Wars
of the Laptop Bombers
Today's
Stories
John Ross
Hecho
en Mexico: the Iraqi Election
February 8,
2005
Patrick Cockburn
Shia/Kurd
Coalition to Dominate New Iraqi Govt.: "It's an Electoral
Pact, Not a Party"
Brian Cloughley
Out
of the Mouths of Generals: "It's Fun to Shoot Some People"
Steve Breyman
Against the Selfishness of the "Ownership Society"
Harry Browne
"Don't
Get on that Plane!": Soldiers Seek Asylum in Ireland
Doug Giebel
"We Love Free Speech in America": the People, the President
and Ward Churchill
Nate Collins
The Censorship of Ward Churchill and Dancehall Reggae: It's the
Same Beast
Dave Lindorff
It's Time for a Labor-Oriented Newspaper
David Smith-Ferri
Sanctions and the Health Crisis in Iraq
February 7,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
Bush's
War on Jobs
Carolyn Baker
The New McCarthyism on Campus: Churchill and the Attack on Higher
Ed
Joshua Frank
Marc Cooper's Hit List: First Mumia; Now Ward Churchill
Mickey Z.
Warning: More Hate Speech from W. Churchill
Patrick Cockburn
The
Kidnapping Gangs of Iraq
Mike Whitney
Tom Friedman: Scribe for New Age Imperialism
Stacie Jonas
Pinochet: Fit to be Tried
Dave Zirin
A Miserable Super Sunday: Clinton, Bush and the FBI
Tariq Ali
Imperial
Delusions
February 5
/ 6, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Ward
Churchill and the Mad Dogs
Kurt Nimmo
A Ward Churchill Kind of Day
Joshua Frank
Liberals Trash Ward Churchill
P. Sainath
Mumbai's Man-Made Tsunami
Patrick Cockburn
Sistani's Triumph; Allawi's Bust
Laura Carlsen
Bush, Rice and Latin America
Dave Lindorff
How the NYT Killed the Bush Bulge Story
Pamela Olson
West Bank Story
Behzad Yaghmaian
The Future of Sudanese Refugees in the West
Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen
A Threatened UN in King George's Court
Roger Burbach
World Social Forum: a Tale of Two Presidents
Robert Fisk
History by Laptop
David Swanson
James Forman and the Liberal-Labor Syndrome
Justin E.H. Smith
Gay Marriage: a Report from Canada
Cacie Hart
The "State" of the Union: More War and a Ban on Love
Ron Jacobs
Chairman Bob Avakian: a Revolutionary Life
Mickey Z.
Viewing America from the Outside
Ben Tripp
Republican Heroes: a New Breed of Good Guy
Ben Sonnenberg
France at the End of the Devil's Decade: Renoir's Rules of the
Game
Poets' Basement
Smith-Ferri, Davies, Collins, & Albert
Website of
the Weekend
John Trudell: How to Earn a 17,000 Page FBI File
February 4,
2005
Brian Cloughley
The
Army Symphonist: "Sometimes the Only Way to Change the Behavior
of Someone Like That is to Kill Them"
Bill Christison
Election
Parallels: Vietnam, 1967; Iraq, 2005
Elaine Cassel
Did Zoloft Make Him Do It?
Jacob Levich
Chomsky and the Draft
Kanak Mani Dixit
Return of the Royalists in Nepal
Ron Jacobs
The
Downward Spiral in Iraq
February 3,
2005
Ward Churchill
On
the Injustice of Getting Smeared: a Campaign of Fabrications
and Gross Distortions
Sharon Smith
Resisting
Soldiers Need Our Support
Mickey Z.
Leslie
Gelb Asks Iraq: Who's Your Daddy?
