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April 18, 2002
M. Shahid
Alam
A
Colonizing Project
Built on Lies
Alexander Cockburn
Austin Cultural Limits:
Willie Nelson, Film and BBQ
April 17, 2002
Norman
Finkelstein
Behind
the Carnage in Palestine
Kristen Schurr
With the Wounded
and the Homeless in Nablus
Norman
Madarasz
Undoing
Chavez:
The View from South America
Brian Wood
Combing The Ruins of Jenin
George
Monbiot
Chemical
Coup: The CIA's Attempt to Undermine the UN's Weapon Inspector
for Iraq
Robert Fisk
Fear and Learning in America
April 16, 2002
Todd May
US
Should End Aid to Israel
Gabriel Ash
The Oilman, the General
and the Coup that Failed
Ron Jacobs
Wake
Up Some Mornin',
Find Your Own Self Dead:
The Chavez Coup
Brian Wood
Inside Jenin: Rubble and Decomposing
Bodies
Jack McCarthy
Citizen
Coup: The Times,
The Post and the Coup Plotters
Dave Marsh
Hymns: How I Got Through
Last Week
April 15, 2002
Susi Abeles
A
Field Trip to Jenin
Breyten Breytenbach
A Letter to Ariel Sharon:
"You Won't Break Them"
Gregory
Wilpert
CounterCoup
in Venezuela
Kristen Schurr
Amid the Rubble of Nablus
Jordy
Cummings
An
Open Letter to Abe Foxman
Christopher Reilly
The Media, the CIA
and the Chavez Coup
James
T. Phillips
"Homicide"
Bombers
April 14, 2002
William Blum
The CIA and Venezuela
David
Vest
A
Good Old-Fashion "Incursion"
Ralph Nader
General Motors:
Stuck in Reverse
M. Junaid
Alam
From
the Ashes: Palestinian Struggle for Freedom
Sam Bahour
Palestinians and Americans
April 13, 2002
Beth Daoud
Life
in the Ruins of Nablus
Patrick Cockburn
Bulldozing History:
The End Nears for Stalin's
Most Monstrous Hotel
Gregory
Wilpert
The
Coup in Venezuela:
an Eye-Witness Account
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Thoughts on Our War
Against Terrorism
Anne Winkler-Morey
Why
I Didn't Organize
a Passover Seder This Year
April 12, 2002
Nancy Stohlman
Live from East Jerusalem:
International Nonviolence
Brian
J. Foley
Defeating
Evil
Olivier Audeoud
Did the US Break
the Laws of War?
Rep. Ron
Paul
The
Middle East Quagmire
Michael Colby
Republican Porn:
Oiling Up the Caribou
John Chuckman
Tom
Friedman's Fabrications
April 11, 2002
Patrick Cockburn
Battle of St. Petersburg Zoo
Jeff Halper
After
the Invasion:
Now What?
Falk / Krieger
Taming the Nuclear Monster
Steve
Perry
The
Good Life of
Nellie Stone Johnson
Nick Ring
Efficiency and Occupation:
Terrorism vs. Taylorism
Alexander
Cockburn
From
the West Bank to BBQ
to Old Sparky, And Beyond
April 10, 2002
M. Junaid Alam
Blaming the Victims:
Hating the Palestinians
George
Monbiot
World
Bank to West Bank
Fran Schor
US-Sponsored State Terror
David
Vest
Political
Color Schemes
Jack McCarthy
Florida State Radicals:
The Berkeley of the South
Rises Again
Doreen
Miller
A
Tale of Two Warring Tribes
Michael Neumann
Israelis and Indians
April 9, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
Colin
Powell's Table Talk
Matt Vidal
Thomas Friedman,
Another Wasted Pulitzer
Ron Jacobs
Buyer
Beware
Robert Jensen
I Helped Kill a Palestinian
Vijay
Prashad
Memories
of Barbarity:
Sharonism and September
Wayne Madsen
Anthrax and the Agency:
Thinking the Unthinkable
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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This Explosive
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Reviews of Gore:
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April 18, 2002
Latin America's Dilemma:
The Propaganda
of Otto Reich
By Tom Turnipseed
The Bush administration is engaging in damage
control for their questionable involvement in the failed 2 day
coup against the democratically elected government of President
Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Alarmingly, the ominous Otto Reich
is emerging as a key player in the administration's role in
the failed coup attempt to replace Chavez with an oligarchy
of business, military and wealthy elites. Scrambling to distance
themselves from the botched overthrow of the democratically
elected Chavez government, the Bush administration admitted
that Mr. Reich called the coup leader, Mr. Carmona, and asked
him not to dissolve the National Assembly because it would be
a "stupid thing to do". The next day the administration
revised their story and said Reich only asked our ambassador
to relay that message to Carmona.
