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Amazing Plan Surfaces: "We Need Ethno-Weapons!"

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Today's Stories

July 9 / 10, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
After the Bombings

Sheldon Rampton
Blaming Galloway: Rhetoric vs. Reality in London

Bill Christison
Hiroshima's 60th Anniversary and Nukes in Iran: an Opportunity or Just More Hand-wringing from the Peace Movement?

Robert Fisk
Blair's Alliance with Bush Bombed

Behrooz Ghamari
Thomas Friedman's Muslim Problem

Karl Beitel
False Promises and Real Debt Relief

Brian Concannon, Jr.
Throwing Gasoline on Haiti's Fires

Fred Gardner
Sentencing Season

John Whitlow
And What Does the Market Say?

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The London Blasts: Who's Being Transformed, Them or Us?

Jackie Corr
Ted Turner and Jiminy Cricket

Dave Lindorff
"My Brother Went Over There Gung Ho; Now He's Just Bitter"

N. D. Jayaprakash
Why the CIA Tried to Kill Chou En Lai at the Bandung Conference

Seth Sandronsky
Meet the "Truth Tour": Rightwing Radio Hosts Go to Iraq

Ben Tripp
The Inevitability of George W. Bush

Website of the Weekend
The Mother of All Enemies Lists

 

July 8, 2005

Paul Craig Roberts
Blowback Hits Britain: Londoners Pay Heavy Price for Blair's Deception

Tariq Ali
The London Bombings: Why They Happened

Monica Benderman
One Soldier's Fight to Legalize Morality

Rick Jahnkow
Beyond Opt-Out: the Counter-Recruitment Movement

Christopher Brauchli
Dear Vet: If You Want to Eat While You Recuperate, You Gotta Pay Extra

Kim Peterson
Bombs in the Underground: Terror Begats Terror

Joshua Frank
Leakers and Liars: Inching Toward Indictments?

Norman Solomon
Messages from the Carnage

Website of the Day
An Interview with Ray McGovern

 

July 7, 2005

Cockburn / St. Clair
Judy Miller: the Luckiest Martyr

John Walsh
More Hawkish Than Bush: Dems in Full Battle Cry

Mike Marqusee
Message from London

Gilad Atzmon
London's Burning

Nicole Colson
Showdown at the Supreme Court

Jack Random
Judith Miller, Anti-Hero

Norman Solomon
Judith Miller, Drum Majorette for War

Len Colodny
Is Bob Woodward Still Protecting Al Haig?

Cockburn / St. Clair
Judy Miller: the Luckiest Martyr

 

July 6, 2005

Elaine Cassel
Political Necrophilia in Florida: Jeb Bush and Terri Schiavo, a Strange Affair

Sean Donahue
Why the G8 Debt Relief Plan Won't Help Nicaragua's Poor

Jeremy R. Hammond
State Sponsors of Terrorism, Applying the US Standard

Joshua Frank
Will Rove be Indicted?

Ali Khan
The "Gift" of US Democratization

Michael Dickinson
Billy Graham's Final Crusade: Blessed are the Warmakers

Norman Solomon
How to Plunge Deeper into a Quagmire: Withdrawal and US Credibility

Dave Zirin
Triumph of the Shrill: Tony Blair's Olympiad

Gary Leupp
Accusing Ahmadinejad

Website of the Day
Humiliation in Baghdad: "Not Something We Would Do"

 

 

July 5, 2005

Behrooz Ghamari
What's the Matter with Iran?: How the Reformists Lost the Presidency

Elaine Cassel
Why This Progressive Will Miss Sandra Day O'Connor

Ron Jacobs
Robert and Mabel Williams's Great Fight for Justice

Bob Libal
The Right's Assault on Academia

Dr. Peter Rost
Mea Culpa from a Big Pharma CEO

Mark Engler
The Big Debt Deal: Where's the Jubilee?

Gideon Levy
They Broke the Public's Heart

Dave Zirin
The Great Olympics Scam

Sameer Dossani
The Trouble with Gleneagles

 

July 2 / 4, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
"Bomb Teheran!" Urges Jilted Condi?

