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HOW RUMSFELD MICROMANAGED TORTURE!

* Real-time grilling of Lindh by satellite
* "Put a bra and panties on this guy's head"
* His "Do This" List for Abu Ghraib
* Driving Jose Padilla Insane

Read Andrew Cockburn's devastating report in Our New CounterPunch Newsletter. PLUS: Robert Bryce on Frank Gaffney, Halliburton and Iran. Still available: WHAT DID ISRAEL KNOW IN ADVANCE OF THE SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS? At last, the answers. Read Christopher Ketcham's exclusive expose in CounterPunch special double-issue February newsletter. Plus, Cockburn and St. Clair on how this story was suppressed and ultimately found its home in CounterPunch. 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

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Linebaugh in LA; Cockburn in San Francisco

Today's Stories

March 3 / 4, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
The Persecution of Sami Al-Arian

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

 

February 10 /11, 2007
Weekend Edition

Alexander Cockburn
Will They Nuke Iran?

Gabriel Kolko
Israel, Iran and the Bush Administration

Patrick Cockburn
Now It's War on the Shia

Jeffrey St. Clair
Till the Cows Come Home: How the West was Eaten

Kevin Alexander Gray
Barack Obama: Not a Bold Bone in His Body

M. Shahid Alam
The Pacification of Islam

Greg Moses
The Words of Mohammad: an 11 Year-Old Prisoner

Paul Craig Roberts
Brzezinski's Damning Indictment

George Ciccariello-Maher
Coups and Democracy in Venezuela

Kevin Zeese
"You Can't Oppose the War and Fund the War:" a Conversation with Anthony Arnove

Turner / Kim
The World's Factory: China's Filthiest Export

George Duke
Has Jazz Lost Its African-American Core?

Walter Brasch
A Dream Still Unfulfilled: America Remains Divided

Shepherd Bliss
Veterans' Love Story

Missy Beattie
Fear and Diversions: Anna Nicole, Wolf Blitzer and the Missing Body Count in Iraq

Peter Harley
Mr. Hyde and Uncle Sam: Reading Stevenson in an Age of Shock and Awe

Pat Wolff
Oprah's Strange Endorsement of "The Secret"

Poets' Basement
Davies, Holt, Engel and Louise

Website of the Day
The 25 Most Corrupt Members of Bush Administration


February 9, 2007

Conn Hallinan
The Najaf Massacre: an Annotated Fable

Gary Leupp
Charging Iran with "Genocide" Before Nuking It

Lee Sustar
An Interview with Patrick Cockburn

Nikolas Kozloff
Bombing Venezuela's Indians

Newton Garver
Politics and Apartheid

Yitzhak Laor
Under the Steamroller

Dave Lindorff
Truth or Consequences: Some Questions for Bush

David Swanson
The Politics of Self-Congratulation: Democrats Change Gas, Claim It's a New Car

Website of the Day
Why Corporate Social Responsibility is Not Working for Workers

 

February 8, 2007

John V. Walsh
Filibuster to End the War Now!

Marjorie Cohn
Watada Beats Government

Trish Schuh
The Salvador Option in Beirut

Ron Jacobs
The Case of the San Francisco 8

Laura Carlsen
Mexico at Davos: the Split with Latin America Widens

Ramzy Baroud
Countdown for Iran

Brenda Norrell
"Leave It in the Ground": Indigenous Peoples Call for Global Ban on Uranium Mining

Bryan Farrell
The Splinter and the Beam: Violence in the Eye of the Beholder

Judith Scherr
BP Beds Down with Cal-Berkeley

Website of the Day
Peace TV

 

February 7, 2007

Daniel Wolff
"The Road Home is a Joke": Playing Politics with the Recovery of New Orleans

Tao Ruspoli
CounterViews: A Conversation with Oliver Stone on Art, Politics and the Future of Cinema in Bush's America

