home / subscribe / donate / about us / books / archives / search / links / feedback / events

Inside the New Print Edition of CounterPunch: a Special Report by David Price on the CIA on Campus The CIA's New Campus Spies: Meet "PRISP", it may be at work on a campus near you. Program doles out cash to train tomorrow's spooks ; they say it's like ROTC, only it's all secret; a hundred spooklets on campus today; thousands down the road; pay back your loan by translating for torturers in tomorrow's Abu Ghraibs; meet PRISP's Frankenstein, Prof Felix Moos; anthropologists and the CIA, a deadly embrace by David Price; ALSO Alexander Cockburn on Disaster Relief as Scam; air-conditioned tents for the NGOs and money to burn; how tourist "development" deepened tsunami's impact; why governments love "relief". AND Humans and Woodchippers: When small isn't beautiful. Remember these stories are available exclusively in the print edition of CounterPunch. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! Call Toll Free 1-800-840-3683 or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558

Wars of the Laptop Bombers   Today's Stories January 26, 2005 Toni Solo The US and Latin America: a Not-So-Magical Reality Eric Hobsbawm Delusions About Democracy Scott Fleming In Good Conscience: an Interview with Concientious Objector Aidan Delgado Alexander Cockburn The CIA's New Campus Spies   January 25, 2005 Brian Cloughley Iraq as Disneyland Mike Roselle Satan is My Co-Pilot Josh Frank / Merlin Chowkwanyun The War on Civil Liberties John Chuckman Freedom on Steroids Paul Craig Roberts A Party Without Virtue Dr. Teresa Whitehurst The Intolerance of Christian Conservatives James Petras The US / Colombia Plot Against Venezuela Website of the Day Lowbaggers for the Environment   January 24, 2005 Fred Gardner Last Monologue in Burbank Lori Berenson On the Politicization of My Case Uri Avnery King George January 22 / 23, 2005 Jennifer Van Bergen / Ray Del Papa Nuclear Incident in Montana Alexander Cockburn Prince Harry's Travails Jeffrey St. Clair The Company That Runs the Empire: Lockheed and Loaded Stan Goff The Spectacle Saul Landau Nothing Succeeds Like Failure Gary Leupp Official Madness and the Coming War on Iran Fred Gardner Is GW Getting the Runaround? Phil Gasper Clemency Denied: the Politics of Death in California Stanley Heller A Kill-Happy Government: Connecticut Chooses Death Greg Moses The Heart of Texas: an Inauguration Day Betrayal on Civil Rights Justin Taylor The Folk-Histories of John Ross Daniel Burton-Rose One China; Many Problems Elaine Cassel Try a Little Tyranny: Questions While Watching the Inaugural Mike Whitney Failing Upwards: the Rise of Michael Chertoff Mark L. Berenson My Daughter Has Been Wrongly Imprisoned Christopher Brauchli It Doesn't Compute: a $170 Million Mistake Gilad Atzmon Zionism and Other Marginal Thoughts Niranjan Ramakrishnan Day of the Rats Mark Donham The Secret Messages of Rahm Emmanuel Ben Tripp Adventures in Online Dating Walter Brasch Hollywood's Patriots: Soulless Kooks, Mr. Bush? Poets' Basement Wuest, Landau, Ford, Albert & Drum     January 21, 2005 Dave Lindorff A Great American Journalist: John L. Hess (1917-2005) Sharon Smith The Anti-War Movement and the Iraqi Resistance Don Santina Baseball, Racism and Steroid Hysteria Ron Jacobs Locked Out and Pissed Off: Protesting the Bush Inauguration Kurt Nimmo The Problem with Mike Ruppert Don Monkerud Once They Were Cults: Bush's Faith-Based Social Services Alan Farago Swimming Home from the Galapagos Derek Seidman An Interview with Army Medic and Anti-War Activist Patrick Resta Read How the Press & the CIA Killed Gary Webb's Career     January 20, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts Dying for Sycophants William Cook The Bush Inauguration: A Mock Epic Fertility Rite Joshua Frank The Democrats and Iran: Look Who's Backing Bush's Next Eric Ruder Why Andres Raya Snapped: Another Casualty of Bush's War Mike Whitney Coronation in a Garrison State Robert Jensen A Citizens Oath of Office Peter Rost Bush Report on Drug Imports: Good Data, Bad Conclusions David