Lenni Brenner
Jefferson, God and the Fourth of July

Laura Carlsen
Zapatista's Red Alert

James Petras
The Pretensions of Neoliberalism: Six Myths About the Benefits of Foreign Investment

William A. Cook
Kings of Serpents

Brian Cloughley
Quagmire of the Vanities

Saul Landau
The Mass Media, Symbols and Ownership

Tom Crumpacker
Who Has What to Hide About Luis Posada Carriles?

Greg Moses
Dylan's America

Dr. Susan Block
My Adelphia Story: a Tale of Censorship, Fraud, Christian Family Values and Really Lousy Cable Service

Fran Shor
Disassembling Bush's Iraq War: Liberated into a No Man's Land

Fred Gardner
Study: Smoking Marijuana Does Not Cause Lung Cancer

Moshe Adler
The New London Case: Corporate Giveaways That Destroy Communities, But Don't Create Jobs

David Model
The Downing Street Memo: So What's New?

Seth Sandronsky
California Spying, Schwarzenegger-Style

Ramzy Baroud
Managed Democracy in the Middle East

Suzan Mazur
Frank Carlucci the First: the "Sublime Prince" of Scranton

Ben Tripp
Voltaire, I Can Dig Your Rap

Justin Taylor
Faux Biography and the Pleasures of "Lint"

Brendan Bailey
Mesh Caps, Vice Magazine and the Trouble with Irony

Poets' Basement
Albert, Engel and Louise

Website of the Weekend
Radical Reference

 

July 1, 2005

Christopher Brauchli
With Friends Like These: Bush Buddies Karimov and Musharraf

Pat Williams
What Real Westerners Think About Bush's Pseudo-Cowboy Palaver

Gary Leupp
Summer Surprise?

John Stauber
Mad Cow in America: the USDA Continues to Lie

John Chuckman
The Blessings of Canada

Justicia y Paz
Colombia's Disappeared: Their Names, At Least!

Cockburn / St. Clair
It's Put Up or Shut Up for Bush and the Dems on the Supreme Court

 

June 30, 2005

Kathy Kelly
An Open Letter to Carl Levin: Compassion for Iraqis

John Stauber
Oprah Not the "Only" Mad Cow in America

Virginia Rodino
All Roads Lead to Baghdad: Unity in the Anti-War Movement

Jason Leopold
Meet the New Chair of the FERC: James Kelliher, the Man Who Invited Enron to Write Bush's Energy Policy

Dave Lindorff
What Was Bush Thinking?

Greg Moses
Racism at Cape Cod

Norman Solomon
Memo to the Iraq War

Joshua Frank
Israel's Theocrats

Alexander Cockburn
The Political Function of PBS

 

June 29, 2005

Mike Schaefer
How the Washington Post Lied About Its Own War Poll

Roger Burbach / Paul Cantor
Bush's Big Democratic Hoax in Iraq

Sharon Smith
Democrats Shift into Reverse

Sam Husseini
A Quick Way to End the Insurgency

John Stauber
Put a Photo of Mad Cow #2 on a Milk Carton

Ahmad Faruqui
Is Militarism Irreversible in Pakistan?

Linda S. Heard
Bush's Speech: the View from Cairo

Stew Albert
Chet Helms: a Rock and Roll Hero

Ray McGovern
Bush at Ft. Bragg: Stay the Crooked Course

 

 

June 28, 2005

Paul Craig Roberts
A Defeat Bred in Deceit

Landau / Hassen
Bush's Meddling in Internal Syrian Politics

John A. Murphy
Keeping Nader Off the Ballot: an Analysis of Political Profiling in Pennsylvania

Mike Whitney
More Lies from Rumsfeld: Those "Meetings" with Insurgents

CounterPunch News Service
JFK on Staying in Vietnam: Is Bush Reading from Kennedy's Playbook?

Dave Zirin
Pining for the Pistons

Dave Lindorff
Showtime in Washington

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq: a Bloody Mess

 

 

June 27, 2005

Paul Craig Roberts
Blood Sacrifices for Empty Slogans

Mike Marqusee
G8: Who are the Hijackers?

Mark Scaramella
When a Corporate Raider Claims Economic Hardship: the Court-Approved Lies of Charles Hurwitz

Leigh Saavedra
Press Apologists for Torture

Kathy Kelly
Where is the UN?


