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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

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"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
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Weekend Edition
March 31 / April 1, 2007

The Peter Pace Principle

The Pentagon's "Don't Ask" Disaster

By ELIZABETH SCHULTE

The comments by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Peter Pace speak volumes about the bigotry against gays and lesbians that flourishes in the upper ranks of U.S. military.

Speaking about the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy for gays and lesbians, Pace offered this in an interview with the Chicago Tribune: "I believe that homosexual acts between individuals are immoral, and that we should not condone immoral acts. I do not believe that the Armed Forces of the United States are well served by saying through our policies, 'It's okay to be immoral in any way.'"

Pace shot his mouth off just as some political leaders were moving toward a repeal of "don't ask, don't tell"--the military policy that allows gays and lesbians to serve in the armed forces, but only if they aren't open about their sexuality.

"'Don't ask, don't tell' is not working," said Sen. Hillary Clinton in an interview with ABC News reporter Jake Tapper. "We are being deprived of thousands of patriotic men and women who want to serve their country."

Even former Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. John Shalikashvili wrote in an op-ed article in the New York Times that he had "second thoughts" about the policy. "I now believe that, if gay men and lesbians served openly in the United States military," he wrote, "they would not undermine the efficacy of the Armed Forces."

When "don't ask, don't tell" went into effect more than a decade ago, the result was a higher level of soldiers dishonorably discharged because of their sexual orientation. So when it comes to the motives of politicians criticizing "don't ask," you can't help but note the obvious fact that the military is strapped for recruits to fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Clinton was upfront about it: "[O]ne can argue whether it was a good idea when it was first implemented, but we now have evidence as to the fact that we are in a time of war--when we really need as many people as we can to recruit and retain in an all-volunteer army--we are turning people away or discharging them not because of what they've done but because of who they are."

Now, Rep. Martin Meehan (D-Mass.) has announced plans for a bill to repeal "don't ask" called the "Military Readiness Enhancement Act."

* * *

A 2005 study by the Government Accountability Office showed that about 10,000 service personnel have been discharged since the "don't ask, don't tell" policy took effect.

And there's no telling how many former soldiers are like Brian Fricke, an ex-Marine sergeant who served nine months in Iraq's Anbar province--and who left because he was tired of pretending he wasn't gay. "You'll never be able to tabulate" how many gay people left the military voluntarily because of "don't ask, don't tell," Fricke told USA Today.

Harassment of gays and lesbians is still standard operating procedure. Over a year's time, 80 percent of service members had heard offensive speech, derogatory names, jokes or remarks about gays, according to a 2000 Defense Department inspector general survey.

While many cases aren't reported for fear of further retaliation, 37 percent of service members reported they had witnessed or experienced direct, targeted forms of harassment, including verbal and physical assaults and property damage.

Some service members have lost their lives under "don't ask." Pfc. Barry Winchell was brutally beaten to death with a baseball bat in his barracks at Fort Campbell, Ky., in 1999 after rumors and harassment about his sexual orientation.

* * *

The "Don't Ask" policy went into effect in 1993 as one of the first acts of the newly elected Clinton administration.

When Clinton ran for election in 1992, he promised he would repeal the existing policy of excluding gays and lesbians from the military. He made this promise after several veterans of the first Gulf War broke their silence and made public announcements of their sexuality to protest the existing antigay policy.

Expectations were high that there might be significant progress made on gay rights. But Clinton broke his promise almost immediately after winning. Instead, he introduced "don't ask, don't tell" in 1993.

He tried to explain it away by arguing that, "Because [the military] is a conservative institution, it is right for the military to be wary of sudden changes...it is also right for the military to make changes when the time for change is at hand."

Clinton's duplicity didn't stop there. In 1996, he signed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that barred the federal government from giving any legal recognition to married gay couples. DOMA denies lesbians and gays some 1,000 federal rights and benefits that married heterosexual couples have--ones with often life-altering consequences, like being able to sponsor a spouse who is not a U.S. citizen for permanent residence.

In the absence of any real pressure from gay rights activists and comfortable in the calculation that he would have the support of the liberal gay and lesbian organizations whose focus is elections, Clinton decided to satisfy his supporters on the right.

"In retrospect, 'don't ask, don't tell' was an astonishing act of political cowardice," Matt Taibbi wrote in Rolling Stone magazine. "Telling gay men and women that they had to hide who they were in order to earn the privilege of getting shot at for our idiot military adventures was almost worse than open bigotry. It essentially institutionalized the Closet."

Today, the first instinct of the leading Democratic presidential contenders is to skirt the issue of gay rights.

Hillary Clinton initially responded to questions about whether she agreed with Pace that homosexuality was "immoral" by telling ABC's Jake Tapper, "Well, I'm going to leave that to others to conclude."

She quickly readjusted, saying she opposes "don't ask," but used the most conservative arguments to do so. "This policy doesn't just hurt gays and lesbians," she told a meeting of the Human Rights Campaign, "it hurts all our troops, and this to me is a matter of national security, and we're going to fix it."

Sen. Barack Obama followed Clinton's dodge when a Newsday reporter asked him whether he agreed with Pace. "I think traditionally the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman has restricted his public comments to military matters," he said. "That's probably a good tradition to follow."

Later, he cleared up his position (sort of), stating, "I don't think that homosexuals are immoral any more than I think heterosexuals are immoral" in an appearance on CNN's Larry King Live.

But the incident is telling about who leading Democrats see as their audience. Neither Clinton nor Obama want to anger social conservatives.

John Kerry took the same attitude in the 2004 election. At the time, he was getting advice from Bill Clinton, who suggested he support ballot initiatives that would ban gay marriage from state constitutions in order to get the conservative vote, according to Newsweek. "Out in the country, they're wearing us out with guns and gay marriage," Clinton told an Arkansas crowd on the stump for Kerry in 2004.

While he didn't go as far as Clinton recommended, Kerry did publicly oppose gay marriage, indicating his support for an amendment to the state constitution that would overturn gay marriage in Massachusetts.

Unfortunately, gay rights organizations that might have organized pressure on Kerry to support same-sex marriage--a demand that mobilized thousands in Kerry's home state of Massachusetts, and won equal marriage rights there--didn't organize, and instead threw their support behind the Democrats.

* * *

Whatever Pace thinks about gays and lesbians, his view isn't shared by an increasing majority of the population. A Pew Research Center survey last year found that 60 percent favored gays serving openly in the military, up from 52 percent in 1994.

Retired Staff Sgt. Eric Fidelis Alva, who lost his right leg to a land mine in the Iraq war's opening days, told Time magazine, "It was like carrying this enormous secret that you want to share with someone. I eventually formed close bonds with other Marines and did confide in them. They treated me with the same respect and dignity afterward. We were still buddies."

About 23 percent of troops know someone in their unit who is gay or lesbian, according to a recent Zogby International poll of troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. And about 55 percent of troops who know a gay peer said the presence of gays or lesbians in their unit was well known by others.

The sentiment exists for demanding an end to "don't ask, don't tell" and the back-of-the-bus compromises on same-sex marriage.

When it comes to fighting for gay rights, the Democrats may want to sit on the fence. But there's no room on that fence for anyone committed to equal rights for lesbians and gays.

Elizabeth Schulte is a reporter for the Socialist Worker.





 

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