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Cockburn / St. Clair's Scorching New History of a Decade of War Now Available! Today's Stories May 10, 2004 Diane Christian Images & Abstractions & Genitals May 8 / 9, 2004 Cockburn / St. Clair Torture: as American as Apple Pie Adam Jones America's Srebrenica: What About the Hundreds of POWs Suffocated and Shot at Kunduz? Douglas Valentine Who Let the Dogs Out?: Torture, the CIA and the Press Kurt Nimmo Rush Limbaugh and the Babes of Abu Ghraib Brian Cloughley Humpty Dumpty is Falling Lucia Dailey Forbidden Games Joanne Mariner * * * *: Redacting Moussaoui Mickey Z. Please Forgive U.S.? (There Are No Innocent Bystanders) John Chuckman The Thing with No Brain Doug Giebel Someone Knew: There Were No WMDs Norm Dixon How the Bush Gang Exploited 9/11 Sam Bahour A Guiding Light Falls on Ramallah Susan Davis Disorderly Conduct as Fine Art Dave Marsh In a Pig's Eye: Alan Lomax, Dead But Still Stealing Laura Flanders Life with Dick and Lynne Dave Zirin Fans Push Spiderman Off Base Carolyn Baker Why I Won't Vote in 2004 Prince "Ain't No Sense in Voting" Dr. Susan Block Onan for Two: Liberating Masturbation Poets' Basement Smith, Sleeth, Ford, Albert and Saska   May 7, 2004 Human Rights Watch 10 Prisons; 9,000 Prisoners: US Detention Facilities in Iraq Ron Jacobs UnAmerican? I Wish It Were So Robert Fisk An Illegal and Immoral War Ahmad Faruqui The 50th Anniversary of Dien Bien Phu Alexander Zaitchik From Terrell Unit in Texas to Abu Ghraib: Doesn't It Ring a (Prison) Bell? Mike Whitney The Price of Victory Norman Solomon This War, Racism and Media Denial M. Shahid Alam A Comic Apology   May 6, 2004 Jeffrey St. Clair They Did It for Jessica: Smeared with Shit; Kicked to Death Kathy Kelly May Day in Pekin Prison: Prison Labor for the War Machine Werther The Sunk Cost Fallacy: War as Vegas Casino Game Lawrence Ferlinghetti Totalitarian Democracy Robert Fisk "Smoke Him": Video Shows Wounded Men Being Shot by US Helicopter John Janney Torturing the Way to Freedom? Christopher Ketcham Outlaw Heterosexual Marriage Now! Alan Farago Dead Oceans: So Long, Thanks for the Fish Sam Hamod Bush on Arab TV: Worthless and Demeaning James Brooks Sullen Spring William S. Lind On the Brink of Defeat in Iraq May 5, 2004 Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba Complete US Army Report on Abuse of Iraqi Prisoners Kathleen and Bill Christison Kerry: a Lost Cause for Progressives? Will Youmans Deal with the Devil: a Palestinian Zionist and the End of the World Patrick B. Barr Terrorists R Us: the Powerful are Exempt from the Label Lawrence Magnuson Nightline's All-American Morgue Greg Moses Pocketbook of Denuded Ideals Niranjan Ramakrishnan Tormenting Prisoners, Torturing Truth Lee Ballinger Cinco de Mayo and Unity Gilbert Achcar Bush's Cakewalk into the Iraq Quaqmire Website of the Day Operation Phoenix & Iraq   May 4, 2004 Human Rights Watch A Timeline of Torture and Abuse Allegations and Responses Kurt Nimmo The CIA Privatized Torture David Peterson CBS, Self-Censorship & Iraq Barry Lando CACI's Private Torture Chambers Patrick Cockburn Torture: Iraqis Disgusted, But Not Surprised Dr. Susan Block Indecent Insurgents: Watch What You Say Fidel Castro A Mindless, Unnecessary War Mike Whitney Empire of Torture Sonali Kolhatkar How to Stop the War: Demonstrate Against John Kerry Josh Frank The Lost Sierra Club Stan Goff The Role: Another Open Letter to US Troops in Iraq Agustin Velloso Spare Us Your Disgusting Ethics Stew Albert American Know-How Website of the Day Scenes from a Cover-Up     May 3, 2004 Virginia Tilley Let the Wall of Silence Fall May 1 / 2, 2004 Patrick Cockburn An Army in Disgrace, a Policy in Tatters, the Real Prospect of Defeat Robert Fisk "Good Guys" Who Can Do No Wrong Alexander Cockburn Watching Niagara: Stupid Leaders, Useless Spies, Angry World Heather Williams Gringo, We're Going Home: Latin American Troops Flee Iraq Diane Rejman An Army Vet on Torture in Iraq: Abu Ghraib as My Lai? Diane Christian Blood Spilling: Osama, Bush and Sharon Speak the Same Language Patrick Cockburn Seems Like Old Times in Fallujah Dave Lindorff Bush's Torturous Logic: Shocked, Shocked, Shocked Chris Floyd Suicide Bomber: Neocons, Nihilists and Annihilation April 29 / 30, 2004 Dave Zirin A Pawn in Their Game: the Unlonesome Death of Pat Tillman Kathy Kelly The Warden's Tour Greg Weiher Fallujah and the Warsaw Ghetto: the Banality of Evil Michael S. Ladah Terrorism and Assassination: the Ultimate Depception Patrick Cockburn The Fallujah Mutinies     April 28, 2004 Christopher Brauchli Meet Congressman Know-Nothing: Tom Tancredo Wendy Brinker The Politics of the Numb Faisal Kutty The Dirty Work of Canadian Intelligence John Chuckman Seeking the Evil One Mike Whitney Flag-Draped Coffins and the Seattle Times Tom Mountain Rwanda and the F***** Word Graeme Greenback The Iraqi Alamo: a CNN/CIA Production Tracy McLellan The War Comes Home M. Junaid Alam We are the Barbarians William Loren Katz Iraq, the US and an Old Lesson   April 27, 2004 James Davis The Colombia 3 Acquitted Dave Lindorff Chalabi as Prosecutor Bruce Schneier Terrorist Threats and Political Gain Cockburn / Sengupta British Generals Resist Calls for More Troops to Aid Americans in Iraq Walt Brasch Presidential Letters: The Day I Was Asked to Feed an Elephant Saul Landau The Empire in Denial and the Denial of Empire April 26, 2004 Patrick Cockburn Crossing the Shia Line: US Troops Prepare to Enter Najaf Wayne Madsen Trading Places: Will the US Go the Way of the USSR? Grover Furr Protest, Rebellion, Commitment Elaine Cassel Lies About the Patriot Act Mickey Z. Inspired by Pat Tillman? Greg Moses Bremer's De-De-Ba'athjfication Gambit Gila Svirsky Anarchy in Our Souls Uri Avnery Vanunu and the Terrible Secret April 24 / 25, 2004 William A. Cook Tweedledee and Tweedledum: Kerry and Bush Melt into One Jeffrey St. Clair Stryking Out: a General, GM and the Army's Latest Tank Brandy Baker A Revitalized Women's Movement? Let's Hope So Robert Fisk A Warning to Those Who Dare Criticize Israel in the Land of Free Speech Ben Tripp October Surmise: a Case of Worst Scenarios Nelson Valdés "Submit or Die": Iraq and the American Borg Lucson Pierre-Charles Haiti's Return to the Future Kurt Nimmo The CIA Killed Pat Tillman Mark Scaramella Does Anybody Know Anything? Patrick Cockburn The Return of Saddam's Generals Gary Engler Welcome to La Paz: a Vacation in Tear Gas Col. Dan Smith Whistling in the Dark: Israel, Palestine and Bush Greg Weiher Iraq is Utterly Unlike Vietnam... Elaine Cassel Life on the Outside: a Review Vanessa Jones Letter from Australia: Why an Independent Won Sydney Jim French Agriculture's Bullied Market Hammond Guthrie Al Aronowitz, Bob Dylan and The Beatles Poets' Basement Jones, Holt, Albert, LaMorticella April 23, 2004 Ron Jacobs The Only Solution is Immediate Withdrawal Dave Lindorff Imagination Deficit Disorder Mokhiber / Weissman Contractors and Mercenaries: the Rising Corporate Military Monster Norman Solomon Country Joe Band, 2004: "What Are We Fighting For?" Cynthia McKinney All Things Are Not Equal: the Perils of Globalization CounterPunch Wire A Bitch Called Wanda Karyn Strickler Sierra Club, Inc. Hammond Guthrie Yellow Caked in the Face Paul de Rooij Graveyard of Justifications: Glossary of the Iraqi Occupation   April 22, 2004 Patrick Cockburn When Terror Came to Basra: "I Saw a Minibus of Children on Fire" Tanya Reinhart The Wall Behind Disengagement Lance Selfa Why is Kucinich Still in the Race? Josh Frank Street Fighting Man? Kucinich's Pulled Punches Sen. Robert Byrd Bush Owes America Answers on Iraq