Underhill Is It Torture Yet?: the Eclectic Fool Aid Torture Test James Reiss Adieu, Colin Powell: Pea Soup in Foggy Bottom CounterPunch Staff Voices from Abu Ghraib: the Injured Party       January 19, 2005 Marta Russell Social Security Privatization & Disability: 8 Million at Risk Mike Ferner Marines Stretching Movement: Protesting Urban Warfare in Toledo Nancy Oden The Nuremberg Principles, Iraq and Torture Tony Paterson A Catalogue of British Abuses in Iraq Dave Lindorff Bush's Divide-and-Conquer Plan to Destroy Social Security Doug Giebel BS and CBS: When 60 Minutes Helped Promote WMD Fantasies Alexander Cockburn Will Bush Quit Iraq?       January 18, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts How Americans Were Seduced by War: Empire and Militant Christianity Jennifer Van Bergen Federal Judge: Abu Ghraib Abuses Result of Decision to Ignore Geneva Conventions Douglas Lummis It's a No Brainer; Send Graner: a Rap for Our Time Ron Jacobs Syria Back in the Crosshairs? Seth DeLong Enter the Dragon: Will Washington Tolerate a Venezuelan-Chinese Oil Pact? Lance Selfa Stolen Election?: Most Democrats Didn't Even Bother to Inquire Paul D. Johnson Mystery Meat: a Right-to-Know About Food Origins Elisa Salasin An Open Letter to Jenna Bush, Future Teacher     January 17, 2005 Heather Gray Misconceptions About King's Methods for Social Change Robert Fisk Hotel Room Journalism: the US Press in Iraq Dave Lindorff What the NYT Death Chart Omitted: Civilians Slaughtered by US Military Jason Leopold Sam Bodman's Smokestacks: Bush's Choice for Energy Czar is One of Texas's Worst Polluters Gary Leupp A Message from the Iraqi Resistance Douglas Valentine An Act of State? the Execution of Martin Luther King Harvey Arden Welcome to Leavenworth: My First Encounter with Leonard Peltier Greg Moses King and the Christian Left: Where Lip Service is Not an Option   January 15 / 16, 2005 James Petras The Kidnapping of a Revolutionary Robert Fisk Flying Carpet Airlines: My Return to Baghdad Ron Jacobs Unfit for Military Service Brian Cloughley Smack Daddies of the Hindu Kush: Afghanistan's Drug Bonanza Fred Gardner The Allowable-Quantity Expert Dr. Susan Block The Counter-Inaugural Ball: Eros Day, 2005 John Ross Zapatista Literary Llife Suzan Mazur Unspooking Frank Carlucci M. Shahid Alam America's New Civilizing Mission Frederick B. Hudson Jack Johnson's Real Opponent: "That I Was a Man" Mike Whitney Bush's Grand Plan: Incite Civil War in Iraq Tom Crumpacker A Constitutional Right to Travel to Cuba Bob Burton The Other Armstrong Williams Scandal John Callender La Conchita and the Indomitable 82-Year Old Lila Rajiva Christian Zionism Saul Landau An Imperial Portrait: a Visit to Hearst's Castle Doug Soderstrom A Touch of Evil: the Morality of Neoconservatism Poets' Basement Davies, Louise, Landau, Albert, Collins and Laymon     January 14, 2005 Robert Fisk "The Tent of Occupation" Lee Sustar Bush's Social Security Con Job José M. Tirado The Christians I Know Dave Zirin The Legacy of Jack Johnson Sheldon Rampton Calling John Rendon: a True Tale of "Military Intelligence" Tracy McLellan Under the Influence Yves Engler The Dictatorship of Debt: the World Bank and Haiti Tom Barry Robert Zoellick: a Bush Family Man Website of the Day Ryan for the Nobel Prize?     January 13, 2005 Mark Chmiel / Andrew Wimmer Hearts and Minds, Revisited Joe DeRaymond The Salvador Option: Terror, Elections and Democracy Greg Moses Every Hero a Killer?...Not Dave Lindorff The Great WMD Fraud: Time for an Accounting Jorge Mariscal Dr. Galarza v. Alberto Gonzales: Which Way for Latinos? Christopher Brauchli Gonzales and the Death Penalty: the Executioner Never Sleeps Gary Leupp "Fighting for the Work of the Lord": Christian Fascism in America     January 12, 2005 Robert Fisk Fear Stalks Baghdad Josh Frank The Farce of the DNC Contest Jack Random Casualties of War: the Untold Stories John Roosa Aceh's Dual Disasters: the Tsunami and Military Rule Carol Norris In the Wake of the Tsunami Mike Whitney Pink Slips at CBS Alan Farago Can the Everglades be Saved? Paul Craig Roberts What's Our Biggest Problem in Iraq...the Insurgency or Bush?     