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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 Tom Barry October 17, 2006 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 A Report from BuffaloThundersnowBy BRUCE JACKSON Nobody knows quite what to call the storm that hit Buffalo Thursday and Friday, October 12 and 13. It wasn't simply a blizzard, like that epic monster back in 1977 that piled snow so high you didn't walk through fences or around the stalled cars, you just walked over them. Nor was it an ice storm. One weather reporter call it "thundersnow," which is as good as anything I've heard. Delaware Park When I came home Thursday about 5:30, I noticed that along my street branches were hanging low. Snow-covered trees that weren't willows drooped as if they were. The park across the street had a cold beauty to it that reminded me of one of my favorite passages in James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: "All over Alabama, the lamps are out. Every leaf drenches the touch; the spider's net is heavy. The roads lie there, with nothing to use them. The fields lie there, with nothing at work in them, neither man nor beast. The plow handles are wet, and the rails and the frogplates and the weeds between the ties: and not even the hurryings and hoarse sorrows of a distant train, on other roads, is heard." But by the time I got to my driveway, pretty was over. The two red maples in front of my house were a third shorter than when I had left a few hours earlier and a huge oak directly across the street in Delaware park had lost nearly all of its larger limbs. Branches were on the ground everywhere. About midnight I let my dog Henry out the kitchen door. Immediately there were two sharp cracks, like a rifle not far away in the woods. Henry scooted back inside. A little later I opened the front window and heard more of the crack crack crack, some close, some distant, some followed by muffled thumps. Each was a limb giving up, shearing away, falling to to the ground. All night I heard that sound like rifle fire, and the trees dying. Off and on during the evening there had been thunder, but near morning it turned ferocious. One peal followed another, closer and closer. Some of the lightning struck the tall oaks and maples across the road. Not long before dawn, the electrical storm seemed centered in this part of the park: though closed eyelids I saw brilliant flashes of light immediately followed by enormous blasts of thunder. Henry stayed close. Lake effect snow Outsiders think of Buffalo as a city of snow and ice, but they've got it wrong. Many of Buffalo's houses are set back from the street, so they have lawns and, in many areas, greenways between the sidewalks and the roads. Near Delaware Park, wide parkways, also designed by Olmsted, have as many as six parallel green spaces if you count the lawns on either side. Visitors are often surprised by the vast expanse of green when you fly over the city into the Buffalo airport in spring and summer, or how the gorgeous colors of fall in the rural land to the city's south continue right up the shore of Lake Erie. For locals, it's always one of the pleasures of coming home. Buffalo is a city of trees: maples, oaks, chestnuts, ash, sycamores. It sometimes gets cold here, but rarely does it get very cold. Now and then it snows here, but rarely more than a few inches. Sometimes, as in the winters of 1977 and 2003, we get heavy snowfalls, but that happens rarely enough that we remember the years when they happened and have stories about them. Winter doesn't bother us very much. Like people around Chicago and Minneapolis and all the other cities in these latitudes, we know how to drive in snow and ice, and we have clothing appropriate to it. For us, the moist heat of the Deep South in summer is far more debilitating. In winter, the towns south of Buffalo often get what the meteorologists call "lake effect snow"- sudden precipitation that occurs when cold Arctic air picks up moisture as it passes above the warmer Lake Erie water, then dumps it when it moves over the cooler landmass. But only rarely does that lake effect snow hit Buffalo. Most of the time when you see on national tv that Buffalo got two or three feet of snow in a lake effect storm, Buffalo itself really only got a few inches, but the towns south of Buffalo, the names of which you never hear unless you're listening to one of the local stations, got the snowbanks. National news doesn't differentiate city and suburb. In 1977 Buffalo got it. And, last Thursday night, Buffalo got it. The leaves were still on the trees when this lake effect storm hit, and the wet snow clung to the leaves as well as the branches, tons of wet snow on the larger trees, hundreds of pounds on the smaller trees. The leaves and branches were warmer than the snow, so it melted, the water held in place by the new snow falling atop what was already there. The pines shrugged the storm off, but the broadleaf trees couldn't abide that enormous weight. Morning