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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
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Onward,
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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 |