home / subscribe / donate / tower / books / archives / search / links / feedback / events / faq

Exclusive to CounterPunch Newsletter Subscribers!

THE ORIGINS OF THE ISRAEL LOBBY

"It was impossible to hold the line. All we got was a battering from the Jews."
--John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State, 1956

Read Harry Clark's devastating chronicle of how the Lobby humbled Ike, in our new CounterPunch newsletter. PLUS It'll be different under the Democrats? Think again, as Diana Johnstone returns to Kosovo. Get your copy today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Remember contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now

Order CounterPunch By Email for Only $35 a Year and Receive a Free Copy of
"Imperial Crusades: a Diary of Three Wars" by Cockburn and St. Clair

This is no April Fool! Alexander Cockburn live for three hours on C-SPAN-2, April 1, Noon (EST), repeated at midnight

Today's Stories

March 31 / April 1, 2007

Cockburn / St. Clair
That Was an Antiwar Vote?


March 30, 2007

Alan Maass
Oil and the Empire

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
A Memo on Iran: Brinksmanship in Uncharted Waters

Richard W. Behan
George Bush's Land Mine: If Iraqis Get Revenue Sharing, Exxon Gets Their Oil

Gabriel Kolko
Israel's Last Chance

William S. Lind
Operation Anabasis

Stedjan / Weis
The Cluster Bomb Treaty: Again, It's the US vs. the World

Kevin Zeese
Is Bush Lame or Is Congress?

David Busch
Homeless in LA

Fidel Castro
Biofuels and Global Hunger

CounterPunch News Service
Mistrial in Olympia 15 Case

Website of the Day
Free Shaquanda Cotton


March 29, 2007

Saul Landau
Comparing Padillas

Patrick Cockburn
When Iraqi Cops Go on a Rampage

Dave Lindorff
War and the Futures Market: Oil Traders Fear an Attack on Iran

Arthur Neslen
Normalizing Injustice: Jaffa's Ugly Truth

Michael Dickinson
Incident at Westminster Abbey

Ingmar Lee
Plantskyyd: Planting Trees with Pig's Blood in British Columbia

Aseem Shrivastava
As India Goes Global, the Public Goes Private

Marlene Martin
Sacco and Vanzetti, Revisited

Mahmoud El-Yousseph
Wake Up, You Live in America!

Michael Foley
A Citizen's Peace Lobby

Website of the Day
Impeach Bush Club Parade


March 28, 2007

Nicole Colson
The Ongoing Persecution of Sami Al-Arian

Harry Clark
Michigan Peaceworks on Palestine

Larry Everest
Another $100 Billion to Continue the War

Jonathan M. Feldman
Citigroup, Property and Theft

Dave Zirin
Yet Another Book on Muhammad Ali (and Why I Wrote It)

Jane Stillwater
How Runaway Inflation Has Slipped Under the Radar

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
Pakistan's Cry for Justice

Jim Wilfong
Who Owns Maine's Water?

Hawra Karama
An Open Letter to Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi Uncle Tom

Website of the Day
Free Fire on Iraqi Civilians



March 27, 2007

Iain Boal /
Standard Schaefer
British Petroleum and the New Greenmail

Patrick Cockburn
The Hostage Game

Monica Benderman
On Ending War: Is America Ready for the Troops When They Come Home?

Corporate Crime Reporter
Political Players and Single Payer

Joshua Frank
Dems in Power: Broken Promises and Bald-Faced Lies

Harvey Wasserman
Will Al Gore Deliver Us to Solartopia?

Sen. Russell Feingold
FBI Abuses of the Patriot Act

Tillman Family
Crimes and Cover Ups are Not "Missteps"

Patrick Bond
Zimbabwe's Descent

David Judd
Arbitrary Discipline at Columbia

Website of the Day
Why Work?


March 26, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
Seven Days on Iraq's Cruel Roads

Uri Avnery
Schoolbooks and Borders

Greg Moses
Hothouses for Hapless Masses on the Rio Grande

Bill Hatch
A Plague of Big Shots

John V. Walsh
The Democrats' War Funding Debacle

Diane Christian
God Does Not Love the Aggressor

Dan La Botz
The Immigration Movement at a Crossroads

Frederico Fuentes
Latin America Tells Bush to "Get Out!"

Sunsara Taylor
Democrats' Victory Means More Iraqi Deaths

Mickey Z.
Pat Tillman: Beyond the Hype

Website of the Day
DynCorp's Iraq Training Policy

 


March 24 / 25, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
Where are the Laptop Bombardiers Now?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Nuclear Saviors?: Kyoto, Gore and the Atomic Lobby

David Rosen
An American Obituary: Anna Nicole Smith and the Exploitation of Nature

Ron Jacobs
The Political History of the Car Bomb

Robert Fantina
Vietnam and Iraq, the Rhetoric Remains the Same

Alan Maass
Why Ralph Nader Took a Stand

Atul Gawande
On Washing Hands: A Surgeon's Notes on How Infections Spread in Hospitals

Marianne McDonald
Staging Anti-Colonial Protest

China Hand
Zealots Scheme to Derail North Korea Accord

Kaz Dziamka
The Iroquois Way of Impeachment

Andrew Wimmer
The Nursemaid's Tale

Don Monkerud
World's Biggest Debtor Nation

Anthony Papa
Bong Hits 4 Jesus Case

Matthew Provonsha
Return of the Black Bloc

Missy Beattie
Calling Youth and Young Adults

Stephen Fleischman
Confrontation, At Last

Poets' Basement
Newberry, Laymon, Harley and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
An Interview with Ron Jacobs

Song of the Weekend
"Who Would Jesus Bomb?"


