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Inside Iraq's Resistance HOT HOT HOT New CounterPunch Print Edition! Meet actual Iraqis and not just Western caricatures. Laith al-Saud interviews top man in Iraq's national resistance. It's not just Abu Ghraib and bids to kill Fidel Castro. Torture and assassination are integral parts of America's imperial machine. Don't miss Andrew Wimmer's searing journey into the soul of a nation that tortures as a way of life. Plus Alexander Cockburn on the killing of General Kassem. PLUS Sam Sillen's rollicking exhumation of Edmund Wilson as Malthusian Trostskyite. Get the answers you're looking for in the latest subscriber-only edition of CounterPunch ... CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! CounterPunch Writer Daniel Wolff in Portland on Race, Music and Ashbury Park Call Toll Free 1-800-840-3683 or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558

Today's Stories October 7, 2005 Jennifer Van Bergen New American Law: the Case of Dr. Dhafir October 6, 2005 P. Sainath "Take That, Tom Friedman": Indian Masses Reject NYT's Neoliberal Idol Again Scott Parkin When Antiwar Activists Get Mugged Paul Craig Roberts Blundering into Syria Andréa Schmidt Haiti's Biometric Elections: a High-Tech Experiment in Exclusion Dave Lindorff Easy Money in the Big Easy Joshua Frank In Defense of Lew Rockwell M. Junaid Alam Jackboots at George Mason Matthew Koehler Cock and Bull on the Bitterroot Robert Pollin Is the Dollar Still Falling?   October 5, 2005 Heather Gray Militarization is Not an Answer for Reconstruction: the Case of the Philippines Robert Jensen Is Bush a Racist? Ramzy Baroud Bush's Final Choice: America or the Empire Col. Dan Smith Keeping Promises to Iraq: "Everything is Bad" Dave Zirin Barry Bonds Laughs Last Paul Craig Roberts Liberal Guilt? How the Neocons Took Over Alan Maass Doing the Right Wing's Dirty Work   October 4, 2005 Nikolas Kozloff Shocking the Two Party System: a Political Opportunity for Sheehan and the Antiwar Mvt. Mike Roselle Houston, You've Got a Problem Joshua Frank The Scoop on Harriet Miers John Chuckman War Porn: What the Gruesome Images Say Alan Farago Storm Warning for Jeb: Developers, Hurricanes and the Keys Mickey Z. An Interview with Thaddeus Rutkowski Christine & Ethan Rose Home Depot Exploits Hurricane Victims Gary Leupp An Earlier Empire's War on Iraq: a Lesson from Roman History Website of the Day Rodney Crowell on Bob Dylan   October 3, 2005 Vijay Prashad Desperation at Holyoke Paul Craig Roberts Condi Rice: Gunslinger Joshua Frank An Interview with Cindy Sheehan Seth Sandronsky The Hiring Crisis for Black Teens Jeffrey St. Clair The Great Green Scare   October 1 / 2, 2005 Cockburn / St. Clair Democrats Sink Deeper into the Ooze Dave Marsh A Direction Home: a Message from Bob Dylan Ralph Nader Gutless, Spineless and Clueless Flavia Alaya Showdown at Sheriff's Plaza Uri Avnery The Gladiators: Sharon's Victory Chris Kutalik The Battle at Northwest Airlines Greg Moses Bill Bennett's Book of Cracker Virtues Brian J. Foley I Gave My Copy of the Constitution to a Pro-War Vet Nicole Colson Hunger Strike at Gitmo Ray McGovern Abu Ghraib is a Command Responsibility Fred Gardner Ricky Williams Takes a Late Hit Justin Felux Save America from Crime: Abort Every White Baby! Will Youmans "Free the P": Hip-Hop for Palestine Mike Ferner What Else Shall We Do? David Krieger The War in Iraq: a Broken Covenant Agustin Velloso Samson Returns to Gaza Saul Landau The Constant Gardener: Serious Cinema Ben Tripp Right Down the Middle Poets Basement Peddibone, Crowell, Engel and Albert Website of the Weekend Holler If Ya Hear Me   September 30, 2005 Mary Geddry Why I Marched: They Made My Son Kill Paul Craig Roberts Bush is Cooking Up Two New Wars Dave Lindorff Judith Miller's Strange Voluntary Jail Time Gregory Wilpert "The Osama Bin Laden of Latin America" Benjamin Dangl "Gringo, Go Home:" an Interview with Orlando Castillo James McMurtry We Can't Make It Here Anymore T.R. Johnson Return to the Ninth Ward   September 29, 2005 Sen. Russ Feingold Bush's Iraq War is Weakening America Carl G. Estabrook Obama the Enabler Ramzy Baroud Rhetoric and Reality of War Dave Lindorff What Opposition Party? Mike Whitney Brownie's Comic Opera Jozef Hand-Boniakowski What Noble Cause? Gary Handschumacher Getting Arrested with Cindy Sheehan Winslow T. Wheeler No Leaders in Congress Against This War: Lame Democrat and Tame Republicans   September 28, 2005 Dr. Eyad Serraj Letter from Gaza: What Disengagement Sounds Like William A. Cook Bush's Security Barrier Liaquat Ali Khan The Invention of Porno Torture Mike Whitney Apartheid Justice in America Joshua Frank Sheehan and the Democrats: Anybody Home? CounterPunch Wire New Orleans Prisoners Abandoned to Floodwaters Chris Genovali Cutting the Bears Out of the Great Bear Rainforest Linn Washington, Jr. White Affirmative Action: How John Roberts Got to the Top   September 27, 