January 11, 2005 Tom Barry The US isn't "Stingy"; It's Strategic: Aid as a Weapon of Foreign Policy James Hodge and Linda Cooper Voice of the Voiceless: Father Roy Bourgeois and the School of the the Americas Linda S. Heard Farah Radio Break Down: Joseph Farah's Messages of Hate and Homophobia Derrick O'Keefe Electoral Gigolo?: Richard Gere and the Occupied Vote Gila Svirsky A Tale of Two Elections Harry Browne Irish "Peace Process", RIP   January 10, 2005 Ramzy Baroud Faith-Based Disasters: Tsunami Aid and War Costs Talli Nauman Killing Journalists: Mexico's War on a Free Press Uri Avnery Sharon's Monologue Dave Lindorff Tucker Carlson's Idiot Wind Dave Zirin Randy Moss's Moondance Dave Silver Left Illusions About the Democratic Party Charles Demers Plan Salvador for Iraq: Death Squads Come in Waves William A. Cook Causes and Consequences: Bush, Osama and Israel     January 8 / 9, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Say, Waiter, Where's the Blood in My Margarita Glass? John H. Summers Chomsky and Academic History Greg Moses Getting Real About the Draft Walter A. Davis Bible Says: the Psychology of Christian Fundamentalism Victor Kattan The EU and Middle East Peace John Bolender The Plight of Iraq's Mandeans Robert Fisk The Politics of Lebanon Fred Gardner Situation NORML Joe Bageant The Politics of the Comfort Zone Mickey Z. I Want My DDT: Little Nicky Kristof Bugs Out Ben Tripp CounterClockwise Evolution Ron Jacobs Elvis and His Truck: Out on Highway 61 Saul Landau Sex and the Country Rep. Cynthia McKinney Time to End the Blackout Ellen Cantarow NPR's Distortions on Palestine Richard Oxman Bageantry Continued Poets' Basement Gaffney, Landau, Albert, Collins January 7, 2005 Omar Barghouti Slave Sovereignty: Elections Under Occupation Kent Paterson The Framing of Felipe Arreaga: Another Mexican Environmentalist Arrested Niranjan Ramakrishnan Old Vijay Merchant and the Tsunami David Krieger Cancel the Inauguration Parties Gideon Levy New Year, Old Story Dave Lindorff Ohio Protest: First Shot Fired by Congressional Progressives Christopher Brauchli Privatizing the IRS Roger Burbach / Paul Cantor Bush, the Pentagon and the Tsunami     January 6, 2005 Brian J. Foley Gonzales: Supporting Torture is not His Greatest Sin Greg Moses Boot Up America!: Gen. Helmly's Memo Leaks New Bush Deal Petras / Chomsky An Open Letter to Hugo Chavez Alan Maass The Decline of the Dollar Dave Lindorff Colin Powell's Selective Sense of Horror Jenna Orkin The EPA and a Dirty Bomb: 9/11's Disastrous Precedent P. Sainath The Tsunami and India's Coastal Poor     January 5, 2005 Alan Farago 2004: An Environmental Retrospective Winslow T. Wheeler Oversight Detected?: Sen. McCain and the Boeing Tanker Scam Jean-Guy Allard Gary Webb: a Cuban Perspective Fred Gardner Strutting, Smirking, As If The Mad Plan Was Working David Swanson Albert Parsons on the Gallows Richard Oxman The Joe Bageant Interview Bruce Jackson Death on the Living Room Floor       January 4, 2005 Michael Ortiz Hill Mainlining Apocalypse Elaine Cassel They Say They Can Lock You Up for Life Without a Trial Yoram Gat The Year in Torture Martin Khor Tragic Tales and Urgent Tasks from the Tsunami Disaster Gary Leupp Death and Life in the Andaman Islands   January 3, 2005 Ron Jacobs The War Hits Home Dave Lindorff Is There a Single Senator Who Will Stand Up for Black Voters? Mike Whitney The Guantanamo Gulag Joshua Frank Greens and Republicans: Strange Bedfellows Maria Tomchick Playing Politics with Disaster Aid Rhoda and Mark Berenson Our Daughter Lori: Another Year of Grave Injustice David Swanson The Media and the Ohio Recount Kathleen Christison Patronizing the Palestinians     January 1 / 2, 2005 Gary Leupp Earthquakes and End Times, Past and Present Rev. William E. Alberts On "Moral Values": Code Words for Emerging Authoritarian Tendencies M. Shahid Alam Testing Free Speech in America Stan Goff A Period for Pedagogy Brian Cloughley Bush and the Tsunami: the Petty and the Petulant Sylvia Tiwon / Ben Terrall The Aftermath in Aceh Ben Tripp Requiem for 