William S. Lind Why We Get It Wrong Mickey Z. Undoing the Latches Robert Jensen Why They Fast: Remembering the Victims of the World Bank John L. Hess The New York Times from 30,000 Feet   April 21, 2004 Gary Leupp Yeats on Iraq Alfredo Castro Colombia's Forgotten Prisoners Dr. Susan Block Bush's Taliban Drug Deal William A. Cook George 1 to George 2 Jack Random Iraq and Vietnam Jean-Guy Allard Alarcon Meets the Editors Mike Whitney Charade in the Desert Bill Christison Only Major Policies Changes Can Help Washington Now     April 20, 2004 Dave Lindorff Bush and Kerry Share a Problem Stan Cox Wal-Mart's Magic Numbers Bruce Anderson On Listening to Air America Joseph Kalvoda Czech Mate for Condi Greg Moses Yesterday's Intelligence Stan Goff The Democrats and Iraq Website of the Day Santorum Happens     April 19, 2004 Kurt Nimmo The "Central Hand" of the Resistance Mike Whitney Bob Woodward's Imperial Trifles Douglas Valentine 52 Pick-Up and the 100-to-1 Rule John Chuckman The Sharon Annex: Evil Does Often Triumph Doug Giebel Welcome to the Club Rahul Mahajan Hospital Closings and War Crimes     April 16 / 18, 2004 Robert Fisk Bush Legitimizes Terror Saul Landau Subverting Brazil and Cuba Dave Lindorff Paying for War: $2,150 per Family and Counting Brandy Baker Fallujah's Collateral Damage Mickey Z. The Left Attacks from the Right Bruce Jackson The Bush Press Conference: Gott Mit Uns Norman Solomon How the "NewsHour" Changed History Alexander Cockburn Bush, Kerry and Empire   April 15, 2004 Greg Moses Follow the Families, Not the Script Virginia Tilley The Carnage According to Gen. Kimmitt: Just Change the Channel Ron Jacobs They Coulda Been Champions of the World: Hurricane Carter and Ron Kovic Michael Neumann A Happy Compromise: Hate Crimes Reporting in the Toronto Globe and Mail   April 14, 2004 Tom Reeves Return to Haiti: an American Learning Zone Reza Fiyouzat Japan and Iraq Ron Jacobs What Bush Really Said Diane Christian The Real Passion   Hot Stories Alexander Cockburn Behold, the Head of a Neo-Con! Subcomandante Marcos The Death Train of the WTO Norman Finkelstein Hitchens as Model Apostate Steve Niva Israel's Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings? Dardagan, Slobodo and Williams CounterPunch Exclusive: 20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians Steve J.B. Prison Bitch Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber True Lies: the Use of Propaganda in the Iraq War Wendell Berry Small Destructions Add Up CounterPunch Wire WMD: Who Said What When Cindy Corrie A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter I Can't Hear From Gore Vidal The Erosion of the American Dream Francis Boyle Impeach Bush: A Draft Resolution Click Here for More Stories.     Subscribe Online

May 10, 2004 Racism & Torture as Entertainment From Hollywood to Abu Ghraib By ROBERT FISK The Independent Less than six month before the outbreak of the First World War, my grandmother, Margaret Fisk, gave my father William a 360-page book of imperial adventure, Tom Graham VC, A Story of the Afghan War. "Presented to Willie by his Mother," she wrote in thick pencil inside the front cover. "Willie" would have been almost 15 years old. Only after my father's death in 1992 did I inherit this book, with its handsome, engraved hardboard cover embossed with a British Victoria Cross, and only last month did I read the book. An adventure by William Johnston and published in 1900, it tells the story of the son of a British mine-owner who grows up in the northern English port of Seaton and, forced to leave school and become an apprentice clerk because of his father's sudden impoverishment, joins the British Army underage. Tom Graham is posted to a British unit in County Cork in the south-west of Ireland--he even kisses the Blarney stone--and then