Mike Whitney
President of Alienation: a Desperate State of the Union
Jenna Orkin
9/11 the Sequel: the Toxic State of Lower Manhattan
Saul Landau
Elections Won't Prevent Civil War in Iraq
Yitzhak Laor
Strange is the Silence
Dave Lindorff
The
Assault on Social Security: a New Campaign of Lies
February 2,
2005
David Domke
/ Kevin Coe
Bush's
Brand of Christianity
Noam Chomsky
Iraq
After the Elections
M. Shahid Alam
O'Reilly's
Fatwah on "Un-American" Professors: FoxNews Puts Me
in Its Crosshairs
Richard Oxman
Ringing in 1984 with Ward Churchill and Derrick Jensen
Joshua Frank
The Suckering of Howard Dean
Dave Lindorff
A History Lesson from the NYT
Nina Hartley
Feminists for Porn
Website of the Day
War is a Racket
February 1,
2005
Joshua L. Dratel
The
Torture Memos
Patrick Cockburn
New Doubts About Allawi
Robert Fisk
"The Only Decent Food We Get is at Funerals"
Uri Avnery
The Stalemate
Col. Dan Smith
"W" Stands for Withdrawal
Alison Weir
Making America as "Secure" as Israel
Alan Farago
Heaven and Hell in the Everglades
Ray Hanania
Low Voter Turnout of Iraqi Expatriates: Less Than 10% of Qualified
Voters
Paul Craig
Roberts
American
Police State
Website of the Day
Statisticians Refute Official Rationale for Exit Poll Errors
January 31,
2005
Dave Zirin
Mr.
Frank's Fatwah: New Republic Writer Calls for Death & Torture
of Arundhati Roy and Stan Goff
Robert Fisk
Amid
Tragedy, Defiance
Chyng Sun
Gonzales: Chief Prosecutor of Porn?
Greg Moses
The Real Scandals of the Texas Election
Mike Whitney
Cheney at Auschwitz
Ali Tonak
Turkey and the EU: Fantasies and Ultimatums
Patrick Cockburn
A
Victory for the Shia
Website of
the Day
Voting by the Script: Where Did the 8 Million Voter Turnout Figure
Come From?
January 29
/ 30, 2005
Manuel Yang
/ Peter Linebaugh
A
Dialogue About Murder in Toledo
Gabriel Kolko
Wilsonian
and Neoconservative Myths
Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad: City of Empty Streets
Robert Fisk
This Election Will Change the World, But Not as the US Wanted
Linn Washington,
Jr.
Con Job: Bush Pledges on Racism Lack Realism
Bernard Chazelle
Why the Children of Iraq Make No Sound When They Fall
Gary Leupp
"This Kind of Subject Matter": Bush's New Ed Secretary
vs. Vermont's Lesbians
JoAnn Wypijewski
The Passion of Paul Shanley
Alexander Cockburn
The Case of Father Jerry
Ron Jacobs
Ballot of the Puppets in Iraq
Brian Cloughley
Smart Bombs; Wrong House: Iraq's Civilian Dead
Fred Gardner
Peron May Split
Sister Dianna
Ortiz
Memo to Bush from a Survivor of the Guatemalan Torturers: Stop
the Torture!
Tom Reeves
How Bush Brings Freedom to the World: the Case of Haiti
Fran Quigley
Report: Haiti Now "More Violent and More Inhuman"
Suzan Mazur
"Mr. Garsin from Kinshasa": an Old Hand Weighs In on
the Murder of Lumumba
Kurt Nimmo
Condi Rice and the Neocon Plan for the Palestinians
Lenni Brenner
Holocaust History: Beyond the UN's Rhetoric
Gilad Atzmon
The
Politics of Auschwitz
Luis Gomez
Power and Autonomy in Bolivia
Mark Gaffney
NASA Searches for a Snowball in Hell: Why Velikovsky Matters
Ben Tripp
Lament of the Mnemonopath
Richard Oxman
Meet the Fuqers
Poets' Basement
Louise, Collins, Shanahan and Albert
Website of
the Weekend
Chemical Industry: Deceit and Denial
January 28,
2005
Rachard Itani
Tsunami
Aid By the Numbers: the US Really is a Miser
Jensen / Youngblood
Iraq's
Non-Election
Patrick Cockburn / Elizabeth
Davies
Attacks on Polling Places Leave 13 Dead
Dave Zirin
The Great Donovan McNabb: Proud "Black Quarterback"
Dave Lindorff
Suicide by State Execution?