2004 Greg Moses A Visible Future? Steven Sherman The 2004 Said Awards: Books Against Empire Sean Donahue The Erotics of Nonviolence James T. Phillips The Beast's Belly David Krieger When Will We Ever Learn Poets' Basement Soderstrom, Hamod, Louise and Albert         December 23, 2004 Chad Nagle Report from Kiev: Yushchenko's Not Quite Ready for Sainthood David Smith-Ferri The Real UN Disgrace in Iraq Bill Quigley Death Watch for Human Rights in Haiti Mickey Z. Crumbs from Our Table Christopher Brauchli Merck's Merry X-mas Greg Moses When No Law Means No Law Alan Singer An Encounter with Sen. Schumer: a Very Dangerous Democrat David Price Social Security Pump and Dump Website of the Day Gabbo Gets Laid   December 22, 2004 James Petras An Open Letter to Saramago: Nobel Laureate Suffers from a Bizarre Historical Amnesia Omar Barghouti The Case for Boycotting Israel Patrick Cockburn / Jeremy Redmond They Were Waiting on Chicken Tenders When the Rounds Hit Harry Browne Northern Ireland: No Postcards from the Edge Richard Oxman On the Seventh Column Kathleen Christison Imagining Palestine Website of the Day FBI Torture Memos     December 21, 2004 Greg Moses The New Zeus on the Block: Unplugging Al-Manar TV Dave Lindorff Losing It in America: Bunker of the Skittish Chad Nagle The View from Donetsk Dragon Pierces Truth* Concrete Colossus vs. the River Dragon: Dislocation and Three Gorges Dam Patrick Cockburn "Things Always Get Worse" Seth DeLong Aiding Oppression in Haiti Ahmad Faruqui Pakistan and the 9/11 Commission's Report Paul Craig Roberts America Locked Up: a System of Injustice                                     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

January 26, 2005 Freedom and Occupation Condoleezza Rice Confused About the Middle East By WILLIAM JAMES MARTIN Writing in Dar Al Hayat at the end of the year, Ms Condoleezza Rice, the newly designated Secretary of State, made the following points: " when freedom is on the march, America is more secure ­ when freedom is in retreat, America is more vulnerable. That is why the president has broken with more than 60 years of excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East, As long as the Middle East remains a region of tyranny and despair and anger, it will produce men and movements that threaten the safety of Americans and our friends." "When Iraqis to the polls next year to elect a government and put behind them their brutal history, democracy's power will be reaffirmed again. That opportunity exists today because America and a Coalition acted to remove one of the most brutal and dangerous regimes in the Middle East." Both Ms Rice and Mr Bush like the word, "freedom". In Bush's inauguration on January 20, which Ms Rice's article anticipates, Bush used the word 40 times. On the same day of Mr Bush's inauguration speech, the Israeli daily ran a story to the effect that Israel would proceed to confiscate Palestinian owned land in East Jerusalem. The Absentee Property Law of 1950, which Israel enacted in order to write into statute its desire to transfer to itself land taken from the Palestinians during the Palestinian extirpation in 1948, now plans to confiscate property owned by thousands of Palestinians in East Jerusalem and worth hundreds of millions of dollars. According to the law, those whose lands are confiscated have neither the right to appeal nor a right to compensation. Freedom? Over the past year, 869 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military while Israelis, both military and civilian deaths have totaled 118, a better than 7 to 1 ratio. More than 12,000 Palestinian homes have been either demolished or damaged in the West Bank since 2000. Between September 2000 and September 2004, more than 24,000 Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip have been made homeless by Israeli house demolitions. In the first months of 2004, the Israeli Defense Forces demolished on average 120 residential buildings each month ­ or four per day. In Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, home demolition increased from 15 homes per month in 