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Cockburn / St. Clair's Scorching New History of a Decade of War Now Available! Today's Stories June 10, 2004 Patrick Cockburn The Iraqi Street Has Spoken: New Govt. Made Up of CIA Pawns Saul Landau Force-Feeding Lies About Free Trade June 9, 2004 Mustafa Barghouthi Israel's Common Use of Torture Must be Exposed Mike Whitney Alan Dershowitz, Still Defending Torture John Chuckman Why the CIA will Always be a Costly Flop Jim Tarbell / Roger Burbach Bush's Democratic Charade in Iraq Dave Lindorff Put Reagan on the $3 Bill Miguel D'Escoto Reagan was the Butcher of My People Becky Burgwin The Betrayal of Smarty Jones: Flogging a Natural Born Hero Patrick Cockburn The Rich Have Been Warned to Leave Baghdad June 8, 2004 Jeffrey St. Clair The Nature of Ronald Reagan: Will the Earth Accept His Corpse? Dave Lindorff The March on Rumsfeld's House: Is the US Anti-War Movement Running Out of Steam? Phillip Cryan Torture, Bombings & the Press in Colombia Mark Zepezauer Getting Reagan Wrong Mickey Z. Reagan, Radicals and Repetitive Reactions John L. Hess Reagan and Bush in Normandy Alex Dawoody Reagan and Saddam: the Unholy Alliance Christopher Fons Reagan in a Word: Mean Niranjan Ramakrishnan Some Tenets are More Important Than Others Ahmed Bouzid Nothing New Under the Israeli Sun Michael Leon Bush the Narcissist June 7, 2004 Jason Leopold New Enron Docs Show Lay and Skilling Knew of California Trading Schemes Patrick Cockburn The Baghdad Bombings: the Pattern of Attacks is Changing Dennis Hans From Afghanistan to El Salvador: Reagan's Dark Global Legacy Tracy McLellan Nader at the National Press Club: a Glimpse at a Different Kind of Politics Bill Blum The Myth of the Gipper: Reagan Didn't End the Cold War Ben Tripp What I Owe Reagan: the Brylcreemed Bullshitter Susan Davis Reagan, In a Nutshell Phil Gasper Reagan: Goodbye and Good Riddance Website of the Day A Child's ABCs of Terrorism   June 5 / 6, 2004 C. Douglas Lummis Toward a Universal Declaration of Human Wrongs Saul Landau Five Cubans in Prison, Victims of Bush's Obsession Dave Lindorff John Walker Lindh, Revisited Brian Cloughley Apologies, Please, From Those Who Got It Wrong Rich Gibson The Grenada 17: the Last Prisoners of the Cold War are Black Elaine Cassel A Sorry FBI Cathrin Schütz On the Ruins of Yugoslavia Ben Tripp Call Me, Mr. Cassandra Kurt Nimmo The Madness of King George Ron Jacobs They Ain't Goin' Nowhere (Unless We Make It So) Laura Flanders The Lynne Cheney Show? Lenni Brenner Renaissance Noir: Caravaggio at the Met Abigail Jones Whatever Happened to Lori Berenson, President Toledo's Trophy Prisoner? Mark Latham Nothing Bush Said Has Changed Our Hopes Gerry Adams I Was Photographed While Tortured, Too Toni Solo Venezuela 2004, Nicaragua's Contra War Reprised Derek Seidman Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old M. Junaid Alam Torture is Just the Symptom Matt Siegfried An American Way of War Dave Zirin The Politics of Charles Barkley Poets' Basement Albert, Krieger, St. Clair Website of the Weekend Overnight Sensations     June 4, 2004 Chris Floyd Masked and Anonymous: Inside America's Animal House Cornwell / Penketh Exit Tenet: the Fall of a Fall Guy Wayne Madsen Apprehension & Frustation: Neo-Cons on the Brink Greg Moses Agitating for Workers' Rights in Iraq Yitzak Laor Before Rafah Ghali Hassan Ambassador to Death Squads: Who is Negroponte? Jane Stillwater God, the Rapture and Vera Casey CounterPunch Wire D-Day Reconsidered: Was It Really Worth the Carnage? John Borowski Woo-Wooism v. Meteorites: Why the Dems Are No Match for Bush Mike Griffin Caterpillar's Assault on the UAW Alexander Cockburn Has Bush Gone Over the Edge? Website of the Day Aquae Urbis Romae: Water and Empire   June 3, 2004 Ron Jacobs Iran's Nuclear Dilemma Dr. Susan Block America in tha Hood Michael Donnelly The Bully and the Brahmin John Chuckman Insanity in America: US Ranks Number One in the Deranged Christopher