The New York Times noted that the disclosure
raised questions as to whether Mr. Reich and other administration
officials were stage-managing the takeover by Mr. Carmona.
Although the Bush administration admits their desire to replace
the Chavez government because of its opposition to U.S. policies
and friendship with countries like Cuba and Iran, they now insist
that they were not involved in the armed coup. The administration
also admits talking with various Venezuelan officials prior
to the coup including General Lucas Romero Rincon, head of the
Venezuelan military, who met with Pentagon official Rogelio
Pardo-Maurer, a former close associate of the U. S. supported
Contra forces in Nicaragua.
Mr. Reich's propensity to pernicious
propaganda has once again emerged from events surrounding the
coup. According to the New York Times, Reich told congressional
aides that the administration had received reports that "foreign
paramilitary forces"-suspected to be Cuban-were involved
in the bloody suppression of anti-Chavez demonstrators, in
which at least 14 people were killed in Venezuela. Reich, a
former U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela and lobbyist with ties to
Mobil Oil in Venezuela, further told the Congressional staffers
that Mr. Chavez had meddled with the historically independent
state oil company, provided haven to Colombian guerillas, and
bailed out Cuba with preferential rates on oil.
Reich is a right-wing Cuban-American
obsessed with overthrowing Fidel Castro's regime and is also
a big political supporter of President Bush's brother and Florida
Governor Jeb Bush, who needs strong support from Cubans in
Florida in his re-election bid this year. Reich, along with
fellow Reagan administration cohorts, Elliott Abrams and John
Negroponte, were discredited for their covert activities and
false assertions when the United States intervened in Central
America in the 1980's and '90s, but have been re-instated in
prominent positions in the second Bush administration. They
abhor Latin-American governments that are elected by the poor
and working class people, like the Chavez government in Venezuela
and the deposed Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
Abrams was convicted of lying to Congress
about the Iran-Contra scandal, but has been remarkably rehabilitated
and recycled back into the second Bush administration as head
of the "Office of Democracy and Human Rights". Negroponte
was appointed as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations last
September in spite of being implicated as a friend of Honduran
death squad leaders who committed atrocities against the people
of Honduras while he was the U.S. Ambassador there.
The most recent resurrection of this
trio of right-wing renegades is the appointment of Otto Reich
as Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs.
President Bush used the tricky recess appointment procedure
to bypass potential hostile and damaging questioning by Democrats
on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The Senators had
some interesting examples of Mr. Reich's malfeasance to ask
him about when he was the director of the State Department's
Office of Public Diplomacy(OPD).
On September 30, 1987 a Republican appointed
comptroller general of the U.S. found that Reich had done things
as director of the OPD that were "prohibited, covert propaganda
activities, "beyond the range of acceptable agency public
information activities...". The same report said Mr. Reich's
operation violated "a restriction on the State Department's
annual appropriations prohibiting the use of federal funds
for publicity or propaganda purposes not authorized by Congress."
Reich used the covert propaganda to demonize the democratically
elected Sandinista government of Nicaragua and establish the
Contras as fearless freedom fighters. The purpose was to make
the U.S. public afraid enough of the Sandinistas to get Congress
to fund the Contras directly. The Boland Amendment was passed
by Congress in 1982 that prohibited U.S. funds from being used
to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. Meanwhile, the Contras
were being illegally armed by the Reagan administration via
the Iran-Contra arms deal.
On the night of Reagan's re-election
in 1984, Reich's office put out the news that "intelligence
sources"revealed that Soviet MIG fighter jets were arriving
in Nicaragua and Andrea Mitchell interrupted election night
coverage on NBC to give the phony report. This resembles the
Joseph Goebbel's fabrication that Polish troops had attacked
German soldiers to give the Third Reich an excuse to launch
the Nazi blitzkrieg into Poland to begin World War II in 1939.
Other Reich prevarications given to media sources included:
Nicaragua had been given chemical weapons by the Soviets, according
to the Miami Herald; and leaders of the Sandinistas were involved
in drug trafficking, according to Newsweek magazine.
In Latin American countries the United
States has a history of doing business and siding with wealthy
oligarchies of business, professional and military elites who
tend to be lighter skinned people of European descent against
the poor and working class composed mainly of darker skinned,
indigenous people and those of African descent. The second
Bush administration appears to be adhering to this tradition
with gusto. With Otto Reich churning out the hate and fear,
it is a safe bet to predict that President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela
will be increasingly presented as the devil incarnate and his
government as evil, anti-American terrorists. Mr. Reich will
dish out the poisonous propaganda to every news source that
covers the Bush administration's Latin American policy. Joseph
Goebbels would be proud.
Tom Turnipseed
is an attorney, writer and civil rights activist in Columbia,
South Carolina. http://www.turnipseed.net
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