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Today's
Stories
August 28,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
Zombies
for Kerry
August 27,
2004
Gary Leupp
Neocon
Musings
Robin Cook
The
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
Diane Christian
Disarming
Michael Donnelly
Situational Democracy: the Show Me the Green Party?
Jack Random
4F and Other Heroes: an Army of War Resisters
Mike Ferner
"To the Swift Boats!"
Mazin Qumsiyeh
7000 Palestinian Political Prisoners
Veronza Bowers, Jr.
"You Won't Be Leaving Tomorrow"
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 26,
2004
M. Shahid Alam
The
Clash Thesis: a Failing Ideology?
Diane Christian
War
Rules: Bush is No Sun Tzu
Derek Seidman
"They're As Bad As Wal-Mart:" Starbucks Workers Get
Organized
David Lindorff
Court to RNC Protesters: Drop the Rally
Christopher
Brauchli
Signs of Dissent: the Bush in the Bubble
Stew Albert
Reporting Suspicious Activity
Mark Donham
Judgement in Athens: Give the Koreans Their Day in Court
Saul Landau
Pinochet:
the Al Capone of the Southern Cone
Website of
the Day
The Kerry 527 Ad You'll Never See
August 25,
2004
Amelia Peltz
Can
I Have 9.8 Seconds of Your Time?
Noah Leavitt
Defining and Redefining Torture
Ron Jacobs
Takin' It to the Streets: It's Not About the Election, It's About
Democracy
James Brooks
Coronado Crosses the Jordan
Akiva Eldar
How to Win the Jewish Vote: Turn Gaza into a "Mini-Afghanistan"
Gemma Araneta
Chavez's New Brand of Populism
Philip Cryan
Uribe's Boys: the Death Squads of Colombia
CounterPunch Wire
Cheney Opens the Closet Door
August 24,
2004
Jeremy Scahill
John
Kerry: the Warchurian Candidate
Gary Leupp
"We
Want Them to Go Away"
David Domke
God
Willing: an Echoing Press and Political Fundamentalism
William Loren Katz
The Meaning of Hugo Chávez: Black and Indian Power in
Venezuela
Jonah Gindin
With Chavez? Reading the International Private Media
Fran Schor
Denying Atrocities: From Vietnam to Fallujah
Joe Bageant
Driving
on the Bones of God
Website of the Day
The Great America Lockdown: a Primer for the RNC
August 23,
2004
Winslow Wheeler
Don't
Mind If I Do: Porkbarrel and the War on Terror
John Pilger
Bush
May Be the Lesser Evil
Stan Goff
Swift
Boat Dogfight
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
Notes
from the West Bank: Build, Demolish, Rebuild
Mike Whitney
The Unraveling of Afghanistan
William Blum
Brave
New World of Iraqi Sovereignty
Ralph Nader
A Letter to the Washington Post: a Shameful and Unsavory Editorial
August 21 /
22, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
"They
Want Blood:" The Bi-Partisan Origins of the Total War on
Drugs
Landau / Hassen
Failing
the Mission? Form a Commission
Brian Cloughley
The
Bush Team in Iraq: Moral Cowardice, as Practiced by Experts
Josh Frank
Nader as David Duke? The ADL Wants You to Think So
Mike Whitney
Reincarnating Mengele: the Torture Doctors of Abu Ghraib
Ron Jacobs
Day Labor Blues
Mickey Z.
Shooting at Whales: 40 Years After Tonkin
Fred Gardner
Dr. Wolman Comes Out: The Cannabis Consultants
Dave Zirin
Uprising in Athens: Iraqi Soccer Team Gives Bush the Boot
Josh Saxe
Witnessing Police Brutality in LA
Yanar Mohammed
Letter from Baghdad: a Democracy of Killings and Bombings
Helen Williams
Ali's Story: a Taste of Reality from Baghdad
Michael Donnelly
Elemental and NaturalForests, Fire and Recovery
Elizabeth Schulte
The Crisis in Affordable Housing
Poets' Basement
Adler, Albert, Virgil, Ford and Krieger
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.