Tony Swindell
The Looming Shadow of Nuremberg

Sharon Smith
Why Protest Matters

Ken Couesbouc
Delenda Est Baghdad: Why Republics End Up as Empires

Jeff Cohen
Jonah Goldberg's Gambling Debt

Col. Dan Smith
The Self-Destructive Logic of War

Tom Kerr
McCain to Wounded Soldiers: When Words Fail Fundamentally

Joshua Frank
The Democrats and Iran

Adam Elkus
Surging Right Into Bin Laden's Hands

Stephen Fleischman
The Good News About War on Iran

Website of the Day
Vote Vets: Battling Escalation

 

February 6, 2007

Diana Johnstone
Frenzy in France Over Iranian Threat

Gregory Wilpert
Did Chavez Over-reach?: Venezuela's Enabling Law Could Enable Opposition

Norman Solomon
A Kangaroo Court Martial: Making an Example of Ehren Watada

Dave Lindorff
Borat Goes to Washington: Don't Experiment with the Economy?

William Blum
Space Cowboys: Full Spectrum Dominance

Mike Ferner
War Opponents Occupy Congressional Offices

CP News Service
Nader's CNN Interview: "Hillary's a Panderer and a Flatterer"

Evelyn Pringle
Eli Lilly and Zyprexa: Even the Insurance Companies are Bailing

Christopher Brauchli
Corporate Advice from the Office of Detainee Affairs

Alan Cabal
How Charles Manson Kept Me Out of Vietnam

Website of the Day
Free Josh Wolf: the Longest Jailed Journalist in US History


February 5, 2007

Dave Zirin
Super Bore: When Hawks Cry

Uri Avnery
The Fatal Kiss: Wars and Scandals

Ron Jacobs
The Looming War on Iran: It's Not About Democracy

Paul Craig Roberts
The Real Failed States

Newton Garver
Bush and the Old Hands: Decider vs. Negotiator

Bruce Anderson
The Genocidal Namesake of the Hastings School of Law

Saul Landau
The Golden Globes After a Mud Bath

Ralph Nader
The Good Fight of Molly Ivins

James T. Phillips
Road Outrageous: Tailgating and Iraq

Mike Whitney
Quarantine USA: Bird Flu Panic and Profiteering

Kenneth Rexroth
Clowns and Blood-Drinking Perverts: Imperial History According to Tacitus

Website of the Day
Richard Thompson's Anti-War Song: "'Dad's Gonna Kill Me"


February 3 /4, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
Who Can Stop the War?

Tao Ruspoli
CounterViews: a Conversation with Dr. Susan Block on Sex, Censorship and Liberation

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Thrill is Gone: the Withering of the American Environmental Movement

Patrick Cockburn
Iraqis on the Run

P. Sainath
They Take the Early Train

Sen. Russell Feingold
A Symbol of a Timid Congress

Diane Christian
Dying Well: Why Killing Saddam Backfired on Bush

Brian Cloughley
Space Missiles Away!: the Irony of Bush's Indignation

Diana Barahona
How to Turn a Priest into a Cannibal: US Reporting on the Coup in Haiti

Timothy J. Freeman
The Iraq War Hits Hawai'i: the Stryker Brigade and the Watada Case

Conn Hallinan
The Vishnu Strategy

John Ross
Felipe's First Fifty Days

Greg Moses
The Government Blinks: Freedom for the Ibrahim Family

Missy Beattie
No More Rebukes or Non-Binding Resolutions

Joshua Frank
Unsafe in Any Seas: Cruising with Ralph Nader?

Evelyn Pringle
"These Drugs are Poison to Some People"

Stephen Fleischman
Let's Hear It for Chuck Hagel!