March 23, 2007

Saul Landau
Return to Syria

Patrick Cockburn
Welcome to Iraq, Mr. Ban

Greg Moses
Protesting Immigrant Prisons in the Rio Grande Valley

Rep. Ron Paul
The War Funding Bill

Franklin Lamb
Will Hezbollah Hand Israel Its 6th Defeat?

Stephen Gowans
Mugabe Gets the Milosevic Treatment

Roger Burbach
Leftist Victory in Ecuador

Dave Lindorff
The Gutless Mini-Politics of the Congressional Democrats

William S. Lind
Candles in the Hurricane

Alan Mammoser
The New Rules of Food

Russell Hoffman
Al Gore's Nose is Glowing

Website of the Day
Global Outsourcing and the US Working Class

 

March 22, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
Oil-Rich Kirkuk at the Melting Point

Robin Blackburn
Toxic Waste in the Sub-Prime Market

Michael Donnelly
Mr. Green Goes to Washington: Another Oscar Performance from Al Gore

Uzma Aslam Khan
Down Pakistan's No-Constitution Avenue

Lee Sustar
Bush's Braceros: The Ugly Truth About the Guest Worker Program

Robert D. Skeels
LA's Vicious War on the Homeless

Rev. William Alberts
The Forbidden C-Word

Anne McElroy Dachel
The Search for the Elusive Autism Gene

Mickey Z.
This is Your Brain on Meat

Website of the Day
Raimondo Does Hitchens

 


March 21, 2007

Tao Ruspoli
A Conversation with Robbie Conal

James Petras
Meet the Global Ruling Class

Fred Gardner
A U.S. Army Pipe Dream

Corporate Crime Reporter
Cramer Comes Clean: Lies, Market Manipulation and Wall Street

Faisal Kutty
Too Guilty to Fly, Too Innocent to Charge?

Robert Fantina
U.S. Imperialism in Action

Isabella Kenfield and Roger Burbach
Brazilian Opposition to Bush-Lula Ethanol Accords

Lucinda Marshall
Missing in Action: Why is the Peace Movement Ignoring the Impact of War on Women?

Winslow Wheeler
Dem Budget Tricks: Reform Means What We Say It Means!

Website of the Day
Student Day of Action Against the War

 

 

March 20, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq is a Vast, Blood-Drenched Human Disaster

Winslow T. Wheeler
The Blank Check War

Sharon Smith
Hillary's Cojones: Our Bleached-Blond Thatcher?

Uri Avnery
The New Palestinian Unity Government

Stan Cox
Down-to-a-Trickle Economics

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Hating the Rich

Alan Farago
Why Al Gore Soft-Peddled the Environment in 2000

Richard W. Behan
Impeachment and Patriotism

Juan Antonio Montecino Latin America Has Moved On

David Krieger
The Treaty of Tlatelolco

Peter Rost, MD
An Open Letter to Pfizer's CEO: $11 Million Salary, 36% Raise, 10,000 Fired Employees

Mickey Z.
A Cat-Eat-Cat World: Beyond the Pet Food Recall

Website of the Day
Bringing the War Home

Webclip of the Day
Sunsara Taylor Beats O'Reilly, Again

 

March 19, 2007

Paul Craig Roberts
Crime Blotter: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Patrick Cockburn
Operation Deepening Nightmare

Stauber / Rampton
Why Won't MoveOn Move Forward?

Werther
Plame Wars: Valerie Plame, the Washington Post and the Ghost of Joe McCarthy

Noam Chomsky
In Memory of Tanya Reinhart

Jeff Leys
Tap Dancing on Graves: How Democrats Bought the War

Richard May
And Then There Were None: Europe's Afghan Backlash

Ron Jacobs
Lessons of the Antiwar Movement and the Washington Post's Lessons of the Iraq War

Mike Whitney
Rove in the Dock

Website of the Day
Ringtones That Roar

 

 

March 17 / 18, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
Here Comes Another "Crime Wave"

John Scagliotti
A Sissy's Manifesto

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Green Imposter: When Al Gore Was Veep

Paul Craig Roberts
The Confession Backfired

Greg Moses
Jailing Immigrant Mothers in El Paso

Harry Clark
Thrice-Told Tales: Those Israel-Syria Peace Talks

Brian Cloughley
In the Name of Improving People's Lives: Mounting Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq

Mehran Ghassemi
An Interview with Sasan Fayazmanesh on the US, Israel and Iran

William Loren Katz
A Disturbing Expulsion: Racism and the Cherokee Nation

John Ross
Being a Zapatista Where You Live

Ralph Nader
Ban the Bomblets!

Walter Brasch
An Intolerant Minority: the Witch Hunt Against Gays in the Military

Samer Assad
The Palestinian Unity Government: Another for US Diplomacy

Dave Zirin
Bowie Kuhn: Death of a Baseball Reactionary

Ron Jacobs
The Darker Nation's: Remembering and Re-examining the Third World

Missy Beattie
No to War and Pace

Don Santina
First, They Came for the Democrats

Sami Adwan
What Hillary Should Know About Palestinian Schoolbooks

Dr. Susan Block
Gods of Spring: the Erotics of the Equinox

Poets' Basement
Reed, Landau, Engel, Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
God Save Helen Mirren

 

March 16, 2007

R. T. Naylor
The Political Economy of Diamonds

Paul Craig Roberts
The Last Days of Constitutional Rule

Joshua Frank
Obama's Israel Problem

Diane Farsetta
How Reporters Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Nuclear Front Groups

Tom Barry
Tancredo's Putsch: Anti-Immigrant Agenda Veers Hard Right

Stephen Lendman
Plays from a Political Fake Book: Congress's Phony Opposition to War

