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Today's Stories October 24, 2006 Marguerite
Rose Jimenez October 23, 2006 Saree Makdisi Joshua Frank Fred Gardner Ralph Nader Ron Jacobs Norman Solomon Richard Manning Neil Kitson William MacDougall Gilad Atzmon Werther Website of
the Day
October 20 / 22, 2006 Alexander Cockburn Gary Leupp Brian Cloughley Dave Zirin William Blum Christopher
Brauchli Winslow Wheeler Michael Donnelly Fred Gardner Susie Day Lucinda Marshall Fred Wilcox Alan Maass Lee Sustar Ariadna Theokopoulos Missy Beattie CP News Wire CP News Services Poets' Basement Website of
the Weekend
October 19, 2006 Elaine Cassel Col. Dan Smith Manuel Garcia, Jr. Josh Gryniewicz Amira Hass Eric Holt-Gimenez Jesse Hagopian Sam Husseini John Weisheit CP News Service Website of
the Day Art Gallery
of the Day
October 18, 2006 Joshua Frank Dr. Curran
Warf, MD Saul Landau Tom Barry Bruce Jackson Dave Lindorff Frederico Fuentes Michael Simmons Daryll E. Ray Kate Doyle Website of
the Day
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 24, 2006 Dead, Buried, DiscardedThe American Way of GoreBy PIERRE TRISTAM "On the next floor below are the abdominal and spine cases, head wounds and double amputations. On the right side of the wing are the jaw wounds, gas cases, nose, ear, and neck wounds. On the left the blind and the lung wounds, pelvis wounds, wounds in the joints, wounds in the testicles, wounds in the intestines. Here a man realizes for the first time in how many places a man can get hit." The passage is from Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. Paul Bäumer, the hero, also reflects about death: "We have almost grown accustomed to it; war is a cause of death like cancer and tuberculosis, like influenza and dysentery. The deaths are merely more frequent, more varied and terrible." In the United States, the dead and wounded of the Iraq war haven't been so fortunate as to be grown accustomed to. They've been ignored. Chalked up to an abstraction indistinguishable from the kind of "dead" Americans see on their nightly television shows and in Shwartzenegger movies. "In any given period during prime time viewing hours," the Boston Globe once reported, "there are at least 50 people killed, shot, maimed, or raped across the spectrum of broadcast and cable television channels." The dead and wounded of the Iraq war are barely visible because they can't compete with the numbers in prime time"neither in factual numbers nor in dramatic effect. Prime time's dead are more interesting. They're simple. They usually have no names, make no emotional demands, and they're excellent props for plots that us! e them as means to obvious ends: within forty-eight minutes"if it's an hour-long drama and the ads for vagina l lubricants and other orificial commodities are excluded""justice" has been done, the dead have been avenged, usually by killing those who killed them, and wisecracks have been exchanged all around. The credits, as they roll, are as meaningless as the names on a war memorial. The 11 o'clock news, local as it is, won't even mention the real dead in those real war zones far, far away. When an American soldier dies his story is written up in his hometown paper, powerfully enough usually, but the story's effect is limited to that newspaper's readership zone. There is no totality in the reporting of war casualties, no sense that one soldier's death, no matter where from, affects the whole nation. A town in Montana will ache for a lost son by itself, as if it alone is experiencing loss. What mourning and suffering does take place is solitary because inherently isolated. Existentialism at its bitterest, though don't expect our information society ever to touch on the subject more than gingerly. It's an aspect of that sickness of compulsive "localism" in American journalism: if it's not local, it's not relevant. If twelve Americans from other states are killed in a single day, your state, should ! it have been spared, will not care. Newsy attention will rather be focused on Nancy Grace and Larry King, wh o'll be busy exploring the depths and breadth of the latest mystery disappearance of the white model with 38-C tits and a million-dollar estate. So news of the dead is forcibly diffused, its impact lessened to the point of irrelevance beyond that daily listing printed in a few newspapers. The disconnect is a huge benefit to the government, to this government in particular, to whom hiding the dead is official policy, and to this president in particular, who has never showed up at a single soldier's funeral, and who doesn't know the difference between a casualty and a cliché: Brit Hume of the Fox-Bush Network once asked him this question: "When things go badly, as many people would feel they have been in Iraq with the continuing casualties and struggles and difficulties, do you ever doubt?" Bush's reply: "I don't think they're going badly. I mean, obviously I think they're going badly for the soldiers who lost their lives, and I weep for that person and their