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Today's
Stories
August 4, 2004
John Ross
Mexico's Dirty War Never Ended: Inside
Puente Grande Prison
August 3, 2004
Uri Avnery
The
Oligarchs
Ray McGovern
The 9/11 Commission Chimera
Jack McCarthy
Sexual Politics in Jeb's Florida
Eric Ruder
Meet Barak Obama: the Democrats' New Liberal Star
John L. Hess
Crying Wolf: Orange Alert!
Elaine Cassel
Civil Liberties Elections: 1800 v. 2004
Jules Rabin
The Man Who Didn't Walk By
Website of the Day
No Wall
August 2, 2004
Robert Jensen
Kerry's
Hypocrisy on the Vietnam War
Joshua Frank
Greens, Kerry and the Politics of Mendacity
Mike Whitney
The 9/11 Commission and Civil Liberties: "We Need an American
Police State"
Gary Leupp
Beyond
Good and Evil: Some Thoughts on Invasions
July 31 / Aug.
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
July 30, 2004
Kolhatkar /
Ingalls
Shattering
Illusions: Kerry's Speech Tells Anti-War Activists They're Not
Wanted
Dave Lindorff
Murder
Not So Foul?
Bruce Jackson
Walt Whitman on the Sound of Wolf Blitzer's Voice
Fidel Castro
The
Pathology of George W. Bush
Maximilien Robespierre
Memo to Kerry and Bush: Why They Resist
Saul Landau
Bush
Charges Castro with Sex Tourism; JFK Rolls Over in His Grave
Sex, Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's
Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
Click here to purchase
July 29, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
Hail,
the Conquering War Criminal: What Kerry Really Did in Vietnam
Frank Bardacke
What
Michael Moore Left Out of F9/11
Tom Barry
Shallow and Formulaic: Kerry's Latin America Plan
Ron Jacobs
Kerry
and Lennon: Hawking the CounterCulture
Robert Fisk
The Unreported War
Lichtman /
Kellis-Borok
What Kerry Must Do to Win (But Probably Won't)
William S. Lind
The 9/11 Commission Report: Cashing in on Failure
CounterPunch
Wire
Doonesbury Onto John Kerry in 1971!
Website of
the Day
Jabbing JibJab: Copyright Madness
July 28, 2004
Robert Fisk
The
Occupation at 114 Degrees: Baghdad is Swamped in the Smell of
the Dead
Kevin Mink
Kerry's Misperception of Palestine
Ray McGovern
Israel and the Iraq War: How the 9/11 Report Soft-Pedals Root
Causes
United for
Peace & Justice
An
Open Letter to John Kerry: Winter Soldiers and Summer Patriots
Mike Ferner
Vets Demand End to Occupation: "Pull the Troops or Face
Impeachment Mvt."
Imraan Siddiqi
Turning Tricks with Ann Coulter
Alexander Cockburn
Candidate
Kerry
Website of
the Day
Iraq Vets Against the War
July 27, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Why
the Democrats Deserve Nader
Dave Lindorff
Back to the 19th Century: Globalization's Coming!
Mike Whitney
Control Room: Inside Al Jazeera
Ali, Anderson, Bello, et al.