2002, to 77 homes per month in the first nine months of 2004. Some 13,230 dunums (3307 acres) of land have been cleared or damaged due to the barrier construction in the West Bank. Infant mortality, in the Occupied Territories has increased each year since 2000. Is this freedom, Ms Rice? The Israeli bulldozers building the Apartheid separation wall, and expanding the existing settlements are running seven days a week from dawn to dusk creating facts on the ground, no matter who is in power, whether Arafat or Mahmoud Abbas. Facts on the ground by design become facts removed from the possibility of negotiation. It becomes land and resources irretrievably lost to the indigenous population. Is this freedom, for Palestinians, or just for Israeli settlers? On the day of Mr Bush's speech, a man returned to view his home in Falluja only to find it as well as the whole city destroyed. When he appealed to two US soldiers nearby to tell him from where he could receive compensation, they only laughed at him. He grabbed one of their guns and shot both before himself being killed by other US soldiers. The entire city of Falluja, a city of three hundred thousand was completely destroyed by the American aerial and artillery bombardment evidently without significantly suppressing the insurgency. Is this freedom, Ms Rice, and would you be less likely to answer in the affirmative if the city was Palo Alto, or Austin? The best scientific and statistical analysis of the increased rate of death in Iraq since the American invasion comes from a joint study of Columbia and Johns Hopkins University epidemiologists and was published in the English medical journal, Lancet. 100,000 additional deaths resulted from the war, according to that study, mostly from the American aerial bombardment. There is, in fact reason to believe that this figure is conservative as it did not include samples from Anbar province, which includes Falluja and Ramadi, sites of the most intense resistance. Is freedom on the march, or is it just death on the march. Dr Rice claims that democracy is the panacea that will transform the Middle East and end the causes of anti-American sentiment and terrorism. Yet Israel is a democracy, albeit, with a privileged and an underclass racial disparity built into law. Yet that did not prevent Israel's launching an invasion of Lebanon in 1982 which took the lives of 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, nor did it prevent the massacre of approximately 2000 Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps of southern Beirut orchestrated by Ariel Sharon. Being a democracy did not prevent Israel from acquiring WMDs including nuclear fission devices as well as the thermonuclear bomb as well as the enhanced radiation warhead, which the United States did not even build nor deploy. Their chemical and biotoxin programs are well advanced. This disparity between the tolerance for Israel's defiance of international law and international treaties and the lack of tolerance of efforts on the part of Arab states to counter the threat posed by Israel has not gone unnoticed by the Arab populations. From the Arab perspective, the US is simply trying to eliminated hegemonic competition to Israel while allowing Israel to continue to confiscate Palestinian land as they intentionally inflict hardship and suffering on the Palestinians with the intention of driving them out of Palestine or alternately driving them into enclaves with most of the West Bank, and most of the West Bank's resources in the possession of Israel. The view that Saddam Hussein was the incarnation of evil and thus needed to be eliminated even though he lacked WMDs is an exaggeration. That is Israel' perspective, which many Americans have internalized. The Saddam Hussein government during the 1980's had established universal free co-educational education as well as a national health system which provided free health service which reached 93% of the population. This national health service was regionally known as the Jewell of the Middle East. This period of expansion, even during wartime, created