By Friday morning, the great magnolia behind my house was a trunk with a single branch. The large black maple on the property line with the house to my left sheared down the middle--half of it on my neighbor's roof, half on mine. Three trees belonging to my neighbor on the other side were across his row of arbor vitae and my driveway. Across the street, Delaware Park looked like a cyclone or hurricane had bullied its way through. My family was lucky. Our electricity went off briefly five or six times, but it always came back on. Our driveway was blocked by those three fallen trees until Saturday night, but the city was shut down Friday and Saturday so there was nowhere to go anyway. One of the oaks across the street has maybe twenty of its thickest limbs split away. At the top or end of each limb, a jagged six-foot spear of white wood reaches toward the sky. Rings of rubble surround most of the trees. I've known some of those trees for thirty years. They say there are more than 5000 trees in Delaware Park and that 90 percent of them have suffered some damage and that many won't survive. It's the same all over the city, and in the towns. Getting the word The local news radio stations and tv stations kept up a steady supply of updates, but since two-thirds of the city was without electricity only the lucky third and people who'd gotten themselves battery-operated radios could hear them. Cell phones towers went on and off, as the power came and went. People with satellite-based cell phones fared far better. The Buffalo News-the local daily owned by Warren Buffett-website was no help. It's a site that is updated only once a day anyway, at 9:00 a.m. If a major disaster hits any time after that, the website won't have any information about it until the next day. Reporters on the paper tell me that publisher Stanford Lipsey, a long-time friend of Buffett, doesn't believe a web staff is worth the money, so they're all waiting for him to retire and for the paper to get a new publisher more sympathetic to the digital age. But the minimal News web page was even worse than usual this weekend. The site went haywire Friday night-the index column, usually on the left of the screen, came up in the middle of the screen. If you clicked on any of the options- "front page," say-you'd see a flash of the page for less than a second, then the screen reverted to the centralized index. So the automatic program that posted the paper at nine a.m. was doing its job, but nobody could see get to see anything and, apparently, no one working at One News Plaza all weekend knew how to fix it, or cared to. The politicians and the cameras After the local stations came back on sometime Friday morning, the politicians couldn't spend enough time before the tv cameras and microphones talking about something for which, finally, they had no responsibility and couldn't be held accountable. Most didn't have much to say (other than that they're making sure everything that can be done by someone else is being done by someone else and it sure was a bad storm), but they said it over and over again and seemed really sincere. Overall, the politicians seemed to hover between deep-serious and pre-orgasmic. Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown had the most camera face time, but Republican Congressman Tom Reynolds doubled up by being on camera during his own statements and hovering over Brown's shoulder for many of Brown's. When he moved off, Democrat Congressman Brian Higgins, did the same thing, either with Brown or with Senators Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer. Tom Reynolds, in deep trouble because he's been challenged by a businessman running on the Democrat line who would in any other election be a Republican and because he's tarnished by his support of the Iraq war (unpopular around here) and his relationship with House-pager Mark Foley (even more unpopular around here), was on constantly Friday and much of Saturday. He was available for news stories, appearances at community centers, manly poses with arms akimbo, whatever. This is a guy hardly anybody local ever saw before, unless they had a checkbook in hand, now he's omnipresent. He keeps saying "Last night I talked to the FEMA director." It was terrific for all of them, not just the troubled Tom Reynolds. All of them. Mayor Brown didn't have to field questions about how he sold the city out a few days earlier by cutting a casino deal with the Seneca Gaming Corporation that, after months of huffing and puffing, got the city nothing it didn't have five months ago and which will, in the long run, cost the city many times what brings in. Brian Higgins didn't have to talk about why he is George Bush's favorite Democrat war-lover and why he was one of the few Democrats to vote to weaken Constitutional safeguards and back out of the Geneva Convention last month. Governor George Pataki didn't have to talk about anything other than the weather and a state of emergency he hopes the Federal government will