Karyn Strickler
A Corporate Death Penalty Act?
Jorge Mariscal
Fighting
the Poverty Draft
January 27,
2005
Seymour Hersh
We've
Been Taken Over By a Cult
Cockburn /
Sengupta
The
US's Bloodiest Day in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
Juke Box Journalism: Shilling for Bush
Ignacio Chapela
/ John F. García
The Laws of Nature
Mike Whitney
The Widening Chasm Among Conservatives
Dr. Teresa
Whitehurst
Those Liberal Southern Baptists!
Ray McGovern
Reining In Cheney
Russ Wellen
Marginalizing Bin Laden
Christopher
Brauchli
The
FBI's Carnival of Errors
Website of
the Day
Informed Eating
January 26,
2005
Saree Makdisi
An
Iron Wall of Colonization: Fantasies and Realities About the
Prospects for Middle East Peace
Scott Fleming
In Good Conscience: an Interview with Concientious Objector Aidan
Delgado
Dave Lindorff
Filling Saddam's Shoes: the Puppet Regime Return's to Torture
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Salazar and Obama: Two Dismal Debuts
Toni Solo
The
US and Latin America: a Not-So-Magical Reality
William James Martin
Condoleezza Rice: Confused About the Middle East
William A.
Cook
Bush's Second Inaugural Address: the Lost Ur-Version
Eric Hobsbawm
Delusions
About Democracy
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
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.
|
February 9, 2005
Hecho en Mexico: the Iraqi Election
Fox
Helps Bush Craft Bloody Ballot Farce
By
JOHN ROSS
Mexico
City.
Mexico, where electoral fraud is a high
art form, played a key role in crafting George Bush's bloody
January 30th electoral farce in Iraq.
At the behest of both the White
House and the United Nations, President Vicente Fox, once a resolute
foe of U.S. aggression in that blasted country, dispatched a
pair of former high commissioners of Mexico's Federal Electoral
Institute (IFE), the nation's maximum election authority, to
Baghdad where Jacqueline Peschard and Alfonso Lujambio coached
their counterparts on the intricacies of electoral reform
despite countless modifications and "reforms", Mexico's
electoral system remains vulnerable to fraud and manipulation
by unscrupulous political parties.
In addition to paving the bomb-lined
path to January 30th with civic intentions, Mexico played host
to scores of Iraq's 140,000 election workers who were flown into
country for a 15-day nuts and bolts course on such rudiments
as registration and vote counting. Because of volatile Sunni
objections to the election and relentless attacks by the resistance
on Iraqi election workers and their offices, the seminar was
held behind locked gates at Military Camp #1 on the western perimeter
of the capital where many political prisoners here were once
held in Abu Ghraib-like conditions. Security was extremely stringent
during the two-week seminar just holding the course here
made Mexico a terrorist target contended security experts.
The purportedly high Shia and
Kurdish turnouts January 30th drew high praise from Fox during
a morning after phone call with Bush January 31st. Bedazzled
by Bush's re-election, Fox, who once ordered Mexico's representative
on the Security Council to vote against the invasion thus triggering
two years of bi-lateral unpleasantries with Washington, has become
more supportive of the U.S. aggression and, in addition to electoral
advisors,  there are
now Mexican construction workers laboring in Iraq and the sons
and daughters of Mexico now constitute the largest foreign fighting
force out there in the desert, with 8000 Mexican and Mexican-descent
troops in action as part of U.S. combat forces (see BMB #61 next
week.)
The Mexican imprint was written
all over the recent Iraqi elections. From excruciatingly slow
vote counts to polling places switched at the last minute ("el
raton loco" or "crazy mouse" it is called here)
to the buying of votes for free food rations, 200,000 missing
ballots in Mosul to limit the Kurdish vote, thousands of voters'
erased from voting lists ('razurar' or 'razored' in Mexican electoral
parlance), and even electrical blackouts that shut down vote
tabulation for hours (crashing computers stole the 1988 presidential
elections in Mexico), January 30th must have seemed to Peschard
and Lujambio a playback of recent battles back home.
