelstein
Jimmy Carter's Roadmap

Col. Dan Smith
The Pentagon's Revolving Gates: Out with the Old, In with the Old

Shepherd Bliss
After the Party

Dave Lindorff
What Vote-Theft Conspiracy?

Missy Beattie
For Better / For Worse: Will Laura Stay the Course?

Trenticosta / Fleming
Vindication for the Angola 3

 

Weekend Edition
November 11 / 12, 2006

John Walsh
Rahm's Losers

Barucha Calamity Peller
Oaxaca at Any Cost

Al Krebs
Be Careful What You Wish For

Niall Meehan
Ireland's Freedom Struggle and the Foster School of Historical Falsification

Conn Hallinan
The Ills of War: Shafting the Vets

Patrick Cockburn
"We Worry About Staying Alive, Not the U.S. Elections"

Gary Leupp
Democrats Can Be NeoCons, Too

P. Sainath
India High and Low: the Anatomy of a Tiger

Nikolas Kozloff
The Return of Tom Lantos: Beware Venezuela, Here Come the Democratic Hawks

Lawrence R. Velvel
Throwing Rumsfeld Under the Bus

Fred Gardner
Marijuana, the Anti-Drug

Ralph Nader
Taking on the Boss: Claybrook vs. the Chamber

Ben Terrall / John Miller
East Timor: 15 Years After the Massacre

Mike Whitney
Cheney in a Box

Joshua Frank
Post-Electoral Deliriums

Mukul Dube
The Death Penalty Case of Mohd. Afzal

Jason Hribal
Jesse: Eulogy for a Working Dog

Daniel Wolff
The Unseen Springsteen

Michael Donnelly
Red Rock Blues: the Moab Folk Festival

Lord Montague
A Dissenting Note on the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917

Poets' Basement
Davies, Louise, Buknatski and Orloski

 

November 10, 2006

Alexander Cockburn
Lame Duck

Marjorie Cohn
The War Crimes Case Against Rumsfeld

Jorge Mariscal
What Veterans See

Gregory Elich
The Trial of Saddam: Who Will Pass Judgment on the Judges?

Joshua Frank
Blue Dog Group: Bye-Bye Coke, Hello Pepsi

Megan Boler
The Joke is On Us: How "Borat" Lowers the Bar of Political Satire

Ramzy Baroud
The Treacherous Road to Oslo Begins Here

Farzana Versey
An Iraqi in India

Roberto Rodriguez
A Thumpin' or a Whippin'?

Cartoon of the Day
Splat!

 

November 9, 2006

Jennifer Loewenstein
How Gaza Offends Us All

Patrick Cockburn
War of the Snipers

Paul Craig Roberts
Will Democrats Become Part of the Problem?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Roots of Corruption

Mike Whitney
Bush's Chernobyl Economy

Alan Maass
The Repudiation of One-Party Rule

Robert Jensen
Blood on the Tracks: the Elections and the Coming Train Wreck

Nicola Nasser
Saddam's Trial in Context

John Chuckman
As I Lay Dying: Watching the US Elections from Canada

Jamal Juma
Between Resistance and Deception in Palestine

Felice Pace
Can the Klamath be Restored?

Website of the Day
The Robert Gates Files

 

November 8, 2006

Alexander Cockburn / Jeffrey St. Clair
Count Your Blessings: NeoCons and NeoLibs Take Big Hit as Voters Say No to Bush, War and Free Trade

Lawrence E. Walsh
Robert Gates and Iran/Contra: Lies, Cover Ups and Slanted Intelligence

Bruce K. Gagnon
What's Next for the Peace Movement?: Confront the Democrats, Now!

Neve Gordon
Anti-Semitism? Mr. Dershowitz, You Just Don't Like What I Say

Dave Lindorff
Election Post-Mortem: What's Next?

Arthur Neslen
Another Tragic Day in Palestine

Joshua Frank
An Election Hangover: Thank God It's Over

James Goodman
The Corporate Food System is Broken

Charles Sullivan
Voting in the Absence of Choice

David Swanson
Subpoena Envy: The Dems Have the Power, But Will They Use It?

Missy Beattie
The Electorate Speaks and Barney Barks!

Dr. Susan Block
American Voters Say, "Bush Sucks!"

Website of the Day
Stealing Olive Groves from Palestinians

 

November 7, 2006

Michael Neumann
Cut and Run from Iraq: Sooner Rather Than Later

Paul Wolf
Saddam Must Die: A Pre-Ordained Verdict

Nikolas Kozloff
In Nicaragua, a Chavez Wave?

Eliza Ernshire
The Women of Beit Hanoun

William S. Lind
The Smile on Saddam's Face: He's Tan, Rested and Ready

Mike Ferner
Pick a Number: Greater Than 47,615

Felice Pace
Pumping the Klamath Dry

Chris Genovali
The Problem with PBDEs: Why Canada's Proposed Ban Won't Protect People or Wildlife

Gilad Atzmon
Watching Borat

Dick J. Reavis
Going to Class War with the Proletariat We Got ...

Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg
Lives (and Votes) Lost: the Ordeal of Larry Peterson

Website of the Day
Magic Sam: a Sure Cure for the Election Day Blues

Question of the Day
Is Bush Gay?

 

November 6, 2006

Alexander Cockburn
The Message of Campaign 2006

Norman Solomon
Saddam's Unindicted Co-Conspirator: Donald Rumsfeld

Robert Fisk
A Guilty Verdict on America, as Well

Marjorie Cohn
The Banana Election: From Hanging Chads to Hanging Saddam

Paul Craig Roberts
The Goose and the Gander: Is Bush Next?