family. But no, I think we're making good progress. As I said I pray for calmness when the seas are storming, and I"you know, my faith is an integral part of being who I am, and I'm not going to change." Obviously not: The exchange dates back to Septe mber 22, 2003. Notice that Iraqi civilian casualties didn't register with the president's concerns"not then, not now. Asked about the recent estimate placing Iraqi deaths at 650,000 since 2003, Bush's reply was: "600,000, or whatever they guessed at, is just ... it's not credible." It's not as if men with the intellectual capacity to address the matter more intelligently do better. To the contrary. They flex the same kind of contemptuous brawn by other means: "Certainly while we were losing relatively small numbers of soldiers early on, I think that was a huge shock," Max Boot, the columnist and Council on Foreign Relations grunt, Reuters this week. "But now that it's kind of accumulated it doesn't have as much of a shock value. This is reminiscent of Stalin's phrase about how one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.' There's some truth to that." There's truth to it only if the likes of Boot reinforce the likes of Stalin. And the likes of Boot have been stomping that "truth" into t! he Amer ican way of reporting since the beginning of the war, going as far as making such absurd comparisons between the "low" numbe r of American casualties in this war and those in previous wars. They have the numbers on their side. So far in Iraq, 3,026 "allied" soldiers have been killed, 2,788 of them American. At Antietam on September 17, 1862, 6,500 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed in a single day. At Shiloh, 24,000 in two days. On D-Day in Normandy 1,465 Americans were killed and 3,184 wounded. In the Battle of the Somme, at least 21,000 men died in the first hour of the first day, and 60,000 by the end of that first day. Then there are the ghastly bombings of World War II" Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. But the relativists usually prefer not to mention those because they're almost entirely civilian casualties. If even military deaths have essentially been cleansed of their meaning, dehumanized, purposefully and systematically, how are civilian deaths to matter at all? Yet the true devastation of the Iraq war has little to do with soldiers, if we're into comparing numbers. It's about the civilians. Right-wingers can't downplay the number of military casualties in comparison with other wars and ignore the number of civilian casualties, regardless of how those numbers are interpreted"unless they consider an Iraqi civilian death less valuable than an American military death. The open secret here is that they do, and Boot-fetished right-wingers alone aren't to blame for this. Just look at the way the media report on casualties in general. If American soldiers barely register as numbers, Iraqis don't register at all. They don't count. When they are counted, they're scabrously discounted, as has been the case since that study was published, showing possibly 650,000 Iraqi deaths since 2003. The debate over the study shows up the disconnect of the American public and media over the devastation of the war better than anything to date. No matter how much you downgrade the number, even if it's cut in half, it still amounts to more deaths in three years, as a result of the American intervention, than all the killings of the Saddam Hussein regime in a quarter century"and all the killings at Hiroshima, Hamburg, Tokyo and Dresden combined. It's still more than all the American dead of World War I and II combined. It's still more than all the American dead, northerner or souther! ner, of the Civil War, and by far more than all the American dead, soldier and civilian, in all wars involving Americans since World War II, combined. (See for yourself.) But if we care so little about American casualties, we can't very well be expected to care at all about Iraqi casualties. They're means to an end, like those 50 prime-time deaths every night. As President Bush said on January 26, 2005, when he was told of a helicopter crash that claimed the lives of 31 Americans that day: "Obviously, any time we lose lives it's a sad moment And listen, the story today is going to be very discouraging to the American people. I understand that. We value life. And we weep and mourn when soldiers lose their life. And ... but it is the long-term objective that is vital, and that is to spread freedom." In other words, don't Iraqis dare stand in the way. They've never mattered in this war ... not in 2003, not in 2005, not today. They have only one admissible role. They're décor to the American way of gore, fillers for the new mass graves. Pierre Tristam is a columnist and editorial writer
at the Daytona Beach News-Journal, and editor of Candide's
Notebooks, a Web site. Reach him at ptristam@att.net.
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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                        |