June 25 / 26, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
The Supreme Court's Jackboot Liberals

Jennifer Van Bergen
America's Parallel Legal Systems

George Corsetti
This Land is Their Land: Condemnation for Corporations

Mark Chmiel / Andrew Wimmer
Let's Open the Gulag: a People's Mission to Gitmo

Kevin Zeese
Counter-Recruitment: How to Keep the Military From Getting their Hands on Your Kids

P. Sainath
Russian Roulette in Vidharbha

John Stauber
How to Bury a Mad Cow

Scott Handleman
Gay in the Third World

Tom Barry
The Politics & Ideologies of the Anti-Immigrationists

John Walsh
Looking for Peace in All the Wrong Places

Justin E.H. Smith
The Hairless Apes of Kansas vs. the Reality-Based Community: Why Progressives Have a Stake in the War on Evolution

Alan Wallis
The Story of Pinky: the Drug Trade in My Neighborhood

Ben Tripp
Negative Space: an Artful Lesson

Frederick B. Hudson
Songs to Lose Your Loneliness By: the Raised Voices of Sweet Honey in the Rock

Poets' Basement
Gaffney, Engel, Davies, and Albert

 

 

June 24, 2005

Ray McGovern
The Downing St. Fixation: Fixing to Fix "Fixed"

Jorge Mariscal
"They Only Call Us Americans When They Need Us for War": the Paradox of Mexican Americans in Iraq

Desiree Hellegers
Portland vs. the FBI

Zeynep Toufe
What Do the American People Know and When Did They Know It?

Joshua Frank
Call Him Senator Con Job

David Lindorff
Which Flag Would Jesus Burn?

Michael Neumann
Victory and Recruitment

Website of the Day
Gagging Dr. Dean

June 23, 2005

Christopher Brauchli
Thomas Griffith and Rule 49: He Practiced Law Without a License; Now He's a Federal Appeals Court Judge

Clay Conrad
Killing Off the Jury with Tort Reform

Standard Schaefer
A Retort to Military Neo-Liberalism

P. Sainath
Vidharbha: No rains and 116F, But It Does Have "Snow" and Water Parks

Mark Engler
CAFTA Deserves a Quiet Death

Norman Solomon
Voluntary Amnesia in America

Cockburn / St. Clair
Frank Calzon

Kathy Kelly
Where You Stand Determines What You See

 

June 22, 2005

Kevin Zeese
The Bush Administration's Psy-Ops on the American Public: an Interview with Col. Sam Gardiner

William S. Lind
Afghanistan: the Other War

Arsalan Iftikhar
Patriots Against the PATRIOT Act

Dan Nagengast
Give Populism a Chance: From France to Kansas

David Krieger
To the Graduates: We Live in an Interdependent World

Kathleen & Bill Christison
Tempest in Santa Fe: Confronting Israeli Myth-making

 

 

June 21, 2005

Brian Cloughley
Destroy the Unbelievers!

Mike Whitney
President Disconnect

Dave Lindorff
Who Needs Big Bird, Anyway?

Mark Weisbrot
Bush's Lonely Campaign Against Hugo Chavez

Matthew R. Simmons
The Coming Saudi Oil Crisis

Dave Zirin
The Crass Slipper Fits: Ron Howard's Terrible "Cinderella Man"

Virginia Rodino
The Anti-War Movement and Impeachment

Paul Craig Roberts
A War Waged by Liars and Morons

 

June 20, 2005

Alan Maass
The GM Job Massacre

Tariq Ali
To the Gates of the Gleneagles Hotel!

Mickey Z.
WMDs American-Style: It's 60 Years Since Alamogordo

William Blum
Some Things You Need to Know Before the World Ends

Gary Leupp
Old News Indeed: In 1999, Bush Craved Chance to Attack Iraq

Jason Leopold
Someone Tell Bush Iraq Wasn't Behind 9/11, Before He Starts Another War

Dave Lindorff
Why the Media Should be Schiavo'd

Alan Maass
The GM Job Massacre

Uri Avnery
Condi and Hamas

Website of the Day
Crimes Against Poetry

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Weekend Edition
July 9 / 10, 2005

Mission Accomplished

Iraq is Broken

By SAUL LANDAU

It's hard to believe that supposedly intelligent people like Senators Joseph Biden (DE), Hillary Clinton (NY) and John Kerry (MA) call for "staying the course" in Iraq and acting responsibly by sending more US troops with more fire power over there.