Nikolas Kozloff
Election Eve Jitters: the Chavez Factor

Newton Garver
The Progress in Bolivia: Morales' Stunning Victory Over Big Oil

Mike Whitney
Bush's Carnival of Blood

Jesse Hagopian
From the Black Panthers to the Green Party: an Interview with Aaron Dixon

Dr. Peter Rost, MD
The Genocide Election: When a Life Saving Industry Cheats, People Die

Website of the Day
Robert Pollin vs. Rick Wolff: Is Pomo Marxism Marxism?

 

November 4 / 5, 2006

Dave Zirin
Political Players: Where Athletes Give Their Money

Patrick Cockburn
When Does Incompetence Become a Crime?

Sanho Tree
War Timing and Opportunism

Ralph Nader
Failure Across All Fronts

Lee Sustar
The Obama Myth

Dr. Shepherd Bliss
Torture Memories

Adam Elkus
Babies and Banks: Celebrity Colonialism in Africa

Seth Sandronsky
Is Another Recession Looming?

Fred Gardner
10 Years of Medical Pot in California: Dr. Mikuriya's Observations

Joshua Sperber
How the US Lost Latin America

Evelyn Pringle
Ohio Redux: Mr. Blackwell and the Henhouse

Mitchel Cohen
The Left and the Environment: Notes on the Ecological Dimension

Missy Beattie
The Medium is the Massage

Michael Dickinson
Watching the Guards: a Prison Diary

John Holt
The Silk Road to Ruin

Dr. Susan Block
The Beastly Bombing

Poets' Basement
LaMorticella, Engel, Orloski and Davies


November 3, 2006

Laura Carlsen
Day of the Dead in Oaxaca

Stephan Said
Honoring Bradley Will

John Stauber
"Victory in Iraq:" The PR Machine Behind Bush's Favorite Slogan

Mike Whitney
Baghdad is Surrounded

Joshua Frank
DNC Deja Vu

Victoria Furio
More Than Timetables

Tammara~85,441
They Say He is Coming Home

Stuart Croswaithe
Beatings and Sugar Plums: New Labor's War on the Kurds

Missy Beattie
Bush Shock

Website of the Day
Howlin' Wolf


November 2, 2006

Winslow T. Wheeler
The US Body Count in Iraq: an Analysis of Who is Dying and How

Paul Craig Roberts
Evil is as Evil Does

Dave Lindorff
Kerry Out: the Joke's Still on Us

Uri Avnery
The Lovable Man? Lieberman and the Decline of Israeli Democracy

Jeff Birkenstein
Smearing Harold Ford in Black Face

John Ross
Slave Labor in Private Prisons

Zoltan Grossman
Recharging the Anti-War Movement

Eveyln Pringle
The SEC's Probe of Halliburton: Is Cheney Being Fitted for a Striped Jumpsuit?

Christopher Brauchli
Drug Profits and PACs: Why Big Pharma Pushes the GOP

 

November 1, 2006

Alan Dershowitz v. Bruce Jackson
On Torture

Brian Tokar
Running on Hype: the Real Scoop on Biofuels

Fred Leonhardt
Democrats, Sex Crimes and the Press: the Goldschmidt Affair

Richard W. Behan
Triumph of the Petropublicans: Bush's Other Civil War

Brenda Norrell
Indigenous Opposition to the Border Wall

Charles Sullivan
Spoils of Corruption: Who Will Stand Up When America Goes Wrong?

Ron Jacobs
Hell is Rising in Oaxaca: interview with a Oaxacan Rebel

Mike Knapp
Green Stench in Minnesota: the Commissioner and the Hog Lot

Moshe Adler
The Temptations of a Union Boss: the Case of Brian McLaughlin

Walden Bello
Chain Gang Economics

Lee Ballinger
The Collapse of Hip Capitalism: How Tower Records Committed Suicide

Joshua Frank
Party in a Cage: Snake Oil and the Midterm Elections

Carl Gelderloos
Cheerleading the Massacre in Oaxaca: an Open Letter to the Washington Post

Peter Rost, MD
Panic in Big Pharma

Saul Landau
Bush's Anti-Terrorism Record: Don't Look Too Close

Website of the Day
The Meatrix


October 31, 2006

William S. Lind
The Third and Final Act: Iran

Stephen S. Pearcy
Dem Candidate's Wife Urges Cindy Sheehan Not to Protest Iraq War

Uri Avnery
Who's Afraid of an Iranian Bomb?

Michael Colby
Corporations Win Again!: Bush Opens National Parks to Bio-Prospecting

Sunsara Taylor
A No-Win Election for Women

Ben Beachy
Targeting Nicaraguans' Stomachs: 11th Hour Election Meddling by the US

Edward Humes
Nine Words: America's Disservice to Veterans

Roger Burbach
The Meaning of Lula's Victory in Brazil

Subcomandante Marcos
A Communique from the EZLN on Oaxaca

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Funny Business in the Booth: Vote for James H. 'Jim'

Sharon Smith
Those Damned Democrats

Website of the Day
Parks Not for Sale

 

October 30, 2006

Robert Fisk
Dirty Bombs Over Lebanon: Did Israel Use Uranium Weapons?

