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Today's
Stories
August 9, 2004
Gary Leupp
Why
Iraqi Christians are Moving to Syria
August 7 /
8, 2004
James Petras
The
Anatomy of "Terror Experts": Meet the Mandarins of
Abu Ghraib
Fred Gardner
Run
Ricky Run: Football, Pot and Pain
Justin Delacour
Anti-Chavez Pollsters Panic: Fix Numbers; Reinvent Venezuela
Brian Cloughley
Persecuted by All; Supported by None: Who Would Be A Kurd?
Joshua Frank
The
Outsider: a Talk with Ralph Nader
Iain A. Boal
On "Shame": Warmed-Over Orientalism and Racist Projection
Chris Floyd
All About Eve: Open Season on Women in DC and Rome
Andrew Fenton
Fighting for Democracy and Justice in Haiti
Aseem Shrivastava
Saga of an Anguished Afghan
Neil Corbett
See Cuba: Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar, Mr. Bush
Carol Miller
/ Forrest Hill
Rigged Convention; Divided Party: How David Cobb Won with Only
12% of the Vote
Tarek Milleron
Breaking the Principled Voter
Donald Macintyre
The
Battle of Najaf
Ron Jacobs
Spirits of The Dead: Why I Love My Petty Bourgeois Tendencies
Mickey Z.
Kid
Gavilan's Grave: Propaganda Scores a TKO
Poets' Basement
Adler, Ford and Albert
Sex,
Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's
Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
Click here to purchase
August 6, 2004
Joshua Frank
David
Cobb's Soft Charade: the Greens and the Politics of Mendacity
Derek Seidman
An
Interview with Stan Goff
Mike Whitney
The
Arbitrary Imprisonment of Jose Padilla
William S. Lind
Corruption in the Marine Corps
David Price
In
the Shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
August 5, 2004
Mike Ferner
The Kerry Show: When Peace is Off
Message
Bruce Anderson
Two
Rejections
Robert Fisk
The Tale of Saddam's Cameraman
Todd Chretien
Florida
Comes to California: the Democrats' Plot Against Nader
Peter Linebaugh
Doing Time for Political Crime:
Paul and Silas, Bound in Jail
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.
|
August
9, 2004
The
Politics of Entrapment
Fabricating
Terror in Albany
By
KURT NIMMO
So transparently bogus is the latest
turr'ist threat -- you know, the turr'ist threat supposedly dreamed
up four years ago against neolib loan sharks (IMF, World Bank,
various banks) in Washington by al-CIA-duh-that the FBI and Immigration
and Customs Enforcement had to do something pronto: for instance,
conduct a "sting" (in other words, frame some Muslims)
to make it look like we are indeed threatened by people who hate
our way of life and despise our freedoms.
"Two men with suspected
al Qaeda links were arrested in a sting operation on an Albany,
New York, mosque early on Thursday in a money-laundering scheme
to buy a shoulder-fired missile, law enforcement sources said,"
reports Reuters. "Another law enforcement source said the
two [Muslims arrested] were believed to be linked with Ansar
al-Islam, an Iraqi militant group suspected of having ties to
the al Qaeda network."
It wasn't all that long ago
that Mullah Krekar, reputedly the leader of Ansar al-Islam, told
the al-Hayat newspaper that he met with "a CIA representative
and someone from the American army in the town of Sulaymaniya
(Iraqi Kurdistan) at the end of 2000," according to the
American Free Press. Moreover, although Reuters never mentions
such things or bothers to put things into historical context
(we might reach the wrong conclusions), members of Ansar al-Islam
trained in the CIA's Afghanistan camps during  the US
financed covert war against the Soviets. In other words, Ansar
al-Islam, following a long established and well-documented pattern,
is probably a CIA-(Pakistan) ISI creation, part of the Islamic
Terror Network. Funny thing is, as we recall, Colin Powell attempted
to connect Ansar al-Islam to Saddam, a stupid and fatuous claim
only the intellectually somnolent -- that is to say, most Americans
-- would buy into.
Even so, a few of us are not
taking the bait. "Many people are rightly suspicious, based
upon past history going back to Vietnam, the Iran-Contra affair,
and 9-11 that the U.S. government will cook the books and manufacture
whatever evidence is needed for tomorrow's dog and pony show,"
writes From the Wilderness.
So it is in Albany. Remember,
the Bushcons will do whatever they think is necessary to scare
you into cheerleading the destruction of civil liberties at home
and forever war abroad. Freddy Krugers are needed, and so two
hapless Muslims, tricked in a sting by the FBI, are offered up
as "evidence" that al-CIA-duh is plotting to kill us,
the Good and Righteous and the Envy of the World, because they
hate us and, besides, they follow a doggrel religion that preaches
hatred and the beheading of infidels.
In the weeks ahead, as the
election nears, we can expect more of this sort of behavior from
the Straussian Bushcons as they jockey to stage manage another
election and deny the other neolib -- who is, after all, not
part of neocon faction, although his philosophy differs little
from the Bushcons -- a chance to become CEO of America.
Kurt Nimmo is a photographer and multimedia developer
in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Visit his excellent no holds barred
blog at www.kurtnimmo.com/blogger.html
. Nimmo is a contributor to Cockburn and St. Clair's,
The
Politics of Anti-Semitism. A collection of his essays
for CounterPunch, Another
Day in the Empire, is now available from Dandelion Books.
He can be reached at: nimmo@zianet.com
Weekend
Edition Features for July 31 / August 1, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Kerry:
He's the (Any) One
Merlin Chowkwanyun
Five Questions with Noam Chomsky: "The Savage Extreme of
a Narrow Policy Spectrum"
David Lindorff
The Shame of the DNC
John Chuckman
The
Disturbing Words of John Edwards
Brian Cloughley
All Slam and No Dunk; All Blame and No Responsibility
Christopher Brauchli
"Being Poor is a State of Mind": the Frowning Face
of Compassionate Conservatism
Fred Gardner
A World of Pain
Michael Donnelly
How Big Pharma Bilks the Elderly
David Nally
Genocide in Darfur?
Joshua Frank
Forest Battles Escalate in Oregon
Sam Bahour
Colin Powell and My Grandmother
Diane Farsetta
The IMF and the Indonesian Elections: The Invisible Hand in the
Voting Booth
Harold Gould
Was Iraq a Mutual Charade?
Van Bergen / Stephens
Election 9/11: Surreal Political Theater
Lee Sustar
A New Model for the Labor Movement?
Ron Jacobs
The Lost Art of Hitchhiking
M. Junaid Alam
An Interview with Palestinian-American Rapper, The Iron Sheik
Poets Basement
Albert, Ford, Krieger, St. Clair
Website of
the Weekend
Cross Cultural Poetics
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