pay for. For politicians on the way out or in embarrassing positions, it rarely gets any better than that Byron gets strange By Saturday, Mayor Brown had gotten strange in the interviews. In a singsong voice, he would repeat every question, like a kid in fifth grade geography: "Franklin: What is the capital of Spain?" "The capital of Spain is Madrid." "And what is the capital of North Dakota?" "The capital of North Dakota isthe capital of North Dakota is" Like that. At first I thought it was maybe because he was really tired from being up all night telling the road crews where to go, but then I remembered that somebody else does that. Maybe it was because he hadn't made the shift to live interviews. People who are interviewed a lot learn to repeat the question to make it easier for the guy in the cutting room to find a seven-second sound bite later. But seven-second- sound-bite style doesn't work when it's going out live and long. When it's going out live and long the fifth-grade-geography call and response style just sounds strange or canned, which is how Brown sounded. Political attire Over the weekend, most of the politicians appeared on camera in sweaters, even Pataki, who looked like he'd just come off the tennis club patio on a cool fall evening. The only thing missing was the glass with the straw. Reynolds sported a black vest on Friday and Saturday and a heavy wintry shirt on Sunday. Whenever he wasn't at a mike or lectern he stood in that arms akimbo pose, like a captain at the bow of a ship, looking at something, but the only thing I could figure that was in his field of view was the camera. By Sunday, Byron Brown was back in a suitcoat, though without a necktie. Brian Higgins favored dark turtlenecks the entire time. Hillary Clinton was the only one who never adopted a wintry costume for the event or the cameras. Coming back On Sunday, all over town you could hear the up and down whine of chainsaws, sometimes singing duets or trios, common in the suburbs but rare within the cityline. By afternoon, there were neat piles of branches in front of many houses. It was a clear blue day, with only occasional tufts of cloud here and there, and the temperature was in the mid-fifties, easy weather for working outdoors. By Tuesday morning the streets were mostly clear, but it was difficult for the work crews to get to the downed trees behind many houses, and many of those trees took power lines with them. About a quarter-million people were still without electricity; many did not have phone service and many others in the surrounding towns couldn't trust their water supply. Most traffic lights still weren't working. Had the same storm come along two or three weeks later, after the maple, oak and ash leaves had fallen to the ground in their usual autumn fashion, it would have been just one more two-foot snowfall with a melt a day or two later, no big deal around these parts. It came now while the leaves were there to catch the weight. It was a piece of bad luck. Bad luck happens. You deal with it. What happened in Buffalo these past two days and what will be dealt with over the next several weeks is, by and large, mostly an inconvenience. A far bigger inconvenience for some people than others, but few people died as a result of this storm and few were injured. Many kids missed a week of school and many adults lost a week or more of wages. Small business took a hit. A year from now we'll be telling stories about this storm the way some of us are still telling stories about the Blizzard of '77. It is terribly sad about the trees-but they are, finally, trees, not people. Forty years ago, some Buffalo's major streets went bare when the Dutch Elm blight ravaged the Northeast. All those barren streets were replanted. It took a while, but the green shade came back. This time too, it will take a while, and then the green shade will come back. I find it difficult not to think of my friends in New Orleans, the enormity of what they went through, what many of them are still going through. New Orleans was a natural event, like this one, but it was compounded by official incompetence, disinterest and malfeasance. A lot of people died. It is difficult not to think of people at the World Trade Center, at Oklahoma City, in Iraq and Lebanon and all those other places where nature had nothing to do with it at all, where the disasters rained down merely because someone felt like doing it, had the technology to do it, and chose to do it. We're lucky, here in Buffalo, and we know it. For a slideshow of images from the Buffalo thundersnow go to http://brucejackson.us/thundersnow/thundersnow.html Bruce Jackson is SUNY Distinguished Professor at
University at Buffalo. He edits the web journal BuffaloReport.com.
His book The Story is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling
Stories will be published in March by Temple University Press.
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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                        |