Bruce Jackson
Normalizing Torture

Norman Solomon
I Was Wrong About Thomas Friedman, the World's Wealthiest Pundit

Lance Selfa
Liberal Doormats: Tread on Us

Ali Khan
The Veil and the British Male Elite

Lee Sustar
European Islamophobia: Fanning the Flames of Hate

Robert Jensen
The Death of Empathy

Akiva Eldar
Lieberman: Making Haider Look Good

Tim Montague
The Natural Step to Eco-Villages

Brian M. Downing
Evil in the Valley: Civilian Massacres, From Vietnam to Iraq

Website of the Day
Alien Impeachment


October 27 / 29, 2006
Weekend Edition

Jeffrey St. Clair
Hogwash: Fecal Factories in the Heartland

Maher Arar
The Horrors of Extraordinary Rendition: a Personal Account

David Rosen
Perversions of Power: Mark Foley and the Bush Administration

Gregory Elich
"A Bursting Boiler at Russia's Doorstep:" Why Bush is Seeking Confrontation with N. Korea

Tom Barry
Fear and Loathing in the North: an Apartheid Fence in America?

Jeff Taylor
Democrats By Default?

Dave Lindorff
Why Nancy Pelosi is Wrong

Ron Jacobs
The General Who Called Out the Devil: the Politics of Hugo Chavez

Maurus Chino
Hauba Hanu: Oppression Affects All People

Christopher Brauchli
Veiled Threats: the Global War on Fashion

Sherwood Ross
The Wages of Whistleblowing: Why Bunny Greenhouse Sits in a Corner

Rev. William Alberts
In Search of a Real Inter-Religious Dialogue on War and Justice

Aseem Shrivastava
Pushing India Toward a "Dollar Democracy"

Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen
Bush's Mea Culpa Speech, First Draft

Russ Fine / Dee Fine
Of Peters and Principles: Learning About Sex and Hypocrisy from the GOP

Seth Sandronsky
Social Security: the Distortions of Sebastian Mallaby

Michael Carmichael
Rogue President: Midterm Meltdown

Joe Allen
The Legacy of Gillo Pontecorvo: a Maker of Revolutionary Films

David Vest
Playlist: What I'm Listening to This Week

Poets' Basement
Landau, Engel and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
Safely Home

 

October 26, 2006

Ismael Hossein-zadeh
Islamic Fascism?: Inflammatory Ironies

Carlos Zorrilla
The Police Raid on My House: Trumped Up Charges and Collusion Between a Mining Company and the Government of Ecuador

Paul Craig Roberts
The Crimes of Greed vs. the Crimes of Government: If Enron's Skilling Gets 24 Years in Prison, How Many Should Bush and Cheney Get?

Mike Whitney
The Charnel House of Baghdad

Lily Hughes
A Cruel and Unusual Reality: Inside the Texas Death House

Jennifer Matsui
Madonna's African Safari: The Great White Baby Hunter

Tim Matson
How to Save Vermont

Stephen Fleischman
Like a Soldier: Benchmarks, Timelines and Lies

Missy Beattie
The Blood of October: Are We Sure Barney Still Supports This War?

Patrick Cockburn
From "Mission Accomplished" to "Mission Impossible" in Iraq

Website of the Day
Open Letter to The Nation

 

October 25, 2006

Michael Donnelly
Ethnicity and Baseball

John Stanton
The Vindication of Sibel Edmonds

John Ross
Upheaval from the Bottom

Conn Hallinan
Hunting Hugo: When It's About Oil Nothing is Off the Table--Not Even Assassination

Robert Jensen
Academic Freedom on the Rocks

Johnny Barber
Drinking Tea with Hizbullah

Bruce K. Gagnon
Space Cowboy: Bush's War on Heaven

Daniel McGowan
Elie Wiesel for Israeli President?

James J. Brittain
Uribe's Failure to Learn from Colombia's Past

Peter Harley
Afghanistan in 3-D

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Minister of Strategic Threats

Shepherd Bliss
The Bioneers and the New York Times

Website of the Day
The Price of Staying the Course

 

October 24, 2006

John Walsh
The Book of Rahm: Emanuel's War Plan for Democrats

M. Shahid Alam
Not All Terrorists Are Muslim: the Latest Falsehood from the Advocates of Civilizational War

Dr. Trudy Bond
The Silence at Home, as America Eats Her Young

Michael Phillips
The Story of My Kidnapping in Nablus: "I Never Feared for My Life"

Dave Lindorff
Truth and Consequences on Iraq: Bush's Latest Cut-and-Paste War Plan

David Phinney
A US Fortress Rises in Baghdad: Asian Labor Trafficking Used to Build World's Largest Embassy

Laura Carlsen
Food Insecurity: the World Needs Its Small Farmers

Pierre Tristam
The American Way of Gore

Marguerite Rose Jimenez
"About That Trip to Cuba:" When the FBI Came Calling

Website of the Day
Tampon Terrorists

 

October 23, 2006

Saree Makdisi
Israel's Cluster Bomb War: "What We Did Was Insane and Monstrous"

Joshua Frank
The Antiwar Movement and Independent Politics: an Interview with Cindy Sheehan

Fred Gardner
What Have California Doctors Learned About Cannabis?

Ralph Nader
The End of Habeas Corpus and the Belligerent Despot-in-Chief

Ron Jacobs
Bush's Clark Clifford: James Baker Wants a Kinder, Gentler War

Norman Solomon
Punditry Without Consequences: Channeling Thomas Friedman

Richard Manning
Outside the Market: We Need and Owe Rural People

Neil Kitson
Canadians in Afghanistan: Bloody, Unbowed, Stoned?

William MacDougall
The Socialist, the Columnist, His Wife and the Prostitute

Gilad Atzmon
Surviving the Board of Deputies

Werther
The Evening of Empire

Website of the Day
Different Drummer: Internet Coffeehouse Movement

 

October 20 / 22, 2006

Alexander Cockburn
The Myth of Microloans

Gary Leupp
How the US Declared War on North Korea

Brian Cloughley
What Are They Dying For?