Al Krebs
Compounding Infamy: Chiquita, Its Workers and Colombia's Death Squads

Jackie Corr
Senator Schumer and the Corruption Culture

Ramzy Baroud
Palestinians Must Redefine Struggle

Reza Fiyouzat
The Chinese Way of Capitalism

Website of the Day
Introducing: the iRak

 

March 15, 2007

Alison Weir
Strip-Searching Children at Israeli Checkpoints

Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad Under Surge

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
Memo to Congressional Leaders on Iraq Funding: First Stop the Bleeding

Franklin Spinney
Of Character and Contractors: the Unauthorized Rumsfeld

Standard Schaefer
Biofuels and the Green Resistance

Conn Hallinan
The Right's Stuff in Africa: Neocons, Evangelicals and Sudan

Maureen Webb
Another Patriot Act Abuse

Sonja Karkar
Rachel Corrie and Palestine

Margaret Kimberly
The Profits of Self-Hatred: Malkin and D'Souza, Incorporated

Anthony Papa
The New Capones: It's Time to Rethink Drug Prohibition

Katherine Hancy Wheeler Bush's Latin American Tour: Good Will Lost

Video of the Day
The Easiest Targets

Website of the Day
Memo to Kucinich: Watch Your Back!

 

March 14, 2007

Tao Ruspoli
A Conversation with Peter Linebaugh on the Slave Trade, Magna Carta and the State of the Left

Philip Agee
The Decline of the US, the Rise of Latin America

Bruce Dixon
The Digital Redlining of African-Americans

John Walsh
How One Senator Could End the War

Sunsara Taylor
Red Light, Green Light: the Democrats and Iran

William Johnson
Still Reeling from Katrina: The Spirited Strike at Pascagoula Shipyards

Richard Thieme
Entitlement and Empire

Jeffrey Klein
Right-Wing Academic Values

Nicola Nasser
This Time, Israeli is Missing an Historic Opportunity

Dave Lindorff
Political Hide-and-Seek with the Democrats

Website of the Day
Oil Change

 

March 13, 2007

Catherine Wilkerson, M.D.
Scenes from a Cop Riot

Jonathan Cook
The Real Goal of Israel's Invastion of Lebanon

Robert Bryce
Beyond Redemption: the Legacy of George the Second

Corporate Crime Reporter
Coal-Powered Democrats

Pierre Rimbert
Libération and the Evolution of French Neoliberalism

Dave Lindorff
What's Good for Halliburton is Good ... for Dubai

Elizabeth Schulte
The Repackaging of John Edwards

Norman Solomon
The Pragmatism of Prolonged War

Kevin Zeese
The Democrats' Fraudulent Iraq Exit Plan

Jeff Conant
Greeting Rumsfeld in Taos

Website of the Day
Tacoma and the Big Heat

 

 

March 12, 2007

Marjorie Cohn
Patriot Act Unbound

Col. Dan Smith
Ghost Prisoners, Shadowy Jails and Secret Trials

Paul Craig Roberts
Neocons in Kafkaland

Ingmar Lee
The Sentencing of Betty Krawczyk: a 78-Year-Old Eco-Heroine

Fred Gardner
Cannabis for the Wounded: Another Walter Reed Scandal

Ron Jacobs
Showdown at Port Tacoma: Confronting the War Machine in the Northwest

Ralph Nader
Send the Bush Twins to Iraq!

John Ross
Political Prisoners in Calderon's Mexico

Stephen Fleischman
Bush's Latin American Slip

Eva Carazo Vargas
Why We Reject CAFTA

Website of the Day
Mountain Justice Spring Break

 

March 9 / 11, 2007

Sameer Dossani
Interview with Noam Chomsky: War, Neoliberalism and Empire in the 21st Century

Jeffrey St. Clair
Crude Alliance: The Bi-Partisan Politics of Oil

Dave Marsh
Bono's Bullshit: Not One Red Cent

Patrick Cockburn
Shia Pilgrims Die Despite US Offensive

Jennifer Van Bergen
A Gonzo Argument: Alberto Gonzales's Defense of NSA Domestic Spying

James P. Stevenson
Pardon Whom? Libby and the Cheney Unseen

Arthur J. Versluis
Crusade for Commercialism

Corporate Crime Reporter
Not a Dime's Worth of Difference: Congress and Corporate Crime

Missy Beattie
Too Much Info, Newt!: Sex, God and Praying

Michael Simmons
Annie Get Your Gums: Why I Like Ann Coulter

Kevin Zeese
Making Democrats Pay the Price: Voting Against the War is No Longer Enough

David Swanson
Shocking Video: The Dark Side of the Democrats

John A. Murphy
Are the Congressional Democrats Spineless?

Dave Lindorff
Bush Dodges a Constitutional Bullet in New Mexico: Abetted by Democrats

Nikolas Kozloff
Lights! Camera! Chavez!

Christopher Fons
Bush Goes to Latin America: Is It All About (N)PR?

Mike Roselle
A Thousand Miles of Bad River

Mike Mejia
Justice for Sibel Edmonds

Susie Day
Anna Nicole Smith Bombs Iran!

Michael Donnelly
LA Story: Rock Stars, Porn Stars and Peace

Tao Ruspoli
Just Say Know (Parts 4 and 5)

Poets' Basement
Reed, Laymon, Mezmer and Harley

Website of the Weekend
Japanese Dolphin Massacre

 

March 8, 2007

Elaine Cassel
The Tragic Case of Jose Padilla

Yifat Susskind
Iraq's Other War: Violence Against Women Under US Occupation

Corporate Crime Reporter
Politics and the Prosecutors

Col. Dan Smith
The Sins of Walter Reed

William S. Lind
The Washington Dodgers

Mark Engler
Bush's Latin American Spring Break

Roger Burbach
With Negroponte as Tour Director, Bush's Trip Destined to Fail

Dana Cloud
Return of the Campus Witch Hunts: David Horowitz and the Thought Police

Isabella Kenfield
Brazil's Ethanol Pland: Breeding Rural Poverty and Environmental Degradation

Lucinda Marshall
We Stand with the Women of the World

Tao Ruspoli
Just Say Know: a Personal Look at Drugs and Drug Addiction (Part 3)

Website of the Day
Filibuster for Peace


March 7, 2007

Christopher Ketcham
What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?

