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Today's
Stories
February 27, 2004
Saul Landau
The
Haiti Redux
February 26, 2004
Brandy Baker
Is Nader
on to Something?
Jacques Kinau
AEI
to Colombia: "Can't Give You Anything But Guns, Baby"
Norman Solomon
Bugging Kofi Annan: UN Spying
and the Evasions of US Journalism
Greg Weiher
A Purloined Letter: the Zarqawi Gambit
Walt Brasch
Janet Jackson, Bush & No. 542: There are No Halftime Shows
in War
Shadi Hamid
The Music World Explodes in Anger
Norman Madarasz
As Canadian as Corruption
Chris Floyd
Bullets and Ballots
Virginia Tilly
The
Deeper Meaning of the Wall
Amy Goodman / Jeremy
Scahill
Haiti's
Lawyer Says US is Arming Haiti's Anti-Aristide Paramilitaries
Website of the Day
Clear Channel Sucks
February 25, 2004
Dr. Susan Block
Saddam's
Sex Therapist and the Rape of Free Speech
Bruce Anderson
Treacherous Bastards: The Greens and the Dems and Nader
Ron Jacobs
Our Power is on the Streets and
in Our Hearts
Mike Whitney
Bush
and Gay America: the Politics of Duplicity
Sam Husseini
Jesus in 100 Words
John L. Hess
Kick Off or Flub?
Sam Hamod
Bush's Newest Red Herring
Cockburn / St. Clair
Winning
with Nader
Website of the Day
VotePact
February 24, 2004
Ralph Nader
Why
I'm Running for President
Greg Moses
Rally
the Mob! Bush, Gay Marriage and the Constitution
Douglas O'Hara
The
Merchants of Fear: Smearing Nader
Phillip Cryan
Frozen in Time: The WSJ's Paranoid
Lens on Latin America
David Lindorff
John Kerry's China Connection
Jason Leopold
Cheney's Shame: Halliburton Faces New Charges
Gary Younge
Haiti: Throttled by History
Kromm, Masri & Purohit
Why No Democracy in Iraq?
Steve Perry
Tangled Up in Red and Blue: Beware the Electoral College
February 23, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israel's Apartheid Wall on Trial
at The Hague
Kurt Nimmo
Richard Perle, Executioner: "Heads Should Roll"
Jonathan Franklin
US Soldier Seeks Refugee Status in Canada
Al Krebs
The Liberal "Intelligentsia" v. Nader
Josh Frank
Nader's Nadir? Not a Chance
Bruce Jackson
Nader, Another View: "He's as Evil as Bush"
Gary Leupp
A Misguided
Attack, The Passion, Rabbi Lerner and the Gospels
February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
February 19, 2004
Cecilie Surasky
Anti-Semitism
at the World Social Forum? That's Not What I Saw
Ray McGovern
Iraq
Hawks and Deceptive Intelligence: Did They Really Think They'd
Get Away With It?
Tariq Ali
How Far
Will Bush Go in Iraq?
Ralph Nader
Whither
the Nation?
Wayne Madsen
Would Kerry Purge the Neo-Cons?
Norman Solomon
The Collapse of Dean's Cyber-Bubble
Christopher Brauchli
Cheney, Halliburton and the NYT
Mike Whitney
Bush's Iraq Strategy: "I Hope They Kill Each Other"
Lewis Carroll
Bush the Mighty Helmsman from Yale
Website of the Day
Sex Toy Horoscope
February 18, 2004
William Wilgus
Bush:
AWOL and Dereliction of Duty
William Blum
Mush-Minded
Liberals
Dave Lindorff
Bush's China Syndrome
Greg Weiher
Why
is Kerry Getting a Pass?
Mike Griffin
Killing the Messenger: the AFL-CIO's Attack on Harry Kelber
Mark Hand
Kerry Tells Peace Movement to "Move On"
February 17, 2004
Mike Ferner
The
Countryside Murders in Iraq
Mokhiber / Weissman
Corporation
as Psychopath
Marjorie Cohn
DrakeGate:
a Victory for Free Speech
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's
Endgame: a Review of Chalmers Johnson's "Sorrows of Empire"
Greg Bates
Nader Ambush: a New Low for The
Nation
Ximena Ortiz
A Bush
Doctrine, of Sorts
Gary Leupp
Whatever Happened to Gen. Khazraji?
Sen. John Kerry
"The Cause of Israel is the Cause of America"
Steve Perry
Kerry
1, Drudge 0
February 16, 2004
James Johnston
Huddling
with the Cheeseheads in a NASCAR World
Sara Eltantawi
To
Wear the Hijab or Not
Bruce Anderson
Kevin
Cooper and the Midnight Needle
Elaine Cassel
Feds
on Campus: the Drake Subpoenas
Rahul Mahajan
Bush,
Is the Tide Finally Turning?