Brauchli The Return of Cardinal Law: Rome on $12,000 a Month Samia Nassar Melki Caravaggio in Iraq Mike Whitney Subverting Justice: Pre-Trial Ruminations in the Padilla Case Diane Rejman Memorial Day Isn't Just About the Dead Scott Morris "WMDs" in Cuba Paul de Rooij Palestinian Misery in Perspective     June 2, 2004 Brian Cloughley The Liars are Winning Ray McGovern How Far Would They Go? Beware "Credible Intelligence" Josh Frank The Anybody But Bush Offensive Mike Whitney The Afghanistan Failure: Bush's Warlord Patriots Jackie Corr Iraq and Ireland: Three Tales from Butte, Montana Robert Jensen The US Lost the Iraq War...and It's a Good Thing, Too Alexander Cockburn "Bye, Bye Boonville!"   June 1, 2004 Gary Leupp Instant Karma: Bush's Sins Catch Up with Him William A. Cook Manufacturers of Fear and Loathing in Rafah Dave Lindorff Will the Times Clean House? Kevin Zeese Inside the Kerry / Nader Meeting: Did the Kerry Campaign Lie About What Was Discussed? Jacob Levich Coming Soon: Return of the Draft, a Bipartisan Production Kathy Kelly Voices in the Wilderness v. the US Government Website of the Day Remind Us     May 29 / 31, 2004 Lee Ballinger / Dave Marsh The Origins of Memorial Day Janine Pommy Vega Memo for Memorial Day Mike Ferner On Their Way to Abu Ghraib Alfred W. McCoy The Cruel Shadow: the Long History of CIA Torture Research Douglas Valentine An Open Letter to the NYT: Questions, Questions, Questions Chris White First to Fight Culture: a Former Marine on the Marine Motto Bruce Anderson The Awful Injustice to Tai Abreu David Vest Get Ready for Kerry's War: the 100 Year Quagmire Saul Landau Torture: the Logical Outcome of Bush's War for Democracy? Kurt Nimmo Abu Hamza al-Mazri, Made in the USA Elaine Cassel The Secrets of Surveillance: Ashcroft, Snoops, and Gag Orders Will Potter The New War on "Terror": Protest the Torture of Chimps; Get Arrested as a "Terrorist" Ben Tripp They Fiddled While Nero Got the Matches Dr. Susan Block Save Abu Ghraib! Kia Kojouri Nukes, the US, Israel and Iran: an Interview with Sasan Fayazmanesh Mickey Z D-Day: 60 Years is Enough! Jon Brown Correcting the Correction at the Times Patrick B. Barr Pre-emptive War Insurance Stephen Gowans Bad Apples in a Bad Barrel Tom Gorman Gore on Bush in Iraq: the Approach May be Exotic, But It's Hardly New Dave Zirin Fighting for Boxers' Rights: an Interview with Eddie Mustafa Muhammad Gregory Weiher Bush to Arabs: "Go Get Yourself Some Democracy" Erik Cummings Jung Meets Bush Poets' Basement Davies, Ford, Kearney, McLellan and Albert   May 28, 2004 Rafael Rodriguez Cruz Curtain of Silence on the Cuban 5 Greg Moses Bush's Misleading Speech on Abu Ghraib Dave Lindorff Dissing Independent Contractors: Those Who Do the Dirty Work Norman Solomon Leaping for Lies at the Times Rep. Bill Delahunt Bush's Cruel New Rules on Cuba Paul McGeough Chalabi Baba and the 40 Thieves Niranjan Ramakrishnan India and Nehru: 40 Years After Alexander Cockburn NYTs: "Maybe We Did Screw Up...a Little"     May 27, 2004 Amy Goodman / David Goodman Fatal Errors: the Lies of Our Times Douglas Valentine Ragging the Dogs of War at the NYTs John L. Hess The Times Confesses...Kind Of Stew Albert Dellinger, the Wrestling Pacifist Dave Dellinger a 1993 Interview Christopher Brauchli Tax Breaks for Scions...to Hell with Poor Kids Rampton / Stauber Banana Republicans: Pumping Irony     May 26, 2004 Ron Jacobs Goodbye, David Dellinger: He Was a Friend of Ours Robert Fisk The Things Bush Didn't Say in His Speech Zeynep Toufe New Draft UN Resolution Permits Perpetual Occupation Conn Hallinan Bush and Sharon: the Oil Connection Tom Stephens 2 + 2 is On My Mind: More Morons and War Crimes Derek Medley Protesting Gov. Bigot CounterPunch Wire FBI Abducts Artist; Seizes Art Andrew Cockburn The Trail to Tehran   May 25, 2004 Joe Bageant The Covert Kingdom: On Earth as It is in Texas Col. Dan Smith A Question of Human Dignity Gary Handschumacher Visiting Lori Berenson: Time to Bring Her Home