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
Iraq in Fragments

Poets' Basement
Holt, Engel, Ford and Saavedra

Website of the Day
Flamenco Dali


February 2, 2007

Chris Kutalik
The Meanest Industry

R. Gibson / E. W. Ross
Cutting the Schools-to-War Pipeline

Pam Martens
America's "Money Honey" as Corporate Matchmaker: Maria Bartiromo and the Co-Branding of CNBC and Citigroup

John Feffer
Picturing the President

Daryll E. Ray
Why the Family Farm is Good for Rural America

Ronald Bruce St. John
Apartheid By Any Other Name

Mitchel Cohen
Listen Gore: Some Inconvenient Truths About the Politics of Environmental Crisis

Website of the Day
The Real Issue is Empire


February 1, 2007

Diane Farsetta
An Army Thousands More: How PR Firms and Major Media Military Recruiters

Marjorie Cohn
Bush Targets Iran: Cruise Missile Diplomacy

Mark Scaramella
Our Founding War Profiteers

Ranni Amiri
Senator Prejudice: the Day Joe Biden Threatened to Kick My Ass

Christopher Ketcham
Die, TV!

Winston Warfield
Art Panic Hits Boston!

Corporate Crime Reporter
Jailing the Artists, Not the Executives: the Great Boston Art Panic, Turner Broadcasting and the AG Who Won't Pursue Corporate Crime

Thomas P. Healy
Adios Molly Ivins: Populist Journalism and Never Dull

Website of the Dau
The Ordeal of Gary Tyler

 

January 31, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
Waco of Iraq?: US "Victory" Cult Leader was a "Massacre"

Jean Bricmont
What is the Decisive "Clash" of Our Time?

Tao Ruspoli
CounterViews: a Conversation with Dr. Susan Block on Sex, Politics and Liberation

James T. Phillips
Flashbacks de Jour: Photographing War

William Johnson
Worker Reistance at Smithfield Foods

Tim Wilkinson
A Hawk in Drag: Dershowitz and the Iraq War

Evelyn Pringle
The Judge, the Reporter and the Secret Zyprexa Documents

Joshua Frank
What America Really Needs to Hear

Ramzy Baroud
Shameless in Gaza

Mickey Z.
Nader Still in the Crosshairs

Website of the Day
What's Goin' On?

 

 

 

 

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Weekend Edition
March 3 / 4, 2007

Glory Boy and the Snail Darter

Al Gore, the Origins of a Hypocrite

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

What we now recognize as the Gore style was fashioned in the earliest days of his political career. The young congressman picked out safe issues on which to cut a posture. He'd fully digested the lessons of his own masters' thesis, that television had shifted the balance of power from the Congress to the Executive branch. He became a zealous promoter of TV cameras in Congress and contrived matters so that he was the first to speak to those cameras from the House floor. Characteristically his premier message concerned the therapeutic value of filming House proceedings on a day- to-day basis: "It is a solution for the lack of confidence in government." Anyone who has watched C-Span for the past twenty years would surely come to precisely the opposite conclusion.

Gore would seize on an issue that could be easily exported to the Sunday talk shows, such as children's nightwear treated with Tris, a flame retardant that turned out to be carcinogenic. Those particular hearings in May of 1977 were the first to bring young Rep Gore onto the network news shows, and he made full use of the opportunity. "Did it trouble you," he howled theatrically at one industry executive, "that the children of this country might have tumors, carcinogenic or otherwise, produced by the chemical that would be used in all this sleepwear?"

From perilous nightwear he turned his attention to infant formula, another sure-fire TV grabber, where he and the shapely Tipper discoursed on the virtues of breastfeeding. On the heels of fiery sermons against Nestle for its infant formula came Gore's efforts to enact a national organ transplant database. This talent for converting minor issues into major TV opportunities was no doubt what prompted Gore's enthusiasm for Clinton's pollster Dick Morris when the latter arrived to bail out the Clinton White House in l995 and l996.

"Around Washington he's what we call 'a glory boy'," a Democratic Party insider told Gore Vidal. "He gets to the House and starts running for the Senate. He gets to the Senate and starts running for the White House. There's no time left to do any of the real work the rest of us have to do."