Christopher Ketcham
The Kuala Lumpur Deceit: a CIA Cover Up

Alexander Cockburn / Jeffrey St. Clair
Ketcham's Story: Coming in From the Cold

Winslow T. Wheeler
Mismeasuring the Defense Budget

Sean Donahue
Free Scooter Libby!

Dave Lindorff
The Fall Guy Has Fallen

Evelyn Pringle
Psychosis and Mania: ADHD Drug Warnings Come Too Late for Many

Tao Ruspoli
Just Say Know: a Personal Look at Drugs and Drug Addiction

Website of the Day
Debating Iraq: Gaffney Against the World!

 

March 6, 2007

Gary Leupp
Meet Eliot Cohen: "As Extremist a Neocon and Warmonger as It Gets"

Uri Avnery
Esterina Tartman: The Big Mouth of Israeli Fascism

Patrick Cockburn
The War on Terror is a Bust: Bush is Now Al Qaeda's Top Recruiter

Saul Landau
World in Crisis, Candidates in Denial

Corporate Crime Reporter
John Edwards' Big Lie

Ron Jacobs
The Legacy of Lordstown: The Union Makes Us Strong!

Mike Roselle
Judi Bari: Ten Years Gone

P. Sainath
Neoliberalism and the Ideology of the Cancer Cell

Joshua Frank
Dump the Dems, Unite Against the War

Aniket Alam
Women's Day, Lenin and a Riot in Copenhagen

Dave Zirin
Resurrecting Don Barksdale: Basketball's Forgotten Pioneer

Website of the Day
Physicians for a National Health Program

 

March 5, 2007

Greg Moses
Holding Suzi Hazahza for Profit

Patrick Cockburn
Exodus of Iraq's Ancient Minorities

James Petras
Bush vs. Chavez

Frida Berrigan
US Nuclear Hypocrisy and Iran

Marjorie Cohn
Conscientious Objector Faces Court-Martial: the Case of Augustín Aguayo

Douglas Kammen and S.W. Hayati
The Rice Crisis in East Timor

Sen. Barack Obama
On Israel and AIPAC: "We Must Preserve Our Total Commitment to Our Unique Defense Relationship with Israel"

Michael Young
Sy Hersh and Iran: the Dark Side of Spun a Lot?

Dave Lindorff
It's the People of Washington vs. Pelosi, et al

Sonja Karkar
Raiding Nablus: Israel's Hot Winter Offensive

Website of the Day
How Obama Learned to Love Israel

 

March 3 / 4, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
The Persecution of Sami Al-Arian

Corporate Crime Reporter
"No Fingernails, No Good:" Al-Arian Prosecutor's Anti-Muslim Bias

Jeffrey St. Clair
Glory Boy and the Snail Darter: Al Gore, the Origins of a Hypocrite

Patrick Cockburn
War Reporting in Iraq: Only Locals Need Apply

Ralph Nader
Hillary, Inc.: Sen. Clinton and Corporate America

M. Shahid Alam
American Mamlukes

Gilad Atzmon
From Esther to AIPAC

Fred Gardner
It's Official!: Cannabis Reduces Pain

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Fourth World War Started in Venezuela

Rock & Rap Confidential
Do the James Brown!: "No One Could Speak More Authoritatively for Blacks"

Gillian Russom
The Court Martial of Agustín Aguayo

Michael McPhearson
My Small Act of Civil Disobedience

Kevin Zeese
The Democrats and the Peace Movement: Who Owns Whom?

Sunsara Taylor
Four Years of an Unjust War

Wendy Thompson
Re-Organizing the UAW

Kenneth Rexroth
Gibbon's "Decline and Fall"

Missy Beattie
Regarding Cheney

Don Monkerud
Jesus Turned Away at US Border

Tina Louise
Stuffed with Terror, Starved of Dreams

Poets' Basement
Richards, Landau and Davies

Website of the Weekend
John Prine: Flag Decal

 

March 2, 2007

Roger Morris
Cheney's Bagram Ghosts

Phil Gasper
Prisoners of Ideology

Mike Roselle
Buffalo Gore: The Blood-Stained Snow of Yellowstone

Robert Bryce
The Ethanol Scam

John V. Walsh
Who is He This Time?: Kerry's Strange Call to Filibuster the War

Sherwood Ross
Bush and Walter Reed Hospital: Praise the Care, Slash the Budget

China Hand
Who Let North Korea Get the Bomb?

David Rosen
To Cut or Not to Cut?: the Politics of Circumcision in America

Chris Genovali
Connecting the Dots

Peter Harley
The Wall, Apartheid and Mandela

Website of the Day
Courage to Resist

 

March 1, 2007

Laura Carlsen
Return to Sender: Migrants as Globalization's Junk Mail

Paul Craig Roberts
The Tragedy of a Dozen Evil Men

Ray McGovern
How Far is Iran from the Bomb? Who the Hell Knows?