travels to India and to the Second Afghan War where he is gazetted a Second Lieutenant in a Highland regiment. As he stands at his late father's grave in the local churchyard before leaving for the army, Tom vows that "he would lead a pure, clean and upright life". The story is typical of my father's generation, a rip-roaring, racist story of British heroism and Muslim savagery. The real-life murder of the British embassy staff in Kabul in 1879 provoked a British military response and Tom Graham marches into Afghanistan with his regiment. Within days, Tom is driving his bayonet "up to the nozzle" into the chest of an Afghan, a "swarthy giant, his eyes glaring with hate". In the Kurrum Valley, Graham fights off "infuriated tribesmen, drunk with lust and plunder". The author notes that whenever British troops fell into Afghan hands, "their bodies were dreadfully mutilated and dishonoured by those fiends in human form". Afghans are a "villainous" lot at one point in the text, "rascals" at another and, of course, "fiends in human form". The text is not only racist but also anti-Islamic. "Boy readers," the author pontificates, "may not know that it was the sole object of every Afghan engaged in the war of 1878-80 to cut to pieces every heretic he could come across. The more pieces cut out of the unfortunate Britisher the higher his summit of bliss in Paradise." After Graham is wounded in Kabul, the Afghans--in the words of his Irish-born army doctor--have become "murtherin villains, the black niggers". A British artillery officer urges his men to fire at close-packed Afghan tribesmen with the assurance that his cannon fire "will scatter the flies". It's not difficult to see how easily my father's world of "pure, clean and upright" Britons bestialised its enemies. Though there are a few references to the "boldness" of Afghan tribesmen, no attempt is made to explain their actions. The notion that Afghans do not want foreigners invading and occupying their country does not exist in the story. But, of course, history is not kind to latter-day liberals. For I have in my library another book of the period, a sensitive and thoughtful biography of Henry Mortimer Durand--the man who drew the "Durand Line" between Afghanistan and the British Raj--which includes a replica of an original letter sent by the real-life Durand to his biographer's sister. On 12 December 1879, he recalls, "Two Squadrons of the 9th Lancers were ordered to charge a large force of Afghans in the hope of saving our guns. The charge failed, and some of our dead were afterwards found dreadfully mutilated by Afghan knives... I saw it all." The problem is clear. The Afghans really did chop bits off young Englishmen--later historical works would make it quite clear what bits these authors were talking about--just as Iraqis kicked the head off an American mercenary in Fallujah on 30 March this year and hanged his burned remains, along with those of a colleague, from the girder of an old British railway bridge over the Euphrates river. Our enemies are savages. So are we. First we learn to hate our enemies and bestialise them--and then we bellow our wrath and take our revenge when our enemies oblige us by behaving in exactly the way we expect them to. And then we torture them and humiliate them. The present-day equivalent of Tom Graham VC is Hollywood, with its poisonous, racist portrayal of Arabs and Muslims. True to form, our enemies turned out, on 11 September 2001, to be as terrible as our movies made them out to be. One day, some serious research might be conducted into how far the pilot killers modelled themselves on Hollywood's version of their ruthlessness. But it's not difficult to see how the American thugs at the Abu Ghraib prison acquired their cruelty. Born-again Christians who no doubt publicly