The legislative venue for Gore's grandstanding was the House Commerce Committee's subcommittee on oversight and investigation. Gore had lobbied strongly to be appointed to this subcommittee, correctly assaying its screen-time potential. In short order he developed an inquisitorial style, matched off the floor by his mercilessly abusive treatment of his staff. His sponsor was the powerful Michigan Democrat John Dingell, the auto industry's greatest friend on Capitol Hill and later the most virulent opponent of clean air legislation. Dingell can himself be a merciless interrogator and evidently saw Gore's potential. Gore would describe himself later as Dingell's spear carrier.

Gore's skills at self-promotion carried his name into the news and afforded him a certain national reputation as a crusading liberal. But at the substantive legislative level Gore remained emphatically on the center-right. Take the issue that perhaps defines the Democratic Party's social mission more than any other: labor rights. In the dawn of the Carter presidency, with Democrats controlling both houses, a bill came before the House aimed at expanding unions' picketing rights. Famously in America, one has the right to strike (barely) but not the right to win, because picketing--a vital component of any serious strike--is so circumscribed by legal restrictions as to be effectively useless in many cases as a coercive tool in a fight with employers. So this vote was a big one. The AFL-CIO felt confident of victory, but it missed the fact that newly arrived Democrats like Gore felt no loyalty to labor and were intent on advertising that disposition to their business contributors. Gore provided one of the crucial votes that turned back labor's bill.

As a House member Gore was virtually a poster boy for the National Rifle Association. In 1978 he voted to block funding for the implementation of new federal handgun regulations, explaining many years later that "when I represented a rural farm district in the House of Representatives there wasn't a problem [with handguns] perceived by my constituents". In 1985, after he had moved from representing the crackers in the 4th District to being the junior senator for all the people of Tennessee, he voted for what the NRA called "the most significant pro-gunners' bill in the last quarter-century"..

As a Congressman, Gore spoke of his belief in "the fetus's right to life". He was a relentless supporter of the Hyde amendment, which banned federal funding for abortions for poor women. In one early version of Hyde's bill there was language allowing exceptions to the ban in the case of rape. Gore voted against that.

The most far reaching of all the measures dreamed up by the conservative right to undercut Roe v Wade was an amendment put forward by a Michigan Republican, Mark Siljander, in 1984. It carried a one-two punch. First, it defined the fetus as a person from the moment of conception. Second, it denied federal funding to any hospital or clinic that performed an abortion. Gearing up for his Senate run that year, Gore was one of seventy-four Democrats to vote for Siljander's ultimately unsuccessful measure.

Those votes returned to haunt Gore as his political ambitions went national and he was bidding for more support than he ever needed in the 4th District or even the entire Volunteer State. By 1988 he was brazenly rewriting his political biography. He and his staff were well aware that his votes against choice of only four years earlier would be brought up by his opponents. "Since there's a record of that vote", an aide told US News & World Report in March of 1988, "in effect what we have to do is deny, deny, deny."

The problem returned briefly in 1992 and again in the Democratic primaries in 2000, when Bill Bradley, challenging Gore for the nomination, used the occasion of a debate in the Apollo Theater in Harlem, to flourish and then read out a letter Gore had written to a Tennessee constituent in 1984, in which had stated: "It is my deep personal conviction that abortion is wrong. I hope that some day we will see the current outrageously large number of abortions drop sharply. Let me assure you that I share your belief that innocent human life must be protected and I have an open mind on how to further this goal."

When confronted with contradictions between his pretensions and his deeds, Gore reflexively performs a ritual of numbed incantation. "I believe a woman ought to have the right to chose", he kept repeating to his interlocutors in 1992, and he did the same thing at the Apollo in 2000. Someone less rigid could have said, "Look, I've evolved Freed from his lawyers, Bill Clinton can go through such a routine effortlessly. But Gore, the perfect child of demanding parents, can never admit error, even in retrospect. In 1988, even as both Al and Tipper issued their fabrications about their use of marijuana, Tipper said, "It was either admit it or lie, and we would never lie."