Christopher Brauchli
Bush's Theater of the Absurd

Najum Mustaq
America's Musharraf Dilemma

Brent Bowden
The War on Terror and the Terror of War

Tina Richards
Demoralizing the Troops? The Mother of an Iraq War Vet Responds

Ethan Nadelman
Mexico and the Drug War

Mike Stark
"Tough on Crime" is the Problem, Not a Solution

Wadner Pierre / Jeb Sprague
Haiti's Poor Under a State of Siege by UN

Mike Whitney
Market Meltdown: the Dead Hand of Greenspan

Website of the Day
Dylan Hears a Who

 

February 28, 2007

Peter Linebaugh
An Amazing Disgrace

Tao Ruspoli
A Conversation with Francisco Letelier

China Hand
The Shanghai Crash: Take the Money and Run

Marjorie Cohn
Why the Boumediene Case on Gitmo Detainees and Habeas Corpus Was Wrongly Decided

Sarah Olson
Is Lt. Watada an Isolated Case of Military Dissent?

Susan Van Haitsma
Mark Wilkerson: Standing for a Soldier's Right to Conscience

Nicole Colson
License to Torture

Harvey Wasserman
The Sham of Nuclear Power

William S. Lind
The Non-Thinking Enemy

Nicola Nasser
US Turnabout?: Engagement and Confrontation in the Middle East

Website of the Day
Andrew Cockburn on Rumsfeld

 

February 27, 2007

Tariq Ali
The Khyber Impasse: the Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan

Tom Barry
America's Crusaders: Santorum and Lieberman

Uri Avnery
The Next War

Antonia Juhasz / Raed Jarrar
Oil Grab: the Secret Scheme to Split Iraq

Jeff Nygaard
Howard Hunt and the National Memory System

Hugh O'Shaughnessy
Grenada: an Invasion Revisited

Mitchell Kaidy
Israel's Cluster Bombs: Made in USA, Ground-Tested in Lebanon

Carl Finamore
Airline Bankruptcies, Mergers and Profits

Anne McElroy Dachel
The Really Big Lie About Autism

Ramzy Baroud
Who is Really in Control?

Andrew Rouse
The Queen, Her Apothecary and the War on Iraq

Website of the Day
New York City Skyline

 

February 26, 2007

Franklin Lamb
US Israel Lobby Targets Lebanon's Jihad al-Bina

Bill Quigley
The Right to Return to New Orleans

Greg Moses
Suzi Hazahza in Haskell Hell

Col. Dan Smith
Calling All Carriers

Ralph Nader
The Bush Administration is a Threat to Our National Security

Paul Buchheit
The Income Gap

Jeff Leys
How Democrats Are Buying the Iraq War

Dave Zirin
Bojangling for Bigots: an Open Letter to Jason Whitlock

Mike Whitney
Doomsday Dick and the Plague of Frogs

Michael Dickinson
Free Kareem Amer!

Website of the Day
Beware the Chickenhawks!

 

February 24 / 25, 2007

Jeffrey St. Clair
Frightening Tales of Endangered Species

R. T. Naylor
Inside Islamic Charity

Gary Leupp
AIPAC Demands "Action" on Iran

Saul Landau
Modern Day Miracle: Rev. Haggard Cured! Thank You, Jesus!

Ron Jacobs
Missile Defense Redux

Jeffrey Blankfort
A Debate on the Israel Lobby

Chris Sands
Afghanistan in Winter: Where Death Comes Cheap

Gary Freeman
The N-Word and Black History Month

Larry Portis
Zionism and the United States: the Cultural Connection

P. Sainath
Two Million People in "Maximum Distress"

Lee Sustar
What Next for the Immigrants' Rights Movement?

Kevin Wehr
Liberal vs. Radical Enviros: the Thrill isn't Gone, It's Just Moved

Ken Couesbouc
The African Card

Soffiyah Elijah
FBI Hunting Dead Panthers: Can John Bowman Ever Rest in Peace?

Kathlyn Stone
Iraqi Labor vs. Big Oil

Dave Lindorff
Breaking the Dam in Olympia

Jason Kunin
Criticizing Israel is Not an Act of Bigotry

Kevin Zeese
Can Hillary be Trusted?

Remi Kanazi
All Roads Lead to Checkpoints

Missy Beattie
Five Words That Change Lives

Poets' Basement
Davies, Holt and Rodriguez

Website of the Weekend
Caught on Tape: an Anti-War Movement Finding Its Feet?

 

February 23, 2007

Franklin Spinney
Top Gun vs. the Axis of Evil: Is This What We Have Become?

Jonathan Cook
Watching the Checkpoints

Patrick Cockburn
The True Extent of Britain's Failure in Basra

Kathy Kelly
Do Something Good

Chris Dols
Islamophobia at Urban Outfiters: the Case for Keffiyehs

Evelyn Pringle
The Neurontin Suicides: Risks Kept Hidden for Years

Stephen Pearcy
If Bush is a War Criminal, What About the Troops?

Dan Brook
Making Poverty History

Yifat Susskind
Iraqi Police Commit Rapes

Website of the Day
A Citizens Arrest of Patty Murray

 

February 22, 2007

Robert Fantina
Repeating History

Tariq Ali
Prodi's Soap Operatic Fall: Neoliberalism and War in Italy

Michael Shank
An Interview with Noam Chomsky on Iran, Iraq, the Democrats and Climate Change

John Ross
Calderon's War on Drugs

Christopher Brauchli
Stockcars on Dope: How NASCAR and the Tour de France are Bring the World Together

Cindy Litman
Paying for the Damage Done to Iraq

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Mr. Jefferson's Inheritors: Caution, Calculation and Cold Feet

Kevin Zeese
Finally, a Populist Antiwar Candidate for President

Aseem Shrivastava
The New Indian Way?: a Developer's Model of Development

Reza Fiyouzat
A Letter to the Israeli People: We are All Led by Mad Men

Illinois Students Against the War
Why We Protested at Obama's Speech

Website of the Day
An Interview with Mike Gravel

 

