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Is it the guy who asks you after the meeting about how the antiwar movement needs to get "serious" and asks you lots of questions about terrorism and "fighting back"? Jennifer Van Bergen reports, first-hand. Part 2 of our series on what really happened on 9/11/2001: the physics of collapse, and how not to make a "pancake" by Manuel Garcia, PLUS Engineer Pierre Sprey on why "controlled demolition" theories are off target. What you just missed, but can still get, in our last newsletter: Paul Craig Roberts on the Collapse of America. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation towards the cost of this online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! |
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Today's Stories October 18, 2006 Saul Landau Tom Barry Bruce Jackson Kate Doyle
Michael Neumann Manuel Garcia,
Jr. Stephen S.
Pearcy Sharon Smith Al Krebs David Underhill Daniel Wolff James Brooks Website of the Day
October 16, 2006 Gary Leupp Patrick Cockburn David Wilson Robert Fisk Robert Jensen Ingmar Lee
/ Krista Roessingh Mike Whitney Jake Whitney Sanho Tree Website of
the Day
Uri Avnery John Walsh Jean Bricmont Jennifer Van Bergen Ralph Nader Floyd Rudmin Mark Weisbrot Laura Carlsen Hani Shukrallah Dr. Susan Block John Chuckman Lucinda Marshall Don Monkerud Missy Comley
Beattie Ron Jacobs Website of
the Weekend
October 13, 2006 Jorge Mariscal Stephen Philion John Blair Col. Dan Smith Alastair Crooke / Mark Perry Stephen Fleischman Charles Perroud Anne E. Brodsky Website of the Day
October 12, 2006 Jonathan Cook Norman Solomon M. Shahid Alam Paul Craig
Roberts Meredith Schafer / Chris Kutalik Carl Gelderloos Alastair Crooke / Mark Perry Charles Sullivan William S. Lind CP News Service Website of
the Day
October 11, 2006 John Feffer Dave Lindorff Jackson Katz April Howard / Ben Dangl Michael Carmichael Ken Couesbouc Gregory Afghani Alexander Cockburn Website of
the Day
October 10, 2006 Paul Craig
Roberts Robert Robideau Joshua Frank Dave Lindorff Dave Zirin Heather Gray James Knotwell Missy Beattie Mike Whitney David Rosen Website of the Day
Robert Fisk Norman Solomon Ron Jacobs Gideon Levy Walter Brasch Mickey Z. John Holt Lucinda Marshall Saul Landau Website of the Day
October 7 /
8, 2006 Alexander Cockburn Peter Kwong Ralph Nader Mark Donham Dave Lindorff Peter Bosshard Ron Jacobs Lawrence R.
Velvel Fred Gardner David Green Jim B. Missy Beattie Michael Donnelly Jackson Thoreau Jon Hung CounterPunch
News Service Tom D'Antoni Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
Alison Weir Tiffany Ten
Eyck / Mark Brenner Corporate Crime Reporter Juan Antonio
Montecino Walden Bello Christopher
Brauchli Brynne Keith-Jennings Jonathan Cook Website of the Day
John Walsh Carol Norris Paul Craig Roberts Ricardo Alarcón James Abourezk Nicola Nasser Kirkpatrick Sale Uri Avnery Website of the Day
Elizabeth Terzakis Paul Wolf Sean Penn Dave Lindorff Diane Farsetta Sharon Smith Felice Pace Sara Roy Website of
the Day
Jennifer Van
Bergen Greg Moses Stan Cox Niranjan Ramakrishnan Evelyn Pringle Fred Wilhelms Michael Abelman Gary Leupp Website of the Day
October 2, 2006 Eric Hazan Mike Whitney Norman Solomon Assaf Kfoury Missy Beattie Arthur Neslen Paula J. Caplan Website of the Day
Sept. 30 /
0ct. 1, 2006 Paul Craig
Roberts Marjorie Cohn Ben Tripp Ron Jacobs Ralph Nader Mike Whitney Christopher Reed Seth Sandronsky Fred Gardner Mokhiber /
Weissman Michael Dickinson Alan Gregory Poets' Basement
September 29, 2006 Bruce Jackson Michael J.
Smith Emira Woods William S.
