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Today's Stories October 13 / 14, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Al Gore's Peace Prize October 12, 2007 Cindy Sheehan Leadership Void Brendan Cooney Washington's Holocaust Deniers Alan Farago Gore Still Lost Florida Jan Oberg Gore's Peace Prize, a Grand Misjudgment M. Shahid Alam The Mercenary State: Pakistan's Killer Elites David Macaray Lies About Teachers and Unions Julia Kendlbacher Urban Legend, We Love Our Forest People Peter Rost, MD Drug Money and the Clinton Campaign Website of the Day Nader Live: "Things are a Lot Worse Than We Thought" October 11, 2007 Al Giordano Bill Clinton as Ambassador to the World? Saul Landau Killing for Profit: Blackwater in Iraq Jacob G. Hornberger The Failed Legacy of Interventionism William S. Lind The Iraq Mirage Joshua Frank Big Sky Rebels Josh Mahan Colorado River Blues Pat Williams Where Are You, Paul Wellstone?     October 10, 2007 Michael Yates Travels Across Greenspan's America Gary Leupp Spreading Awareness or Smearing a Religion? David Macaray How Wal-Mart Can be Beaten Alan Farago Corruption and the Law of Intended Consequences Tom Clifford Homeless in Their Own Land: Iraq's Deepening Refugee Crisis Col. Douglas MacGregor Washington's War Sunsara Taylor Nooses at Columbia George Wuerthner Behind the Bovine Curtain Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz Indigenous Peoples' Day Michael Dickinson Forgetting Lennon's Birthday Website of the Day Paying for War   October 9, 2007 Paul Craig Roberts Blinded by Ideology: Cato, Trade and Outsourcing Andy Worthington Fourth Whistleblower Rocks Guantánamo Alan Farago The Fall of Florida's Largest Land Developer Brian Eno Exporting Democracy with Missiles David Rovics The RIAA vs. the World Farzana Versey Two Lovers and the Funeral of Secularism Andrew Buncombe and Omar Waraich Musharraf's Landslide Website of the Day Romney and the Wheelchair Bound Medical Marijuana Patient   October 8, 2007 David Macaray Lesbians for Hillary? or Teamsters for Hillary? Jeff Ballinger Nike, Steroids and Marion Jones Brian Eno This Ban Won't Stop Us Christopher Brauchli Translating Bush Louay Safi End the Disgrace of Guantánamo Matt Reichel Homocide by Cops at the Phoenix Airport Dave Lindorff Finally, A Good Day for the Constitution Thomas P. Healy The Politics of Mercury Pollution Martha Rosenberg E. Coli Spreading Slaughter Allowed to Stay Open Richard Rhames A Democrat's Lament Website of the Day Not All Italians Love Columbus   October 6 / 7, 2007 Alexander Cockburn A Rainbow Over a Graveyard Norman Finkelstein Jeffrey Goldberg's Prison James Bovard Are Presidents Entitled to Kill Foreigners? Patrick Cockburn The Invasion of Afghanistan, Six Years Later Jeffrey St. Clair At Disaster Falls Ralph Nader Where Are the Lawyers of America? Ray McGovern So Who's Afraid of the Israel Lobby? Saul Landau A River Runs Through It Ben Tripp Bring on the Next War! Terry Lodge The Grateful Dead Body Parts Delivered to Your Door Reform Act Seth Sandronsky Market Mystification and the Liberal Virus Kevin Funk / Steve Fake Divestment and Darfur Missy Beattie In the Custody of Bush and Cheney Website of the Weekend Snoop Dogg vs. Bill O'Reilly   October 5, 2007 Andy Worthington The Anonymous Victims of Guantánamo David Macaray De-Skilling America's Labor Force Lee Sustar The Democrats and Iran: Can They Sink Any Lower? Dan La Botz Cincinnati Six Years After the Killings and the Riots Aaron Hess Hate Week Comes to Campus William A. Cook Unmasking AIPAC Website of the Day Range of Memory   October 4, 2007 Uri Avnery The Power of the Israel Lobby Dave Marsh Dick Cheney, a Eulogy Valerio Volpi How Italy Became a Launching Pad for the US Military Cecilie Surasky Dissenting at Your Own Risk Dave Lindorff Remaking Iraq, as Vietnam Norman Solomon Sputnik, 50 Years Later Laura Carlsen Costa Rica and CAFTA: Memo Reveals Manipulation Scheme Walter Brasch When Compassion Fails: Bush and the Children's Health Act Ben Terrall Haitian Human Rights Advocate Kidnapped William S. Lind Beyond the OODA Loop Website of the Day Musicians in