Dave Zirin
Pat Tillman's Brother Breaks His Silence

William Blum
Don't Look Back: Who Said Clinton Didn't Kill Anybody?

Christopher Brauchli
The Cronies' War

Winslow Wheeler
The Mad Logic of Pentagon Spending: As Costs Rise, Readiness Declines

Michael Donnelly
GOP Death Slide: Is the Party Really Over?

Fred Gardner
Corporate Drugs Useless Against Alzheimer's

Susie Day
How to Stay Out of Gitmo

Lucinda Marshall
Behind Closed Doors: the Invisibility of Domestic Violence

Fred Wilcox
The Second Palestinian Intifada: History of a Struggle for Survival

Alan Maass
Standing Up Against Racism at Columbia: a Wake Up Call to the Passive Left

Lee Sustar
A Bipartisan Border Wall: New Phases in the Crackdown on Immigrants

Ariadna Theokopoulos
Shame on You, Dr. Warf: Hail the Epidemiologist in Chief

Missy Beattie
Surges: the Dow and the Death Count

CP News Wire
Bush's Paraguay Land Grab: Hideout or Water Raid?

CP News Services
Sexually Repressed Republicans: Robert Bork, Riveted

Poets' Basement
Davies, Engel, Buknatski and Orloski

Website of the Weekend
Scenes from Oaxaca

 

October 19, 2006

Elaine Cassel
The Bush Administration's Assault on Defense Lawyers

Col. Dan Smith
Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine: Cracks in the Bush / Blair Axis

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
North Korea's Nuclear Test: a Q & A

Josh Gryniewicz
Wal-Mart Tightens the Squeeze on Workers

Amira Hass
What is 20 Tons of Explosives?

Eric Holt-Gimenez
Poison and Famine in the Fields: How the Agri-Food Industry's Deadly Cycle Feeds Immigration

Jesse Hagopian
Arrested Democracy: On Trying to Ignore Aaron Dixon

Sam Husseini
How Third Parties Can Solve the "Spoiler" Problem and Win Elections

John Weisheit
A Gathering of Water Buffaloes: Feds Celebrate Death of the Colorado River

CP News Service
A Plea to U2 From Africa's Children: Stop Bono Before He Kills Again

Website of the Day
George W. Bush: Hollywood Producer

Art Gallery of the Day
Botero's Abu Ghraib Paintings in Manhattan

 

October 18, 2006

Joshua Frank
Cindy Sheehan's Lesser Evilism: Democrats or Bust?

Dr. Curran Warf, MD
Slandering Sound Science: Bush's Attack on the Lancet Iraq War Death Study

Saul Landau
Bush's Foley: Will the Dems Blow It?

Tom Barry
The Politics of Fear

Bruce Jackson
Thundersnow: a Report from Buffalo

Dave Lindorff
Loveless Among the Ruins: Even Repubs Flee Bush's Failed Middle East Policy

Frederico Fuentes
When Cochabamba Said "Enough": Bolivia's Blow to Neoliberalism

Michael Simmons
Greetings from Echo Park: an Open Letter to Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner

Daryll E. Ray
The Root Problems in American Agriculture

Kate Doyle
The Dead of Tlatelolco

Website of the Day
The Lynne Stewart Defense Committee

 


October 17, 2006

Michael Neumann
Hit and Run: Guerrilla Reviewing

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Nuclear Test, Political Flare: Interpreting the Physics and Politics of N. Korea's Nuclear Test

Stephen S. Pearcy
The Interrogation of Julia Wilson: Secret Service Grills 14 Year-Old Artist

Sharon Smith
Afghanistan Reconsidered: The Taliban Aren't Gone, Women Haven't Been Liberated

Al Krebs
The Corporate Assault on Zoning

David Underhill
Politicus Interruptus: Come Back, Jo Bonner

Daniel Wolff
NY's Iraq Veterans Against the War Needs Your Help ... Now

James Brooks
Desirable Duds: Israeli / US Cluster Bombs Litter Lebanon

Website of the Day
Stop Torture Now

 

October 16, 2006

Gary Leupp
North Korea as a Religious State

Patrick Cockburn
General Mutinies Against Blair

David Wilson
Where Have All the Doctors Gone?: the Collapse of Iraq's Health Care Services

Robert Fisk
Confronting Turkey's Armenian Genocide

Robert Jensen
Racism and Cheap Thrills at U. of Texas Law School

Ingmar Lee / Krista Roessingh
An Appeal for S. India's Wild Elephants

Mike Whitney
America's Other War Party

Jake Whitney
The Courageous Dr. Rost

Sanho Tree
Sugar Daddy Politics: Was Foley Blackmailed to Secure His Vote on CAFTA?

Website of the Day
Best War Ever

 


October 14/15, 2006
Weekend Edition

Uri Avnery
Gaza as Laboratory: the Great Experiment

John Walsh
How Rahm Emmanuel Has Rigged a Pro-War Congress

Jean Bricmont
A Fable About Palestine

Jennifer Van Bergen
Bush's Military Commissions Act and the Future of America

Ralph Nader
Wilted Yankees: the Fruits of Checkbook Baseball

Floyd Rudmin
The Logic of Proliferation: How Bush's Belligerence Prompted N. Korea to Pursue Nuclear Weapons

Mark Weisbrot
Correcting the Facts on US/Venezuela Relations

Laura Carlsen
Building a Future in the Mixteca

Hani Shukrallah
A Stroll Through the Cairo Mall: Shopping as Cultural Pursuit

Dr. Susan Block
The Spent Milk of Human Foley

John Chuckman
North Korea's Bomb: Still 1,126 Nuke Tests Behind the US

Lucinda Marshall
Is Betty Ugly?: the Profits of Denigration

Don Monkerud
The Case Against Depleted Uranium

Missy Comley Beattie
What Bush Means By Tolerable Violence in Iraq

Ron Jacobs
Shouting "No One is Illegal" in a Crowded Theater

Website of the Weekend
Ratfink Raunchfest

 