If We Were Venezuelan, We'd Vote for Chavez
Stefan Wray
Texas Plan to Grab Los Alamos Takes Hold, as DOE Shuts Down Labs
Louis Proyect
Reflections on Nicaragua: First Came the Contra Butchers, Then
the Sweatshops
Rick Giombetti
Faith in Freedom: the Challenge of Thomas Szasz
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
The
9/11 Report and Its Weak-Kneed Consensus: Dogding Israel/Palestine;
Blinkered on Causes of Terrorism
July 26, 2004
Todd Chretien
Green
Resistance: a Reply to Normon Solomon & Medea Benjamin
Robert Fisk
Terror
by Video
Richard Forno
Security
Theater in Boston: Security Expert Harrassed by DHS for Exposing
Flaws at the Fleet Center
Mitchel Cohen
Report from a Boston Demo: Arresting the Curious
Richard Moreno
Rockers
for Justice: an Interview with Tom Morello and Serj Tankian
Alexander Cockburn
Boston
Awaits a Dead Party
July
24 / 25, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
The Democrats and Their Conventions:
Part One
Dennis
Hans
Those 16 Words Still Smell, Mr. Bush
Patrick
Cockburn
The Struggle for Iraq is Only Beginning
Josh
Frank
The War Path of Unity: Dems Reject
the Peace Movement
Justin
E.H. Smith
Christianity and the Left: the Latin
American Experience
Tariq
Ali
What's at Stake in Venezuela
Fred
Gardner
The Politics of Pot: Year of the
Antagonist
Mark
Scaramella
There's Dope and There's Dope
Ron
Jacobs
The Weather Underground's Prairie
Fire Statement...35 Years On
July
23, 2004
Lee
Sustar
Revolution in Nicaragua: 25 Years
On
Dave
Lindorff
Battle for NYC: Bush 1, Protesters
0
Saul
Landau
Zaniest President in US History: Bush
Beats Reagan
Mike
Whitney
The 9/11 Whitewash: Blaming No One
Mickey
Z
Get On the Bus: 150 Years After Elizabeth
Jennings
Gary
Leupp
The 9/11 Commission and the Looming
War on Iran
July
22, 2004
M.
Junaid Alam
Ten Ways to Build a Better Democrat
Brian
McKinlay
Rusted On Down Under: Howard, Bush and Sharon
Jason
Leopold
Cheney Lobbied for Easing of Sanctions on Terrorist Regimes While
CEO of Halliburton
Chris
Floyd
Mob Rule: Ripping the Lid Off of America's Pious Myths
Uri
Avnery
Chirac v. Sharon
July
21, 2004
Paula
J. Caplan
The Emotional Casualities of War: Psychologists
Can't Heal All the Damage
Joshua
Frank
Nader Sleeping with the Enemy? Let's be Fair
Ron
Jacobs
American Exceptionalism
Reza
Ghorashi
The Elections, Iran and al-Qaeda
Amy
Martin
Will Congress Rearm the Guatemalan Generals?
John
Ross
Bush May Lose, But His Wars Will Go On and On
|
August 4, 2004
Mexico's
Dirty War Never Ended
Inside Puente
Grande Prison
By
JOHN ROSS
Mexico
City
First
the prisoners were stripped naked at gunpoint and forced to lie
down face first on the freezing concrete floor with their hands
locked behind their heads for hours on end while guards took turns
walking over them. The women too were ordered to disrobe under the
leering gazes of male guards and locked into a basement room where
they were threatened with rape and sodomy.
One
by one, the prisoners were taken out for interrogation and when
they refused to sign blank confessions, were beaten into unconsciousness.
Sleep deprivation was introduced to break the prisoners down –
whenever one would close his or her eyes, the guards brutally kicked
them awake. One naked prisoner was "hooded" in a black
garbage bag just as U.S. interrogators tortured Iraqi prisoners
at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. Prisoners were forced to wash
their hands and faces in their own urine.
"When
I wouldn’t sign, they pulled down my pants and punched me
so hard in the testicles that I blacked out. When I came back, they
tied a plastic bag around my head and beat me with bats that were
wrapped in sponges so they didn't leave any marks. When I tried
to breath, the plastic stuck to my nose and mouth and I felt like
I was suffocating.
"After
I passed out for the third time, they put the wires on my balls
and up my ass and gave me a 'calienton' (electric shock) –
but I never signed the confession" the young protestor who
goes by the name of "El Mapache" ("Raccoon")
told human rights investigators proudly.
While
the torture sessions continued hour after hour in the basement of
the Palace of Justice, the parents searched frantically for their
disappeared children, chasing from one police precinct to another
with their long lists of names.
Scenes
from the "dirty war" that swept through the southern cone
of the Americas in the 1970s and '80s, Videla in Argentina, Pinochet's
Chile? Film from Mexico's own dirty war which preceded those further
south in which hundreds were similarly tortured and disappeared?
The
answer is none of the above. These descriptions were assembled from
the testimonies of 43 young men and women, 21 of them – including
a deaf mute and a 66 year-old man - still being held incommunicado
in one of Mexico's three super maximum  security prisons despite an outcry from Mexican
human rights advocates and a flurry of urgent action bulletins issued
by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
"The
inhuman behavior of the prison personnel can only have been ordered
from the highest level of command," wrote HRW's Jose Miguel
Vivanco to the governor of Jalisco state where the mistreatment
of the so-called "globalfobicos" at Puente Grande prison
is ongoing.