February 21, 2007

Maass / St. Clair
The Clintons: the Art of Politics Without Conscience

Sharon Smith
Inside the Imperial Budget

Greg Moses
Showdown Over Texas Immigrant Prisons

Margaret Kimberly
America the Stupid

Ralph Nader
Making Cancer Cool: Tobacco and Hollywood

Nicola Nasser
Evasive Diplomacy: Bush Adm. Shuns Middle East Peace Talks

Mike Whitney
The Second Great Depression

Tao Ruspoli
Revolutionary But Gangsta: a Conversation with Stic.Man of Dead Prez

Byeong Jeongpil
Beyond the "Protection Facility", Another Prison

Corporate Crime Reporter
Why Hillary, Obama and Edwards Oppose Single-Payer Health Care

Josh Mahan
The Lost Art of Shattuck: a Good, Old-Fashioned Drinking Story

Website of the Day
Time to Free the Puerto Rican Nationalists


February 20, 2007

Sgt. Martin Smith
Structured Cruelty: Learning to be a Lean, Mean Killing Machine

Werther
How to be a Washington Expert

Corporate Crime Reporter
Exposing SAIC

Carl G. Estabrook
Common Sense About the Recent Past

China Hand
Setting Sun: The Diverging US-Japan Relationship

Joshua Frank
Cleaning Up Exxon's Greenpoint Oil Spill

Megan Boler
The Daily Show and Political Activism

John Feffer
People Power vs. Military Power in East Asia

Daryll E. Ray
What's Inside the New Farm Bill

Alan Gregory
Midwest Wolves Fall Prey to Slob Hunters' PR Scam

Website of the Day
"Not a Target Rich Environment?"

 

February 19, 2007

Paul Craig Roberts
Economists in Denial: Blind to the Consequences of Offshoring

Gary Leupp
"A Genocidal, Suicidal Nation:" Mitt Romney Joins Iran's Hysterical Accusers

Ron Jacobs
The Mecca Agreements: the Future Remains Bleak

Michael F. Brown
The Peace Process Industry

Robert Jensen
Liberal Icons and War: Bi-Partisan Empire-Building

Roger Burbach
Ecuador Stands Up to US

Monica Benderman
America, Where Are You Now?

Sonja Karkar
Apocalyptic Archaeology: Israel's Provocations Threaten Jerusalem

John Walsh
Some Good News from Beantown

Talli Nauman
Colorado Delta Blues: Challenging the Law of the River

Website of the Day
"The Best Place to be in Town"

 

Feburary 17 / 18, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
Sold to Mr. Gordon, Another Bridge!

Tao Ruspoli
CounterViews: a Conversation with Patrick Cockburn, Part Two

Gary Leupp
Iran: A Chronology of Disinformation

Jeffrey St. Clair
Dark Mesas in an Ancient Light

Roger Morris
The Undertaker's Tally: the Tragedy of Donald Rumsfeld

Uri Avnery
Facing Mecca

James Brooks
Palestinians and the "Diplomatic Horizon"

Sen. Russell Feingold
Congress Must Defund the Iraq War

Linn Washington, Jr.
"Death Row is a Web That Catches Only the Poor"

Michele Brand
Iran: the Proxy War?

Fred Gardner
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on Music and Basketball in the Harlem Renaissance

Mitchel Cohen
Storming the Pentagon: Lessons from 1967

Mike Ferner
Democrats Keep Ohio Refugee Free: "No Iraqis in Our Backyards!"

David Swanson
Memo to Don Young: What Lincoln Really Said

P. Sainath
In the Theater of the Jungle Belt

Mike Stark
GoreAid: Gore Plans Concert with Musicians He and Tipper Betrayed in the 80s

Missy Beattie
The Object of My Disaffection

Jonathan Franklin
Carnival: Where Dance is Hope

Website of the Weekend
The Godfather and the Tenor: "It's a Man's World"


February 16, 2007

Marc Levy
Turning Point: Veterans' Voices Trigger Response

Andrew Cockburn
In Iraq, Anyone Can Make a Bomb

Glen Ford
Powell, Rice and Obama: Putting Black Faces on Imperial Aggression

Greg Moses
The Terror of Suzi Hazahza: Why Her Family Must Be Freed

Ron Jacobs
Marching on the Pentagon: Then and Now

John W. Farley
Hook, Line and Sinker: The Press and Stephen Hadley

James Marc Leas
Vermont Legislature Says: "Bring Them Home Now!"

Tim Rinne
The Most Dangerous Place on the Face of the Earth?: StratCom and the Coming War on Iran

Albert Wan
Star-Cross'd Lovers?: The Strange Romance of Hillary and David Brooks

Website of the Day
Did Wal-Mart Murder Tweety Bird?

 


February 15, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
Who is Muqtada al-Sadr?

Saul Landau
How to Obsess Your Enemies

Stephen Lendman
The Rules of Imperial Management

Evelyn Pringle
More Zyprexa Postcards from the Edge

Michael Simmons
Is the Joke Over?: an Evening with Ralph Steadman

Kevin Zeese
A Congressional Kabuki Show

Dave Lindorff
The Co-Dependent Congress

Pete Shanks
They Want You to Eat Cloned Meat--And They Don't Want You to Know It

Peter Rost
The Michelle Manhart Affair: the Air Force Listens!

Lenni Brenner / Gilad Atzmon
An Exchange

Website of the Day
Barack Obama vs. Huey P. Newton

 

February 14, 2007

Tao Ruspoli
CounterViews: A Conversation with Patrick Cockburn

Dick J. Reavis
War Without a Name

Margaret Kimberly
Medical Apartheid in America

Christopher Brauchli
The Perils of Charity: You Can be Prosecuted for Funding Terror Even If the Designation of the Group as a Terrorist Organization was Wrong!