As is the Mexican mode, Iraqi
government claims of massive participation (as high as 75%) soon
proved extravagant Spain's El Pais reports election officials
are predicting about a 43% turnout, 6.2 million out of 14 million
eligible voters. Given 10% turnouts in Mosul and Baghdad, and
in lieu of any hard numbers from the independent electoral authority,
this seems a more accurate ballpark figure than the pipe dream
ciphers the interim government and the State Department are putting
out.
While Shia holy cities in the
south turned out up to 90% of registered voters, polls didn't
even open in much of the Sunni triangle. Overseas voting by exiles
(out-of-country Mexicans also demand such a vote) were ballyhooed
as pulling 95% of registered voters but only a fifth of
eligible exiles even bothered to register.
"Under Lockdown, Iraqis
Hold First Free Election" ironized (however unintentionally)
the CNN curtain raiser on election morning. Visuals of frightened
flak-jacketed Marines hunkered down behind rolls of razor wire,
the long guns of the Bradley Fighting tamks trained on an unseen
enemy, the Apache helicopters beating at the sky like Apocalypse
Now was yesterday, and nine suicide bombings in Baghdad, a one-day
record according to the London Independent's indomitable Robert
Fisk (260 around the country, another one day record), made the
Iraqi election look anything but free to most non-U.S. eyes.
The U.S. and Iraqi troops surrounding
the heavily fortified polling stations provided one further parallel
to vote-taking here - Mexican presidents have been known to send
the military into the streets to insure a favorable outcome in
highly contested elections.
Crowned by the appearance of
a proud, purple-thumbed Iraqi voter at Bush's State of the Union
address, Washington's spin and distortion of the Iraqi election
was a propaganda masterstroke rarely has the complicity
of corporate media been made more embarrassingly evident then
this past January 30th and its aftermath.
Embedded reporters were escorted
to middle class Shia precincts in Baghdad for the obligatory
photo op of cheering throngs, purportedly extolling Bush-delivered
democracy because of the violence, most reporters were
confined to their Baghdad hotels. Arab broadcasting capabilities
on the ground were limited by the ban on Al-Jazeera, which has
been unable to report from Iraq since last June. Independent
journalists who sought to cover the election did so at great
personal peril.
One wily freelancer, the intrepid
Dahr Jamail, slipped through the barricades without U.S. permission
to cover sparsely attended precincts in downtown Baghdad. Most
of those standing on line, he later reported, said they had been
registered through the Iraqi government's monthly free food giveaway
program, a feature of Saddam's Iraq that the Occupation has never
been able to deconstruct for fear of sparking public riots. Several
of those interviewed asserted they had been threatened with cut-off
if they did not vote. Making food giveaway programs contingent
on delivering votes is a pillar of Mexico's corrupted electoral
system. No wonder Peschard and Lujambio were brought in to train
Iraq's electoral authorities.
Bush needed big numbers in
Iraq to blunt persistent criticism of his mad aggression just
as he needed them November 2nd to erase the stain of having lost
the popular vote in 2000. Big Iraq numbers allows the U.S. president
to claim a mandate for his war and immunizes him from opponents'
arguments that it is time to abandon ship. In both ballotings,
only the fringe has questioned the legitimacy of the election
results. Meanwhile, the White House uses the corporate media
as its bullhorn to shout down dissenters and proclaim victory
in this year's new improved model for the War on Terror, the
War on Tyranny.
On January 30th, Condoleezza
Rice beamed and snarled on the Sunday talk shows as if Nicaragua
'91 had come again, and Bush himself brayed Mission Accomplished
for the fifth time to this nation of sheep from the entrails
of the Oval Office. The media extravaganza filled a vacuum between
the NFL Conference Championships and Superbowl Sunday and was
part of the Bushwa blitz that began with the inauguration and
ran through the State of the Union address and the Superbowl,
a traditional platform for presidents to hype their wars from.