2005 Forrest Hylton Political Murder in Puerto Rico: a Matter for Our Movement Jason Leopold The Decline and Fall of Bill Frist Jennifer K. Harbury Torture is US Policy, Not an Aberration Ray McGovern Torture and Cowardice: Why are American Religious Leaders Silent? Mike Ferner Bringing the War Home: Arrested at the Pentagon Antony Loewenstein When the Truth Comes to Town: What You Can't Say About Israel in Australia Harry Browne Live from Hollywood: the IRA Disarms   September 26, 2005 Rafael Rodriguez Cruz Assassination in Puerto Rico: the FBI Murders a Legend Joshua Frank Democrats Flee Peace Protests Lamis Andoni The Railroading of Taysir Alony Mike Marqusee Those Pesky "Urban Intellectuals": Blair, Spiro Agnew and the Antiwar Movement Rep. Cynthia McKinney They Can't Fool Us Anymore Ron Jacobs A Small March for Me, a Giant March for the Antiwar Movement Norman Solomon The Media and the Antiwar Movement John Chuckman Bush in a Bottle Paul Craig Roberts America is Running Out of Time   September 24 / 25, 2005 Kathy and Bill Christison Polluting Palestine: Settlements & Sewage Ralph Nader Stealing the Moment: How Corporations Cashed in on Katrina Saul Landau The Terrorist Resumé of Luis Posada Greg Moses A Movement Gathers Power on the Sorrow Plateau Roger Burbach Hugo Chavez's Mission Vijay Prashad America's Shame Laura Carlsen After NAFTA Robert Fisk When Man and Nature Conspire to Expose the Lies of the Powerful Dave Lindorff A Gusher Called Katrina: They Fix Oil Prices, Don't They? Kirkpatrick Sale / Thomas Naylor Secession from the Empire: the Middlebury Declaration Maj. Anthony Milavic The US Military and Torture: the View of a Former Interrogator Brian Concannon, Jr. Haiti: the Time for Action is Now   September 23, 2005 CounterPunch News Service In Which, Phil Donahue Demolishes Bill O'Reilly Diane Farsetta Katrina and Right-Wing Think Tanks Robert Sandels Militarizing the Market Christopher Brauchli Bush: the Good Samaritan for Corporations Alan Farago Bird Flu Takes Flight Dave Zirin When Sports & Politics Collided: Redeeming the Olympic Martyrs of 1968 Maxine Conant A Simple Test for Bush David Price Workers Get Hit Twice: Katrina and Davis-Bacon Profiteering   September 22, 2005 Smith, Wood, Leas, and Greenfield Which Way Forward for the Green Party? a Report from Tulsa Patrick Cockburn Iraqis: This Government has No Authority Manuel Garcia, Jr. Thinking is Religious Freedom Lucia Dailey Trial of the St. Patrick's Four: Day One Mokhiber / Weissman Are You a Speed Freak? Russell D. Hoffman The Nukes in Rita's Path Kona Lowell God's Hurricane? Jason Leopold GOP Fiscal Policy and Katrina Website of the Day Robert Pollin on the Global Economy   September 21, 2005 Jorge Mariscal Military Recruiters: Counselers or Salesmen? Linda S. Heard Double Standards in Iraq: Basra Brit Jailbreak Joshua Frank NYPD Unplugs Cindy Sheehan Eric Ruder "The Problem in Iraq is the US": an Interview with Camilo Mejia Pierre Tristam The Struts and Bull Presidency Dave Lindorff The Real Story of the German Elections Mike Ferner Sit Down in DC Missy Comley Beattie Bush's Katrina Bling Bling Jeffrey St. Clair W Marks the Spot Website of the Day New Orleans: Survivor Stories   September 20, 2005 Steve Breyman Toxic Gumbo: Katrina and Environmental Justice George Galloway Et Tu, Greg Palast? Patrick Cockburn What Happened to Iraq's Missing $1 Billion? M. Shahid Alam Gen. Musharraf and Israel: Is Pakistan Selling Out? Mike Whitney The Gitmo Hunger Strikers Winslow T. Wheeler It's Not Rocket Science Niranjan Ramakrishnan Back to the Future: North Korea's Gambit Paul Craig Roberts Will Neocon Fanaticism Destroy America?         Subscribe Online

October 7, 2005 How About Focusing on the Real Issues? The Plame Case By LARRY JOHNSON Former CIA analyst Want to know one reason why the CIA has been unable to recruit spies? Just reflect on how a potential recruit would react to the outing of Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA operations officer. The investigation into which administration officials compromised Plame, wife of former US ambassador Joseph Wilson, is nearing completion. Lost in the recent spurt of press reporting, however, is the fact that the outing of Ms. Plame (and, as night follows the day, her carefully cultivated network of spies) has done great damage to US clandestine operations-not to mention those she recruited over her distinguished career. Ms. Plame, a very gifted case officer, was a close colleague of mine at CIA. Her dedication and courage were made abundantly clear when she became one of the few to volunteer to asume the risks of operating under non-official cover-meaning that if you get caught, too bad, you're on your own; the US government never heard of you. The supreme irony is that Plame's now-compromised network was reporting on the priority-one issue of US intelligence-weapons of mass destruction. Thus, it was made clear to all, including active and