Paul Craig Roberts
Cracks in the Pentagon

John Ross
The Plot Against Mexican Corn

Michael F. Brown
The Democrats and Palestine: New Chairman, Old Rules

Dave Lindorff
The Press Bites, Again: a Word of Caution on Those Iranian Weapons

J.L. Chestunut, Jr.
Texas-style Injustice in Black and White

Don Fitz
Hybrids, Biofuels and Other False Idols

Michael Donnelly
Give Love, Give Life

Dr. Susan Block
The Chemistry of Love

Website of the Day
Code Pink Drops By Hillary's Office

 

February 13, 2007

Uri Avnery
Three Provocations: the Method in the Madness

Patrick Cockburn
Targeting Tehran

Ralph Nader
When Wall Street Whines (You Know They're Making a Killing)

Marjorie Cohn
Fool Us Twice? From Iraq to Iran

Col. Dan Smith
Iran Bashing Goes Prime Time

Col. Douglas MacGreagor
Empty Vessels: Gen. Patraeus and Other Hollow Men

Thomas Power
Coal Ambivalence: Mining Montana

Nicola Nasser
The Politics of Archaeology in Jerusalem

David Swanson
Iran War Talking Points

Columbia Coalition Against the War
Why We Are Striking

Website of the Day
Our Friends at Antiwar.com Need Your Help

 

February 12, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
Scapegoating Iran

Paul Craig Roberts
How the World Can Stop Bush: Dump the Dollar!

John Walsh
A Splintered Antiwar Movement: Nader and Libertarians Not Welcome

Dr. John Carroll, MD
What Next for Haiti's Cite Soliel?: a Journey Through the World's Most Miserable Slum

Greg Moses
An Outrageously Sickening Immigration Policy

Nicole Colson
The Frame-Up That Fell Apart: Jury See Through Another Botched Federal "Terrorism" Case

Dave Lindorff
Acting in Bad Feith: Inappropriate Behavior and Impeachment

Ray McGovern
The Kervorkian Administration: Are Bush and Cheney the Biggest Threats to the Existence of Israel?

Doug Giebel
Rampant Cyncism

David Swanson
Twisted: Sex and Torture in America

Website of the Day
The Texas Model: Executing Women in Iraq

 

 

Subscribe Online

Weekend Edition
March 31 / April 1, 2007

From Salem to Gitmo

The Politics of the Witch Hunt

By ROGER MORRIS

A little after two on the afternoon of Sept. 26, 2002, Maher Arar, a Canadian businessman of Syrian descent, on his way home to Ottawa after a family vacation, deplaned at New York's JFK Airport -- and walked into a nightmarish history.

Arar also found himself in an all-too-contemporary wasteland of fear, ignorance, racist xenophobia and careerist atavism otherwise known as U.S. foreign policy. It is the service of these two important books to link that gruesome past and present of his emblematic ordeal, a plight in a wider sense we all share.

Canadians will be more familiar with the Arar case, which only two months ago brought a belated public apology from Prime Minister Stephen Harper and a $10.5-million compensation, torture-chamber money that spoke more eloquently than any ministerial words to the shame of the Canadian government. Wrongly accused of ties to al-Qaeda based on plainly bogus information and guilt by the merest association, Arar, his Canadian passport discarded like used tissue, was arrested and interrogated by U.S. agents for five days without seeing a lawyer, and more than a week before the Canadian consul finally showed up -- only to lie to him by saying that the United States would not deport him to Syria as they were threatening.

Days later, he was being beaten and tortured in a Syrian dungeon, where the young McGill University graduate would suffer for more than year, until his wife's tireless campaign and his own desperate false confession brought his release.

In an aftermath of mounting public outrage, Judge Dennis O'Connor's September, 2006, inquiry found categorically that there was no evidence of a terrorist connection, that the RCMP had knowingly passed false information to U.S. authorities, and that Arar -- as Ottawa and Washington both well knew, and some surely intended -- was brutally tortured after being illegally deported to Syria. But Harper's mincing if cash-laden regret for "any role Canadian officials may have played in what happened to Mr. Arar" still ceded the decision to "render" Arar to Syria to the Bush administration, which typically claims it was all quite legal and justified, and in any event secret, a matter of "national security." Judge O'Connor and $10.5-million notwithstanding, south of the border, Maher Arar remains on the terrorist watch-list.

Readers may be less familiar with how much this sordid tale echoes a bleak history of persecution and injustice amid political cravenness and public hysteria, figurative and literal burnings at the stake in which U.S. civil liberties and Canadian legal rights are only the latest of ashes. Robert Rapley's Witch Hunts: From Salem to Guantanamo is a masterful, chillingly clinical yet grippingly readable tour of the horrid heritage from 16th- and 17th-century witch hunts, through the Dreyfus case in fin-de-siècle France, to the infamous railroading of the Scottsboro Boys in 1930s Alabama, to the Guildford and Maguire terrorist prosecution miscarriages in Britain in the 1970s. What deplorable ancestry we can claim with the Arar case and the countless other renderings and outsourced torture known and unknown, and the U.S. dungeons at Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantanamo, the latter the first prisons created for "witches" since Salem.