October 13, 2006

Jorge Mariscal
PowerPoint Racism: How Military Recruiters Pitch to Latinos

Stephen Philion
The Myth of the Spat Upon Vets: an Interview with Jerry Lembcke

John Blair
Strip Mining Wildlife Preserves: Black Beauty's Filthy Lucre

Col. Dan Smith
Oil, Atoms and War

Alastair Crooke / Mark Perry
How Hezbollah Defeated Israel: Part Two, Winning the Ground War

Stephen Fleischman
Journalism Then and Now

Charles Perroud
The Death Penalty's Invisible Victims

Anne E. Brodsky
Return to Afghanistan: Where the Rhetoric Doesn't Match the Reality

Website of the Day
Underwater Nuke Test

 

October 12, 2006

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Plan for a Military Strike on Iran

Norman Solomon
The Pundit Path to Death in Iraq

M. Shahid Alam
On Colonialism and Colleagues

Paul Craig Roberts
Can We Call It Genocide Now?

Meredith Schafer / Chris Kutalik
Is a General Transportation Strike Looming for 2008? Can Labor Seize the Moment?

Carl Gelderloos
Images of Occupation: Teaching in Nablus

Alastair Crooke / Mark Perry
How Hezbollah Defeated Israel: Part One, Winning the Intelligence War

Charles Sullivan
Assassins of Truth

William S. Lind
Why Do We Still Fight a Lost War?

CP News Service
The South Turns Against the War

Website of the Day
There's a Riot Goin' On

 

October 11, 2006

John Feffer
Pyongyang 1, Bush 0

Dave Lindorff
A Killing Occupation

Jackson Katz
Gunning Down Women: Coverage of "School Shootings" Misses Central Issue

April Howard / Ben Dangl
The Tin War in Bolivia

Michael Carmichael
World War W

Ken Couesbouc
The New Witchcraft: Marvin Harris on the War on Terror

Gregory Afghani
Sleepless on Skid Row: Guilty of Being Homeless in America

Alexander Cockburn
600,000 Dead in Iraq: Chortles in the New Yorker for Slaughter's Cheerleader, C. Hitchens

Website of the Day
Petition: Defend Columbia Students Who Confronted the Minutemen

 

October 10, 2006

Paul Craig Roberts
Lost Wars and a Lost Economy

Robert Robideau
The Myth Keepers of Columbus

Joshua Frank
The Democrats and the War on Civil Liberties

Dave Lindorff
Free the Press Free Linda Greenhouse

Dave Zirin
Brother of the Fist

Heather Gray
Where Votes Matter: My Experience in South Africa

James Knotwell
Big Ag in the Heartland: the Future of Nebraska's Family Farms

Missy Beattie
The Return of James Baker, III

Mike Whitney
Bush and North Korea: Bumbling Toward Disaster

David Rosen
Sex Panic on Capitol Hill: Mark Foley and the Politics of Sex in America

Website of the Day
Eno / Byrne: Music to Enjoy the Foley Scandal By

 


October 9. 2006

Robert Fisk
The Age of Terror

Norman Solomon
Welcome to the Nuclear Club

Ron Jacobs
The Boom Heard Around the World

Gideon Levy
The Mystery of America

Walter Brasch
Their Back Pages: Sex, Lies and Family Values

Mickey Z.
Who Killed Michael Moore?

John Holt
Grizzlies in Our Midst: Can Humans and Bears Coexist?

Lucinda Marshall
Not So Pretty in Pink: Profits and Breast Cancer

Saul Landau
Post-Castro Cuba

Website of the Day
War, Inc.

 

 

October 7 / 8, 2006
Weekend Edition

Alexander Cockburn
Wargasms and Orgasms

Peter Kwong
The Chinese Face of Neoliberalism

Ralph Nader
Revolt of the Generals

Mark Donham
What Cynthia McKinney Means to Me

Dave Lindorff
Philly's Police Snoops

Peter Bosshard
World Bank Shuts Out Dissident Voices: Big Dams, Huge Profits & Political Corruption

Ron Jacobs
Evil Hour in Colombia

Lawrence R. Velvel
Governmental Derelicts: Moral Meltdown in America

Fred Gardner
Arnold Vetoes Hemp Bill

David Green
The US, Israel and the Invasion of Lebanon

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Weekend Edition
November 18 / 19, 2006

The School of the Americas and Memory in Latin America

Ghosts of Dictatorships Past

By WES ENZINNA

"Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past--which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments"

--Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

This November 17-19, for the seventeenth annual time, an estimated 20,000 marchers will convene on Fort Benning, Georgia, home to the infamous school for Latin American military soldiers, the School of the America's (SOA). As part of their protest to shut down the SOA, the marchers will line up at the gate of what critics call the "School of Assassins," and will, as they do every year, perform a ritual: holding small white crosses, one for each of the more than 300,000 estimated victims of SOA-trained soldiers since the School's beginning in Panama in 1946, a march leader will call out the name of each victim (it takes several hours), to which the crowd will shout back, "Presente!" But this November, something will be different: the ghosts of Latin America's dictatorships past, as well as their living descendents, will also shout back, in unison with the voices of the marchers: "Presente!"