a burgeoning middle class and led to the creation of the well educated and highly skilled work force which was in existence on the eve of the American invasion. It was the American led UN sanction regime, conducted mostly under President Clinton, which ultimately destroyed the infrastructure of the society and led to a substantial increase in mortality, particularly childhood mortality which, more than anything Saddam did, contributed to diminished freedom for the Iraqis. Ms Rice who was in the forefront of those leading the public campaign for military intervention in Iraq states that we all expected to find WMDs and that intelligence agencies around the world expected to find WMDs. Those intelligence agencies around consisted uniquely of the US, the UK, and Israel. And what else would one expect from Israeli intelligence. Yet Ms Rice had ignored the UN Weapons Inspection regime which, under the direction of Hans Blix, and consisting of experts in nuclear engineering, in chemistry , and biotoxins and had surveyed more than 900 sites of suspected weapons facilities or weapons production facilities and had set up remote monitoring devices capable of detection of both radioactivity and toxic chemicals. Nor did Mr Rice consider the testimony of IAEA head Mohammed El Baridai who testified before the UN Security Council that his agency had concluded that the imported aluminum tubes were most probably not intended for Uranium enrichment by gas centrifuge, which was in direct contradiction of Ms Rice's later statements. Ms Rice's phrase of a "smoking gun becoming a mushroom cloud over American cities" would seem to come straight form Madison Avenue. In an interview with journalist Diane Sawyer, when asked "what newspapers do you read?", President Bush responded that he did not read any newspapers but rather relied on Condoleezza Rice and his aid Andrew Card to brief him on the recent events. Mr Bush added that such briefing had the advantage that they, unlike newspaper accounts, were free of editorializing. Yet, Mr Bush has revealed himself to be surprisingly, or not so surprisingly, uninformed on many occasions. One such occasions occurred on a visit to the Bush ranch, at Crawford, Texas, by Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia just after the Prince had floated the Saudi Initiative for a Middle East Peace in which the Prince had proposed an Israel return to the 1967 borders between Israel and the West Bank in return for peace treaties with the surrounding Arab states and their recognition of Israel's right to exists. The Prince found that Bush was barely aware of the plan and had not been briefed on it. The Prince, who had invested much of his personal prestige on the plan, said that he was personally insulted. Another remarkable such incident of either ignorance or dementia occurred when President Bush stated at a press conference in July, 2003, four months after the American invasion, "We gave his a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in". In fact, the UN weapons inspectors were allowed into Iraq from December 2002 until March of 3003 when they were withdrawn because in the imminent American invasion, and, as mentioned above, they had surveyed more than 900 sites. Due to the Reagan experience, we became somewhat acclimated to such bazaar utterances, ascribing them to some stage of dementia, however, in this case, ignorance is a more plausible explanation as Bush does not appear to be demented. Because Bush does not independently follow the news, it is mind boggling that the President may have launched an invasion without knowing that UN Weapon inspectors had been in Iraq for four months, had surveyed 900 sites and had never found either the WMDs nor the capacity for producing them, and that Saddam Hussein had complied with UN Resolution 1441 determining that the weapons inspection team be allowed into Iraq and given unfettered access. Did Ms Rice fail to mention that fact in the presidential briefings. For the neo-cons who were determined to go to war, there was little point in telling him. One searches the record