The
crime for which the young protestors are being held in maximum lock-up?
Having been in and around downtown Guadalajara. Mexico's second
city, on the afternoon of May 28th 2004 while 52 heads of state
from Latin America and the European Union gathered nearby in a largely
ceremonial summit focused on combating terrorism and expanding free
trade between the two blocs.
After
clashes between police and "altermundistas" ("other
worlders") exploded in a 65 minute "zipizapi", the
cops went after protestors like Milosevic's Cossacks carrying out
an ethnic cleansing, sweeping the downtown area and beating and
arresting suspect young people, including eight non-Mexicans who
were summarily deported under Constitutional Article 33 which gives
authorities fiat to throw anyone out of the country who is deemed
"inconvenient" to the president. 111 were taken to the
Justice Palace and charged with riot, treason, and sedition - 67
were released after a sleepless 24 hours in the basement interrogation
rooms. The 44 comrades they left behind suffered the full brunt
of the tortures. One 23 year-old IndyMedia activist was "disappeared"
and, in classic dirty war style, was found chained to a bed in the
civil hospital with a fractured skull four days later.
The
governor of Jalisco, Jose Ramirez Acuna, a member of the right-wing
PAN party whose most notable member is President Vicente Fox, justified
the pogram as being directed at "anarchists and criminals."
"Guadalajara is not Mexico City" he warned the hated "chilamgos"
(Mexico City residents), "you cannot come here and sleep in
our parks. We will not allow these savages to parade around with
their faces covered like highwaymen!"
Anti-globalization
foes had gathered in Guadalajara to make their opposition heard
against free trade, ALCA (Bush's "Free Trade Area of the Americas"),
and the occupation of Iraq, a sub-text of social movements everywhere
these days, to more than half a hundred heads of Latin American
and European states. Among the luminaries: Jacques Chirac, Brazil's
Lula, Hugo Chavez, and Spain's newly-elected Jose Rodriguez Zapatero
(the star of the show) but not Fidel Castro or Tony Blair or George
Bush, the latter being excluded for geographical reasons. Despite
Bush's absence Washington's shadow hovered over the conclave like
an ominous pterodactyl.
Perhaps
because Bush's exclusion did not give the summit a clear target,
the globalphobes' numbers were reduced to a handful of activists
from the venerable Mexican Network Against Free Trade (RMALC), the
Authentic Workers Front (FAT), a few electricity workers representing
the powerful SME union, laid-off Euskadi tire workers, a posse of
gays and lesbians from the city's combative community, the usual
spike-haired anarco-punks, and the highly inflammable (and infiltrateable)
General Strike Council, the final remnants of a long-ago student
strike at the national university.
The clash between 300 demonstrators maximum and 1500 heavily armed
state and local police was like the chronicle of a massacre foretold.
"A clear (police) provocation" avowed Jaime Aviles, special
correspondent for the national daily La Jornada. Aviles wrote of
encountering a pair of burly police types (in shorts) handing out
leaflets addressed to "the students of the national university
who have been shot, killed or expelled" to resist police aggression.
Later, at the zenith of the clash, he would see the same men direct
uniformed police to an alcove where their billyclubs were stockpiled.
Mortally
offended by the left daily's charges of provocateurs, the Bloque
Negro ("Black Bloc") issued an e-mail communiqué
taking full responsibility for confronting the police with marbles
and slingshots to demonstrate to the rest of the lily-livered (editors
note) movement that some militants still took the struggle seriously.
Mexico
has a checkered history in handling the globalphobes. In Cancun
in February 2001, 60 demonstrators trying to reach the hotel zone
where a road show of the Davos World Economic Forum was being addressed
by President Fox were clobbered so badly by police that their blood
dappled the white sands of that luxury Caribbean resort. In Monterrey
in March 2002 at a United Nations development summit, protests were
muted when dissident non-governmental organizations were invited
in from the cold to speak their mind. The heavy presence of U.S.
military that locked down the city in anticipation of Bush's arrival
also deterred the globalphobes. When the World Trade Organization
played Cancun in September 2003, thousands of enraged anti-globalization
farmers rushed police barricades and one Korean activist committed
suicide in desperation, a gesture that subsequently sobered up both
the security forces and the black bloc.