Declaring victory and beating
a judicious retreat is an old trick of scoundrels and tyrants
when they outstrip their ambitions and meet with stiff resistance
from the locals and their allies Saddam did just that in
Kuwait and the U.S. likewise in Vietnam. Indeed, Bush might have
used the Shia sweep as a pretext for drawing down U.S. troop
numbers but with 1500 of his American Boys lost in Iraq, each
casualty makes avenging the deaths more obligatory to his political
legacy, and Bush is unlikely to see this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity
to get out of harm's way with minimal punishment as a viable
alternative.
Alfonso Lujambio, one of the
Mexican advisors the IFE posted to Baghdad, advises the U.S.
president that gloating over the big Shia outpouring is probably
misplaced. "Remember, the Shias forced this election upon
Bush and January 30th was not a victory for him" he told
late night Mexican TV news, "this was a vote against the
occupation the people voted so that the Americans would
have no other excuse and have to leave." One recent Zogby
poll has 69% of all Shias and 82% of the Sunnis demanding an
early end to the Occupation. Robert Fisk, the world-weary veteran
of decades of Middle East skirmishes, suggests the results show
a 100% opposition to the U.S.'s continuing presence. Whether
one voted for the Shias or sat out the election with the insurgents,
he reasons, Iraq cast a unanimous ballot against the Occupation
January 30th.
And while the Shias voted to
kick the Yanquis out and take control of the Iraqi state, millions
of Kurds were voting to separate themselves from that state
a separate referendum passed out with the official ballot in
Kurdistan registered a 100% vote for an independent Kurdish homeland.
As they begin their second
terms hand in hand (the new Secretary of State reportedly refers
to the President as "my husband"), Bush and Rice's
neo-imperialist hubris lead them to reject any historical parallels
between Iraq and the U.S. disaster in Vietnam but the January
30th feast of hypocrisy stirred nagging nostalgias.
In 1967, President Lyndon Baines
Johnson, fed up with an interminable parade of coups and counter-coups
in Saigon, sought to put a democratic patina on his puppets in
that year's "free election" of a new president (the
old one having been assassinated.) The ticket of Nguyen Thieu
and the killer flyboy Ky was cobbled together to carry the torch
of democracy and all other candidates were forced to retire
one general, the ignobly-named "Big" Minh was exiled
to Hawaii, and others were bought out or chased off or
imprisoned. To run up the vote totals, U.S. and Vietnamese military
forces bullied villagers caged up in "strategic hamlets"
to vote at gunpoint.
The election convinced no one.
Months later, the National Liberation Front launched its Tet
offensive, briefly taking the U.S. embassy in Saigon and killing
over 1300 American troops. Johnson, reading the tealeaves of
history and realizing the U.S. was hopelessly trapped in the
Vietnam quagmire, bailed and "did not choose to run again."
Bush, although a Texan (albeit a carpetbag one) does not share
LBJ's political acumen.
Whatever the final tally tells
us in ten days time (in Mexico this period is traditionally dedicated
to cooking the vote), there can be no doubt that the Shias have
taken state power in Iraq for the first time since the British
installed the Sunnis in Baghdad in 1920.
Victory in Iraq extends Shia
majority influence from Iran through Mesopotamia into Syria and
Lebanon with sizeable influence in the Gulf States as well (Bahrain
is Shia.) The real story of January 30th is that in title at
least, the Shias now control a good deal of the world's petroleum
resources, a shift that must certainly worry Saudi Arabia's Wahabi
dynasty Osama Bin Laden is himself a Wahabist whose crusade
is to topple the Saudi Royal Family which he accuses of being
apostates to this fundamentalist Sunni sect.
Although the Grand Ayatollah
Al Sistani, a bearded ancient who seems to exercize mesmerizing
powers over the Occupation bosses, could not vote because he
is an Iranian citizen raised in the holy city of Qum, he mobilized
Shia masses to take power and now he and his Iranian handlers
expect to reap the rewards.