in vain of statements for statements by Ms Rice revealing anything reflecting any significant understanding of either the history or the politics or culture of the Middle East. Ms Rice once stated in an Israeli television interview, "I first visited Israel in 2000. I already then felt that I am returning home despite the fact that this was a place I never visited. I have a deep affinity with Israel. I have always admired the history of the state of Israel." It is doubtful that anyone with a competent understanding of the recent historical works on the founding of Israel, including those of Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe or others and who understands the origin of the Palestinian Diaspora, and the massacres and threats of massacres that drove it, could admire Israel's history. It is more likely that the history she admires is a mythical history engendered by decades of Israeli propaganda aimed at the purification of Zionism and the demonization of the indigenous Palestinian population who, in fact, were ethnically cleansed. Ms Rice supported the American decision to sever all ties with Yasser Arafat on the grounds that he constantly supported the suicide bombings and refused to condemn terrorism. It takes an incredible amount of ignorance to sustain that position and to ignore Arafat's many impassioned condemnations of suicide bombings, some presented on Palestinian national television and one very eloquent Op Ed in the New York Times. Prejudice is not good enough, if Ms Rice has evidence supporting her position, she needs to present it. In fact, Ms Rice would be hard pressed to show that Arafat had ever supported attacks on civilians in his entire career. George Bush had called Ariel Sharon, "a man of peace". It is difficult to reconcile this appellation with Sharon's history which includes orchestrating the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, as well as others. The most likely explanation is ignorance on the part of Bush and his National Security Advisor. To refer to Ariel Sharon as "a man of peace" is a substantial insult to the Arab people implying that Arab blood is cheap and that mass murders of Arabs are quickly forgotten for being inconsequential. The world needs not to forget those massacres and others of Sharon. Ms Rice has never displayed any sign that she understands the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as being anything other than one of Palestinian terrorism against Israel. That the occupation was 25 years old before the first suicide bombing occurred is elementary knowledge which Ms Rice has never acknowledged. Any competent understanding of Israel, its formation, and the drivers of Zionism -- Ben Gurion, Weiss, Jabotinsky, Begin and Shamir, whose ideas now shape the Lukud, along with Sharon's, should know that expansionism is intrinsic to the state of Israel and that Zionism, and that from the earliest settlements in 1882, the Zionists had exactly two goals ­ the cleansing of the indigenous Arab population and the establishment of a racially, or ethnically, pure Jewish state with as few Arabs as possible. In fact, the War of 1948 and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine never ended, it only slowed and its methods became political/military - open war by other means. Ms Rice celebrates the healing virtues of democracy, but refused to deal with Yasser Arafat, the democratically elected President of the Palestinian authority. Could Ms Rice be ignorant that Arafat won an election in 1996 carrying 88% of the popular vote in an election monitored by international monitors and by the Carter Center? To answer this question, we may choose between hypocrisy and ignorance. Despite Dr Rice's reputation for academic competence, it appears that, as either National Security Advisor or as Secretary of State, we have a case of the blind leading the blind, or more forthrightly, the ignorant leading the ignorant. William James Martin teaches in the Mathematics Department at the University of Florida. He can be reached at: wmartin@math.ufl.edu WWW http://www.counterpunch.org