History of Brutality

43 year-old Gonzalo Guevara Cerritos looked like your average blue-collar janitor, working for his daily bread along with thousands of other recent Latino immigrants in Los Angeles. His constant nervousness and avoidance of social interaction could have been chalked up to his discomfort living in a foreign land, or to his less-than-perfect English. Or it could have been chalked up to the fact that in 1989, while sub-lieutenant in El Salvador's counterinsurgency Atlacatl Battalion, he had taken part in the massacre of six Jesuit priests, a housekeeper, and her 14-year-old daughter, and was wanted by Salvadoran authorities for these crimes. As it turns out, the latter was the case, and Guevara Cerritos was arrested this October 16 by Los Angeles Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, tipped off by another Salvadoran who had recognized Guevara Cerritos' face. He is currently awaiting deportation.

As part of Ronald Reagan's Cold War-era Central America policies, throughout the 1980's the White House supported an array of death squads and dictators - such as the Atlacatl Battalion - in the name of "rolling back" communist influence. The US infamously funneled money and guns to the Contras in Nicaragua, as well as to right-wing death squads in Honduras, Guatamala, and El Salvador. As historian Greg Grandin points out in is new book, Empire's Workshop, "U.S allies in Central America during Reagan's two terms killed over 300,000 people, tortured hundreds of thousands, and drove millions into exile." They also supplied Central American forces with instruction manuals in psychological torture, as well as tools such as cattle-prods for torture of the more corporeal kind.

In 1988, one of the instruction manuals, titled Human Resource Exploitation, surfaced during a Congressional hearing sparked by a New York Times allegation that the US had trained Honduran military officers involved in mass torture. It also came out that these manuals were based in part on SOA classroom lesson plans.

But it was the 1989 massacre of six priests, a housekeeper, and her daughter in El Salvador that galvanized US public opposition to the SOA--Gonzalo Guevara Cerritos was trained at the Fort Benning, Georgia School. Also bad for SOA's press was its connection to the 1980 rape and murder of four American Mary Knoll nuns in El Salvador, as well as to Panama's dictator Manuel Noriega and Salvadoran death-squad architect Roberto D'Aubuisson, in addition to the killers of beloved Salvadoran Archibishop Oscar Romero--all SOA graduates. In the end, it is estimated that the 64,000 Latin American troops trained at SOA since the 1960's have been involved in around 75,000 murders in El Salvador, 200,000 in Guatemala, and thousands more in other violence-torn countries such as Columbia.

In response to this laundry list of dirty deeds, in 1990 Roy Bourgeois, an indefatigably spunky Mary Knoll Priest who was kidnapped in Bolivia during Hugo Banzer's 1971- 1978 dictatorship, moved into a tiny apartment in Fort Benning, Georgia, right outside the gates of the SOA, to start School of the America's Watch (SOAW), with the goal of shutting down the SOA.

Since then, SOA-W has expanded from a one-man operation to an international movement with 30,000 unofficial members. Their successes have been numerous: they've tirelessly dragged the School's skeletons out of the closet and into the pages of countless magazines and newspapers; they forced the School, in 2001, to change its name to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in an attempt to avert negative public attention; they've brought together a diverse coalition of Christian peace advocates and youth social justice activists at the annual marches at Fort Benning, where each year a handful of participants voluntarily go to prison for six to twelve months to raise public awareness about SOA--in 2005, for example, thirty-seven people went to jail, some of them over seventy years-old; and they've provided the steam behind several Congressional bills to pull funding from SOA, one of which, in 1998, lost by only eleven votes--and with recent Democrat victories in the midterm elections, twenty House opponents of the new "close SOA" bill, HR 1217, have lost their seats. Accordingly, SOA-W activists are predicting success.

 

Getting to the Root of the Problem

However, while SOA-W haven't slowed their demonstrations or lobbying efforts, in the last year organizers have pioneered a new--and dramatically successful--strategy.

The new strategy involves directly working with Latin American social movements and sympathetic governments to get them to agree to stop sending troops to the SOA. To this end, in past months SOA-W activists have traveled to Venezuela, Bolivia, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Ecuador, meeting with movements and urging governments to deprive SOA of students. "The thinking behind this new Latin America strategy' was simple," writes Lisa Sullivan, one of the key organizers of this new campaign and who, to better coordinate with Latin social movements, has recently opened an SOA-W office in Caracas, Venezuela. "If there were no more students, there would be no more school."

To date, they have made vital steps towards this goal. In recent months, the Defense Ministers of Venezuela, Uruguay, and Argentina have all agreed to stop sending troops to the SOA. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez had Bourgeois and Sullivan on his weekly television show, "Hello President," to talk about SOA, before announcing Venezuela's boycott of SOA. Uruguay, which has not sent troops since the inauguration of President Tabaré Vásquez, made its abstention from sending troops official with a public announcement. Argentina, which has typically sent 10-20 troops a year, made a similar public announcement, timed to coincide with the thirty year anniversary of the 1976 military coup.

In Bolivia, President Evo Morales has promised to dry-up Bolivia's stream of soldiers to the School, 500 of whom have been sent in the last ten years. However, the more than $100 million in US aid money the poor Andean country receives a year has made a total withdrawal difficult.

In Peru and Ecuador, SOA-W has made vital links with activists there who are spearheading movements to force their governments to stop sending troops to the SOA; in Chile several members of Congress have offered to introduce a bill to demand President Michelle Bachelet withdraw troops from the School. "We have been astounded with the success of this new strategy," Roy Bourgeois told me last March in Argentina.

But while props certainly go to SOA-W, the success of their new Latin America strategy has as much to do with the historical moment in Latin America today as with the well-crafting of SOA-W's new program.