Al Sistani has pledged that
no cleric will sit in the new secular government which is expected
to evolve from the elections, but holding back the political
ambitions of the Shia hierarchy will not be easy. January 30th,
like November 2nd in the U.S.A., had all the earmarks of a religious
revival. "We voted for the triumph of Islam," a well-dressed
Shia businessman told the El Pais correspondent in Basra. "I
feel like I'm at a religious feast," said another outside
of a Kerbala voting station. No matter what the U.S. High Command
would like the folks back home to believe, the black turbans
will be pulling puppet strings in the new legislature. And the
Mullahs just across the desert sands in Axis-of-Evil Iran will
be pulling theirs.
Whether U.S. Pro-consul John
Negroponte, whose Green Zone sanctuary was shattered on election
eve by rebel rocketry, is able to mitigate post-electoral Shia
exuberance and a thirst for revenge and install a handful of
Uncle Tariq-type Sunnis in the national legislature and the new
cabinet (but more significantly in the commission that will write
the new constitution) in time to blunt a Shia-Sunni civil war,
is anyone's guess. Because of the impressive Shia landslide,
the new government will most probably not be headed by ex-Baathist,
ex-CIA, Saddam-in-drag tough guy Ayub Alawi as Negroponte and
company had anticipated. Nonetheless, a legislature recruited
out of Ali Baba's cave, filled as it is with political gangsters
like Chalabi and Pachachi, Talabani and Barzani, looks a lot
like déjà vu all over again.
The Iraqi vote taking once
again underscored how unreliable a measure of democracy such
show elections are. Recent high profile balloting from Ohio to
Iraq, has been corrupted by religious hysteria, flagrant fear
mongering, out-of-control corporate financing, and vote count
flimflam that transform the electoral option from an expression
of popular will into a commercial enterprise replete with armies
of spin doctors and bag men battling to buy or steal the vote.
Bush's own re-election, rife
as it was with suppression of the Afro-American vote, terror
tactics (Mexicans call it "the vote of fear"), and
dubious voting mechanisms, hardly validates the U.S.'s self-issued
credentials as a paragon of electoral democracy which the whole
world is obligated to emulate.
Despite their own blemished
record, the Bushites have made "free elections" into
a fetish, a totem for Bush's retooled "War on Tyranny"
from the Ukraine (a neo-cold war contest where tons of bucks
from the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy beat back old
line Soviet fraud) to Venezuela (where Jimmy Carter is calling
upon the OAS to displace Hugo Chavez although he was overwhelmingly
elected and re-elected) to Palestine (where the White House winked
at grossly-inflated results that won the presidency for Mahoud
Abbas and gave him a free hand to sell off the Palestinian right
of return when he sits down with Sharon this week in Egypt.)
In Mexico, which was so vital
to buttressing up Bush's ballot strategy in Iraq and where electoral
politics are contaminated beyond clean up, voters went to the
polls in three states one Sunday after the presumed Shia landslide.
Six years ago in Guerrero,
the left-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) lost
the governorship of that Pacific state to the once-ruling Institutional
Revolutionary Party (PRI) in an election so redolent with fraud
that the evidence free diapers and turkeys, cancelled checks,
refrigerators, television sets, "indelible" ink that
washed right off was eventually packed up into a mobile
"Museum of Fraud" and driven all around the state.
This February 6th, gubernatorial
balloting got off with a Baghdad-like bang when three cops and
a young bystander were gunned down in Acapulco by unidentified
drive-by shooters on election eve. In spite of the gunfire, Guerrero
voters, like their Iraqi counterparts, ventured out to vote in
about the same numbers (50%) the next morning.
At the end of the day, despite
burnt ballot boxes, rampant vote buying, the stabbing of one
election official, the stacking of the state electoral commission,
and even a ten point "how to commit fraud" booklet
issued by the once-ruling PRI, the PRD had carried Guerrero for
the first time in its 16 year history, during which hundreds
of its militants have been murdered in political vendettas and
its candidates repeatedly victimized in stolen elections. In
Guerrero, as in Iraq, blood stains the ballot.
John Ross is at home on the Aztec island of Tenochtitlan
nursing a bum back. Pray for him -- and buy his latest instant
cult classic "Murdered
By Capitalism--A Memoir of 150 Years of Life & Death on the
U.S. Left".
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