Rapley reminds us that the fears and ignorance and issues may change, but the characteristics of the witch hunt make its identity -- and wanton barbarism --unmistakable. Whether the victim is a too-lively French parish priest, a willful Puritan wife, an African-American teenager, a Canadian specialist in telecommunications or an Afghan or Iraqi duly or randomly caught in the web, the marks are all the same: The accused is guilty before evidence is sought; beatings and torture are justifiable means to confessions and accusations against others; any incriminating evidence, however dubious or vague, is in, any proof to the contrary is out; false evidence may be created and used as necessary to convict; defenders of the victim, including legal counsel, are suspected accessories; the accused is by definition so dangerous as to have no normal rights; secret accusations are routine; since the "witch" is never alone, the hunt must always expand to accomplices. And, not least, the crowning glory of all witch hunts: Everything, from the most petty to the most magisterial abuse, is justified, buried, beyond revelation, appeal or accountability by virtue of the protection of society, the good of the state, national security.

A retired civil servant in Ottawa, Rapley delivers the inescapable diagnosis of how much this madness still lodges in our bones. One is tempted to find some redemption in the conclusion that witch hunts are made, not born. But Rapley's withering sequence shakes even that small comfort. He repeats the unforgettable indictment he made in his earlier masterpiece, A Case of Witchcraft: The Trial of Urbain Grandier, that however we may blame these outrages on leaders of the moment (and the leaders are inevitably weak or execrable or both), there is always a willing legion of minor Eichmanns to staff these mini-holocausts: the agents at JFK, the RCMP clerks who supplied them, the ever-agreeable military warders, the waning but enduring claque around the rotting Bush regime, rationalizing the loss of civilization as glibly as the United States' loss of a war and its international standing. Like their predecessors, like their necessary accomplices in the once-screaming or cowed and silent crowd, almost all of them will go on with utter impunity when the burnings are finally done.

Yale professor Ian Shapiro brings Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy Against Global Terror to assure us that it can be over, if only the United States heeds another heritage. His cure comes in the form of a paean to the late U.S. diplomat and scholar George Kennan, whose famous "Long Telegram" of 1947 is legendary as authoring the postwar U.S. policy of "containing" the Soviet Union.

Shapiro recognizes what the archival record increasingly shows: that Washington was relentlessly aggressive and probing with the Russians, while unctuously declaring its policies purely defensive, often given to "rollback" and "liberation" as well as drawing the old cordon sanitaire from which Kennan derived his notion. But he credits the principle of "containment," even honoured in the breach, for deterring and ultimately overcoming the Soviet threat without a major war or ruinous damage to U.S. prestige and democracy, costs he sees inflicted by the rampant unilateralism of Bush's "war on terror."

Putting aside this rather sweeping, simplistic and problematic verdict on the lethal ambiguities of the Cold War, whose ghosts haunt us still, Shapiro makes the unexceptionable case that everyone would be relatively better off if Washington only regained some its old anti-communist senses. By the proper mix of multilateralism, diplomatic sticks and carrots (foreign policy analysts' favourite inducements), economic means and military deterrence (with war only "a last resort'), the United States could "contain" any states prone to harbouring terrorists. And without a refuge of some sort, the terrorist threat would be reduced to a still serious, yet comparatively lesser, danger than the mad-hatter Bush crusade has made it.

Along the way in this small book -- visibly pieced together from earlier lectures and the requisite corps of student researchers -- Shapiro paints a hopeful picture of how such a policy worked with once-outlaw Libya, how much U.S. allies would welcome the change, and how much the current disaster owes to the Democrats' craven surrender on the Iraq war as well as White House or neo-conservative delusion.

Yet in the end, this is one more of those bland recipes an intellectually bankrupt establishment can smile on simply because it begs so many questions, threatens so little of the root problem in U.S. foreign policy. As Rapley understands, this is at heart a profoundly cultural crisis -- America's angry, sullen, self-justifying clash with the world and a more pluralistic modernity. There is no real answer in going back to men and policies which, in their dark hearts, were as much precursors as counterpoints of this sad, ominous moment.

To dispel the darkness Rapley chronicles so starkly -- the prospect of Patriot Act II, which with another glaring terrorist attack puts any of us on the threshold of a Bagram or a Guantanamo -- will require nothing less than a political and moral honesty, an authentic regeneration that no mere policy framework can begin to touch.

Roger Morris, who served in the State Department and on the Senior Staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, resigned in protest at the invasion of Cambodia. He then worked as a legislative advisor in the U.S. Senate and a director of policy studies at the Carnegie Endowment, and writes this Rumsfeldian history from intimate firsthand knowledge as well as extensive research. A Visiting Honors professor at the University of Washington and Research Fellow of the Green Institute, where his work originally appears. He is an award-winning historian and investigative journalist, including a National Book Award Silver Medal winner, and the author of books on Nixon, Kissinger, Haig, and the Clintons. More recently, he co-authored with Sally Denton The Money and the Power, a history of Las Vegas as the paradigm of national corruption. His latest work, Shadows of the Eagle, a history of U.S. covert interventions and policy in the Middle East and South Asia over the past half-century, will be published in early 2008 by Knopf.

 

Now Available!
The Gang's All Here: Judy Miller, Bob Woodward, Jeffrey Goldberg, Rupert Murdoch, Bill O'Reilly...End Times Leaves No Reputation Unstained!


Buy End Times Now!

Now Available from
CounterPunch Books!
Saul Landau's Bush and Botox World with a Foreword by Gore Vidal


Click Here to Order!

 

"The Case Against Israel"
Michael Neumann's Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz

WHAT'S INSIDE
Grand Theft Pentagon:
Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror

by Jeffrey St. Clair

 

 

 


The Occupation
by Patrick Cockburn

 

 


CITY BEAUTIFUL
By Tennessee Reed

 


Bruce Springsteen On Tour
By Dave Marsh

 

The Book on 9/11 the White House Denounced as "ABSOLUTE GARBAGE"

<IMG SRC="../arnove.jpg" WIDTH="167" HEIGHT="259" ALIGN="BOTTOM" BORDER="0"