Don't they understand that American soldiers break, not fix? The more US soldiers in Iraq, the more damage they will do and the more enemies they will make. To limit damage, to act morally and responsibly, remove the cause of violence and chaos in Iraq: the US military presence.

Since the early 1950s, US Presidents have used troops and the CIA to break other countries, not fix them. In 1953, the CIA shattered Iran's integrity by overthrowing the elected Mossadegh government. 26 years later, Iranians overthrew the US-backed Shah. In 1979, Iranians showed the depth of their rage by also seizing scores of US officials as hostages. The Ayatollah's regime labeled the United States "The Great Satan" ­ for screwing their country.

In 1954, the CIA smashed Guatemala by overthrowing a democratically elected government and replacing it with a military gang that killed and looted for forty years. Embraced by the Pentagon, these gangsters in uniform slaughtered as many as 100,000 Guatemalans (mostly indigenous peasants) and stole their land. The country has not yet recovered.

On September 11, 1973, Richard Nixon helped rupture Chile by "destabilizing" its elected government. For seventeen subsequent years, Washington supported a bloody military dictatorship led by General August Pinochet, a specialist in assassinating, disappearing and torturing his opponents at home and abroad. In 1991, the civilian government's National Truth and Reconciliation Commission listed Pinochet's crimes: 3,197 people assassinated or disappeared, tens of thousands tortured, hundreds of thousands forced into exile.

In March 2003, George W. Bush ordered the US military to break Iraq. The US arsenal destroyed the electricity and water supply, damaged sewage treatment and other vital sanitary facilities and pulverized bridges, other public places and thousands of homes. On May 1, 2003, dressed in a jump suit, Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln and announced: "Mission Accomplished."

His critics, myself included, laughed at such braggadocio. We misunderstood him. He had accomplished the standard post-WWII US military mission: He broke another country.

The US-led Coalition has not restored what it demolished in Iraq, nor reestablished services to the level of Saddam Hussein's regime. They imprisoned tens of thousands of Iraqis, subjecting many of those to systematic torture.

Former prisoner Ali Abbas told journalist Dahr Jamail that to break the will of Iraqi prisoners, US guards at Abu Ghraib "used electricity on us" while millions of homes lacked electricity for hours each day. "They also shit on us, used dogs against usand starved us." As Abbas told Jamail, "the Americans delivered electricity to my ass before they brought it to my house" (Jamail testimony at the World Tribunal on Iraq, June 25, 2005, Istanbul). Estimates of Iraqis in prison range as high as eighty thousand, most of whom have not been charged.

In 1991, during the first Gulf War, the breaking began. US planes and artillery delivered more than 300 tons of uranium tipped bombs and shells to targets in southern Iraq alone. Residue from these weapons turned into particles that people -- including US troops ­inhaled. In 2003, more US toxic material rained down on the Iraqi environment.

In September 2002, I saw dying kids in the Baghdad Children's Hospital. Iraqi doctors had already surmised that only the presence of depleted uranium could have caused such a profound spike in the cancer rates among children.

In June 2005, Dr. Thomas Fasy of the Mr. Sinai School of Medicine concluded that data from Iraqi hospitals indicated that depleted uranium's effect had shown up dramatically in a more than 400% rise in children's cancer in just over a decade. Uranium ions bond with DNA and this, he said, has also caused a notable leap in children's leukemia rates along with sharply elevated incidences of congenital birth defects. The United States literally released cancer-causing material into Iraqi air, soil and water.

This toxic metal had performed the coup de grace to the Iraqi health system, already devastated by US bombing and embargo, Fasy said. The cost of such breakage: human life (World Tribunal on Iraq, June 26, 2005).