One unlovely hoof print after another tracks its way across Gore's legislative voting record. In 1986, when the IRS proposed new regulations denying tax-exempt status to private schools that barred black students, Gore was among those in Congress who tried to undermine the regulations.

Likewise, in Gore's supposed devotion to the environment there has always been a vast rift between stirring proclamation and legislative reality. Back in the late 1970s two of the hottest environmental battles concerned the Clinch River Breeder Reactor and the Tellico Dam, both within the purview of the TVA. As planned, the Clinch River reactor not only was a $3 billion boondoggle of the first water but was also destabilizing in terms of the arms race, since it was scheduled to produce weapons-grade plutonium. The Congressional battle over the planned reactor stretched from the mid-1970s to 1983, when, amid growing national disquiet about nuclear power, it went down to defeat.

Gore was a fanatic defender of the reactor, the most ardent of all in the Tennessee House delegation. When the Republicans briefly captured the Senate in 1981 the senior senator from Tennessee, Howard Baker, became majority leader and made protection of the Clinch River project one of his prime tasks. He and Gore kept the fight going until the end. Arkansas's Senator Dale Bumpers gave an entertaining account in a speech in 1997: "I remember in 1981, Republicans took over this place and Howard Baker, the senator from Tennessee and one of the finest men ever to serve in this body, became majority leader. I was trying to keep any additional nuclear plants from being licensed--and it was not a tough chore. A lot of people had made up their minds at that point that the nuclear option was not a good one. I fought for about four years to kill the Clinch River Breeder. But I was up against the majority leader. And as everybody here knows, as the old revenuer said, when they announced United States versus Jones, he turned to his lawyer and said, "Them don't sound like very fair odds to me." And it was not very fair odds to go up against the majority leader on the Clinch River Breeder, which was going to be built in his beloved Tennessee. Howard Baker could always just pull out that one extra vote he needed. The vote was always close, but you are majority leader, you know, you can just call somebody over and say, 'I need your vote', and you usually get it. Finally, one year I was ahead by about six or seven votes as the votes were being cast, and I think Senator Baker decided that he was done for, and he turned everybody loose that had committed to him who did not really like the idea of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor and only voted for it to accommodate him. He turned them loose, and I think we won that day by about 70 to 30. Happily, that was the end of the Clinch River Breeder."

In 1984, Al Gore took Baker's Senate seat and over the next eight years voted for the nuclear lobby 55 percent of the time. As vice president and author of Earth in the Balance (which stays fairly mute on the topic of nuclear power) Gore, along with HIS FORMER STAFFER Energy Department Assistant Secretary Thomas Grumbly, tried to bring the Clinch River scheme to life again as the Fast Flux Test Facility in the Hanford nuclear reservation in the State of Washington.

Then there was the Tellico Dam, the first big test of America's greatest environmental law, the Endangered Species Act, passed in 1973 during the Nixon presidency, which also saw creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. The dam, on the Little Tennessee River, was 95 percent complete when biologists discovered the imperiled snail darter species still clinging on in the stretches of the river that were to become the reservoir behind the dam. Environmentalists brought suit against the dam project, and eventually the Supreme Court ruled that the Endangered Species Act required that the dam not be completed.

The Little Tennessee was one of the few wild rivers left in the state unmolested by the TVA. The dam wasn't needed for flood control and wouldn't generate power. All it would do was store water and divert it to another dam nearby. The recreation benefits were negative, since the Little Tennessee was a famous trout stream and popular with canoeists. In fact, the only purposes of the dam were to line the pockets of the cement producers and construction nabobs of Tennessee and to afford an amenity for the "Timberlake" community being planned by Boeing. As Mark Reisner puts it in his book Cadillac Desert, "It was like deciding to put a 50,000 seat Superdome in the middle of Wyoming and then building a city of 150,000 around it to justify its existence."

Shocked that the Act could threaten huge pork barrel projects, the very lifeblood of Congress, the legislators set up the so-called God Squad, which would pass judgement on species-endangering schemes, using cost-benefit analysis as the standard. In the case of the snail darter the God Squad, led by economist Charles Schultze, did its homework. "Here is a project that is 95 percent complete", Schultze concluded, "and if one takes just the cost of finishing it against the benefits, it doesn't pay."

The fight over the snail darter was fierce and bitter because the stakes were so high. If the pro-dam forces could win a waiver of the Endangered Species Act here, then such a waiver would inevitably be the first of many. Gore was among the leaders in the effort to get this waiver, and in the end Congress exempted the dam from compliance and overturned the Supreme Court's injunction. As the defenders of the snail darter predicted, the path to destruction of the Endangered Species Act now lay open, and first down that path had been none other than Al Gore.

After he and the other pork-barrelers got the vote that exempted the dam, Gore announced triumphantly, "It was unfortunate that the controversy over the snail darter was used to delay completion of the dam after it was virtually finished. I am glad the Congress has now ended this controversy once and for all."

How Gore, Howard Baker and James Duncan (the Republican Congressman in whose district the dam was located) consummated their awful victory was vividly described by Representative Bob Edgar, a Democrat from suburban Philadelphia. Edgar recounts how on June 18, 1979, Gore and his colleague Duncan pushed through, as a rider to the appropriations bill, a measure allowing the Tellico Dam to go forward. "Duncan walked in waving a piece of paper. He said, 'Mr. Speaker! Mr. Speaker! I have an amendment to offer to the public works appropriation bill. Tom Bevill and John Myers [two dreadful reps] of the Appropriations Committee both happened to be there. I wonder why. Bevill says, 'I've seen the amendment. It's good.' Myers says, 'I've seen the amendment. It's a good one.' And that was that. It was approved by voice vote! No one even knew what they were voting for! They were voting to exempt Tellico Dam from all laws! They punched a loophole big enough to shove a $100 million dam through it, and then they scattered threats all through Congress so that we couldn't muster the votes to shove it back out. I tried--lots of people tried--but we couldn't get that rider out of the bill. The speeches I heard on the floor were the angriest I've heard in elective office. They got their dam. That is the democratic process at work."

The foes of the dam had one last hope, that President Jimmy Carter would veto the bill. But Carter too was bushwhacked. The Baker-Gore forces threatened to withhold support for the Panama Canal Treaty, which Carter was fighting for at the time.

Gore supported a scheme to transplant some of the snail darters to the nearby Hiwassee and Holston rivers, where they survived. But the larger damage was done. As David Brower, America's greatest environmentalist, said in retrospect, "This was the beginning of the end of the Endangered Species Act." After the snail darter came other species and other waivers, the most notorious of them engineered under the auspices of Vice President Gore. In the Pacific Northwest the spotted owl and marbled murrelet, in the Southeast the red-cockaded woodpecker, in Southern California the gnatcatcher--all were as chaff under the chariot wheels of the timber and real estate industries, who successfully lobbied the vice president and his minions for the all-important waivers. Like refugees in wartime, imperiled species were assigned one holding pen after another, issued temporary "safe" passes, while Gore's appointments in the Interior Department and the Council on Environmental Quality felt the heat from developers and timber barons and crumbled.

The way American politics works, it took a reputed environmentalist to destroy America's best environmental law. In l98l there wasn't a major environmental group in the country that didn't bugle its frantic alarums at the approach of the Reaganauts and that Beelzebub of the greens, James Watt, Reagan's Interior Secretary. The Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, National Audubon, the Natural Resources Defense Council, all raised millions of dollars on the spectre of Watt and the havoc he would wreak on environmental regulations. In fact, the pathetic and maladroit Watt never stood a chance. He set back the cause of environmental pillage by at least a decade.

But when Watt was gone and Reagan was gone and Bush was gone, the Democratic "greens" came back to power, and they accomplished triumphs that the Republicans had never dared dream possible. Gore, who had reinvented himself as an environmentalist largely on the basis of Earth in the Balance, was embraced by the Big Green organizations. They used his entirely mythical green credentials as a way of getting their membership to overlook Bill Clinton's own adversarial relationship with nature while he was governor of Arkansas.