Kevin Cooper
The Ritual of Death
Stan Cox
Goodbye, Howard Dean
Larry David
My War
Steve Perry
Bush and the Guard: the Cover-Up's the Thing
Website of the Day
Prison Patriots: Help This Vital Film Get Made
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
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for More Stories.
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February
27, 2004
Spying on Kofi Annan
Undermining
the UN Mission in Iraq
By JASON LEOPOLD
More evidence emerged Thursday about the United
States and Britain's underhanded tactics aimed at undermining
the United Nations Security Council as it considered a U.S.-backed
resolution in launching a preemptive strike against Iraq last
year.
Clare Short, a former member of British
Prime Minister Tony Blair's cabinet, told the BBC that British
intelligence officials spied on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan
during the run-up to war in Iraq so it could learn how Security
Council members would vote on the resolution. Short said she
read transcripts produced by British spies who allegedly bugged
Annan's office before the Iraq war.
A UN spokesman said any such espionage,
if true, would be illegal.
This latest revelation is just another
example of how the U.S. and Britain tried to undermine UN missions
ahead of the United States' invasion of Iraq and calls into question
whether intelligence used to show that Iraq had weapons of mass
destruction--which the Bush administration cited as the key reason
for waging war-was indeed "sexed up" so the U.S. could
launch a preemptive strike.
In January 2002, Deputy Secretary of
Defense Paul Wolfowitz, one of the major architects of the war
in Iraq, in an unusual move, asked the Central Intelligence agency
to investigate the performance of Swedish diplomat and former
UN Weapons Inspector Hans Blix while he headed the International
Atomic Energy Agency from 1981 to 1997. Wolfowitz was hoping
the CIA would find evidence he could use to discredit Blix for
failing to find an active nuclear weapons program in Iraq during
IAEA inspections there. Wolfowitz asked the CIA to investigate
Blix a month before UN weapons inspectors were gearing up to
return to Iraq for the first time since 1998. At the time, Wolfowitz
and other hawks in the Bush administration feared that renewed
inspections in Iraq would undermine their overall goal to launch
a military campaign against Iraq.
The CIA followed through with its secret
probe of Blix and sent a report to Wolfowitz in January 2002
that said Blix conducted inspections of Iraq's nuclear power
plants "fully within the parameters he could operate"
during his tenure at the IAEA.
According to published reports, Wolfowitz
"hit the ceiling" because it failed to provide ammunition
to discredit Blix and, by association, the new U.N. weapons inspection
program. The request for a CIA investigation underscored the
fears by Wolfowitz and others in the Pentagon that new inspections
could dismantle their plans for a military strike to remove Hussein
from power.
"The hawks' nightmare is that inspectors
will be admitted, will not be terribly vigorous and not find
anything," a former U.S. official told the Washington Post
in an April 15, 2002 story on the issue. "Economic sanctions
would be eased, and the U.S. will be unable to act."
Kofi Annan said in April 2002 that the
CIA probe against Blix was tantamount to intimidation. Fred Eckhard,
the spokesman for Annan, said in a prepared statement in April
2002 that the CIA investigation into Blix's past work was "an
attempt at intimidating an international civil servant and that
of course would be unacceptable."
It's possible that British spies may
have been eavesdropping on Annan at the time as well
The steps taken by Wolfowitz to push
a war agenda underscores the steps the Bush administration was
willing to take to manipulate and or exaggerate intelligence
information to support it's claims that Iraq posed an immediate
threat to the United States and that the only solution to topple
Saddam Hussein by using ground forces.
Nearly a year after the first bombs were
dropped in Iraq, U.S. military forces has yet to find any evidence
of WMD. President Bush recently announced the formation of an
independent commission to investigate the accuracy of prewar
intelligence. In addition, congressional and senate committees
are conducting their own probe to find out if the Bush administration
exaggerated the Iraqi threat and manipulated prewar intelligence
to win support for a preemptive strike against the country.
In June 2003, Blix accused the Bush administration
of launching a smear campaign against him because he could not
find evidence of WMD in Iraq and, he said, he refused to pump
up his reports to the U.N. about Iraq's WMD programs, which would
have given the U.S. the evidence it needed to get a majority
of U.N. member countries to support a war against Iraq. Instead,
Blix said the U.N. inspectors should be allowed more time to
conduct searches in Iraq for WMD.
In a June 11 interview with the London
Guardian newspaper, Blix said, "U.S. officials pressured
him to use more damning language when reporting on Iraq's alleged
weapons programs."
"By and large my relations with
the U.S. were good,'' Blix told the Guardian. "But toward
the end the (Bush) administration leaned on us."
Jason Leopold
may be reached at: jasonleopold@hotmail.com
Weekend
Edition Features for February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
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