From the 1960's to the 1980's, the vast majority of Latin Americans lived under the cloud of brutal dictatorships. When these dictatorships collapsed, with something of a domino effect occurring throughout the 80's, newly elected democratic governments almost unequivocally took a soft approach to punishment for ex-dictators--whether because of remaining ties to these dictatorships, or because of fear or threats of renewed coups, these governments, from Argentina to Guatemala, gave sweeping impunity to ex-dictatorship members--let the past be past, work towards "reconciliation," these governments argued.

Yet, in recent years this has all been changing. Critics in Latin America are arguing that "reconciliation" is just another word for "impunity," and that, in the name of building strong democratic institutions, citizens need to critically engage with their past, especially the legacy of the past in the present. And just what is the legacy of past-dictatorships in present democracies? For many, it is a continued excess of power of the military in civil society.

In an attempt to hold both past and present human rights violators accountable, grassroots social movements from north to south have been successfully demanding past-dictators and present military offenders--often ex-members of authoritarian old guards themselves--be punished. In Argentina, this past September, prosecutors won the first significant conviction of an ex-member of the 1976-1983 dictatorship there when they sentenced ex-Police Chief Miguel Etchecolatz, responsible for the torture and murder of twenty high school students in 1976, to twenty-five years in prison; Pinochet, after years of stalled efforts to bring him to trial, is likely to be judged for crimes against humanity in a Spanish court; in Bolivia, a strong movement has emerged to extradite ex-President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada for his role in the 2003 massacre of over sixty protestors in the city of El Alto; in Peru, the National Supreme Court has authorized the extradition of ex-Army Major Telmo Hurtado, who now lives in the US and has confessed to involvement in the 1985 massacre of 74 children, women, and old men, in an Andean village. The message Latin American movements are sending is clear: the era when the military, or anyone else, could torture and kill without fear of justice is over.

And here is where the SOA ties in to the new Latin American movements against impunity. The Latin America strategy of SOA-W has found such success because as Latin American movements fight against and work to build accountable and democratic governments, SOA's role in both dictatorship and democracy-era military violence comes up again and again.

Guevara Cerritos is one example of an SOA-graduate turned human rights violator. Noriega, D'Aubiosson, and Hurtado are others. Leopoldo Galtieri, a chief architect of Argentina's 1976 military coup and close associate of Etchecolatz, is also an SOA graduate. More recently, in the post-dictatorship era, the suspected kidnappers of Julio Lopez, an ex-torture victim who testified against Etchecolatz in Argentina, have ties to SOA; in 2000, a Guatemalan SOA graduate, Colonel Byron Disrael, was arrested for the 1998 murder of Catholic Bishop Juan Gerardi, who was documenting Disrael's and the Guatemalan military's crimes committed during the country's thirty year civil war; and it has just been discovered--SOA keeps its students names confidential--that two officers, Generales Juan Veliz Herrera and Gonzalo Rocabado Mercado, involved in the October 2003 "Gas War" massacres in Bolivia, are also SOA graduates.

In short, SOA-W's new campaign has met such success because of the coalescence between its goals and the anti-impunity mood in Latin America. "Everywhere we've traveledin South America, we've been amazed to realize that people are fully aware of the reality of the School of the America's," says Lisa Sullivan. "They have experienced firsthand the horrors of the tortures, detentions, imprisonments and disappearances' caused by its graduates."

 

The Dead Shout Back

Of course, not all Latin Americans favor punishment for past human rights violators, least of all those implicated in the violence. These detractors argue that the trials and demonstrations just put salt on old wounds and make it difficult for contemporary society to live together peaceably. They propose "reconciliation" through focusing on the present, charging that anti-impunity movements are living in the past.

Indeed, perhaps the defining characteristic of the new movements against impunity as well as the movement to shut the SOA, is their focus on remembering the victims of state and military violence. After all, what is the SOA "presente" ritual, or the giant tapestries woven with the names of the dead in Chile, or the towers of photographs of those "disappeared" in Argentina made by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, but acts of remembrance? We could even say that the ability of any given civil society to bring ex-human rights violators to justice is directly correlative to the degree of historical consciousness of a regime's victims in the country, that is, the degree to which the history of the victims is not obscured and repressed. Thus, this also points to the importance of grassroots movements focused on creating memory, such as HIJOS, an organization in Argentina made up of the children of people disappeared,' who do street-festival-slash-public-denunciations, called escraches, in front of ex-dictators houses.

This whole politic, I think we could say, is characteristic of these new movements, of what I want to call a "politics of remembrance," the tools of which are the truth commission, the trial, the march and the escrache.

It is possible this politic represents a new type of Latin American social movement. In a January 2002 article by James Petras, the author argues that there have been three waves of social movements in Latin America in recent years. The first were the "new social movements" of the 1970's and 1980's, focused on "challenging the military and civilian authoritarian regimes of the time;" the second are the movements, such as the Zapatistas in Mexico and the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement, running from the 1980's to the present, "united in their opposition to neoliberalism and imperialism;" and the third are the new urban, neighborhood-based social movements, such as the FEJUVES that have come out of the city of El Alto in Bolivia. The new "politics of remembrance," shot through with characteristics of these other movements, can be seen as a sort of "fourth wave."

While this "fourth wave" of movements is clearly focused on the past, far from just being about a narrow idea of punishment, they actually have the potential to reinvigorate and open new possibilities for today's left. Latin America is in a profound moment of self-reflection, interrogating the past to open up the question, what kind of future do we want?' These movements and their "politics of remembrance" have the potential to act as a source of rejuvenation for left politics by virtue of their ability to draw out connections between yesterday's dictatorships and today's dominant economic and political order and by bringing up profoundly new questions and challenges in the present.

