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Today's
Stories
August 28,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
Zombies
for Kerry
August 27,
2004
Gary Leupp
Neocon
Musings
Robin Cook
The
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
Diane Christian
Disarming
Michael Donnelly
Situational Democracy: the Show Me the Green Party?
Jack Random
4F and Other Heroes: an Army of War Resisters
Mike Ferner
"To the Swift Boats!"
Mazin Qumsiyeh
7000 Palestinian Political Prisoners
Veronza Bowers, Jr.
"You Won't Be Leaving Tomorrow"
Sex, Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's
Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
Click here to purchase
August 26,
2004
M. Shahid Alam
The
Clash Thesis: a Failing Ideology?
Diane Christian
War
Rules: Bush is No Sun Tzu
Derek Seidman
"They're As Bad As Wal-Mart:" Starbucks Workers Get
Organized
David Lindorff
Court to RNC Protesters: Drop the Rally
Christopher
Brauchli
Signs of Dissent: the Bush in the Bubble
Stew Albert
Reporting Suspicious Activity
Mark Donham
Judgement in Athens: Give the Koreans Their Day in Court
Saul Landau
Pinochet:
the Al Capone of the Southern Cone
Website of
the Day
The Kerry 527 Ad You'll Never See
August 25,
2004
Amelia Peltz
Can
I Have 9.8 Seconds of Your Time?
Noah Leavitt
Defining and Redefining Torture
Ron Jacobs
Takin' It to the Streets: It's Not About the Election, It's About
Democracy
James Brooks
Coronado Crosses the Jordan
Akiva Eldar
How to Win the Jewish Vote: Turn Gaza into a "Mini-Afghanistan"
Gemma Araneta
Chavez's New Brand of Populism
Philip Cryan
Uribe's Boys: the Death Squads of Colombia
CounterPunch Wire
Cheney Opens the Closet Door
August 24,
2004
Jeremy Scahill
John
Kerry: the Warchurian Candidate
Gary Leupp
"We
Want Them to Go Away"
David Domke
God
Willing: an Echoing Press and Political Fundamentalism
William Loren Katz
The Meaning of Hugo Chávez: Black and Indian Power in
Venezuela
Jonah Gindin
With Chavez? Reading the International Private Media
Fran Schor
Denying Atrocities: From Vietnam to Fallujah
Joe Bageant
Driving
on the Bones of God
Website of the Day
The Great America Lockdown: a Primer for the RNC
August 23,
2004
Winslow Wheeler
Don't
Mind If I Do: Porkbarrel and the War on Terror
John Pilger
Bush
May Be the Lesser Evil
Stan Goff
Swift
Boat Dogfight
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
Notes
from the West Bank: Build, Demolish, Rebuild
Mike Whitney
The Unraveling of Afghanistan
William Blum
Brave
New World of Iraqi Sovereignty
Ralph Nader
A Letter to the Washington Post: a Shameful and Unsavory Editorial
August 21 /
22, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
"They
Want Blood:" The Bi-Partisan Origins of the Total War on
Drugs
Landau / Hassen
Failing
the Mission? Form a Commission
Brian Cloughley
The
Bush Team in Iraq: Moral Cowardice, as Practiced by Experts
Josh Frank
Nader as David Duke? The ADL Wants You to Think So
Mike Whitney
Reincarnating Mengele: the Torture Doctors of Abu Ghraib
Ron Jacobs
Day Labor Blues
Mickey Z.
Shooting at Whales: 40 Years After Tonkin
Fred Gardner
Dr. Wolman Comes Out: The Cannabis Consultants
Dave Zirin
Uprising in Athens: Iraqi Soccer Team Gives Bush the Boot
Josh Saxe
Witnessing Police Brutality in LA
Yanar Mohammed
Letter from Baghdad: a Democracy of Killings and Bombings
Helen Williams
Ali's Story: a Taste of Reality from Baghdad
Michael Donnelly
Elemental and NaturalForests, Fire and Recovery
Elizabeth Schulte
The Crisis in Affordable Housing
Poets' Basement
Adler, Albert, Virgil, Ford and Krieger
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.
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Weekend
Edition
August 28 / 29, 2004
An
Exchange
Senator
McCain's Pork Chops
By
WINSLOW T. WHEELER
Yesterday, Friday, the Washington Post
published a letter from the President of Citizens Against Government
Waste in response to my commentary
in last Sunday's Outlook section. Tom Schatz, the President
of CAGW, focused on defending Senator John McCain against my
descriptions and criticisms of his actions on defense bills.
I sent the Post a response to Mr. Schatz, but the Post has decided
not to publish it. Both letters are reproduced below.