Toni Solo A Developing War in the Andes Marc Estrin September Song: Disturbing Questions About 9/11 Stephen Banko, III A Vietnam Vet on "Supporting the Troops" Website of the Day The Wizard of Whimsy May 24, 2004 Ron Jacobs Dan Senor is Safe! Kurt Nimmo Dirty Tricks & TortureGate: the Missing Taguba Pages Sam Hamod Gen. Zinni: "Wrong War, Wrong Place, Wrong Time" Mike Whitney The Wedding was a Bomb Stan Goff Open Season on MAMs Image of the Day A Photo from Abu Ghraib We Didn't See on the Front Page of the NYTs     May 22 / 23, 2004 Paul de Rooij Colin Powell, a Political Obituary Jeffrey St. Clair When War is Swell: Bush and the Carlyle Group Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg Her Son Was Told He Wouldn't See Combat; Now He's Dead: an Interview with Sue Niederer Brian Cloughley America is Committing War Crimes in Iraq Saul Landau Democracy in Latin America: Great for Investors; Not So Good for People Brandy Baker Feminists Stand By Their Man: Abortion, Judges and Kerry Randall Robinson Bushwhacked in the Caribbean Uri Avnery The Rape of Rafah Ben Tripp Assume the Worst Bruce Anderson News from Ecotopia: the Truth About the Wine Business Josh Ruebner Why I Burned My Israeli Military Papers Peter Wolson, Ph. D. Exhibitionistic Revenge at Abu Ghraib Chloe Cockburn In Defense of "Troy": What Hector Could Teach Rummy Linda Burnham Sexual Domination in Uniform: an American Value Adrien Rain Burke War of the Necrophiliacs: Spc. Sabrina Harman and Her Corpse David Krieger Charting a New Course for US Nuclear Policy Ron Jacobs Turnaround Poets' Basement Ford, Albert & LaMorticella   May 21, 2004 Ray Close The Canards of the Apologists Christopher Brauchli "The Object of Torture is Torture" Amira Hass Darkness at Noon Jack McCarthy Camilo Mejia: Can the Son of a Sandinista Get a Fair Trial from the US Army? Bill Kauffman Nader v. Bush Omar Barghouti No More Tears for America Ghali Hassan Moral Failure of the "Free World" in Gaza Christopher Reed How the CIA Taught the Portuguese to Torture Website of the Day Eric Idle on the Bush Administration: Fuck You, So Very Much   May 20, 2004 Andrew Cockburn The Truth About Chalabi Kathy Kelly A Visit from the FBI Niranjan Ramakrishnan Brown and Bored of Education in India Tom Stephens & John Philo The War Crimes of Bush, Cheney & Co. Sam Bahour / Michael Dahan Genocide by Public Policy Robert Ovetz Ending the Race for the Last Turtle Billy Wilson The Most Important Thing I Learned at School This Year Website of the Day Rafah Today         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.     Subscribe Online

June 10, 2004 Deja Vu All Over Again Ronald Reagan, Neo-Cons and the "Intelligence Failures" By ZEYNEP TOUFE United in a fervent desire to praise Reagan, not bury him, the pundit class seems to have agreed that, no matter what else they might say about him, Reagan won the cold war by outspending the Soviets and forcing them into bankruptcy. It's a neat story, except that it's not what happened. In fact, the Soviet Union was already economically crumbling and in severe decline by the 1970s, barely able to keep its economy functioning let alone surpass the United States militarily or economically. The Soviets were doing a pretty good job of bankrupting themselves and did not even try to keep up with the United States' insane levels of military spending in the eighties. Reagan's policies helped bust the United States' budget, provided massive corporate boondoggles to the military-industrial complex, such as the missile defense systems which did not work then and do not work now. If anything, emerging memoirs and interviews suggest that Reagan's aggressive policies impeded and delayed Gorbachev's efforts at reform. And in contrast to the current political rhetoric that portrays the Iraq war "intelligence failures" as mistakes and shortcomings resulting from unprecedented pressure on intelligence agencies, the CIA of the time was also heavily pressured, and