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June 18, 2002
Edward Said
Palestinian
Elections Now
June 17, 2002
Jack McCarthy
Watergate
and All That
Philip Farruggio
A Maximum
Wage Law
Ron Sullivan
Law
and Orders:
The Assault on Trial by Jury
Rev. Charles Booker-Hirsch
Taking
on the School
of the Americas
Joan Smith
G.W. Bush:
The Man is Stupid
Dave Marsh
Corporate
Buy Outs and the Decline of Teen Jive
Robert Jensen
Rhetoric
Distorts Realities
June 15 / 16, 2002
Tanweer Akram
A Review
of Noam Chomsky's 9-11
Daniel Wolff
The Day
They Shot a Wolf in the Ghetto and What It Meant
Ralph Nader
A Corporate
Crime State
David Vest
Have You
Been Serviced?
Karl Kraus
A Minor
Detail
Alexander Cockburn
The
Terrorism of Everyday Life
June 14, 2002
Mark Weisbrot
US Trade
Policy:
"Do as We Say, Not as We Did"
Starhawk
The Boy Who Kissed the Soldier
David Krieger
Farewell
to the ABM Treaty
Tom Turnipseed
The Fear Factor to Promote
War and Trample Truth
Steve Perry
How the
Bush Adminstration Buried Coleen Rowley
June 13, 2002
Linda Belanger
Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict:
The Story Behind the Headlines
Amira Hass
Indefinite
Siege
Mokhiber / Weissman
Time to Put Lives Over Patents
Robert Fisk
Bush's Weird
War
Stanton / Madsen
Democracy
in Crisis:
What is to be Done?
Roldan Tomasz Suárez
Venezuela:
Five Facts
About the Coup
June 12, 2002
Fran Shor
Dirty Bombs, Blowback
and Imperial Projections
Dave Marsh
Shelley
Stewart, Radio and the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement
Chris Floyd
Murder, Inc.
June 11, 2002
Omar Barghouti
On Dance, Identity and War
Robert Fisk
The Bush
Afghan Gang:
Murderers, Gangsters, Stooges
Minerva Wright
The Donkeys of the Holy Land
David Krieger
Stopping
a Nuclear War
in South Asia
June 10, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
Executioner's Last Songs
June 8/9, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Mademoiselle
M.
Or Getting Screwed in Paris
Susan Davis
Sleepless
in the Suburbs
Curing Insomnia: a new use for The Nation?
George Sunderland
"Send
in the Weekly
Standard": The Screaming Pundits Assault Corps
June 7, 2002
Michael Colby
Bush to the Nation:
You're All Cops Now
Tanweer Akram
Howard
Zinn's "Terrorism
and War": a review
David Krieger
New Security Challenges
Sam Bahour
The Palestinian
Intifada:
A Very American Struggle
Tom Turnipseed
A Crisis of Confidence
in US Leadership
June 6, 2002
Michael Colby
White House
vs. EPA:
Political Hot Air and
Global Warming
Ron Jacobs
The Indo-Pakistan Conflict:
It's Just a Shot Away
Francis Boyle
Take Sharon
to The Hague:
Prosecute Israeli War Crimes
at Jenin
CounterPunch Bulletin
60 Minutes and President Chavez's
Censored F-Word
Mark Weisbrot
Spying
and Lying:
The FBI's Shameful Past
June 5, 2002
Robert Fisk
Berlusconi the Censor
Danielle Brian
Nuclear
Plants and Terrorism
Ardeshir Cowasjee
For What Do We Fight?
George Monbiot
Kashmir
on the Brink
Michael Neumann
What is Antisemitism?
June 4, 2002
Dave Marsh
Bono the Useful Idiot
William Evan / Francis
Boyle
Kashmir:
Invoking Intl. Law to Avoid Nuclear War
Cockburn / St. Clair
The Future Wellstone Deserves
June 3, 2002
Ramdas / Makhijani
India,
Pakistan and Nukes:
A Road Map to Peace
Fran Shor
Meanwhile, Back in Afghanistan
Neve Gordon
The Caterpillar
Effect
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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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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This Explosive
New Book at an
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Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
June 18,
2002
"Come Out
With Your Hands Up, W."
"OK, We Surrender"
by David Vest
Nine months into the global war on terrorism,
if we can believe the Bush administration, al Qaeda is stronger
than ever, its tentacles wrapped around the planet, running wild
from Iraq to the Philippines, all along the Axis of Evil from
Nowhere to North Korea.