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Weekend
Edition
August 28 / 29, 2004
Reflections
of a Torture Survivor
From
El Salvador to Abu Ghraib
By
Dr. JUAN ROMAGOZA
As a survivor of torture in El Salvador,
I find news about the mistreatment of prisoners by U. S. soldiers
heartbreaking.
On December 12, 1980, I was
picked up by Salvadoran National Guardsmen after they opened
fire on a crowd where my group of health workers was setting
up a makeshift clinic.
For 24 days I was subjected
to physical, psychological and emotional torture designed to
force me to admit participation in a guerrilla group. But I had
nothing to admit. Still, I was beaten, subjected to electrical
shocks and had the tendons in my hands destroyed, among other
horrors.
When I was released, I weighed
70 pounds and had infected wounds on my body. Now, more than
20 years later, I am still working to heal the psychological
wounds.
The traumas of war in Central
America have also exacted a painful toll on other immigrants
here in the United States. Gangs, violence, alcoholism, family
breakdown and persistent fear and suspicion keep many locked
in a space in which they perpetually relive the war, whether
consciously or unconsciously.
The health clinic where I work
in Washington, D.C., routinely treats patients who bear the scars
of torture and the emotional wounds of trauma.
Some of the most profoundly
affected victims of war are those who were responsible for enforcing
it. Many former Salvadoran military soldiers are now sleeping
on sidewalks in a drunken stupor, alcohol being the only way
they can appease the demons of their past.
Torture has many effects ---
not just on those who are tortured.
In July 2002, I participated
in a civil lawsuit against two former generals from El Salvador.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, they were responsible for overseeing
the military's brutal repression of revolutionary groups that
were challenging the status quo of poverty for most of the population.
As this was still in the thick of the Cold War, U.S. military
aid training flowed generously to the military in El Salvador
to support whatever means were necessary to put down these groups
and their supporters.
The Torture Victims Protection
Act, signed into law by the first President Bush, was enacted
to hold people such as these generals accountable for crimes
committed under their watch. Under the principle of command responsibility,
if these generals effectively exercised military command over
troops who were committing torture, they should have known it
was happening and they should have stopped it. They were ultimately
responsible for the actions of their troops.
Sadly, the current situation
in Iraq sounds familiar to my experiences in El Salvador: a military
rounds up large groups of suspicious people in order to quell
insurgent activities. Confessions are sought form detainees with
no regard for due process. Those in charge of the military claim
that they did not know, that they did not yet read the investigative
report that the influence of other groups led a few soldiers
astray.
Although President Bush and
other high Washington officials have expressed revulsion and
disgust at the actions of some troops, from my perspective as
a survivor, the abuse confirms what many of us wanted to believe
was not true.
I held no illusions about the
U.S. military's innocence at places like the School of the Americas
in Georgia, where U.S. instructors trained international troops
to torture and terrorize their own citizens. But I clung to the
hope that our military would model the humane processes this
country claims to embrace. I also hoped that our leaders would
realize they cannot combat terrorism while losing sight of the
basic principles of civilization.
Viewing the images of detainees
being tortured and mistreated in Iraq, I also feel the heavy
weight of compassion and pity for the victims. I remember that
the torturers themselves are among that group. I imagine their
terror, panic and confusion, and I worry for their long process
of recovery.
The loss of humanity that enabled
these soldiers to treat fellow human beings as animals has a
deep, hard and cold effect on the survivors who have experienced
this.
The road is long and difficult,
and I hope that they have the strength to come back from such
a dark place.
Dr. Juan Romagoza is executive director of La Clínica
del Pueblo (www.lcdp.org),
a health clinic in Washington, D.C. He can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.
This essay originally appeared
in Tidings, Southern California's Catholic Weekly.
Weekend
Edition Features for 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
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