wished to be seen upholding a "pure, clean and upright life" treated the Iraqis as if they were "fiends in human form", as "fanatics", as "flies". Hadn't the US proconsul in Iraq, Paul Bremer, described America's enemies as "dead-enders", "die-hards", "terrorists"? When the young woman involved in this torture expressed her surprise at all the fuss, I immediately understood why. Not because what she did was routine--though it clearly was--but because that is how she was told to treat these Iraqi prisoners. Hadn't they been killing American soldiers, setting off car bombs, murdering schoolchildren? Hollywood turned into reality. Now maybe you don't think that entertainment influences the young, that Tom Graham VC could no more influence a young Englishman than Hollywood could bend the mind of the American guards at Abu Ghraib. Well, you would be wrong. For Bill Fisk--the "Willie" of that dedication almost a century ago--was also taken from school in a northern English seaport because his father Edward could no longer support him. He was apprenticed to a clerk, in Birkenhead. In the few notes he left before his death, Bill recalled that he tried to join the British Army underage; he travelled to Fulwood Barracks in Preston to join the Royal Field Artillery on 15 August 1914, 11 days after the start of the First World War and almost exactly six months after his mother had given him Tom Graham. Successful in enlisting two years later, Bill Fisk, too, was sent to a British battalion in County Cork. I even have a pale sepia snapshot of him then, kissing the Blarney stone. Two years later, in France, my father was gazetted a Second Lieutenant in the King's Liverpool Regiment. Was he not consciously following the life of the fictional Tom Graham? No, Bill Fisk didn't torture prisoners--at the end of the First World War, with great nobility, he refused to command a firing party ordered to execute an Australian soldier for murder. But don't tell me we aren't conditioned by what we read and what we see as a child. All his life, Bill Fisk talked about "niggers", demeaned the Irish and talked about the "Yellow Peril"--the Chinese--as the world's greatest danger. He was a man of the Victorian age. I fear the American torturers in Iraq are creatures of our century. For if you are taught to despise your enemy as inhuman, you will--if you get the chance--cease to be a human yourself. Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity the Nation. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's hot new book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. Weekend Edition Features for May 8 / 9, 2004 Cockburn / St. Clair Torture: as American as Apple Pie Adam Jones America's Srebrenica: What About the Hundreds of POWs Suffocated and Shot at Kunduz? Douglas Valentine Who Let the Dogs Out?: Torture, the CIA and the Press Kurt Nimmo Rush Limbaugh and the Babes of Abu Ghraib Brian Cloughley Humpty Dumpty is Falling Lucia Dailey Forbidden Games Joanne Mariner * * * *: Redacting Moussaoui Mickey Z. Please Forgive U.S.? (There Are No Innocent Bystanders) John Chuckman The Thing with No Brain Doug Giebel Someone Knew: There Were No WMDs Norm Dixon How the Bush Gang Exploited 9/11 Sam Bahour A Guiding Light Falls on Ramallah Susan Davis Disorderly Conduct as Fine Art Dave Marsh In a Pig's Eye: Alan Lomax, Dead But Still Stealing Laura Flanders Life with Dick and Lynne Dave Zirin Fans Push Spiderman Off Base Carolyn Baker Why I Won't Vote in 2004 Prince "Ain't No Sense in Voting" Dr. Susan Block Onan for Two: Liberating Masturbation Poets' Basement Smith, Sleeth, Ford, Albert and Saska WWW http://www.counterpunch.org   Keep CounterPunch Alive: Make a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online! home / subscribe / about us / books / archives / search / links /