Handcuffs   October 3, 2007 Vijay Prashad Gang of Four Anita Sinha Black Ties and Bulldozers in New Orleans Winslow T. Wheeler Posturing at the Petraeus Hearings: Where was the Oversight? Sharon Smith The Kucinich Quandary Jeff Leys Our Bonhoeffer Moment Sen. Russ Feingold We Must End This Tragedy Mohamad Bazzi Playing Into the Hands of Ahmadinejad Brenda Norrell A Cry from the Top of the World Robert Weissman No Sex, Still a Scandal at the IMF Website of the Day Jena by Mellencamp   October 2, 2007 Ibrahim Warde Logical Lies About Bin Laden's Wealth Gary Leupp "I Hate All Iranians": Frank Talk from a Defense Dept. Official David Macaray The Hunt for a Blue November: In Pursuit of the Labor Vote Conn Hallinan Religion and Foreign Policy John Ross The Great American Chess Match Alan Farago Ripping Off Miami's Poor Sonja Karkar The Right to Exist: States or People? Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Meteor and the Mahatma Website of the Day Grandin on Che's Legacy   October 1, 2007 Al Giordano The Clinton Campaign's Reckless Race for Big Money Donors Paul Craig Roberts From Burma to Iraq: Hypocrisy Rules the West Moshe Adler The Crimes of Microsoft Ingmar Lee My Kayak Journey Down the Wild Pacific Coast John V. Walsh Ahmadinejad is Not My Enemy Norman Solomon Political Science and Truth of Consequences Roger Burbach Historic Victory in Ecuador for the Left Ramzy Baroud The Politics of Assassination Stephen Lendman The Maestro of Misery: Greenspan's Dark Legacy Susie Day Honey, I Shrank the Military! Website of the Day Letters from Fort Lewis Brig   September 29 / 30, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Clinton Time: Do We Set Our Clocks Forward or Back? Uri Avnery So What About Iran? Andrew Cockburn Iraq's WMD Myth: Why Clinton is Culpable Jeffrey St. Clair Through the Gates of Lodore Wajahat Ali The Good, the Bad and the Iraqi Andy Worthington The Curse of the Military Commissions Don Santina Ethnic Cleansing in San Francisco Ralph Nader Free Lunches, for Corporations! Fred Gardner The Man Behind the MoveOn Ad Seth Sandronsky The US Economy Since 1980 Gideon Levy The Children of 5767 William S. Lind A Ticking Bomb Reza Fiyouzat An Anti-Imperialist Case Against a Nuclear Iran Richard Rhames Wag the Tail, Frag the Dog David Michael Green Buyer's Remorse: Their Purchase, Our Regret Zach Mason Hate and Hope in Herndon Poets' Basement Gibbons, Ali, Davies and Suss Website of the Weekend Domestic Crusaders     September 28, 2007 Kathleen and Bill Christison The Teflon Alliance with Israel Roberto J. González / David H. Price When Anthropologists Become Counter-Insurgents Saul Landau September, the Cruelest Month in Chile Tom Clifford Burma by the Numbers Christopher Brauchli Of Toxic Almonds and Bad Beef Martha Rosenberg Spinning Suicide Statistics Dave Zirin Soldier in Winter: John Carlos Speaks Out on the Jena 6 Laray Polk Bush Library or Lockbox? Binoy Kampmark When Reagan Turned Brown James McEnteer Hell, Columbia: an Academic Hotshot Introduces a Petty Tyrant Website of the Day Concerned Anthropologists   September 27, 2007 Alan Farago Housing Market Crashes and Burns Andy Worthington A Bad Week at Guantánamo Jonathan Cook Why Did Israel Attack Syria? William Hughes Billy Graham, a Prince of War Exposed Ray McGovern Bush, Oil and Moral Bankruptcy Ron Jacobs Joe Biden's Plan to Chop Up Iraq Dave Lindorff Quit the Party! Join the Mass Resignation Movement! Joshua Frank Pruning the Green Party Anne Dachel The CDC, Vaccines and Autism Website of the Day The God-O-Meter   September 26, 2007 Bill Quigley HUD's Home Wreckers Paul Craig Roberts A Pandemic of Police Brutality Jeff Kisseloff Still Smearing Alger Hiss China Hand Is China the True Target of Financial Sanctions Against Iran? Behzad Yaghmaian At the Gates of Paradise Sonja Karkar The Quality of Mercy in Gaza Mike Ferner Interrupting the Empire, 30 Seconds at a Time Col. Dan Smith Freedom to Speak, Freedom to Learn Clifton Ross Bollinger's Barbarous and Ignorant Speech Brenda Norrell A Meeting of Indigenous Peoples in Caracas Website of the Day The Smearing of Jean Maria Arrigo, a Psychologist Opposed to Torture   September 25, 2007 Nicole Colson On the March Against Racism Uri Avnery Foam on the Water Brendan Cooney Ahmadinejad on Broadway: Free Speech? Arrest Him! Harry Browne Bruce Springsteen Comes Home ... to Hell Marjorie Cohn The Drift Toward War with Iran David Macaray The UAW-GM Strike: the Long Knives are Already Out Ralph Nader Hypocrisy and Inverted Priorities in Congress Dan Bacher Schwarzenegger, the Climate Change Hypocrite Anthony Papa Perverted Justice & America's Drug Laws Christopher Ketcham All Politicos Now Classed as Sexual Deviants Website of the Day John Waters on Free Speech   September 24, 2007 George Ciccariello-Maher Racist Violence from Jena to Oakland Saree Makdisi The War on Gaza's Children David Keen Action-as-Propaganda: Learning About the Iraq War from Hannah Arendt Sherwood Ross Just How Powerful is the Israel Lobby? Only Cheney Knows for Sure Ron Jacobs Greenspan's Open Secret Donna Saggia The Cult of the Military and the Decline of Democratic Values Mike Ferner Free Speech Takes a Capitol Beating Malini Johar Schueller Norman Hsu is a Model Minority Monique Dols and Dylan Stillwood Ahmadinejad and Columbia Website of the Day The Promotion September 22 / 23, 2007 Alexander Cockburn On Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" Jennifer Loewenstein Beneath the Hideous Veneer of Security Linn Washington, Jr. The Injustice in Jena: Prosecutorial Misconduct More Dangerous Than Racism Jeffrey St. Clair Going Down in Dinosaur: Oil, Dams and Whitewater (Part One) Alan Farago Genuflecting to China Brian Cloughley Of Hate, Hubris and Atrocities Robert Fantina The Deadly Pattern of US Imperialism Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz Land Tenure and Resistance in New Mexico Jason Hribal Fear of an Animal Planet David Rosen Slugger Sex: Athletes, Violence and Male Sexuality Mike Whitney The Era of Global Financial Instability John V. Walsh Who Will Lead a Filibuster of the Iraq War Spending Bill? Dave Lindorff Why Aren't We Banning Blackwater Here? David Michael Green Hiding Behind a Camouflage Skirt Fred Gardner Claudia Jensen (Look Back in Anger) Cassandra Jones Support Our Mercenaries Roger van Zwanenberg Pluto Press Under Attack by Israel Lobby Poets' Basement Buknatski, Davies and Ford Website of the Weekend "For the Bible Tells Me So"   September 21, 2007 Karim Makdisi Letter from Lebanon M. Shahid Alam A History of Violence Alan Farago Who Will Buy My House? Joshua Frank The Demise of the Congressional Black Caucus Dave Zirin Notre Dame and the Economy of Sports Kenneth Couesbouc A Short History of Lending and Borrowing Dr. Steffie Woolhandler and Dr. David Himmelstein Mass Health Care Failure Ben Terrall The Streets of San Francisco: Where Impeachment is Taken Seriously--By Everyone But Pelosi Steve Fournier Ex-Dems, Sign Up Here Frederico Fuentes, et al Voices in Defense of Bolivia Website of the Day Sabra and Shatila, Remembered   September 20, 2007 Kathleen Christison Whatever Happened to Palestine? Zoltan Grossman An Endless Occupation? Paul Craig Roberts As the Empire Slips: Greenspan and the Economy of Greed Stan Cox and Wes Jackson Carbon-Free and Still Wrecking the Planet Russell Mokhiber AARP to Kucinich: Drop Dead Charles Modiano Jim Crow's Children: the Jena 6, Shaquanda Cotton and Blog Power Raymond J. Lawrence Bush's Worrisome Use of Religion Brendan Cooney Body-Snatched Nation Website of the Day Mind Control for Breakfast   September 19, 2007 Paul Craig Roberts Why Did Senator John Kerry Stand Idly By? Paul Krassner The Power of Laughter Sgt. Martin Smith The New Private Warriors: Blackwater in Iraq Seth Sandronsky Living in a Dilapidated Market: To Rent or Own? Claud Cockburn Looking back at the Great Crash Victoria Buch Israel's Agenda for Ethnic Cleansing and Transfer Robert Weissman Oil Warriors: From Greenspan to Kissinger Mike Ferner Can We Talk? Dan Bacher Schwarzenegger's $9 Billion Boondoggle for Big Water Website of the Day Housing Cost Calculator   September 18, 2007 Mike Whitney U.S. Banks Brace for Storm Surge as Dollar and Credit System Reel Alan Farago Interviewing Alan Greenspan: How 60 Minutes Blew It John Ross America's Great Wall: Where Will the Workers Go When They Finish It? Ron Jacobs Nooses Hung From Jena, La. to College Park, Md. Alex Doherty Britain's 9/11 "Truth Movement": Who's Responsible? September 17, 2007 Marjorie Cohn Erwin Chemerinsky and the Post-9/11 Attack on Academic Freedom Paul Craig Roberts Conservatism Isn't What It Used to Be Ricardo Alarcón The Return of C. Wright Mills Amid the Dawn of a New Era Marc Levy Fake Vets Chasing Fame Eva Liddell In 1969 We Already Knew What 2007 Would Look Like Website of the Day Propaganda: Your Job in Germany. Directed by Frank Capra, and written by Theodor Geisel Sept. 15-16, 2007 Alexander Cockburn The General Came to Washington Vicente Navarro How the U.S. Schemed Against Spain's Transition from Dictatorship to Democracy Mike Whitney Plummeting Dollar, Credit Crunch Herman Mindshaftgap Has There Ever Been a Surge? If so, Has it a Future? Ellen Cantarow Girls! Music! Palestine! Jordan Flaherty K-Ville: Fox's New Paean to the N.O.P.D. Zachary Hurwitz Julio Cusurichi on Amazonian Development September 14, 2007 Debbie Nathan New York Times reporter was a member of an illegal underage porn site, claims he was only "posing as online predator" Franklin Lamb Sabra-Shatilla, 25 Years Later Patrick Cockburn Greet Bush and Die: The Killing of Abu Risha Farzana Versey The World's Richest Muslim Tycoon Alan Farago This is Florida, Epicenter of the Housing Bust and of Public Corruption Hank Edson Bill's New Book is Giving Me a Headache September 13, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Petraeus Confided Presidential Ambitions to Iraqi Official Scott Vest, former Air Force Captain at Minot The Barksdale Nukes Andy Worthington Guantánamo: "Ghost" Prisoners Speak At Last Michael Baney Mr. Fixit of Quake-Stricken Peru Has Death Squad Past Dr. Susan Block Is U.S. Run by Secret Homintern? September 12, 2007 Paul Craig Roberts American Economy: RIP Stan Goff The Petraeus Report William Blum When Soldiers Mutiny...Only Those Fighting the War Can End It. Manuel Garcia Forgetting 9/11 Debbie Nathan Why One Sex Survey Didn't Make the Big Time               Subscribe Online

Weekend Edition October 13 / 14, 2007 It's As Ridiculous As If They'd Given Goebbels One in 1938 Al Gore's Peace Prize By ALEXANDER COCKBURN Put this one up on the shelf of shame, right next to Henry Kissinger's, or the peace prize they gave to Kofi Annan and the entire UN in 2001, sandwiched between the UN's okay for the bombing of Serbia, the killing of untold numbers of Iraqis, many of them babies and children in the years of sanctions, and its greenlight for the bombing of Baghdad in 2003. In 1998 the Nobel crowd gave the prize to Medecins Sans Frontieres, whose co-founder Bernard Kouchner is now France's foreign secretary urging the bombing of Iran. Like Gore, Kouchner was a rabid advocate of the dismemberment of the former Yugoslavia and onslaughts on Serbia. The UN often has an inside track on the "Peace" prize. The UN Peace-Keeping Forces got it in 1988. In 1986 another enthusiast for attacking Iraq and Iran, Elie Wiesel, carried off the trophy. Aside from Kissinger, probably the biggest killer of all to have got the peace prize was Norman Borlaug, whose "green revolution" wheat strains led to the death of peasants by the million. When Gore goes to get the prize he shares with the pr hucksters and falsifiers at the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Gore should be forced to march through a gauntlet of widows and orphans, Serbs, Iraqis, Palestinians, Colombians, and other victims of the Clinton era. Back in Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign Gore was told to earn his keep with constant pummeling of George Bush Sr for having been soft on Saddam. Gore duly criss-crossed the country yoking Saddam and Bush in fervid denunciation, his press aides passing out speeches flatteringly footnoted with references to the work of the journalists covering his campaign. Gore charged that Bush had given Saddam "one of those milquetoast routines George Bush is so famous for". "The cover-up of Bush's arming of Saddam was", Gore shouted, "bigger than Watergate ever was." Right before the 2000 election Gore called for expansion of the no-fly zones in Iraq and said that any Iraqi plane venturing into such zones should be shot down. In early January, 1993, Thomas Friedman interviewed president elect Clinton and asked about Saddam. Clinton amiably responded, "I always tell everybody, I'm a Baptist. I believe in deathbed conversions. If he wants a different relationship with the US and UN, all he has to do is change his behavior." This elicited cries of outrage from the national security establishment, and its prime respresentative,vice president-elect Gore, who announced that there could never be normal relations with Iraq so long as Saddam remained in power. He reiterated the call for a coup, if not by the Iraqi military then by the CIA (which in point of fact had been in receipt of a 'presidential finding' from Bush, three months after the guns of the Gulf War fell silent, authorizing it 'to create conditions for the removal of Saddam Hussein from power'). Vice president Al Gore was then given authority in the Clinton Administration for Iraq policy. On April 14, 1993, Bush went to Kuwait, whose regime duly arrested 17 people charged with plotting to kill Bush with a bomb placed in a Toyota Landcruiser. Again the national security establishment mustered in support of a plan to hold Saddam accountable and bombard Baghdad, a plan hotly advocated by Gore and his national security advisor, Leon Feurth. The two individuals most reluctant to endorse this plan were Bill Clinton and George Bush Sr. "Do we have to take this action?" Clinton muttered to his national security team as the cruise missiles on two carriers in the Persian Gulf were being programmed. Eight of the 23 missiles hit the residential Mansour suburb of Baghdad, one of them killing Leila al-Attar, a prominent Iraqi artist. According to Clinton's pollster Stan Greenberg, the bombing of Baghdad caused an uptick of 11 points in Clinton's popularity, a lesson Clinton and Gore did not forget. Years later, in the 2000 campaign, Gore out-hawked George Bush Jr on the subject of finishing the job in Iraq. On June 29, 2000, Gore was in Chicago to talk about "energy policy incentives for cities". Danny Muller of Voices in the Wilderness went to Navy Pier, where the event was being held. Gore was at the podium amid wild ovations. Muller remembers the scene: "I raised my voice and asked 'Mr. Gore, why should anyone vote for an administration that kills 5,000 innocent children a month through sanctions in Iraq?' Gore stopped. And he laughed. He actually laughed. He said he would discuss this later in the day. I responded by saying that every ten minutes a child dies in Iraq due to sanctions and we do not have the time to wait." Muller was still protesting as Gore's security goons hauled him off. The specific reason why this man of blood shares the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the IPCC is for their joint agitprop on the supposed threat of anthropogenic global warming. Bogus science topped off with toxic alarmism. It's as ridiculous as as if Goebbels got the Nobel Peace Prize in 1938, sharing it with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for his work in publicizing the threat to race purity posed by Jews, Slavs and gypsies. (The peace prize actually went that year to the Nansen Committee for Refugees. Gore certainly played his part in creating Iraq's current 4 million refugees, among the greatest displacements of the past hundred years.) The notorious "man-made" greenhouse gasses comprise about .26 per cent of the total greenhouse gas component of the earth's atmosphere and the influence of this component remains entirely unproven, as I have pointed out on this site many times,and will be doing so again in reflections that will be published early next year in my forthcoming book, A Short History of Fear. Gore's contribution to the debate has been an appalling mishmash of cooked statistics, demagoguery about "scientific consensus" and New Age hocus pocus about spiritual renewal. Anyone who has studied the antics of his co-winner of the peace prize, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will know that the IPCC's prime role every three years has been to ignore the work--some of it respectable scientific research--of its expert panels and issue entirely mendacious and to issue alarmist press releases designed to win headlines in the New York Times. Of course Al Gore has been a shil for nuclear power ever since he came of age as a political harlot for the Oakridge nuclear laboratory in his home state of Tennessee. The practical beneficiary of the baseless hysteria over "anthropogenic global warming" is the nuclear power industry. This very fall, as Peter Montague describes at length in our current CounterPunch newsletter, this industry is reaping the fruits of Al Gore's campaigning. Congress has finally knocked aside the regulatory licensing processes that have somewhat protected the public across recent decades. The starting gun has sounded, and just about the moment Gore and his co-conspirators at the IPCC collect their prizes, the bulldozers will be breaking ground for the new nuclear plants soon to spring like Amanita phalloides--just as deadly--across the American landscape. Toothless in Babylon The way things are headed, in two or three months we'll have 95 percent of the American people wanting a pullout from the war in Iraq and 95 percent of Congress obediently voting funds to keep the troops there. At the start of October, only 27 percent of Americans wanted Congress to greenlight the $190 billion Bush has requested to go on fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Washington Post summed up its latest poll, conducted with ABC TV, thus: "Most Americans do not believe Congress has gone far enough in opposing the war." Here we are in the gray dawn of the twenty-first century, but only a handful of senators and reps dare stand up to be counted on matters of war and peace. The Kyl-Lieberman bill recommending that Iran's Revolutionary Guards be placed on the US government's blacklist as a "terrorist organization" was clearly hatched as a way for Bush to attack Iran without seeking Congressional approval. It cantered through the Senate with only twenty-five opposing. The House approved a similar measure with only sixteen no's, jusy 12 of them Democrats. Notoriously, Hillary Clinton voted for Kyl-Lieberman, then amid a hail of criticism, tried to fix up a fudge vote for the record, sigining on to an amended version drafted by Senator James Webb. The day before the Senate vote, in the Democratic debate at Dartmouth College candidates Clinton, Obama and Edwards all refused to commit to having all US troops out of Iraq by the end of their first White House term-December 2013. The shortest timeline for withdrawal is offered in Senator Russell Feingold's bill, which requires troops to be out of Iraq by June 30, 2008. That bill has only twelve Senate co-sponsors, Clinton and Obama conspicuous by their absence. The Petraeus hearings showed us the feeble state of the anti-war forces on the Hill. A few senators grandstanding for their one-liners to be flashed up on CNN doesn't add up to anything more than popgun combat. No one laid a glove on Petraeus, and that failure is very significant. Winslow Wheeler worked on the Hill for thirty-one years as a staffer for various senators from both sides of the aisle, also for the GAO. These days he's the director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information in Washington. As CounterPunchers well know, his regular bulletins on defense matters, particularly military budgets and appropriations, are always knowledgeable and succinct. He really knows how the system works. In the wake of Petraeus's easy victories in both the Senate and House hearings, Wheeler looked back at the 1972 hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, taking testimony from Secretary of State William Rogers on the war in Vietnam. The committee's chairman, William Fulbright, took Rogers apart, exposing time after time the Secretary's evasions and lies. Fulbright, Wheeler recalled, counterpunch.org/wheeler10032007.html. "knew all the facts, uncovered by an assiduous professional staff that discovered a whole lot more than what the Defense and State departments wanted them to know." As the bruised Rogers and his entourage filed out, Wheeler heard one of the Secretary's staff hiss angrily to an underling, "Find out how that son of a bitch found all that out." Petraeus endured no such relentless interrogation. There were no angry hisses, only smiles at the conclusion of his claims for the success thus far of his Surge. Yet the facts that the senators and representatives could and should have thrown at him were all available, many of them supplied to the relevant Congressional staffers by Wheeler's organization in the form of body counts, information from the United Nations and other sources, plus polling data from the people best qualified to assess whether their security had been enhanced by the Surge-namely, Iraqis. But the senators and reps didn't use the material as Fulbright would have done. Beyond a few brief interrogatory flurries, they mostly stuck to their scripted speeches. As Wheeler concludes, All that was politicking, not oversight. Oversightmeans finding out exactly what the executive branch is doing and what is going on in the world. Only that, not posturing, provides a sound foundation for competent legislation and the political coalitions needed to enact it. Put simply, if you do not know with some precision what the problem is, you are not going to solve it. And if you don't have the data, mere rhetoric will not always save you, especially when you fail to refute the opposing case. How good is the staff work on the Hill these days? Ideally, in the battles that matter, it should be a blend of savage investigative zeal and experience in what stones to turn over and where to dig out the paydirt. How many battle-scarred oldtimers are there, like Wheeler or Jake Lewis, who remember how it was done? How many eager reporters are there for them to leak to? The Clinton era did dreadful damage to conscientious and effective oversight. The Democrats were out of power on the Hill for a decade, until 2007. I know of one 50-year-old who recently and successfully applied for a good staff job on an important committee who thinks he got the job partly because there weren't that many applicants. And even if you have a terrific staff rustling up devastating data, you still need a senator or rep with the wits and moxy to turn the material into an effective interrogation. These days you can sit and watch C-SPAN all year long and rarely see anything beyond camera-preening by the likes of Chuck Schumer. Arlen Specter can take out the razor when he wants to. So can Feingold. So can a can few of the Republican ex-prosecutors. Not many others. You can chart Ted Kennedy's decline in effectiveness by the decline in the quality of his staff. Dig out a clip of Jack Brooks of Texas Roasting someone in the witness chair, to see how it used to be done. The place just isn't what it used to be. Footnote: The history of Al Gore's warmongering on Iraq is laid out in Al Gore: A User's Manual co-written by your CounterPunch co-editors, Cockburn and St Clair. A shorter version of the second item, Toothless in Babylon, first ran in print edition of The Nation.

Now Available! How the Press Led the US into War Buy End Times Now! New From CounterPunch Books The Secret Language of the Crossroads: HOW THE IRISH INVENTED SLANG By Daniel Cassidy WINNER OF THE AMERICAN BOOK AWARD! Click Here to Buy! Cassidy on Tour Click Here for Dates & Venues "The Case Against Israel" Michael Neumann's Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz Click Here to Buy! Saul Landau's Bush and Botox World with a Foreword by Gore Vidal Click Here to Order!   Grand Theft Pentagon How They Made a Killing on the War on Terrorism         The Occupation by Patrick Cockburn Humanitarian Imperialism By Jean Bricmont   CITY BEAUTIFUL By Tennessee Reed     Bruce Springsteen On Tour By Dave Marsh   The Book on 9/11 the White House Denounced as "ABSOLUTE GARBAGE"