It seems clear that here at the "end of history", with state communism de-legitimized on both the right and the left, leftist movements have found themselves profoundly lacking orientation and direction. In an interesting way, looking to the past gives coherence to the kind of future and goals the left pursues. In the first place, the practice of a politics of remembrance is a negative practice. It is about looking at the past--dictatorships, violence, militarism--and saying, we don't want that.'

It is also, more importantly, about locating and rooting out the presence and weight of that history in the present. One example already mentioned is how the legacy of dictatorships has been preserved in the present in the form of impunity and unchecked military violence, and how remembering the victims of these regimes has highlighted the roots of this violence. In fact, the very language activists use to talk about the present-day persistence of rogue military violence demonstrates the importance of the past for understanding this violence--the dictionary defines "impunity [as] exemption from punishment"--we must not preserve impunity, activists say. This points to how today's violence is rooted in the past. Public and collective actions of remembrance bring this relationship between past and present into clear focus.

Another way in which practices of remembrance are challenging the present is by bringing up critical questions about and challenges to neoliberalism and US imperialism in Latin America. In remembering dictatorships, social movements focused on ending impunity have highlighted how neoliberal economic policies were first implemented during dictatorships under protection of military governments--"armed privatization," as Naomi Klein calls it.

This sheds a critical light on the present reality of the Washington Consensus in Latin America by highlighting the undemocratic nature of neoliberal policies; it draws a connect between how they were implemented (un-democratically) and who they benefit (a small elite), between how, as Noam Chomsky says in a recent article, "Latin American elites and economies [have] linked to the imperial powers but not to one another." This historical connection and its invocation has strengthened and legitimized anti-neoliberal movements, and more clearly shown the political reality of neoliberalism--each protest that highlights this connection further popularizes the idea that, as Grandin writes, "the kind of free-market absolutism advocated by the Chicago School [of neoliberal economists] was only possible through repression." Chomsky further explains how the development of this historical consciousness relates to the growth of democratic movements: "the new wave of democratization [in Latin America] coincided with externally mandated economic reforms' that undermine effective democracy." Thus, "to have [historical and political] consciousness," political philosopher Wendy Brown writes, "is to live actively with--indeed, to activate politically--the spirits of the pastthe bearable and unbearable memories of the past."

This drawing out of the connection between dictatorial repression and neoliberalism in Latin America has allowed Latin American social movements to more clearly characterize neoliberalism for what they believe it to be: a new face of the same old imperialism, the "3rd Conquest of Latin America," as historians have phrased it. Thus here, in the way that it is the popular and collective act of remembrance that highlights connections between dictatorships and neoliberalism, we can see how intimately the politics of remembrance are related to what Chomsky says are the continents "new independence movements," to the myriad new movements for sovereignty over natural resources across the hemisphere. Critical historical consciousness, German philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin argues, is developed through the cultural work of mourning.

The SOA, of course, figures prominently in all of this. It is tied to Argentina's 1976-1983 dictatorship, where Washington-backed Finance Minister Martinez de Hoz experimented with radical new free-market policies as SOA graduates like Galtieri butchered real, imagined, and potential critics to these policies. It is tied to Chile, where Pinochet's regime, with Washington's full support, overthrew the democratically-elected Salvador Allende and replaced his moderate social-democratic economic policies with a revolutionary new economic free-market program designed by University of Chicago economists, who also directly trained Pinochet's Chilean economists on a US government-funded scholarship; here too, approval of the policies was achieved not through democratic means but through the massacre of critics--SOA and other US-trained soldiers helped achieve consensus for these new economic policies at the barrel of a gun.

Thus, it becomes clear that the murder of a whole generation of activists and labor leaders, Grandin explains, made it possible to implement the first neoliberal economic policies. SOA is of course not any sort of monolithic explanation for all or any of this. Rather, through its very real connection to countless of the murderers, it is accurately and viscerally representative of Washington's role in Latin American neoliberalism, and how the northern neighbor uses its military influence in the Western Hemisphere.

Of course, in concrete terms, the legacy of US imperialism and militarism in Latin America are much bigger and bloodier than just the SOA. As Friday Berrigan writes in "Beyond the School of the Americas," "the scope of [US] military training programs [in Latin America] is extensive--as many as 100,000 foreign police and soldiers receive training from the US government each year. There are more than 150 military institutions that train foreign officers in the United States. In addition, US military officers lead countless training programs in other countries."

And SOA-W is very aware of this. Carol Tyx, an English Professor who participated in the 2006 march in Georgia, is quoted in a recent Z Magazine article saying, in regards to shutting down the SOA, "If we close the School, you know, that wouldn't change Plan ColumbiaNot that closing the School is not important [but] we're trying to change a whole foreign policy, a whole attitude about militarism. And the School almost feels symbolic."

For their part, the main organizers of SOA-W's Latin America strategy also recognize this. In addition to their efforts to get Latin governments to stop sending troops to SOA, Sullivan and company have been mobilizing, alongside Ecuadorian social movements, in opposition to a US military base in the city of Manta, as well as against a US military base, called "Nuevo Horizonte," in Peru, where Southern Command is training Peruvian soldiers. Sullivan characterizes these bases as "different chapters of the same book," and insists upon the need to organize in opposition to all of them. Accordingly, this November 17-19, as US marchers convene on Georgia, there will be simultaneous demonstrations in Manta, Ecuador, San Salvador, El Salvador, Asuncion, Paraguay, and in Columbia. Activists will also gather to protest Arizona's Fort Huachuca, in Colorado. "When [activists] stand at the gates of Fort Benning this November," the SOA Watch website proclaims, "[they'll] be standing together with thousands of people