potential intelligence sources abroad, that even when high-priority intelligence targets are involved, Bush administration officials do not shrink from exposing such sources for petty political purpose. The harm to CIA and its efforts to recruit spies instinctively wary of the risks in providing intelligence information is immense. Shortly after the invasion of Iraq, Ambassador Wilson publicly exposed an important lie-and the president as liar-in-chief-when Wilson debunked reporting that Iraq was seeking uranium in the African country of Niger. Still, as Wilson himself has suggested, the primary purpose of leaking his wife's employment at CIA was not so much to retaliate against him personally, but rather to issue a warning to others privy to administration lies on the war not to speak out. Administration officials felt they needed to provide an object lesson of what truth tellers can expect in the way of swift retaliation. ...and It Was All Based on a Forgery Whether or not indictments come down, our domesticated mainstream media probably will continue to play down the damage to US intelligence. Even more important, they are likely to ignore completely the very curious event that started the whole business-the forging of documents that became the basis of reporting that Iraq was seeking uranium in Niger for its (non-existent) nuclear weapons program. Together with other circumstantial evidence, the neuralgic reaction of Vice President Dick Cheney to press reports that he was point man for promoting the bogus "intelligence" report suggests that he may also have been its intellectual author/authorizer. Yes, I am suggesting that it may have been an inside job. Cheney and his chief of staff Lewis Libby may well have had a hand in commissioning the forgery, as a way of manufacturing an intelligence report, with "mushroom cloud" written all over it-in order to deceive Congress into approving an unnecessary war. The more you look into the whole affair, the curiouser and curiouser it becomes. Why, for example, would Senate Intelligence Committee chair Pat Roberts (R, Kansas) adamantly refuse to investigate the provenance of a forgery used to start a war? And why did former Secretary of State Colin Powell, addressing the UN on February 5, 2003, decide to delete from his very long laundry list of spurious charges against Iraq its alleged attempt to acquire uranium from Niger? Even though he himself had avoided repeating the famous "16 words" used by President Bush just five weeks before (se below), Powell was forced to listen stoically as Mohammed El-Baradei, head of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, reported on world-wide TV that his own and outside experts had concluded that the Iraq-Niger documents were "not authentic." The White House left it to Powell to concede that El-Baradei was correct, and Powell eventually did so. Perhaps special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald will be able to shed light on some of this. These are some of the key neglected issues underneath the superficial who-said-what-to-whom-when treatment that has characterized most press reporting. Small wonder that many of those trying to follow this important story are missing the forest for the trees. It is important that a fuller story be available to citizens of this country, to enable us to judge the enormity and significance of what happened. Accordingly, my Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) colleagues and I thought it would be useful to boil down into digestible, chronological form the key facts at the beginning of the story: February 13, 2002: According to the Senate Intelligence Committee's "Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq" of July 2004 (pp 38-39), Vice President Cheney asked his CIA morning briefer for CIA's analysis of a report, which he had seen in a Defense Intelligence Agency publication, alleging that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium from Niger. In response, the Director of Central Intelligence's Center for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control (WINPAC) issued an intelligence assessment with limited distribution. It said, "Information on the alleged uranium contract between Iraq and Niger comes exclusively from a foreign government service report that lacks crucial details, and we are working to clarify the information and to determine whether it can be corroborated." The assessment also noted, "Some of the information in the report contradicts reporting from the U.S. Embassy in Niamey (Niger). US diplomats say the French Government-led consortium that operates Niger 's two uranium mines maintains complete control over uranium mining and yellowcake production." The CIA sent a separate version of the assessment to the Vice President's office, which differed only in that it named the foreign government service. February 19: Officials of the CIA's Directorate of Operations (DO) have told the Senate committee that DO managers-not Valerie Plame-decided to send former ambassador Wilson to Niger to make immediate inquiries. Wilson, who was acting ambassador in Baghdad when the 1991 Gulf War began, had earlier served in Niger, and had wide contacts there. On February 19, after meeting with DO managers and other intelligence community officials at CIA headquarters, Wilson was commissioned to go to Niger and investigate. February 26: Ambassador Wilson arrived in Niger. He determined during the course of his visit that there was no substance to the allegation that Iraq was trying to procure uranium in Niger. The US Ambassador to Niger told the Senate Committee that Ambassador Wilson's conclusion was the same as that reached earlier by the U.S. embassy in Niamey. Early March: Vice President Cheney asked his CIA briefer for an update on the Niger issue. According to the Senate report on the prewar performance of intelligence, Cheney had not forgotten his original request. And so CIA officers immediately debriefed Ambassador Wilson on the results of his trip, wrote up his report, and disseminated the report on 8 March (p. 42 of the Senate report). Fall of 2002: CIA officials repeatedly warned the administration and Congress not to accept as fact the claim that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium. According to the Senate report (p. 54), the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency told Senator Kyl, for example, that the CIA did not agree with the British view that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium. On October 6, 2002, CIA Director Tenet called Deputy National Security Advisor Hadley to warn him not to introduce the bogus information into the speech being readied for the president to use the next day (just three days before Congress voted to authorize war). Hadley removed the passage from the speech (p. 56). January 28, 2003: In his State of the Union Address, President Bush included the (in)famous "16 words," saying, "The British government has learned (sic) that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." May: Vice President Cheney's office was irate over a May 6 article by New York Times columnist Nick Kristof regarding the mission of a "former US ambassador" to Niger, and in particular to Kristof's assertion that the Vice President had instigated the trip. According to former senior CIA officials, Cheney's aides were "very uptight about the vice president being tagged that way." June: The White House, with the participation of Karl Rove and Lewis Libby (and, according to one recent report, of the president and vice president themselves), conceived and then executed a plan to discredit Ambassador Wilson. A variety of reports from journalists and others show that as early as the end of May, White House officials were trying to dig up dirt on Ambassador Wilson. And the State Department drafted a top-secret memorandum on the Iraq-Niger affair, identifying Vallerie Plame by her maiden name. July 13: Robert Novak, citing two Administration sources, identified Valerie Plame by name as a CIA operative. Plame was still under cover when Novak published her name, thus compromising not only Plame, but also the many agents she had recruited. She conducted several overseas missions as part of her cover job. Betrayal. There is no other word for it. Except some might call it treason. Larry Johnson worked as a CIA intelligence analyst and State Department counter-terrorism official. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). An earlier version of this article appeared on TomPaine.com                                                         CLARIFICATION ALEXANDER COCKBURN, JEFFREY ST CLAIR, BECKY GRANT AND THE INSTITUTE FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF JOURNALISTIC CLARITY, COUNTERPUNCH We published an article entitled "A Saudiless Arabia" by Wayne Madsen dated October 22, 2002 (the "Article"), on the website of the Institute for the Advancement of Journalistic Clarity, CounterPunch, www.counterpunch.org (the "Website"). Although it was not our intention, counsel for Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi has advised us the Article suggests, or could be read as suggesting, that Mr Al Amoudi has funded, supported, or is in some way associated with, the terrorist activities of Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda terrorist network. We do not have any evidence connecting Mr Al Amoudi with terrorism. As a result of an exchange of communications with Mr Al Amoudi's lawyers, we have removed the Article from the Website. We are pleased to clarify the position. August 17, 2005

Coming in the Fall from CounterPunch Books! The Case Against Israel By Michael Neumann Click Here to Advance Order Philosopher Michael Neumann's Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz Coming This Fall Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair