They Hated Gary Webb

Alexander Cockburn: Why They Hated Gary Webb

One of the CIA's favored modes of self-protection is the "uncover-up".The Agency first denies with passion, then later concedes in muffled tones, the charges leveled against it. Such charges have included the Agency's recruitment of Nazi scientists and SS officers; experiments on unwitting American citizens; efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro; alliances with opium lords in Burma, Thailand and Laos; an assassination program in Vietnam; complicity in the toppling of Salvador Allende in Chile; the arming of opium traffickers and religious fanatics in Afghanistan; the training of murderous police in Guatemala and El Salvador; and involvement in drugs-and-arms shuttles between Latin America and the US.

True to form, after Webb's series raised a storm, particularly on black radio, the CIA issued categorical denials. Then came the solemn pledges of an intense and far-reaching investigation by the CIA's Inspector General, Fred Hitz. On December 18, 1997, stories in the Washington Post by Walter Pincus and in the New York Times by Tim Weiner appeared simultaneously, both saying the same thing: Inspector General Hitz had finished his investigation. He had found "no direct or indirect" links between the CIA and the cocaine traffickers. As both Pincus and Weiner admitted in their stories, neither of the two journalists had actually seen the report.

The actual report itself, so loudly heralded, received almost no examination. But those who took the time to examine the 149-page document ­ the first of two volumes--found Inspector General Hitz making one damning admission after another including an account of a meeting between a pilot who was making drug/arms runs between San Francisco and Costa Rica with two Contra leaders who were also partners with the San Francisco-based Contra/drug smuggler Norwin Meneses. Present at this encounter in Costa Rica was a curly-haired man who said his name was Ivan Gomez, identified by one of the Contras as CIA's "man in Costa Rica." The pilot told Hitz that Gomez said he was there to "ensure that the profits from the cocaine went to the Contras and not into someone's pocket ." The second volume of CIA Inspector General Fred Hitz's investigation released in the fall of 1998 buttressed Webb's case even more tightly, as James Risen conceded in a story in the New York Times on October 120 of that year.

So why did the top-tier press savage Webb, and parrot the CIA's denials. It comes back to this matter of Uncle Sam's true face. Another New York Times reporter, Keith Schneider was asked by In These Times back in 1987 why he had devoted a three-part series in the New York Times to attacks on the Contra hearings chaired by Senator John Kerry. Schneider said such a story could "shatter the Republic. I think it is so damaging, the implications are so extraordinary, that for us to run the story, it had better be based on the most solid evidence we could amass." Kerry did uncover mountains of evidence. So did Webb. But neither of them got the only thing that would have satisfied Schneider, Pincus and all the other critics: a signed confession of CIA complicity by the DCI himself. Short of that, I'm afraid we're left with "innuendo", "conspiracy mongering" and "old stories". We're also left with the memory of some great work by a very fine journalist who deserved a lot better than he got from the profession he loved.

Footnote: a version of this column ran in the print edition of The Nation that went to press last Wednesday. In fact the oddest of all reviews of Whiteout was one in The Nation, a multi-page screed by a woman who I seem to remember was on some payroll of George Soros. She flayed us for giving aid and comfort to the war on drugs and not addressing the truly important question, Why do people take drugs. As I said at the time, to get high, stupid!



Weekend Edition Features for November 27 / 28, 2004

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Weekend Edition
December 18 / 19, 2004
From Kobe Bryant to Uncle Sam
Why They Hated Gary Webb

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

I read a piece about Kobe Bryant a couple of days ago. The way it described his fall made me think of Bryant as a parable of America in the Bush years, that maybe even W himself could understand. No longer the big guy leading the winning team to victory over Commie scum, but a street-corner lout, picking on victims quarter his size, trying always to buy his way out of trouble. Don't leave your sister alone with Uncle Sam! No one want to buy Uncle Sam's jerseys anymore, same way they don't buy Kobe Bryant's.

This business of Uncle Sam's true face brings me to Gary Webb and why they hated him. Few spectacles in journalism in the mid-1990s were more disgusting than the slagging of Gary Webb in the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. Squadrons of hacks, some of them with career-long ties to the CIA, sprayed thousands of words of vitriol over Webb and his paper, the San Jose Mercury News for besmirching the Agency's fine name by charging it with complicity in the importing of cocaine into the US.

There are certain things you aren't meant to say in public in America. The systematic state-sponsorship of torture by the US used to be a major no-no, but that went by the board this year (even though Seymour Hersh treated the CIA with undue kindness in Chain of Command: the Road to Abu Ghraib) . A prime no-no is to say that the US government has used assassination down the years as an instrument of national policy; also that the CIA's complicity with drug dealing criminal gangs stretches from the Afghanistan of today back to the year the Agency was founded in 1947. That last one is the line Webb stepped over.He paid for his presumption by undergoing one of the unfairest batterings in the history of the US press, as the chapter from Whiteout we ran on our site yesterday narrates.

Friday, December 10, Webb died in his Sacramento apartment by his own hand, or so it certainly seems. The notices of his passing in many newspapers were as nasty as ever. The Los Angeles Times took care to note that even after the Dark Alliance uproar Webb's career had been "troubled", offering as evidence the fact that " While working for another legislative committee in Sacramento, Webb wrote a report accusing the California Highway Patrol of unofficially condoning and even encouraging racial profiling in its drug interdiction program." The effrontery of the man! "Legislative officials released the report in 1999", the story piously continued, "but cautioned that it was based mainly on assumptions and anecdotes", no doubt meaning that Webb didn't have dozens of CHP officers stating under oath, on the record, that they were picking on blacks and Hispanics.

There were similar fountains of outrage in 1996 that the CIA hadn't been given enough space in Webb's series to solemnly swear that never a gram of cocaine had passed under its nose but that it had been seized and turned over to the DEA or US Customs.

In 1998 Jeffrey St Clair and I published our book, Whiteout, about the relationships between the CIA, drugs and the press since the Agency's founding. We also examined the Webb affair in detail. On a lesser scale, at lower volume it elicited the same sort of abuse Webb drew. It was a long book stuffed with well-documented facts, over which the critics lightly vaulted to charge us, as they did Webb, with "conspiracy-mongering" though, sometimes in the same sentence, of recycling "old news". Jeffrey and I came to the conclusion that what really affronted the critics, some of them nominally left-wing, was that our book portrayed Uncle Sam's true face. Not a "rogue" Agency but one always following the dictates of government, murdering, torturing, poisoning, drugging its own subjects, approving acts of monstrous cruelty, following methods devised and tested by Hitler's men, themselves transported to America after the Second World War.

Alexander Cockburn: The CIA's New Campus Spies

Alexander Cockburn: The CIA's New Campus Spies

PRISP participants must be American citizens who are enrolled fulltime in graduate degree programs. They need to "complete at least one summer internship at CIA or other agencies", and they must pass the same background investigations as other CIA employees. PRISP students receive financial stipends ranging up to $25,000 per year and they are required to participate in closed meetings with other PRISP scholars and individuals from their administering intelligence agency.

From his enquiries Dr Price has determined that less than 150 students a year are currently authorized to receive funding during the pilot phase as PRISP evaluates the program's initial outcomes. PRISP is apparently administered not just by the CIA, but also through a variety of individual intelligence agencies like the NSA, MID, or Naval Intelligence.

Secrecy is the root problem here, with the usual ill-based assumption that good intelligence operates best in clandestine conditions. Of course America needs good intelligence, but the most useful and important intelligence can largely be gathered openly without the sort of covert invasion of our campuses that PRISP silently brings.
.
Anyone doubting the superior merits of open intelligence has only to study the sorry saga of the non-existent WMDs whose imagined threat in vast stockpiles was ringingly affirmed by all the secret agencies, while being contested by analysts unencumbered by bogus covert intelligence estimates massaged by Iraqi disinformers and political placemen in Langley and elsewhere.

Dr Price says, "The CIA makes sure we won't know which classrooms PRSIP scholars attend, this being rationalized as a requirement for protecting the identities of intelligence personnel." But this secrecy shapes PRISP as it takes on the form of a covert operation in which PRISP students study chemistry, biology, sociology, psychology, anthropology and foreign languages without their fellow classmates, professors, advisors, department chairs or presumably even research subjects (knowing that they are working for the CIA, DIA, NSA or other intelligence agencies.

"In a decade and a half of Freedom of Information Act research," Dr Price continues, " I have read too many FBI reports of students detailing the 'deviant' political views of their professors." In one instance elicited by Dr Price from files he acquired under FOIA, the FBI arranged for a graduate student to guide topics of 'informal' conversation with anthropologist Gene Weltfish that were later the focus of an inquiry by Joseph McCarthy). Today, Dr Price maintains, "These PRSIP students are also secretly compiling dossiers on their professors and fellow students."


oops - lost this tale / tant pis

Tipping in America

Alexander Cockburn: Tipping in America

Hovering somewhere between charity and a bribe, the tip is one of our most polymorphous social transactions. At its most crude it can be a loutish expression of authority and disdain. At its purest it can approach a statement of love. At one end of the scale we had the foul decorum of those old lunch places where the men thought it their right to pat the waitresses on the backside. If a waitress objected to these caresses the tip would be thrown into the dirty plate.

At the other end we have the elevated snobbism of Marcel Proust, for whom the tip was a profound and complex form of social expression. 'When he left,' writes Proust's biographer George Painter of one meal in the Paris Ritz, 'his pockets were empty, and all but one of the staff had been fantastically tipped. "Would you be so kind as to lend me fifty francs," he asked the doorman, who produced a wallet of banknotes with alacrity. "No, please keep it - it was for you"; and Proust repaid the debt with interest the next evening.' Of course he also used tipping for the coarser purpose of inducing certain waiters to partake in those sessions of mutual masturbation which was apparently as far as Proust proceeded in his erotic encounters.

Hanns Sachs who grew up in Vienna at the same time as his 'master and friend' Sigmund Freud wrote a memoir of life in that city in the late nineteenth century in which he devoted some testy pages to the growing complexities of trinkgeld, complexities which he took to be evidence of the decadence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Everybody had their hand out for prescribed portions of trinkgeld - the coachman, the doorman, the hatcheck girl, the waiter, the wine waiter, the headwaiter, the maitre d'hotel:

"Every door which you had to pass was opened for you by someone who demanded a tip; you could not get into the house you lived in after 10 p.m. nor seat yourself in the car in which you wanted to ride without giving a tip. Karl Kraus, Vienna's witty satirist, said the first thing a Viennese would see on the day of Resurrection would be the outstretched hand of the man who opened the door of his coffin."

Doctor Sachs' indignant portrait is clearly reminiscent of today's taxi driver, doorman, hatcheck lady, waiter, and so forth, all of whom, from Manhattan to San Francisco and from Chicago to Corpus Christi expect and usually receive similar trinkgeld. Is America therefore in decline? Visitors to the young republic found to their surprise that coachmen and waiters refused their tips. An organization called the Anti-tipping Society of America, founded in 1905, attracted some hundred thousand members, most of them traveling salesmen. But anti-tipping laws were declared unconstitutional in the same year that Congress passed the Volstead Act, and Americans entered the twenties buying bootleg liquor and tipping big.

Tipping is even bigger money now, with well o

$5 Who Beat Hitler?

Alexander Cockburn: Who Beat Hitler?

Weekend Edition
May 7 / 8, 2005
CounterPunch Diary
Who Beat Hitler?; Linings to Blair's Victory; I Choose Laura (Over HRC); the End of 666?; Hail Ike Turner (and Audrey); More on Big Woody; Sexual Entrapment and the Mayor of Spokane

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Monday, May 9, brings us the sixtieth anniversary of the defeat of Nazism in Europe. I remember the first VE Day in 1945, sitting on my father's shoulders on the side of some London street, watching the tanks rumble by and a soldier in a tin hat popping up and down in the hatch.

Each time May 9 rolls around Americans have to be reminded who did most of the fighting and who bore most of the losses. In 1944 the Allied forces commanded by Eisenhower faced 53 German divisions in western Europe. The Red Army had to deal with 180 German divisions in the east. The US lost about 400,000 in its armed forces, Britain, 260,000. Historians have been revising upwards Soviet military deaths, to a level as high as 14 million and beyond, with estimates of civilian casualties ranging from 7 to 20 million.

You can say ­ and many do ­ that many among these millions died because Stalin's generals were willing to sacrifice division upon divisions in order to obey the schedules demanded by a psychotic tyrant. True no doubt, but that doesn't alter the sacrifice or the immensity of the numbers lost on the eastern front in the defeat of fascism, or the fact that it was the Soviet Union that played the prime role in defeating Hitler.

Not for the first time, the White House's contribution to these commemorations of victory over Hitler has been to indulge in seamy political antics. On his way to a D-Day memorial in 1988 Reagan stopped off to salute the dead at Bitburg, including members of Hitler's SS. Bush Jr is playing to the Baltic and Georgian galleries.

Roberta Manning, professor of history at Boston College, has a good comment on these antics:

"For Russians, Belorussians, Ukrainians and many Caucasians and Central Asians, like the Jews, World War II was a Holocaust, given the magnitude of the sheer human sacrifice now estimated to range for the former USSR anywhere from 28-35 million war dead. If Israel can mourn the loss of six million of people without having anyone throwing the ongoing plight of the Palestinians in their face, surely Russia and the Soviet successor states have the right to do the same.

"There is no Putin problem. The problem is Bush, whose advisors finally realized that it is easier to divide the EU over anti-Russianism than over Iraq. Dividing the EU over Russia is essential to the global strategy of the Republican Party's increasingly powerful and ever more totalitarian Neo-Conservative-Born-Again Ideologues who openly espouse US-Evangelical domination of the world and its resources in the 21st Century. A unified EU that develops close ties to a democratic Russia would prove a potent obstacle to these plans. The real problem of the world today is to manage America's decline while dealing with an ideologically driven US leadership that lives in a world of fantasy and cannot deal with the rise of China and India much less a real European Union no longer under its political control. We should remember that United States never once criticized Yeltsin's dictatorship."

616 =The Mark of the Beast

Alexander Cockburn: Who Beat Hitler?

The Mark of the Beast

The Reagans need not have changed their street address. It turns out the mark of Antichrist is not 666 but 616. From Great Beast to Area Code, (though this doesn't explain why the 68 Dodge Dart I once owned with a California tag of 666 nearly killed me several times before it passed into the hands of Victor of San Leandro).

Using new photographic techniques, a know-it-all team of classicists has been reviewing the manuscripts chucked onto various rubbish dumps by the citizens of Oxyrhynchus, particularly a new fragment from the Book of Revelation, written in ancient Greek and dating from the late third century.

Professor David Parker, Professor of New Testament Textual Criticism and Paleography at the University of Birmingham, told The Independent that 616 is the correct number, a coded reference to the Emperor Caligula, an emperor the early Christians held in low esteem.

If you're wondering 616 is an area code in south west Michigan, a region replete with militia groups who are probably wondering whether this is all a plot by the Pentagon. Pending further developments, CounterPunch will stay with 666, a number freighted with tradition.

The Wild Palms of Etowah

Joe Bageant: The Wild Palms of Etowah

As to the videos, Bob has made an intense study of Oliver Stone's 1990 ABC TV miniseries, Wild Palms, which he deems prophetic. Set in 2006, Wild Palms begins, with a nightmare, a rhinoceros in an empty swimming pool, symbolizing "the beast in place of the baptism," Bob asserts. "The hero runs inside to the screams of his children where, if you look closely, a shadow forms a distinct cross on their bedroom door from which hideous screams emerge. It is about media manipulation, especially through television. Corporations are running wild and their goon squads are beating the uncooperative; torture is discussed and executed by children. There has been a 'synthetic terrorist attack' which gave the police 'broad new powers.' I think it is damned weird that Wild Palms was so correct right down to the specific year. All cultures have their own prophets that are every bit as important as those in the Bible, but the prophet of course is never recognized in his own time."

Agonizing divinity

The first time I experienced a human window into "something other" was in 1972 with hipster holy man Stephen Gaskin. At one point it was very clear that he was experiencing samadhi, the nature of which could be glimpsed. Another time was the birth of my children, that moment when the infant opens its eyes briefly and gives you that unearthly glance of recognition, and the whole room is filled with a funky penetrating electricity that literally smells like the flesh being made holy as the kid's eyes give off a flash that says, "Yes we know each other and always will across space and eternity."

.../...

Deepak Chopra, get a job!

East and West, for the most part religion is synonymous with fraud, with the Pope, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and our president's phony religious values being the icing on the Christian cake of our times. Bob D---- sees the same things in the low-fat spiritual icons of the left and the New Agers:

How has Deepak Chopra managed to express such Republican conservative values with no criticism whatsoever from the left? Chopra is the ultimate example of the wolf in sheep's clothing, a denizen of Oprah, and a spiritual guru for the superficial, self-serving rich in a miserable, dying world. Listen to him carefully. It's the Benny Hinn/Robert Tilton/Creflo Dollar "gospel of prosperity". (If you're poor, you're ungodly, and you got what you deserve. God prospers his people.) Chopra states overtly that material success is directly related to spiritual attainment. Oh, really? It would be news to Christ and Buddha.

I will concede the poor are spiritually bankrupt, but no more so than the rich. No more so than the many monasteries and religious communities I have visited. IT'S ALL OF US (on the other hand, the left seems to think the poor are all saints by virtue of their poverty. And I DO think the poor have a more valid excuse for their crimes.) Then Chopra drives in the stake, decrying "throwing money at social problems" and the says, "where you see poverty it is the expression of a deeper impoverishment - the soul, the spirit screaming for nourishment". Conspicuous by its absence from Chopra's words is any mention of integrity, ethics, morals, self-sacrifice, commitment, and renunciation. The message, essentially, is,"FUCK YOU! GET A JOB!" Another rhetorical point scored for General Motors and Phillips Petroleum. God comes home to the Wall Street Journal. But this IS America, where everybody is a businessman and Chopra makes his pitch with that sweet, smiling, gentle face reminiscent of Ted Bundy. Chopra's place is in Beverly Hills telling rich people what they want to hear --- for money. And will Chopra read this, sneak in while I'm asleep and beat me to death with $150 ayurvedic bars of soap in one of his Versace silk stockings?

A lamp unto the left

And to the forces on the left trying to combat all this I say: The realization IS compassion." "Consciousness" and "heart" arise together. They are one thing. The compassionate try to help even their most despicable brothers. That's why it is written: "Without love, I am nothing. Yet the left throws it all away. Though the left is so often correct in principle, it becomes merely the other side of that one counterfeit coin we have been offered. True spirituality is the answer. Therefore, I say to the left, "don't throw religion away; find out what it's about". And intelligent smug people on the left will answer, "There is no God!" Yet that statement is unperceptive, pointless and offensive.

Be compassionate, but be careful. I saw a fighter pilot on the 700 Club who described what sounded like an homoerotic orgasm experienced while shooting down some enemy planes killing the pilots. He interpreted the rush of killing them as "finding God". God had visited him there in the cockpit. But he and Danuta talked glowingly about it. We have to be careful around these people. Very careful.

Anyhooooo It is raining tonight and right now I am finishing off my liver with orange soda and vodka. The wind is blowing so hard there'll be no roof left tomorrow. And to that I offer a hearty, "GOOD FUCKING RIDDANCE!" Last night I was getting together my mother's "next-day's" medicine --- her prescriptions and other pills. But I forgot what I was doing, drew a glass of water and took them myself. HA! THERE'S NO HOPE! I have a case of beer and a pizza, so LOOK OUT, MOMMA!

And so this is all very surprising to me --- in fact, shocking --- what you are doing. Respecting me like this. I'm a little scared you'll find out who and what I really am. Nobody has ever taken me seriously. All my words are a humble attempt to point at the moon. Like the Buddha said, "my teaching is a finger pointing to the moon, but all of you are looking at my finger." Of course, the finger pointing to the moon is analogous to "trimming one's beard" the teaching, the teacher, the ritual, the dogma, the practice, language, even the concept of "god" all of that is also the beard which "grows out" of the face and obscures it. Trim it daily.

Now I ask you this: What do you call the opposite of someone who is out of his mind? A poet? A divine monster? We do not much acknowledge horror in this country, except the petty stage-managed kind for which we have developed such an appetite, such as Terri Schiavo's morbid gurgling, etc. Yet none of it comes close to the type of horror and grandeur that's lacking in our life, the kind from which we flee, such as our own graves or the sight of the things we do to sentient others so long as they are poor, voiceless, out of sight, or perhaps have four legs. And even then, the only way we can keep up the ghastly charade is by deeming the saints amid us as madmen, and anointing the truly depraved among us kings, avoiding at all costs our divine monsters.

Joe Bageant is a writer and magazine editor living in Winchester, Virginia. He may be contacted at bageantjb@netscape.net. Copyright 2005 by Joe Bageant.

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March 31, 2005
In Praise of Holy Madness
The Wild Palms of Etowah

By JOE BAGEANT

One mark of our soulless New American Century is the lack of respect for saintly madmen. By that I mean holy seers of the Blakean-Coleridge stripe that could be found on America's streets as recently as the hippy era. The kind of crazy adept and enlightened iconoclasts honored by Allen Ginsberg and the beats, holy foolishness in the tradition of Saint Simeon with the dead dog tied to his waist and throwing nuts at the congregation, or Tibetan lama myonpas and India's avadhutas. Perhaps such holy madmen are still out there among the homeless and the crack whores. Maybe there are legions of Zen alcoholics and the like, and maybe we have lost the ability to see them in this season of imperial hubris, consumer fatigue and existential numbness. But I don't think so. I know crazy wisdom and saintly madness in men's eyes when I see it, and I am not seeing it very often in America these days. It has been outlawed by the Republicans and soundly condemned as Devil's work by the Christian Right.

Of course if the dear reader is one who believes science defines all reality and that men possess no spiritual aspect, then it might be best to turn off the computer right now and go out for a beer or click on another story, because I am of the opposite disposition. So much so in fact that I am convinced things like grace really exist and that mankind is so murderously full of shit because it cannot apply itself to higher laws, laws which must be called spiritual for lack of a better term.

Having cleared the air between you and me, (assuming you're still reading) let me tell you about a rare saintly madman I laid eyes and heart upon recently. He is presently eating very expensive pies and watching television with his dogs in his own personal hell out in Etowah, Tennessee, the former "Rubberized Hair Capitol of the World."

At home in hell

For the past two days Bob D---- has lain stupefied in his chlordane insecticide soaked house in Etowah, alternating between near coma and electrifying terror of opening his mail or answering the phone. Chlordane poisoning has destroyed his nervous system, rendered him freakish and weird, and in his own words "with an agonized countenance, a bony 'horn' growing out of the middle of my forehead, strange disoriented behavior, and fat. I didn't get old. I got killed." And on it goes... "I took my dogs to the vet last week where 'substance abuse' on my part was suspected," he tells me. "Once I got locked out of my car, and the police took me in for drug testing. I'm used to the horror of it all. I noticed in one of you columns that you were struggling to remain objective after watching a video beheading. That's my life. Early on, I got this "view of things." I keep asking myself, "Why would I, of all people, know these things?" I have alienated all my friends and relatives. My closest acquaintances know NOTHING about me. And the question lingers always: "Why would I, of all people, know these things? Am I just crazy?"

Home for Bob D---- is a sprawling old Victorian ruin on an entire city block, complete with fountains and lighted gardens, with more white fence than the state of Kentucky, covered parking for 10 cars and paved parking for another 20. This is the materialist nightmare of his late father who was raised in a boxcar and obsessed with the American Dream. He advised his wife, in the event of his death, to move immediately "or be ruined financially." The old man died twenty years ago and his admonishment has become prophecy. The place is a money trap beyond anything yet known, and as Bob carries pills to his 90-plus-year-old mother between his own attacks of chlordane poisoning, she loudly refuses to move, despite the roofs and the floors and the ongoing disasters. Now everything's gone but her small pension and health insurance. The roof is shot, furniture, rare books and carpets ruined by rain long ago. So Bob D---- spends his days amidst buckets and pans full of water watching videos and eating expensive Edwards pies:

Joe, as you probably know, a Christian company cooks those Edwards pies, and they are---- to my taste --- decadent. Next to a really good orgasm (the once-in-five-years kind), the Turtle Pie, or Key Lime or Lemon ... well, it's not something that should be discussed in decent company. One of Edwards' likeable things, in addition to the pies, is what they call "personality pans". There's a Bible verse embossed in the aluminum under the pie. Surprise! "God is love" "All good things come to him who waits" "Do unto others..." Nothing heavy, just fun wholesome Bible verses. Anyway, I was eating my pie, eagerly anticipating the happy moment when the Bible verse would be revealed. As I pushed aside the last lump of gooey lime and lard, there it was, one of those "jaw on the floor moments" (still scraping)... "He who will not work, let him not eat!"

STARVE THE MOTHERFUCKER!

Implicit in this is everything I despise, the assumption that the poor are worthless scum and "won't work", blah. It's about money, taxes... It's about corporations. And it's embossed onto the bottom of a $10 pie (as opposed to a $2 pie, if you get my point) The spirit of the moment, after eating a pie with enough calories to restore all the starving children in Calcutta, was another right-wing "FUCK YOU" in the name of the Lord. IT'S THOSE FUCKING POOR PEOPLE, GOD DAMMIT.

#4 Death, Depression and Prozac [bush -ken lay =Lily board...]

Alexander Cockburn: Death, Depression and Prozac

By now the Lilly defense formula is pretty standardized:self-righteous handouts about the company's costly research and rigorous screening, crowned by the imprimatur of that watchdog for the public interest, the FDA. And of course there's the bogus comfort of numbers; if Lilly's pill factory had a big sign like MacDonald's, it could boast Prozac: Billions Served.

Each burst in the sewage pipe brings a new challenge to Lilly's sales force, which has had some heavy hitters down the years, including George Herbert Walker Bush (onetime member of the Lilly board of directors); former Enron CEO Ken Lay (onetime member of the board); George W. Bush's former director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mitch Daniels (a former senior vice president); George W. Bush's Homeland Security Advisory Council member Sidney Taurel (a Lilly CEO); or the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (a recipient of Lilly funding).

At the turn of this year there was a five-alarm incident when the British Medical Journal went back to the 1994 Wesbecker suit against Lilly, reminding the world that the company had been involved in some shifty footwork involving a back-door payoff to the plaintiffs in a deal that successfully excluded from Judge John Potter's courtroom the regulatory case history of Oraflex, a highly compromised Lilly product, which displayed the company's supposed disclosures to the FDA in an unpleasing light.

Lilly rose to the challenge, successfully persuading gullible journalists that the real story concerned a lonely freelancer writing for BMJ and not a powerful pharmaceutical company with a huge advertising budget. The press dutifully shifted its focus from Lilly's outrageous efforts to suppress evidence to the narrow question of whether a piece of evidence had really been in the public record in the years since 1997, when Judge Potter changed his verdict to "dismissed as settled with prejudice," very far from the victory Lilly had been claiming.

That's the trouble with time, as Paul Krassner joked about Waldheimer's Disease, which is when you get old and forget you were a Nazi. But it's never too late to review the origins of the Depression Industry in the late 1980s, and the saga of what happened after three Lilly researchers concocted a potion in the mid-1970s they christened fluoxetine hydrochloride, later known to the world as Prozac.

Long years of rigorous testing? When Fred Gardner and I investigated the selling of depression and Prozac in the mid-1990s, we found that clinical trials excluded suicidal patients, children and the elderlyoalthough once FDA approval was granted, the drug could be prescribed for anyone. According to Dr. Peter Breggin, the well-known psychiatrist who analyzed the FDA's approval of Prozac, it was based, ultimately, on three studies indicating that fluoxetine relieved some symptoms of depression more effectively than a placebo, and in the face of nine studies indicating no positive effect. Only sixty- three patients were on fluoxetine (fluoexetine hydrochloride was branded as Prozac in the mid 70s) for a period of more than two years. By 1988 the National Institute of Mental Health had not only put the government stamp of approval on corporate-funded depression research but had created a mechanism whereby government money and personnel could be employed to stimulate demand for corporate products.

Psychiatrists--a breed whose adepts, so stated a study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry in 1980, commit suicide at twice the national rate--have been central to the entire enterprise. The process linking their sorcery to the corporate bottom line has a robust simplicity to it. As Prozac came off Lilly's research bench and headed for the mass production line psychiatrists labored to formulate a multitude of bogus pathologies to be installed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, whose chief editor in the 1980s was Robert Spitzer MD, an orgone box veteran and adept copywriter skilled at minting new ailments for late twentieth-century America and sanctioning treatment, medication, state funding for the requisite pills (no expensive consultative therapy) and reimbursement by insurance companies.

When detailed research showed likely linkage of Prozac to violent acts. Lilly-liveried psychiatrists were there to douse the flames of doubt. In 1991 the FDA's Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee met to decide whether Prozac should carry a warning label about links to suicide. Five out of the ten panel members (eight of whom were shrinks) had active financial interests in the drugs the committee was investigating, and all voted against requiring a warning, their obvious conflicts duly sanitized by the toothless FDA. Other shrinks in the hire of the drug companies urged ever wider application of Prozac to remedy social angst, inclcluding plans for compulsory Prozac-dosing of youngsters.

In 2000, when hundreds of farmers in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh were committing suicide because of neoliberal policies that had destroyed their livelihoods, the state government announced it was sending out a team of shrinks to determine why the farmers were depressed. The implication was that these people were mentally unstable. But in India credulity about the causes of depression is not so far advanced. The plan provoked a storm of ridicule, and in the elections that followed the Andhra Pradesh government, darling of Western neoliberals, was duly trounced.

No such happy chance in the United States, where government is in the pay of drug companies and prescriptions for antidepressants have long since taken over from political manifestos that would cure depression by collective social action. How they must have cheered at Eli Lilly when the Senate wiped out Chapter 7 of the bankruptcy statutes, fostering family violence, heightened crime and a vast new potential market for Prozac and kindred potions at the stroke of a pen.

(A shorter version of this column originally ran in the issue of The Nation that went to press on Wednesday of this week.)

top]]
April 2 / 3, 2005
But the Pills Your Mother Gives You...
Death, Depression and Prozac

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

New Dehli, India.

Jeff Weise, teen slayer of ten, including himself, at the Red Lake Indian reservation in northern Minnesota, was on Prozac, prescribed by some doc. How did the consultation go? "Here Jeff, take these, they may help you get over life's little problems, like the fact that when you were 8 your dad committed suicide and when you were 10 your cousin was killed in a car wreck that left your mom with partial paralysis and an injured brain. And let's face it, Jeff, most likely you'll never get off the res. You're here for the rest of your life." Cut to a shot of the doc holding up a Prozac bottle, like the kindly fellow in the white coat and mirrored headband in 1950s Lucky Strike ads, telling us that Luckies were a fine way to soothe a raspy throat.

The minute the high command at Eli Lilly, manufacturer of Prozac, saw those news stories about Weise you can bet they went into crisis mode, and only began to relax when Weise's websurfs of neo-Nazi sites took over the headlines. Hitler trumps Prozac every time, particularly if it's an Injun teen ranting about racial purity. How many times, amid the carnage of such homicidal sprees, do investigators find a prescription for antidepressants at the murder scene? Luvox at Columbine, Prozac at Louisville, Kentucky, where Joseph Wesbecker killed nine, including himself. You'll find many such stories in the past fifteen years.

xx

#2 You Do Love God, Right?

City Pages - You Do Love God, Right?

jj
But back to the poll. There are a handful of numbers in it that give away the game where public professions of faith are concerned. First, consider that 69 percent of Minnesotans affirmed God to be very important in the conduct of their lives and 46 percent said they frequently use religious principles to solve problems; then consider that, to any serious religious person, these two questions are essentially the same question stated in different terms. So why did half again more respondents say yes to the first version of the query? Because it mentioned God, and--as a matter of cultural manners, first and foremost--Americans aren't supposed to say no to God, openly anyway. (Remember that we are "one nation under God" according to the Pledge of Allegiance, even though He was only added to our political catechism and our paper money in the 1950s.)


That 46 percent figure does, however, come close to the 48 percent who identify themselves to the Strib as "intense, practicing believers." So do we have a reliable bit of data at last? No. It isn't hard to believe that roughly half the populace considers itself attached in some fashion (usually upbringing) to one denomination or another, but try applying the most mundane commonsense measure to that number. Minnesota religionists are overwhelmingly Christian, and the majority of Christian services are on Sundays. If nearly half the state were packing off to church on that day, we would routinely see Sabbath traffic jams on streets and secondary roads to rival what we see on rush hour freeways. Yet apart from the entrances to a few suburban mega-churches, these traffic problems don't materialize--because 40-plus percent of the population does not materialize on Sunday mornings, either.

But the Strib's poll includes a built-in retort to this reasoning, averring that 83 percent of the state's populace believes you can be a good Christian without going to church. Here is the Great Loophole question, the one that lets respondents have their cake and eat it too--and thus, probably also the one that elicited the most honest answers. It bespeaks a tolerance that is diametrically at odds with the position of W Bush's supposedly vast army of fundamentalist Christian soldiers.

Apparent contradictions such as these arise regularly in religion polls. They ought to spur questions about the Christian right's actual size and fervor, but somehow it never happens. The fundamentalist electoral army is both a potent myth and a useful one. It isn't tough to see why a cursory look at the political landscape makes them seem so formidable. For about 20 years now, the Christian right has done an extraordinary job of mobilizing its forces to fight localized battles over abortion and education and gay rights. Their successes give the impression that their numbers are greater than anyone has yet shown them to be. Their premier national organization, the Christian Coalition, has about 2 million members. By comparison, the AARP has 35 million. And even as membership in labor unions continues to decline, the AFL-CIO stands at 13 million.

Such figures are seldom cited, though, because the fundamentalist masses are a very useful foil for selling reactionary and otherwise unpopular policies and, more vitally, distracting the public from the real dollars-and-cents business of governance. This is the religious right's true role in the American political economy; as a sheer numeric force in elections, their reach is invariably overstated. None of this is meant to deny that George Bush is quite popular with the people who identify themselves as most religious (and what the Star Tribune notes of Minnesota is probably true in most places: They tend to be older, and women). But it's a mistake to suppose that most are dogmatic about it, I think.

One reason the "religious right" is so misconstrued and overestimated lies in the rural roots of most fundamentalist movements. The fire-breathing hordes are understood to be Out There Somewhere in the sticks, and most politicos and pundits know as much about the courtship rituals of cannibal tribes in the South Sea islands as they do about rural America. Great whopping mystifications naturally ensue. One is that "they" are an ignorant, monolithic lot that marches in lockstep to whoever has his or her hands most tightly round Jesus' neck. In fact, rural folk are no more ignorant than the average American (which is to say, profoundly) and they are not monolithic about their religion or much of anything else.

It so happens that in the hinterlands, where my one and only birth to date occurred, church is still a locus of social life for a much larger share of the populace than in cities. And many of those churchgoers are indeed Bush supporters. They are as susceptible to flattery as anyone, and Bush has surely flattered them. But this doesn't mean they all see life wholly or even mainly through the lens of religious strictures, or that they can only be swayed by a candidate who spends even more quality time with Jesus than George W. Some of them follow politics, read papers, go days at a time without pondering the Rapture; a few even speak a smattering of proper English.

Poor God-impaired Howard Dean is certainly right that you can't run for president without genuflecting to the Almighty, but the mere gesture is all that most Americans require. It will be left to the Republicans and the pundit-provocateurs of our de facto right-wing broadcast media to savage him and all the other infidels for their transgressions, and you can be sure they will. God bless America.
About Steve Perry

top==>
Piety, politics, and polls about religion
You Do Love God, Right?

Image by Ryan Greis

by Steve Perry
January 14, 2004

There are two subjects on which no half-bright person should ever take an opinion poll seriously. And of the two, I suspect people these days are quite a lot more honest about sex than they are about religion. No other subject is freighted with so much doubt, ambivalence--and, this being a Christian nation, fear--on the one hand, and on the other so much cultural coercion to say the right thing. In front of God and Gallup, Americans whose lives bear no practical connection to any religious institution or creed tend to mark themselves down as believers. What's more, the age of Bush and permanent wartime has cranked up the pressure toward collective piety to levels surpassing even the 1950s, when God was dragooned into serving on the front lines of the Cold War.

So if anything, it's a little surprising that only 78 percent of Minnesotans proclaimed themselves believers in God in last month's Star Tribune poll. In the relatively more tranquil days of 1987, the number was 84 percent. There's no point in puzzling over the discrepancy, given how little polls like this have to tell us about the real makeup of American religionists. But that's not the same as saying perceptions like these don't matter. As the election cycle approaches, the notion that America harbors a vast silent horde of dour religious conservatives is taken for granted by political strategists, candidates, reporters, and pundits. And numbers like these only seem to highlight the supremacy of religion (even though the Strib, it should be said, did not put much political spin on its results).
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Even Howard Dean, who proclaimed just a few months ago that religion had no place in politics, has started babbling about his relationship with Christ. But he may have spoiled the gig by telling a reporter that his favorite New Testament story was that of Job. Oops. I spent my formative churchgoing years sitting in the back row composing bawdy lyrics to all the popular hymns with Bobby Staley, and I knew the Book of Job was not in the New Testament. Dean would do better to point out that W's favorite book of the New Testament appears to be Revelation. He then could offer himself as the candidate of those Americans and those Christians who do not care to go swimming in a lake of fire anytime soon.

#5 Oil and Iraq: Some Truth at Last

Alexander Cockburn: Bush, Oil and Iraq: Some Truth at Last

January 14, 2004
The O'Neill / Suskind Bombshells
Bush, Oil & Iraq: Some Truth at Last

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Here we have former US Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill disclosing that George Bush came into office planning to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and MSNBC polls its audience with the question, Did O'Neill Betray Bush?

Is that really the big question? The White House had a sharper nose for the real meat of Leslie Stahl's 60 Minutes interview with O'Neill and Ron Suskind, the reporter who based much of his expose of the Bush White House, The Price of Loyalty, on 19,000 government documents O'Neill provided him.

What bothers the White House is one particular National Security Council document shown in the 60 Minutes interview, clearly drafted in the early weeks of the new administration, which showed plans for the post-invasion dispersal of Iraq's oil assets among the world's great powers, starting with the major oil companies.

For the brief moment it was on the tv screen one could see that this bit of paper, stamped Secret, was undoubtedly one of the most explosive documents in the history of imperial conspiracy. Here, dead center in the camera's lense, was the refutation of every single rationalization for the attack on Iraq ever offered by George W. Bush and his co-conspirators, including Tony Blair

That NSC document told 60 Minutes' vast audience the attack on Iraq was not about national security in the wake of 9/ll. It was not about weapons of mass destruction. It was not about Saddam Hussein's possible ties to Osama bin Laden. It was about stealing Iraq's oil, same way the British stole it three quarter of a century earlier. The major oil companies drew up the map, handed it to their man George, helped him (through such trusties as James Baker) steal the 2000 election and then told him to get on with the attack.

O'Neill says that the Treasury Department's lawyers okayed release of the document to him. The White House, which took 78 days to launch an investigation into the outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA officer, clearly regards the disclosure of what Big Oil wanted as truly reprehensible, as opposed to endangering the life of Ms Plame. It's going after O'Neill for this supposed security breach.

Forget about O'Neill "betraying" Bush. How about Bush lying to the American people? It's obvious from that document that Bush, on the campaign trail in 2000, was as intent on regime change in Iraq as was Clinton in his second term and as Gore was publicly declaring himself to be.

Here's Bush in debate with Gore, October 3, 2000:

"If we don't stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we're going to have a serious problem coming down the road. I'm going
to prevent that."

The second quote is from a joint press conference with Tony Blair on January 31, 2003. Bush rationalizes:

"Actually, prior to September 11, we were discussing smart sanctions. We were trying to fashion a sanction regime that would make it more likely to be able to contain somebody like Saddam Hussein. After September 11, the doctrine of containment just doesn't hold any water. The strategic vision of our country shifted dramatically because we now recognize that oceans no longer protect us, that we're vulnerable to attack. And the worst form of attack could come from somebody acquiring weapons of mass destruction and using them on the American people. I now realize the stakes. I realize the world has changed. My most important obligation is to protect the American people from further harm, and I will do that."

In his cabinet meetings before 9/11 Bush may, in O'Neill's words, have been like a blind man in a room full of deaf people. But, as O'Neill also says, in those early strategy meetings Bush did say the plan from the start was to attack Iraq, using any pretext. Bush's language about "smart sanctions" from the press conference at the start of last year was as brazen and far more momentous a lie as any of those that earned Bill Clinton the Republicans' impeachment charges.

Weekend Edition Features for January 10 / 11, 2004

Alexander Cockburn
Bush as Hitler? Let's Be Fair

Susan Davis
Dangerous Books

Diane Christian
On Lying and Colin Powell

Lisa Viscidi
Exhumations: Unearthing Guatemala's Macabre Past

Daniel Estulin
Destroying History in Iraq

Saul Landau
Homeland Anxiety

Elaine Cassel
Who's Winning the War on Civil Liberties?

Bruce Jackson
Making the Shit List

Christopher Brauchli
Baptizing Hitler's Ghost

Francis A. Boyle
The Deep Scars of War

Lee Ballinger
Cold Sweat: Sweatshops and the Music Industry

Patrick W. Gavin
Hillary's Slur: Mrs. Lott?

Ramzy Baroud
What Invaders Have in Common

Michael Schwartz
Inside the California Grocery Strike

Gary Johnson
An Interview with Former Heavyweight Champ Greg Page

Dave Zirin
An Interview with Marvin Miller on Unions and Baseball

Mark Hand
A Review of Resistance: My Life for Lebanon

Poets' Basement
Thomas, Daley, Curtis, Guthrie and Albert

behind bedroom doors

Alexander Cockburn: The CIA's New Campus Spies

At least one CounterPuncher didn't care for another paragraph in that same diary of mine, which went as follows:

In his wonderful The Duchess of Windsor (recently reissued with sensational new material along with his equally gripping Howard Hughes) my friend Charles Higham quotes the Duke's equerry, Sir Dudley Forwood, who used to peer through the bedroom keyhole, as saying of saying of Windsor that "It is doubtful whether he and Wallis ever actually had sexual intercourse in the normal sense of the word. However, she did manage to give him relief. He had always been a repressed foot fetishist, and she discovered this and indulged the perversity completely. They also, at his request, became involved in elaborate erotic games. These included nanny-child scenes: he wore diapers, she was the master."

Jason Rhodes wrote:

a) people who look through keyholes and report on bedroom activity are such human scum that they are ipso facto untrustworthy, and have no place in any account of anything

b) what goes on between consenting adults behind closed doors is private, even among the worst people. criticize what they do on a social level ­ don't try to shame them, even post humously, with what they did with their genitals.

i'm taking it too seriously. i don't realize that these all these people are just the flabby, pathetic, mind-addled so-called british royalty. they deserve any and all vulgarities we commoners can throw at them. etc. etc.

but it doesn't wash. people who look and tell, in hopes to shame, are far more effective sexual police than any alabama sodomy law. i hate it, and the implication that we all should perhaps stop and make sure that our own sex somehow measures up to a new standard of "counterpunch" normal. what's wrong with feet, diapers and nanny the bedroom? do we all have to like sex like you?

peace,

and power to the people

--jason rhodes
seoul, korea

/////////////////

been dumped. "Those leaflets", complained Amneh as he held up one such picture, "cost us more than a bomb. A bomb - somebody just takes it and leaves it. Leaflets need two people: one to take photographs and the other to hand out the leaflets."

Despite such precautions, Amneh described Nuri as continually fretting that "the Americans will cut off financial aid to us."

Whether or not Nuri's funding was curtailed, the burden of the bomber's complaint concerned the way his superior continually short-changed him on pay and expenses. "We blew up a car and we were supposed to get $2,000 but Adnan gave us $1,000," he grumbled at one point, going on to gripe that at a supply dump meant to contain two tons of explosives he had been given only 100 lbs, the dump's custodian claiming that the rest had been stolen. He had not been able to buy a car or pay the dozen men on his team. On one occasion Nuri had paid him with dollars that turned out to be forged. Despite his position as a sub-contractor for the richest intelligence agency in the world, he "had to buy clocks in the soukh (market) and turn them into timers."

Tired of playing catch-up with reality through papers like the New York Times? If you want to see what really good real-time reporting can be like, best order, right now, Imperial Crusades, by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair. It's about the selling of the wars on Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, and it's hot off the presses, an amazing journal of imperial propaganda, accurately dissected by CounterPunch on a week by week basis. Don't wait, order one up from this site now, or call 1-800-840-3683. Our business staff is standing by.

Alexander Cockburn: Reagan in Truth and Fiction

Alexander Cockburn: Reagan in Truth and Fiction

have boundless faith in the American people, but it is startling to see the lines of people sweating under a hot sun waiting to see Reagan's casket. How could any of them take the dreadful old faker seriously? The nearest thing to it I can think of is the hysteria over Princess Di. In its way , the "outpouring" reminds me of what, nearly 20 years ago, I termed "news spasms", expertly fuelled by the imagineers in the Reagan White House. These spasms, Nuremberg rallies really, were totalitarian in structure and intent, obsessively monopolistic of newsprint and the airwaves, forcing a "national mood" of consensus, with Reagan (in this reprise, his casket) as master of ceremonies. Particularly memorable spasm events included the downing of KAL 007, the destruction of the US Marine barracks outside Beirut, the Achille Lauro hijackings and the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle of January 28, 1986,, which disaster prompted one of the peak kitsch moments in a presidency that was kitsch from start to finish. Reagan ended his address to the nation thus: "We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye and 'slipped the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God'."

In fact it was the White House that had doomed Christa McAuliffe and her companions to be burned alive in the plummeting Challenger. The news event required the Challenger to go into orbit and be flying over Congress while Reagan was delivering his state of the union address. He was to tilt his head upward and, presumably gazing through the long-distance half of his spectacles, send a presidential greeting to the astronauts. But this schedule required an early morning launch from chill January Canaveral. Servile NASA officials ordered the Challenger aloft, with the frozen O-ring fatally compromised.

Nixon thought Reagan was "strange" and, so he told the secret tape recorder in the Oval Office in 1972, "just an uncomfortable man to be around." The late President certainly was a very weird human being, not at all like the fellow being hailed this week as the man who gave America back its sense of confidence and destiny after the Carter years.

The ceremonial schedule for Reagan's corpse the week after his death had it lying "in repose" for several days. What else was it supposed to be doing? Anyway, Reagan always stuck to his script, and even if he had come to in the presidential library in Simi Valley, he would have stayed with his allotted role and lain doggo.

Reagan was "in repose" much of his second term, his day easing forward
.../...


As Reagan shambled toward the stairway of Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base on Inauguration Day, 1989, Bryant Gumbel mused to Tom Brokaw that this seemed to him "quite remarkable." It turned out that Gumbel was mightily impressed that the 78-year-old Reagan had not sought to stave off retirement by mounting a coup d'état. All around the world, Gumbel said, leaders "cling to power." James Baker, the man who, with Paul Volcker, ran the world for Reagan, probably could have done it. The press would have gone along. As it was, Baker just bided his time for twelve years.

Tom Gorman: the Hitchens Doctrine

Tom Gorman: the Hitchens Doctrine

No one denies that there have been horrible acts of mass murder committed by Saddam Hussein and his Ba'ath Party; as with all propaganda, though, Hitchens tells us just half of the story (it is actually more like a quarter of the truth). In the debate with Galloway, Hitchens cites the gas attack against the Kurdish village of Halabja in 1988 as evidence of Hussein's treachery. Though there has been some speculation that it was actually Iran that carried out this attack during the war with Iraq (CIA officer Stephen C. Pelletiere has written that a study by the US Army confirmed that the gas used at Halabja was cyanide-based, which Iran used, but Iraq did not), Hussein is certainly guilty of massacres against Shiites in southern Iraq, as well as the use of chemical weapons against Iranian troops. Indeed, the Bush Administration cited these atrocities in its ramp up to war. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, though, citations of these atrocities always leave out three crucial words: "with our support." The US assisted Saddam in his destruction of the breakaway Kurdish north by granting him agricultural credits. The chemical attacks in northern Iraq, that nation's breadbasket, had the unwanted side effect of disrupting food production; with US money, though, Saddam was able to buy food abroad and continue his brutal ethnic cleansing of the Kurds.

When we consider Hussein's use of chemical weapons on the battlefield with Iran, we must remember, as stated above, that Iraq's attack on Iran was supported by the US. In fact, the US gave Iraq technical support on the battlefield when they knew Hussein was using chemical weapons. As for Hussein's massacres of Shiite Muslims in southern Iraq, large portions of this atrocity occurred when Hussein was the favored ally of the US before the first Gulf War and, in the immediate aftermath of that war, the US allowed Iraqi Army helicopters to operate in the southern no-fly zone so as to suppress the Shiite uprising that had at first been encouraged by the elder President Bush.

Fourth in the Hitchens Doctrine is Iraq having played host to "international gangsters, nihilists, terrorists, and jihadists." Given that these terms are all open to interpretation, it is reasonable that the characterizations are accurate for many friends of the Hussein regime. However, the "terrorists" that the US is most concerned with are undoubtedly al Qaeda, which unfortunately, puts the US on the same side of the "War on Terror" as Saddam Hussein. Hussein's secularist regime was anathema to the fundamentalist ideology of Osama bin Laden; indeed, given that Hussein purports to be Muslim, and is therefore seen as a traitor to the "true faith," al Qaeda likely hates him more than it hates the US.

Phil Gasper: Countdown to a Legal Lynching

Despite the fact that Martin was later censured twice by the California Supreme Court for his racist practices, which led to death sentences in two of the cases he prosecuted being overturned, and despite the fact that the ACLU, the NAACP, the Mexican American Legal Defense & Educational Fund and numerous other groups, filed an amicus brief on Stan's behalf, the Ninth Circuit has twice rejected the claim that his constitutional rights were violated. Now the Supreme Court has upheld these decisions.

After years of inadequate legal representation, Williams now has a top legal firm working on his behalf, which claims to have uncovered fresh evidence of his innocence. They will be attempting to get the courts to reopen the case while simultaneously preparing an appeal for clemency to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who showed no mercy in the execution of a severely brain-damaged prisoner at the beginning of the year.

But the legal strategy is hopeless without enormous outside pressure. Stan's case exemplifies many of the key problems with the death penalty-racism, inadequate counsel, reliance on jailhouse snitches, all of which may soon result in the execution of an innocent man. Stan Tookie Williams needs your help.

For information about what you can do to help save his life, visit http://www.savetookie.org.

Phil Gasper is Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame de Namur University in California and a member of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty. He can be reached at pgasper@ndnu.edu.

Diana Johnstone: Srebrenica Revisited

Diana Johnstone: Srebrenica Revisited

From the the U.N. Secretary General's 1999 Report on Srebrenica, it emerges that the idea of a "Srebrenica massacre" was already in the air at a September 1993 meeting in Sarajevo between Bosnian Muslim president Alija Izetbegovic and members of his Muslim party from Srebrenica. On the agenda was a Serb proposal to exchange Srebrenica and Zepa for some territories around Sarajevo as part of a peace settlement.

"The delegation opposed the idea, and the subject was not discussed further. Some surviving members of the Srebrenica delegation have stated that President Izetbegovic also told them he had learned that a NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina was possible, but could only occur if the Serbs were to break into Srebrenica, killing at least 5,000 of its people." (1)

Izetbegovic later denied this, but he is outnumbered by witnesses. It is clear that Izetbegovic's constant strategy was to portray his Muslim side in the bloody civil war as pure helpless victims, in order to bring U.S. military power in on his side. On his death bed, he readily admitted as much to his ardent admirer Bernard Kouchner, in the presence of U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke. Kouchner reminded Izetbegovic of a conversation he had had with French President Mitterrand in which he "spoke of the existence of 'extermination camps' in Bosnia."

You repeated that in front of the journalists. That provoked considerable emotion throughout the world. [...] They were horrible places, but people were not systematically exterminated. Did you know that?

Yes. I thought that my revelations could precipitate bombings. I saw the reaction of the French and the others-I was mistaken. [...] Yes, I tried, but the assertion was false. There were no extermination camps whatever the horror of those places. (2)

Like the Bosnian Serbs, the Muslims also herded their adversaries into "horrible" camps at the start of the civil war, on the way to expulsion. Unlike the Bosnian Serbs, the Bosnian Muslims enjoyed the services of high-powered U.S. public relations experts in the Washington-based Ruder Finn agency who knew how to "spin" the Bosnian conflict in order to equate the Serbs with the Nazis-the quickest and easiest way to win public opinion over to the Muslim side. The news media and political figures were showered with press releases and other materials exaggerating Serb atrocities, whereas Muslim atrocities (such as the decapitations of Serb prisoners, fully documented) remained confidential. To the public, this was a one-sided conflict between a Serbian "fascist aggressor" and innocent victims, all unarmed civilians.

Thus, many months before the July 1995 "Srebrenica massacre", both Izetbegovic and Milosevic were aware of the possibility and of its potential impact-favorable to the Muslim cause, and disastrous for the Serbs.

A few other indisputable facts should not be overlooked:

Shortly before the Bosnian Serb attack on Srebrenica, the Muslim troops stationed in that enclave carried out murderous attacks on nearby Serb villages. These attacks were certain to incite Serb commanders to retaliate against the Srebrenica garrison.

Meanwhile, the Muslim high command in Sarajevo ordered the Srebrenica commanders, Oric and his lieutenants, to withdraw from Srebrenica, leaving thousands of his soldiers without commanders, without orders, and in total confusion when the foreseeable Serb attack occurred. Surviving Srebrenica Muslim officials have bitterly accused the Izetbegovic government of deliberately sacrificing them to the interests of his State.

According to the most thorough study of Srebrenica events, by Cees Wiebes for the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation report, the Bosnian Serb forces set out in July 1995 to reduce the area held by Bosnian Muslim forces on the outskirts of Srebrenica, and only decided to capture the town itself when they unexpectedly found it undefended.

"The VRS [Republika Srpska Army] advance went so well that the evening of July 9 saw an important 'turning point' [...] The Bosnian Serbs decided that they would no longer confine themselves to the southern part of the enclave, but would extend the operation and take the town of Srebrenica itself. Karadzic was informed that the results achieved now put the Drina Corps in a position to take the town; he had expressed his satisfaction with this and had agreed to a continuation of the operation to disarm the 'Muslim terrorist gangs' and to achieve a full demilitarization of the enclave. In this order, issued by Major General Zdravko Tolimir, it was also stated that Karadzic had determined that the safety of UNPROFOR soldiers and of the population should be ensured. Orders to this effect were to be provided to all participating units. [...] The orders made no mention of a forced relocation of the population. [...] A final instruction, also of significance, was that the population and prisoners of war should be treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention. On July 11 all of Srebrenica fell into the hands of the Bosnian Serbs."

In testimony to a French parliamentary commission inquiry into Srebrenica, General Philippe Morillon, the UNPROFOR officer who first called international attention to the Srebrenica enclave, stated his belief that Bosnian Serb forces had fallen into a "trap" when they decided to capture Srebrenica.

Subsequently, on February 12, 2004, testifying at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, General Morillon stressed that the Muslim commander in Srebrenica, Naser Oric, "engaged in attacks during Orthodox holidays and destroyed villages, massacring all the inhabitants. This created a degree of hatred that was quite extraordinary in the region, and this prompted the region of Bratunac in particular---that is the entire Serb population---to rebel against the very idea that through humanitarian aid one might help the population that was present there."

Asked by the ICTY prosecutor how Oric treated his Serb prisoners, General Morillon, who knew him well, replied that "Naser Oric was a warlord who reigned by terror in his area and over the population itself. I think that he realized that these were the rules of this horrific war, that he could not allow himself to take prisoners. According to my recollection, he didn't even look for an excuse. It was simply a statement: One can't be bothered with prisoners."

Morillon recounted how "the Serbs took me to a village to show me the evacuation of the bodies of the inhabitants that had been thrown into a hole, a village close to Bratunac. And this made me understand the degree to which this infernal situation of blood and vengeance [...] led to a situation when I personally feared that the worst would happen if the Serbs of Bosnia managed to enter the enclaves and Srebrenica."

"I feared that the Serbs, the local Serbs, the Serbs of Bratunac, these militiamen, they wanted to take their revenge for everything that they attributed to Naser Oric. It wasn't just Naser Oric that they wanted to revenge, take their revenge on, they wanted to revenge their dead on Orthodox Christmas."


,000 men reportedly detained as well as about some 5,000 who had fled to central Bosnia. Neither the Bosnian Serbs nor the Muslims were ever forthcoming with whatever information they had, and the "8,000" figure has tended ever since to be repeated as an established total of "Muslim men and boys executed by Serb forces". It can be noted that this was always an estimate, the sum of two separate groups, the smaller one of prisoners (whose execution would be a clear war crime) and the larger one of retreating troops (whose "massacre" as they fled would be the usual tragic consequence of bitter civil war). Anyone familiar with the workings of journalism knows that there is a sort of professional inertia which leads reporters to repeat whatever figure they find in previous reports, without verification, and with a marked preference for big numbers. This inertia is all the greater when no truly authoritative figures ever emerge.


xploitation of "Srebrenica" then helped set the stage for the Kosovo war of 1999:

by blaming the United Nations (whose failure to defend Srebrenica was in reality the inevitable result of the unwillingness of the United States to give full support to U.N. ground forces), NATO emerged as the only agent capable of effective "humanitarian intervention".

by falsely identifying Milosevic with the Bosnian Serb leadership and by exploiting the notion that Srebrenica killings were part of a vast Serb plan of "genocide" carried out against non-Serbs for purely racist reasons, Madeleine Albright was able to advocate the NATO war against Yugoslavia as necessary to prevent "another Srebrenica" in Kosovo, where the situation was altogether different.

To use "Srebrenica" as an effective instrument in the restructuring of former Yugoslavia, notably by replacing recalcitrant Serb leaders by more pliable politicians, the crime needed to be as big as possible: not a mere war crime (such as the United States itself commits on a serial basis, from Vietnam to Panama to Iraq), but "genocide": "the worst atrocity in Europe since the Holocaust". That arouses the Hitler image, which is always good for the image of the United States as saviour from across the seas, and implies a plan decided at the highest levels, rather than the brutal behavior of enraged soldiers (or paramilitaries, the probable culprits in this case) out of control.

But what plan for genocide includes offering safe passage to women and children? And if this was all part of a Serb plot to eliminate Muslims, what about all the Muslims living peacefully in Serbia itself, including thousands of refugees who fled there from Bosnia? Or the Muslims in the neighboring enclave of Zepa, who were unharmed when the Serbs captured that town a few days after capturing Srebrenica? To get around these common sense obstacles, the ICTY prosecution came up with a sociologist who provided an "expert" opinion: the Srebrenica Muslims lived in a patriarchal society, therefore killing the men was enough to ensure that there would be no more Muslims in Srebrenica. This amounts to shrinking the concept of "genocide" to fit the circumstances.

It was on basis of this definition that in August 2001 the Tribunal found Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic guilty of "complicity in genocide". Although he neither ordered, participated in or was even aware of any executions, the judges ruled that he took part in what the ICTY calls a "joint criminal enterprise" simply by capturing Srebrenica, since he must have been aware that genocide was "a natural and foreseeable consequence". This is the ruling that established "genocide" as the official description of events at Srebrenica.

Why such relentless determination to establish Srebrenica as "genocide"? A December 27, 2003, Associated Press dispatch provided an explanation by U.S. jurist Michael Scharf, one of the designers of the ICTY who has also coached the judges for the trial of Saddam Hussein: On a practical level, if the court determines Srebrenica does not fit the legal definition of genocide, it would be very difficult to make the charge stick against Milosevic, said Michael Scharf, a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.

"And it is crucial that he be convicted of genocide," Scharf said. If Milosevic can't be convicted, "then who can you convict of genocide in the modern age?" he asked.


Now in fact, it seems that a serious crime was indeed committed in Pilice. Subsequent forensic investigators exhumed 153 bodies. One hundred and fifty-three executions of prisoners of war is a serious crime, and there is material evidence that this crime was committed. But 1,200? According to the manner of execution described by Erdemovic, it would have taken 20 hours to murder so many victims. Yet the judges have never questioned this elementary arithmetical discrepancy, and Erdemovic's word has consistently been accepted as gospel truth by the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. (4)

Why this insistence on an implausibly higher number than can be supported by material evidence? Obviously, the Tribunal wants to keep the figures as high as possible in order to sustain the charge of "genocide". The charge of "genocide" is what sharply distinguishes the indictment of Serbs from indictments of Croats or Muslims for similar crimes committed during the Yugoslav disintegration wars.

In August 2000 after not quite four and a half years in jail, the self-confessed mass murderer Erdemovic was freed, given a new identity, residence in an unspecified Western country and a "job", so to speak, as occasional paid and "protected" witness for the ICTY.

In contrast, General Krstic was sentenced to 35 years in prison and will be eligible for parole in 20 years.

Clearly, the purpose of the "genocide" charge is not to punish the perpetrators but to incriminate the Bosnian Serb, and the Yugoslav Serb, chain of command right up to the top.