Lind David Swanson Jonathan Cook Website of the Day
Sen. Russ Feingold Ron Jacobs Mokhiber /
Weissman Lee Sustar Robert Jensen John Chuckman Evelyn Pringle Nicola Nasser Uri Avnery Website of the Day
Patrick Cockburn Camilo Mejia Ben Terrall Ridgeway /
Ng Joe Allen Andrew Wimmer Franklin C. Spinney Website of
the Day
Hani Shukrallah William Blum Niranjan Ramakrishnan Barbara Becnel Paul Rockwell Dave Lindorff Rich Gibson Anthony Papa Nate Mezmer Uri Avnery Website of the Day
Patrick Cockburn Jonathan Cook Joshua Frank Paul Craig
Roberts Robert Jensen Dave Lindorff Norman Solomon Dr. Charles
Jonkel Michael Dickinson Alexander Cockburn Website of
the Day
September 23
/ 24, 2006 Jonathan Cook Jeffrey St.
Clair Dr. Anon Tom Barry Carl G. Estabrook Laura Carlsen Todd Chretien Dr. Charles
Jonkel Debbie Nathan Fred Gardner Fred Wilhelms Seth Sandronsky Ralph Nader Rev. William
Alberts Jon Van Camp Heather Gray David Vest Jeffrey St.
Clair Poets' Basement Website of
the Weekend Video of the Weekend
September 22, 2006 Patrick Cockburn Michael Donnelly Ramzy Baroud Evo Morales Stanley Howard Sarah Leah
Whitson JoAnn Wypijewski Website of the Day
Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad Justin E. H.
Smith Mike Roselle Amira Hass Deborah Rich Mickey Z. Saul Landau Website of
the Day
Sharon Smith Christopher
Reed John Ross Joshua Frank Arthur Neslen Norman Solomon Michael Carmichael Evelyn Pringle Hugo Chavez Website of the Day
Patrick Cockburn Jeff Leys Brian M. Downing Col. Dan Smith Liaquat Ali
Khan Ron Jacobs Nik Barry-Shaw
/ Yves Engler Lucinda Marshall Saul Landau Photo of the Day Website of
the Day
Carl Boggs Uri Avnery Mike Stark / Jim Bullington Joshua Frank John Murphy Ramzy Baroud Dave Lindorff Bill Quigley Website of the Day
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October 18, 2006 Unearthing the Secrets of a MassacreThe Dead of TlatelolcoBy KATE DOYLE Who are the dead of Tlatelolco? Archivos Abiertos is determined to find an answer. It seems like a simple question. Who among the thousands gathered in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas on the afternoon of October 2, 1968, did not return home that night? Who fell, instead, at some dark moment, caught between agents shooting from the apartments surrounding the square and the soldiers swarming below? Who died from their wounds as a Red Cross ambulance careened through the streets of Mexico City toward some emergency room? Who succumbed days later in a hospital bed? Who are the dead? What were their names? They are questions that have haunted Mexico for 38 years. Perhaps in another place, at another time, they would have been answered simply-with autopsy and death certificates, police reports, hospital records, film and photographs, and good journalism. But Mexico was not that place, and 1968 was not that time. Mexico in 1968 was a nation of secrets and lies, where rumors trumped facts, propaganda masqueraded as news, and government officials were accountable to no one. As a consequence, today we have neither an official nor an unofficial version of the massacre at Tlatelolco that explains its enduring mysteries: What orders did the PRI-led government give its military, police and intelligence services on October 2? Which senior officials in the administration of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz gave those orders? Why did the shooting begin? And who died? In the face of the government's refusal to explain its role over the decades that followed 1968, others have tried : journalists, writers, the former leaders of the student movement, historians, political analysts. An independent "truth commission" convened in 1993, but failed to reach a definitive conclusion due to lack of resources, time, and authority; the Comisión Especial del 68 tried again in 1998 but was stymied by the lack of evidence. Elena Poniatowska wrote her groundbreaking account in 1971, based on personal testimonies. Former student leaders, such as Luis González de Alba, have contributed important eyewitness accounts of the massacre. Sergio Aguayo established new facts in his invaluable book, 1968: Los Archivos de la Violencia. His unprecedented access to the documents of the Interior Secretariat (General Directorate of Political and Social Investigations, or IPS by its Spanish acronym) helped make his analysis the most definitive to date. And yet, no one has solved the problem of the dead. "[O]ne of the aspects of clarification still pending is the number of those killed," wrote Aguayo in 1998. "As long as this issue is unresolved, it is difficult to claim that Tlatelolco has reached a final point" (Los Archivos de la Violencia, 250). Waiting for Fox Shortly after taking office in 2000, President Vicente Fox promised to clarify the events at Tlatelolco. By naming a Special Prosecutor charged with investigating the "dirty war"-beginning with the 1968 massacre-and opening secret intelligence archives to public scrutiny, Fox appeared to signal that his government would no longer tolerate the official cover-up. "We are prepared to face the ultimate consequences in the clarification of these events," he told an audience gathered outside the national archives to inaugurate the dirty war collection. That was four and half years ago. As the 38th anniversary of Tlatelolco passed, we wait for clarification; there has been none, to date. Last December, the team of investigators and analysts responsible