in the end instrumental, in exaggerating the threat posed by the Soviet Union in order to justify belligerent policies. No amount of falsehood was enough for some just as it wasn't this time around. So, remarkably enough, one can trace the first policy victory of the neo-conservatives to the creation of the infamous "Team B" in the seventies where a panel authorized by the then-CIA chief George Herbert Walker, whose members included Daniel Pipes and Paul Wolfowitz, whose architect was Richard Perle, and whose backers included Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, trashed the CIA for not exaggerating the Soviet threat sufficiently. In its 1976 report, "Team B" argued that the Soviet leadership was achieving "military superiority," that there was a "missile gap" in favor of the Soviet Union, that "Soviet leaders are first and foremost offensively rather than defensively minded" and that the Soviet Union was involved in an "intense military buildup in nuclear as well as conventional forces of all sorts, not moderated either by the West's self-imposed restraints or by the [Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT)]." They derided all those who argued in favor of arms treaties and detente as "appeasers" and clashed with the State bureaucracy for not being aggressive enough. Their methods of "intelligence" production have remained fairly constant, as the Boston Globe noted last year: "At times, Team B performed logical somersaults that eerily foreshadowed Bush administration statements on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. Just because superweapons like a 'non-acoustic anti-submarine system' couldn't be found, Pipes's report argued, that didn't mean the Soviets couldn't build one, even if they appeared to lack the technical know-how." All of their arguments and conclusions were, of course, hogwash -- as we know even more clearly since the fall of the Soviet Union. Their "estimates" were wrong and their "analysis" widely off the mark But the nation needed to be scared in order to go along with the policies that were later instituted by Ronald Reagan. Reagan purposefully stirred up people's worst fears by evoking a military threat posed by an irrational, evil enemy that simply hated us for who we were, bent on our destruction, an enemy which could not be negotiated with and hated freedom. It all sounds familiar because the people that put their stamp on that rhetoric and those policies are still roaming the halls of power, this time under Bush's presidency. Most of the intelligence reporting from that era was as false as, if not more than, the pre-war reports about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction that could be deployed in 45 minutes, mobile biological labs capable of producing deadly pathogens on the run, unmanned drones capable dispersing those agents over the United States, and so much more. And just as the pre-war reports about Iraq, they were deliberately and purposefully wrong -- and all those who told the truth at the time were mercilessly attacked as unpatriotic appeasers and weaklings. The 1977 National Intelligence Estimate made claims such as "the Soviet leaders were now thought to no longer accept the concept of mutual assured destruction even though they did recognize mutual deterrence as a 'present reality' that would be hard to change." Later, under Reagan, the CIA presented conclusions like "Moscow was now more willing to risk a military crisis with Washington (whose power, it asserted, Soviet leaders saw declining) in pursuit of its goals." Reagan famously characterized the Soviet Union as an "evil empire," one that posed a great threat to the United States and to freedom-loving people everywhere. The resulting increased American spending on military expenditures did not result in a change in the Soviet Union's defense spending -- a fact that has been publicly known as early as 1994, but seems to have been forgotten in the current