In November 2004, US soldiers carried out punitive action in Falluja, a city of some 300,000 residents, an operation that surpassed the 1936 Nazi bombing of Guernica in Spain. Falluja was reduced to rubble. Thousands died.
On the economic front, Washington broke Iraq as well ­ of its socialist habit. US colonial administrator J. Paul Bremer forced a constitution down Iraqi throats ­ to break their statist economic system. He planned to privatize some 200 state-owned enterprises. Management of port facilities at Umm Qasr went to Stevedoring Services of America, a US company. "Bremer studiously ignored the rapidly rising unemployment and social disorder that arose from the destruction of a social order." "If privatization isn't halted," wrote Naomi Klein, 'free Iraq' will be the most sold country on earth" (The Nation, April 28, 2003).

But Iraqis resist. They continually sabotage the oil pipeline. Indeed, such tactics have caused major oil companies to lose enthusiasm for owning Iraqi oil. Besides, they do well under the current OPEC arrangement -- $60 a barrel -- and have no wish to change it.

Iraqi workers also have not welcomed the selling of state-owned factories to foreigners. Some work forces have even threatened to assassinate prospective buyers. This does not make investors feel as if modern Iraq provides a welcome climate (Naomi Klein, speech at Cal Poly Pomona, November 2004).

The chaos that engulfs Iraq does not improve from the presence of US troops. Iraqis who testified in the Istanbul World Tribunal on Iraq told about intense hatred of their people for the occupiers. The Iraqis feel abused by far more than the publicized incidents at Abu Ghraib. On routine US patrols and raids, trigger-happy young soldiers gun down innocent Iraqis. Pilots drop bombs on coordinates where people live. The 2004 documentary Gunner Palace resembles scenes from the TV show Cops. GIs bash down doors, charge into homes with fingers on rifle triggers shouting "on the floor motherfucker," while women scream and children cry. The humiliated and handcuffed men go to prison. The soldiers then return to their posh living quarters and count the days remaining before they can go home. Like the GIs in Vietnam three plus decades ago, those in Iraq sacrifice lives, limbs and psyches. But as the film makes clear, most don't know the purpose of their military mission.

Indeed, Iraqis recall well how US troops watched passively while massive looting took place of their national, historic treasure [How does one fix a broken Babylon? A crime wave swept the country and Armed Americans shrugged. Women can no longer walk the streets in safety as they once did. US occupations has also pitted Sunnis against Shiites, Kurds against Turkmen. Some Iraqi Christians have fled in fear to Syria. Bush omitted these facts and ignored the violence and chaos that define daily life. US personnel avidly train young Iraqis into constabulary form ­ those that survive the regular suicide bombings and other attacks aimed at the police.

This scenario ­ reality -- does not penetrate the heads of key Democrats who continue to talk about "our obligation" to fix Iraq. Words don't fix broken lives or property. Commitment to democracy calls for more than the United States appointing an Iraqi government and calling it democratic or forcing an Iraqi election in which millions bravely voted, but for what never got reported. The media and the White House ignored the startling fact that the majority of Iraqis voted against the US-chosen Iyad Allawi and for the United Iraqi Alliance, which demanded "a timetable for the withdrawal of the multinational forces from Iraq" (The Nation, February 11, 2005).

Instead of picking up on the withdrawal demand, before more breakage occurs, foolish Democratic Senators demand that Bush send in more troops. Bush ironically appears as more moderate as he appeals for patriotic unity in the form of flying the flag on July 4.

What must Iraqis feel at the sight of that flag on July 4? In its name, the US military has destroyed their cities, tortured their people, shot many of them for no reason at checkpoints or wherever the troops happened to be patrolling. Iraqis have scarce electricity, food and water and no secure jobs. Yet, Bush keeps repeating that he "liberated Iraq."

On June 28, addressing the Special Forces at Fort Bragg, Bush asked implying that "our" people had given up a lot to wage his war : "Is the sacrifice worth it?" He quickly answered his own question. "It is worth it"

The Iraq war has cost him nothing ­ perhaps a few hours of missed video golf.

"We have more work to do," he stated. Yes, Bush stands as a national model of sacrifice and hard work! And Iraqis must think that those Democrats who ask for more troops are either crazy or stark opportunists. It will take them that much longer to restore some integrity to their broken society.

Saul Landau teaches at Cal Poly Pomona University and is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. Landau testified before the World Tribunal on Iraq June 24-27, Istanbul.