for writing a definitive truth commission-style report for the Special Prosecutor's office completed its work and turned the document over to Dr. Ignacio Carrillo Prieto. When Carrillo failed to present it to the President, a draft version was leaked to a handful of prominent writers and reporters. The National Security Archive posted the draft on our website in order to provide broad public access to it and prod the Fox administration to publish an official version. Fox responded by promising that the final report would be issued on April 15, but the deadline has come and gone without comment from the President. How many died at Tlatelolco? Archivos Abiertos decided we should try and investigate the issue ourselves. Names and Numbers Was it hundreds? John Rodda, a sports writer for the British newspaper The Guardian, was in Mexico to cover the Olympics when the massacre took place. Based on what he witnessed and the interviews he gathered, Rodda originally reported that 325 people died in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas. Many present in the plaza that night came to the same conclusion. Students, passers-by, and residents of the Tlatelolco apartment complex told of witnessing hundreds of bodies: lying in pools of blood, stacked up against the walls of the church, or tossed into trucks that arrived after the shooting stopped to clean up the mess. In the days and weeks and years following the massacre, the range of estimates of the number of victims fluctuated wildly. President Díaz Ordaz's spokesman, Fernando Garza, guessed shortly after the shooting stopped that seven people had died; hours later, he raised the number to 20. El Día counted 30 bodies. Siempre! counted 40. On October 5, the National Strike Council, which had organized the rally at Tlatelolco, said 150 civilians and 40 soldiers had been killed. "Not one," General José Hernández Toldeo told Proceso, when asked in 1978. In 1993, Félix Fuentes-who, as a reporter with La Prensa in 1968, had written a gripping first-hand account of the massacre-could only speculate: "The calculation of those killed has oscillated between 200 and 1,500." Somehow the estimate settled on 300. The number appears repeatedly: in books, editorials, articles, memoirs. I have used the number in my own writing. But without documentation, it is meaningless. "It is terrible to have arrived at a number of those killed by consensus," observed Aguayo (Los Archivos de la Violencia, 249). And by guessing at numbers without linking them to names, we confiscate the very identities of the victims of Tlatelolco: their faces, their families, their lives before they were lost. Archivos Abiertos decided to investigate the names of the victims of Tlatelolco. We spent some eight months conducting an exhaustive review of records found in the IPS, DFS, and Sedena collections of the Archivo General de la Nación. Although we consulted many of the extraordinary books written about the massacre, we were determined to rely exclusively on primary documents to piece together the puzzle. Of course, documents can be misleading. Official records can contain errors and distortions, just as memory can. But read collectively and critically-and checked against secondary sources and eyewitnesses-they can also provide the solid evidence necessary for the construction of accurate history. Official records are the best weapons we have to challenge decades of official silence about the past. They also solve the problem of trying to write history "by consensus"-what Luis González de Alba critiqued as an exercise of "suppositions without facts, without research, without interviews to the contrary, without the historical and detective work that the events deserve" (cited in Los Archivos de la Violencia, 13). Our Sources The decision by the Fox government to force the release of millions of military, police, and intelligence files in 2002 was a watershed for openness in Mexico-and a radical break with the past. The reality of trying to obtain those files, however, and use them in an investigation is a tremendously difficult task. The collections include no index. The archivists rely on internal, unpublished rules-that seem to change frequently and without warning-to decide what to release and what to deny. The process can frustrate even the most persistent researcher to the point of defeat. There are three distinct record groups. The Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS) collection in the AGN's Gallery 1 includes hundreds of documents containing information gathered by the intelligence agency in the aftermath of the massacre, and numerous references to the dead. We relied heavily on the DFS records to construct our list. The release of the documents is maddeningly arbitrary, however. One day we would be told that a document we wanted to read was reserved and could not be released. Weeks later, we would receive the same document without difficulty from a different archivist. Over time, we gathered several versions of the same documents: some with pages missing, others with sections deleted, still others released in full. The inconsistencies reflect the lack of archival guidelines regulating the disclosure of information from Gallery 1. The directorate of the national archives should insist on the creation of a set of clear and defensible rules and publish them, so that archive staff and outside researchers alike will understand how to proceed. In