But
Guadalajara was enemy territory for the altermundistas, a bastion
of orthodox Catholicism guided by the most intolerant Cardinal in
Mexico and a PAN government drawn from the right wing of that right-wing
party. The city has often been a stage for "wars" between
good and evil and served as the capital for "Cristero"
guerrilla groups that fought the federal government from 1926 to
1929 after all churches were closed down by strongman Plutarco Elias
Calles. During the 1960s and '70s, leftist urban guerilleros fought
gun battles with Falange-like right-wing youth on Guadalajara's
streets.
To
add to their troubles, the altermundistas walked into a crossfire
between would-be PAN presidential candidates to succeed Vicente
Fox, each trying to show they were more macho than the other. When
the hardliner Jalisco governor Ramirez Acuna stole the summit spotlight
to unveil then-energy secretary Felipe Calderon as his choice, Fox,
who had been boosting the fortunes of his wife Marta to succeed
him, took umbrage. So did Interior secretary Santiago Creel who
is in charge of the nation's internal security.
While the three hassle over taking credit for the crackdown on the
protestors, 21 altermundistas are subject to daily torture in Puente
Grande, an annex of Abu Ghraib prison.
The
treatment meted out to the Guadalajara prisoners is hard evidence
that Mexico's dirty war, the systematic persecution of dissidents
by security forces, has never abated.
Although
social historians peg the "Guerra sucia" to the suppression
of multiple guerrilla fronts throughout the country under beleaguered
former president Luis Echeverria (1970-76 - see the Dirty War Today
I), his predecessor Gustavo Diaz Ordaz (1964-70) and his late successor
Jose Lopez Portillo (1976-82), the persecution of dissidents continued
long after.
More
than 500 supporters of the upstart Party of the Democratic Revolution
were slain in political warfare following the stolen 1988 presidential
election. Hundreds more died in Chiapas in the aftermath of the 1994
Zapatista uprising. Approximately 80 political prisoners are still
being held in Mexican penitentiaries, most of them accused members
of armed groups like the Popular Revolutionary Army and its offshoots
and the Chiapas-based Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN.)
Torture, which is outlawed as a tool of extracting confessions, is
still a high police art as the continuing ordeal of the altermundistas
abundantly illustrates, further proof – as if it was needed
– that the dirty war in Mexico has never ended.
John Ross will be on the spot in Mexico City for much of
July and August before sallying forth to do maximum mischief at
the Republican National Convention in Manhattan from where he will
launch the intergalactic tour of his latest instant cult classic
"Murdered
By Capitalism--A Memoir of 150 Years of Life & Death on the
U.S. Left".
Weekend Edition July 17 / 18, 2004
Gary
Leupp
Apocalypse Now: Why the Book of Revelations is
Must Reading
Ghada
Karmi
Vanishing the Palestinians
Lenni
Brenner
When Cattle Unite, Lions Go Hungry: Notes for Ralph Nader
Ben
Tripp
Man on a Bridge: a Ghost Story
Brandy
Baker
What Would Elizabeth Cady Stanton Make of John Kerry?
M.
Shahid Alam
Israel Builds Another Wall
Sasan
Fayazmanesh
Nuclear Hypocrisy: Israel, Iran and the IAEA
Patrick
Bond
The George Bush of Africa
Fred
Gardner
Politics of Marijuana: Cannabiniod Therapuetics
William
Blum
Bush and Thucydides
Ben
Terrall
Carter and the Indonesia Elections: "I Don't See Anything Wrong
with a General Running the Country"
Tom
Barry
John Lehman on the War Path
David
Vest
Dylan Without the Music
Phyllis
Pollack
Return to Sin City: Keith Richards Does Gram Parsons
Ron
Jacobs
Smearing Muhammad Ali: Bob Feller Strikes Out
Joshua
Frank
Kerry to Edwards: "Let's Lose!"
David
Nally
A Call for Sudan: Our Georgraphical Blindspot
Toni
Solo
Bolivia's Gas Referendum
Landau,
Hassan, Prashad & Lindorff
Three Reviews of Moore's F911
Poets's
Basement
Ford, Smith and Albert
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