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December 21, 2001
John Chuckman
The
First Victim in the
War on Terror
December 20, 2001
Lawrence
McGuire
Killing
Other People's Children
Miriam Rozen
Foundation
Without Representation?
Kenneth
Roth
A
Letter to Rumsfeld on
Military Tribunals
William Blum
Casualties:
Theirs and Ours
December 19, 2001
Marjorie
Cohn
Don't
Pre-Judge John Walker
Sam Bahour
Palestine
and You
December 18, 2001
Shahid
Alam
Clash
of Civilizations?
Carl Estabrook
Who
Opposes This War?
December 17, 2001
Edward
Said
Mahfouz
and the Cruelty
of Memory
December 16, 2001
Amira Howeidy
Dangerous By
Definition?
Bahour
and Dahan
Zinni's
Doomed Mission
December 15, 2001
John Isaacs
Bush's 12
Lumps of Coal
for Christmas
Dana Cook
The
Execution of bin Laden
Yusuf Agha
Tale of the
Tape:
Osama Gump?
December 14, 2001
Don Atapattu
A Conversation with
Norman
Finkelstein
December 13, 2001
Trojanow and Hoskote:
Nonsense
Mantras of Our Times
Dr. A.
Tajudeen
Afghanistan
and Zaire
Michael Williams
Prohibit
Prohibition
December 12, 2001
Jack McCarthy
Hitchens,
Walker
and Osama's Tape
Laura W. Murphy
Ashcroft's
Jihad
Shahid
Alam
Race
and Visibility
December 11, 2001
Joshua Orton
University
of Wisconsin
Won't Aid FBI Interviews
Philip
Farruggio
Cleansing
the Nation's Soul
Robert Fisk
Why I Was
Beaten
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
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About 9/11
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Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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Published Oct. 15, 2001
8-Page Special Issue
War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
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CounterPunch
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 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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December 21,
2001
War is Working for Bush:
Osama
Becomes Saddam; Iraq Becomes the Scapegoat for U.S.Government-Produced
Anthrax Terror
By Tom Turnipseed
Polls in the United States show unprecedented
support for George W. Bush and his leadership in the victory
of the world's sole super-power over the destitute nation of
Afghanistan, and its rag-tag Taliban government. Bush has become
enormously popular and empowered by war. He is cheered on by
a jingoistic and flag-waving media, from pandering pundits and
admiring anchors to the travel industry employing Bush's visage
in television commercials telling you that to be a good American
and help win the war, you must hurry and buy your tickets. Bush
destroyed the tattered Taliban in Afghanistan with a mighty display
of hi-tech bombing aided by local warlords and warriors on the
ground. He and his fellow warlords in Washington are planning
where and how to keep the war momentum going now that the "the
most evil one," Osama bin-Laden, appears to have vamoosed.
In his Texas cowboy cockiness that thinly disguises his rich
Ivy League frat boy roots, Bush has said he would get Osama "dead,
or alive," but, at least for now, the object of the greatest
manhunt since Jesse James has escaped the noose.
Luckily, for George W., the perfect stand-in
for the elusive Osama bin Laden is the arch-villain of his father,
Saddam Hussein. Under his father, President George H. W. Bush's
leadership, Saddam's relatively affluent country of Iraq was
reduced to poverty by the Persian-Gulf War of 1991 and by the
U.S.-driven economic sanctions continuing since the War. In
that War, more bombs were dropped on Iraq than the total dropped
by both sides in all of World War II. An estimated 150,000 Iraqis
were killed with at least 1,000,000 more dying since due to the
economic sanctions. The elder Bush demonized Saddam as another
Hitler, but withdrew U.S. forces from Iraq before finishing off
Saddam Hussein and his government after Kuwaiti oil fields were
secured for U.S. oil interests. The elder Bush also received
the adulation of the American public with favorable ratings of
90% in the polls at the height of the patriotic fervor of winning
the war against Iraq. The passion of patriotism cooled with the
layoffs of a recession and the elder Bush lost the election to
Bill Clinton in 1992. But now the war against terrorism is
an all-encompassing global struggle, so with Cowboy George, it
is on to other impoverished Islamic countries "who might
be harboring terrorists."
While there is military action brewing
in the squalor of smaller Muslim countries like Yemen, Somalia
and Sudan, the big enchilada for Cowboy George the younger could
be Iraq. Saddam is like Osama in that he came into his own in
militaristic terrorism in a United States-backed war against
Iran in the 1980s, killing 1,000,000 people - much like the U.S.
recruited Osama into the military business as a mujahedeen leader
to terrorize the Soviets out of Afghanistan in the early 1980s.
Anthrax cultures were supplied to Iraq by a Virginia firm, the
American Type Culture Collection Company in 1985. Saddam has
been demonized as a fiendish monster for more than ten years
and there is an ol' family score to settle.
Cowboy George has demanded Iraq allow
U.N. inspections for chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons
or they will find out what happens if they don't. Scott Ritter,
an ex-U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from the United States,
has repeatedly said that such weapons had "been destroyed
or rendered harmless by 1998." On December 20, the New
York Times ran a front page story about a "defector"
from Iraq, who is Kurdish and a member of a group opposing Hussein
called the Iraqi National Congress. He said he was an engineer
who had "personally worked on renovations of secret facilities
for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons." The story
said the Iraqi defector "had been interviewed twice by American
intelligence officials" according to "government experts."
On December 19, White House spokesperson
Ari Fleischer said, "The evidence is increasingly looking
like it was a domestic source" in reference to the anthrax
spores used to kill five Americans in mail attacks. The Associated
Press reported on December 19 that several government laboratories
are being investigated who conducted anthrax research for the
CIA and the Department of Defense. The labs received samples
form the U.S. Army Research Institute of Infectious Disease at
Fort Detrick, Maryland. Military officials have also admitted
that the Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah has been working
with anthrax for bio-warfare since 1992. Last summer the Bush
administration killed the inspection enforcement provision of
the 1975 Biological Weapons Convention saying it might expose
the industrial secrets of U.S. biotechnological and pharmaceutical
companies.
Cowboy George wears his white hat into
the continuing war against evil ones like Saddam Hussein to the
praise of an adoring American public and Congress. On December
19 the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution by Rep.
Lindsey Graham of South Carolina by a vote of 392-12 that names
Iraq as "a mounting threat to the United States, its allies,
and international peace and security." The same day, U.N.
Secretary General Kofi Annan warned the United States against
attacking Iraq and said it would "exacerbate the situation
and raise tensions in a region that is already under strain."
Tom
Turnipseed is an attorney,
writer and civil rights activist in Columbia, South Carolina.
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