Gallery 2, the documents of the Dirección General de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales (IPS) from Gobernación also provided evidence on those killed at Tlatelolco. An important report by then-Attorney General, Julio Sánchez Vargas, titled " Tlatelolco: 2 de octubre," contains details from the autopsies of 15 identified people killed at Tlatelolco, and an additional ten more unidentified. Without a real index, however, the labor involved in trying to review the IPS records is immense. Researchers cannot request individual documents, but must comb through entire boxes of unorganized paper in search of relevant information. The records of the Secretariat of Defense in Gallery 7 of the AGN contain nothing pertinent to the massacre at Tlatelolco. It is clear from a review of the documents in that gallery that Sedena withheld a vast amount of documentation from the collection it turned over to the AGN. For example, "partes militares" exist that announce the deaths of two army soldiers on October 2, but we found them in a book published by Proceso in 1980, not in the archives. President Fox-who charged the Army as well as the Interior Secretariat and intelligence service with turning over their records of the dirty war-should demand compliance by the armed forces of his own executive order and require that Sedena records be disclosed. We also consulted the Informe borrador del Fiscal Especial, Que no vuelva a suceder, (Special Fiscal Draft Report, So that it doesn't happen again) written in 2005 with extensive use of the AGN dirty war archives. It was not a useful document. Although the section concerning Tlatelolco is eloquent and detailed in describing the student movement of 1968, it is riddled with errors and comes to no definite conclusion about who was killed on October 2. Among the list of the victims of Tlatelolco, for example, are people who died at student protests that took place before October 2 (such as Román Nájera Valverde, who died in August 1968; see p. 72). Records are sometimes mischaracterized, such as a draft of the Attorney General's report on Tlatelolco, which is described as a document "apparently elaborated by the CNH [Consejo Nacional de Huelga]" (see p. 60, footnote 216). And in several cases, it was impossible to verify information used by the Fiscal's investigators because the documents have been resguardado por la Fiscalía and are no longer open to the public. Until the final version of the Special Prosecutor's report is made public, it will be impossible to use the draft in an investigation of the events at Tlatelolco. We await President Fox's decision to release it, as he pledged. Registry of the Deaths of Tlatelolco Eight months after Archivos Abiertos launched our search for official records, we can now publish an initial and definitive list of the names of those who were killed at Tlatelolco. The result is surprisingly low, though no less powerful in its implications. To date, we have found records confirming the deaths of 44 men and women in the archives of the dirty war . Thirty-four of the victims are identified by name. Ten more people are listed as "unknown." There may be others, but we have not yet found them in the archives or in any other official registry. We will continue to search for new evidence. What we do know is that the death of each of the 44 individuals found in the files of the dirty war is documented in more than one declassified government record. Each one is cross-checked against the secondary sources available to us. Each one represents a life lost in the senseless attack by government forces on the student movement-an attack that killed not only students but soldiers, workers, a teacher, a housewife, a 15-year old doméstica, and an unemployed father. All of the government documents related to the 44 victims may be found on the National Security Archive's Web site. In the hope of identifying the ten victims of Tlatelolco that remain nameless, and other victims not yet identified in files of the dirty war, Archivos Abiertos is launching a new blog, where friends and family members can register information, documentation, photographs, and memories about their loved ones lost on October 2, 1968. We hope, through this electronic citizen registry to be able to arrive at a more definitive list of Tlatelolco's victims, and to memorialize those lost. To participate in the Registro de los Muertos de Tlatelolco, go to the Web site of the National Security Archive's Mexico Project and click on the link to our blog on Tlatelolco. Together, we can construct an accurate history of the events of Tlatelolco-a history based on facts as well as the painful memories that linger. Kate Doyle is an analyst at the National Security Archive in Washington, DC and a collaborator with the IRC Americas Program . This article forms part of the Archivos Abiertos series of the National Security Archive and Proceso magazine. The documentation can be found at www.gwu.edu/. She can be reached at: kadoyle@gwu.edu
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from CounterPunch Books! The Case Against Israel By Michael Neumann  Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair          Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid? CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues, as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.  The Occupation by Patrick Cockburn                        |