climate of national amnesia: "Revised estimates by the Central Intelligence Agency indicate that Soviet expenditures on defense remained more or less constant throughout the 1980s. Neither the military buildup under Jimmy Carter and Reagan nor SDI had any real impact on gross spending levels in the USSR. At most SDI shifted the marginal allocation of defense rubles as some funds were allotted for developing countermeasures to ballistic defense." The CIA kept producing false and misleading reports under Reagan. As late as 1986, CIA was arguing that Gorbachev would not move on arms control: "'In the next two years or so,' the September 1986 special estimate declared, 'neither the domestic situation nor the foreign policy outlook of the regime obliges Gorbachev to compromise substantially on central arms control or security issues in dispute with the United States.'" Which Gorbachev did very soon after; massively and unilaterally. Gorbachev's attempts at reform pushed the crumbling Soviet system over the edge which apologists for Reagan era policies quickly moved to take credit for in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. And they have succeeded brilliantly in re-packaging deliberate "intelligence failures" and a strategy of outspending the already bankrupt enemy as the brilliant move that won us the cold war. Unfortunately, the myth of good past intelligence versus bad current intelligence is spread by the media with hardly a peep. Even the New York Times, supposedly biased towards the liberals, recently reported on how in the past analysts in the Eurasian division headed John McLaughlin, current head of CIA as George Tenet's replacement, would try to understand the strength of the Soviet Union by using "every conceivable way," even "canned goods specialists" to try to gauge the Soviet food processing industry by examining Soviet cans of peas. "The agency was not as successful at gaining insights into another closed society, Iraq," the Times reported, implying that we were essentially successful in our assessments of the Soviets, unlike with Iraq. The first step in making sure that the evil men do does not live after them should be a frank understanding of what actually happened. It's natural for journalists and pundits to try to find some way to speak well of the dead, and I would say, "so let it be with Reagan," except that there is a higher obligation to the truth -- especially since the policies being misrepresented are still so influential and the stakes still so high. Zeynep Toufe publishes the blog Under the Same Sun. She can be reached at: z@underthesamesun.org. Weekend Edition Features for June 5 / 6, 2004 C. Douglas Lummis Toward a Universal Declaration of Human Wrongs Saul Landau Five Cubans in Prison, Victims of Bush's Obsession Dave Lindorff John Walker Lindh, Revisited Brian Cloughley Apologies, Please, From Those Who Got It Wrong Rich Gibson The Grenada 17: the Last Prisoners of the Cold War are Black Elaine Cassel A Sorry FBI Cathrin Schütz On the Ruins of Yugoslavia Ben Tripp Call Me, Mr. Cassandra Kurt Nimmo The Madness of King George Ron Jacobs They Ain't Goin' Nowhere (Unless We Make It So) Laura Flanders The Lynne Cheney Show? Lenni Brenner Renaissance Noir: Caravaggio at the Met Abigail Jones Whatever Happened to Lori Berenson, President Toledo's Trophy Prisoner? Mark Latham Nothing Bush Said Has Changed Our Hopes Gerry Adams I Was Photographed While Tortured, Too Toni Solo Venezuela 2004, Nicaragua's Contra War Reprised Derek Seidman Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old M. Junaid Alam Torture is Just the Symptom Matt Siegfried An American Way of War Dave Zirin The Politics of Charles Barkley Poets' Basement Albert, Krieger, St. Clair Website of the Weekend Overnight Sensations WWW http://www.counterpunch.org   Keep CounterPunch Alive: Make a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online! home / subscribe / about us / books / archives / search / links /