Friday, August 27, 2004; Page
A20
Washington Post
In the Aug. 22 Outlook piece,
"Don't Mind If I Do," Winslow T. Wheeler leveled much-deserved
criticism at Congress for larding the defense budget with self-serving,
parochial projects. Citizens Against Government Waste's annual
"Congressional Pig Books" have shown how defense pork
has risen 30.6 percent during the past three years, even as our
elected leaders purportedly have marshaled all available resources
to wage the war on terrorism.
However, Mr. Wheeler missed
the mark when he accused Sen. John McCain  (R-Ariz.) of giving a "wink
and nod" to record pork in the 2005 defense appropriations
bill.
Mr. McCain's credentials as
an anti-pork crusader are unassailable. He is the only senator
who consistently takes to the floor to shame members of Congress
for their budget-busting, special-interest spending. Mr. McCain's
decision to insert his criticism into the Congressional Record
instead of speaking on the Senate floor hardly means that he
is "going through the motions" or that his efforts
are insincere.
Mr. McCain has repeatedly pushed
for budget reform legislation that would reduce opportunities
to get pet projects included in the annual spending bills.
Several times, he was rebuffed
by Mr. Wheeler's former boss, Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), when
he sought help to make such remedies a reality. And no wonder.
Mr. Wheeler regularly prepared a laundry list of pork requests
at the behest of his boss for inclusion in defense appropriations,
as he acknowledged in his essay, "Mr. Smith Is Dead,"
published by the Center for Defense Information.
TOM SCHATZ
President
Citizens Against Government Waste
Washington
My response:
Dear Editor:
In large part, I agree with Tom Schatz, in his 26 Aug. letter
regarding my commentary in Outlook, "Don't Mind If I Do."
Both his organization, Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW),
and Senator John McCain perform a valuable public service by
reporting on Congress' atrocious and corrosive pork system. Mr.
Schatz was also right to point out that I was once a busy participant
in that system. As I have already confessed and in much more
detail in my forthcoming book, "The
Wastrels of Defense," I didn't just push pork for the
Senators who employed me, I did a lot to retard Congress's porcine
apparatus. However, I continue to be very disappointed in Senator
McCain. As a U.S. Senator, he is in a position to do more than
just report on pork like CAGW, yet for the most part he takes
no meaningful action.
Senator McCain's inaction constitutes an enabling of pork, not
a crusade against it. As authorizations and appropriations for
pork in Congress's defense bills achieve new records in parallel
with Senator McCain's speeches, the nation's defense weakens.
Accurate reporting outside Congress helps, but just talk inside
keeps the system going. In my book I've come up with a "12
Step" program to impede pork on Capitol Hill and to stop
the other ways Congress sabotages US security. I would welcome
working with Mr. Schatz and Senator McCain to give citizens the
Congress they need and deserve in the area of national security.
Sincerely,
Winslow T. Wheeler
Visiting Senior Fellow
Center for Defense Information
Winslow Wheeler is a visiting senior fellow at the
Center for Defense Information. He contributed an essay on the
defense budget to CounterPunch's new book: Dime's
Worth of Difference. Wheeler's book, "The
Wastrels of Defense: How Congress Sabotages U.S. Security,"
will be available from the Naval Institute Press in October.
Weekend
Edition Features for August 7 / 8, 2004
James Petras
The
Anatomy of "Terror Experts": Meet the Mandarins of
Abu Ghraib
Fred Gardner
Run
Ricky Run: Football, Pot and Pain
Justin Delacour
Anti-Chavez Pollsters Panic: Fix Numbers; Reinvent Venezuela
Brian Cloughley
Persecuted by All; Supported by None: Who Would Be A Kurd?
Joshua Frank
The
Outsider: a Talk with Ralph Nader
Iain A. Boal
On "Shame": Warmed-Over Orientalism and Racist Projection
Chris Floyd
All About Eve: Open Season on Women in DC and Rome
Andrew Fenton
Fighting for Democracy and Justice in Haiti
Aseem Shrivastava
Saga of an Anguished Afghan
Neil Corbett
See Cuba: Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar, Mr. Bush
Carol Miller
/ Forrest Hill
Rigged Convention; Divided Party: How David Cobb Won with Only
12% of the Vote
Tarek Milleron
Breaking the Principled Voter
Donald Macintyre
The
Battle of Najaf
Ron Jacobs
Spirits of The Dead: Why I Love My Petty Bourgeois Tendencies
Mickey Z.
Kid
Gavilan's Grave: Propaganda Scores a TKO
Poets' Basement
Adler, Ford and Albert
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