I was discussing this the other day with
my old friend Leon Despair, who wanted no part of it. "Christ,
you people make it sound like we'd have been better off if the
U.S. had surrendered on 9/11. Just run a white flag up from the
Nebraska bunker where Bush was hiding."
The thing you have to know about Leon
is this: he'll accuse you of something outrageous, and a minute
later he'll turn around and be advocating it himself, while you're
still trying to organize a defense.
"Look," he said, "desperate
measures for desperate times. If this was an actual war we'd
have surrendered months ago."
And off he went, making the "case"
for surrender. Let me see if I can remember his main points.
His argument went something like this.
For starters, after nine months of all-out
war the general public certainly appears to be no safer than
it was on the morning of September 11. Airline security has not
noticeably improved. It took the government almost as long to
develop a terror alert color scheme no one understands (or uses)
as it did to process the visa requests of some of the dead hijackers.
And now we have the "reorganization"
of Homeland Security into a new department. Suddenly the guy
with the color scheme is running the Coast Guard. With all the
turf fighting, Washington looks like the loya jirga.
John Ashcroft, chief among the Bush warlords,
likes to be called simply "General." Has this ever
happened before with an Attorney General? Did anyone but a mail
room intern ever call Janet Reno or Ramsey Clark "General"?
If Bush calls Ashcroft "General,"
what does he call the Acting Surgeon General (assuming he ever
sees him)?
On an almost daily basis, either "General"
or Fleischer or Rumsfeld backtracks from the warning of the day
before, as the administration tries simultaneously to explain
earlier warnings it failed to heed. "Explain" and "clarify"
have become synonyms for "change the subject."
It's important for them to get their
story straight, says Leon, because it's hard to scare people
with dirty bombs from Brooklyn and sell them on a Star Wars missile
shield in the same news cycle without being caught "off
message."
Meanwhile, whoever mailed the anthrax
is still at large (so is Eric Rudolph, North Carolina's very
own bin Laden).
In between fits of nostalgia for Nixon,
the media run stories accusing journalists of "treason"
for even reporting the story. On Sunday, June 16, the Washington
Post ran an op-ed piece by a senior State Department intelligence
analyst blaming "our system of open information" for
terrorist initiatives.
"You know what that means?"
says Leon. "It means that the best and the brightest yet
walk among us."
According to these guys, the "public"
and "terrorists" are virtually the same thing: you
can't inform one without informing the other. So we have to forget
about our civil liberties and our freedoms, otherwise the terrorists
win. It's like what we used to hear in the Vietnam era, "We
had to destroy the village in order to save it." This time
it's not a village, it's the Constitution.
Sooner or later, as public officials
display an increasing willingness to destroy the values and principles
of the country in order to defend it, a critical mass of people
are bound to wonder what's really the greatest threat, the attack
from outside or the assault from within.
We have already reached the point where
the idea of torturing prisoners and executing the families of
suicide bombers are acceptable topics in the public discourse.
And that's just the home front.
Abroad, in the months since 9/11 the
Middle East has exploded into new depths of savagery while India
and Pakistan have moved to the brink of nuclear war. It was enough
to cause the president to display a hitherto-unremarked interest
in foreign affairs: only a couple of weeks ago in Europe he asked
the president of Brazil, in front of witnesses, whether he had
any Blacks in his country. At this rate, he may be able to name
all the continents by the time he leaves office.
After tons of smart bombing in Afghanistan,
Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar remain as elusive as they were
on the tenth of September, assuming they are alive. "For
all I know, they're sitting in the loya jirga right now, making
deals," says Leon.
Every day the hints about an invasion
of Iraq grow stronger. But consider this scenario: What if, after
nine months of pounding Iraq, Saddam Hussein were still at large?
Would we look for him in North Korea?
Thirty years ago, when we were mired
in Vietnam, waist deep in the big muddy, groping in the silt
for an exit strategy, cynical (i.e., wise) people were saying
the U.S. should just declare victory and come on home.
"Is that the kind of surrender you
had in mind?" I wanted to ask Leon, but he was gone again.
David Vest
writes the Rebel Angel column for CounterPunch. He is a poet
and piano-player for the Pacific Northwest's hottest blues band,
The Cannonballs.
He can be reached at: davidvest@springmail.com
Visit his website at http://www.rebelangel.com
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