Yet consider Gore's record by big green's own criteria. Like all the major environmental organizations, the League of Conservation Voters functions as an outrider for the Democratic National Committee, and its annual ratings of members of Congress are notoriously skewed against Republicans. Gore's lifetime rating from the League is 64 percent, meaning he was in sync with the League's positions two-thirds of the time. This is not much when you look at such green stars of the League as Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Tim Wirth of Colorado, George Miller of California or even a Republican like the late John Chafee of Rhode Island, all of whom were consistently in the 90s. The League's rating of Gore in his House years ran at an average of about 55 percent, with one year seeing him down to 30 percent, putting him in harness with such world-class predators as Don Young of Alaska.

Gore didn't make many friends in the House, but his propensity to techno-flatulence (e.g., "The government is just a big software program") soon prompted him to sniff out a kindred soul in the form of a pudgy young Congressman from suburban Atlanta with a marvelous facility for rotund phrase-making on any issue to hand. From the time he was first elected, in 1978, Newt Gingrich was positioning himself with precisely the same blend of opportunism, albeit at a noisier level, as Al Gore.

The two consecrated their amity in a group called the Congressional Clearing House on the Future. They met monthly, published a newsletter and hosted lectures by futurists and pop scientists including Carl Sagan and Alvin Toffler. But these monthly klatsches were not enough to satiate the passions of Gore and Gingrich for heady chat about meta-technical trends, artificial intelligence, the population bomb and extraterrestrial life (Gore believes ardently that We Are Not Alone). The two would meet for dinner at each other's houses. Poor Tipper, hoping for a romantic candle-lit evening with her spouse, would open the door to see the beaming, porcine features of the rising Republican star from Georgia on the doorstep. The relationship didn't end when Gore reached the Senate. In fact, in 1985 he and Gingrich co-authored a bill titled the Critical Trends Assessment Act. The legislation called for the creation of a White House Office on Futurism (WHOOF) to "study the effects of government policies on critical trends and alternative futures". In his career in Congress, Gore was rarely the principal author of a bill. This was an exception, albeit a doomed one. Although the two battled for WHOOF strenuously, it never went anywhere.

Soon after his arrival in Congress, Gore formed the Vietnam Veterans Caucus with John Murtaugh, Jim Jones and Les Aspin. For Gore the caucus opened up a useful avenue into hawkish Democratic circles, where men like Aspin and Sam Nunn were doing the Pentagon's work, proclaiming that "Vietnam Syndrome" was sabotaging the nation's vital sinews. Gore picked up the lingo quickly enough: "I think it is important to realize that we do have interests in the world that are important enough to defend, to stand up for. And we should not be so burned by the tragedy of Vietnam that we fail to recognize an interest that requires the assertion of force."

With such language, Gore established himself early on as "safe" from the point of view of the Pentagon and the national security complex. Safety meant never straying off the reservation on such issues as America's right to intervene anywhere it chooses. Gore backed Reagan's disastrous deployment of the US Marines in Lebanon in 1983. He supported the invasion of that puissant Caribbean threat to the United States (population 240 million) by Grenada (population 80,000). He later chided his 1988 Democratic opponents for their failure to embrace this noble enterprise. At a time when many Democrats wanted to restrict the CIA's ability to undertake covert actions, Gore said he wouldn't "hesitate to overthrow a government with covert actions", a posture he ratified with his approval of the CIA's secret war in Afghanistan. This, the largest covert operation in the Agency's history, ultimately saddled Afghanistan with the Taliban fundamentalists, destroyers of cities, stoners of women, harborers of Bin Laden and overseers of that country's rise in status to the eminence of world's largest exporter of opium and heroin to the United States and Europe.

How's that for a resumé of inconvenient truths?

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book is End Times: the Death of the Fourth Estate, co-written with Alexander Cockburn. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net

 

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