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Today's Stories February 13, 2006 Dave Lindorff Deadeye Dick: If Stupidity Were Impeachable, Cheney Would Be History Michael Neumann Respectful Cultures and Disrespectful Cartoons   February 11 / 12, 2006 Alexander Cockburn How Not to Spot a Terrorist Ralph Nader Bringing Democracy to the Federal Reserve Paul Craig Roberts Nuking the Economy Pat Williams John Boehner's Dirty Little Secret: Flying Lobbyist Air at $4,000 a Junket Fred Gardner Dr. Mikuriya's Appeal: a Last Minute Twist Saul Landau From Munich to Hamas John Chuckman Cartoons and Bombs: Was Rice Right for Once? Roger Burbach Evo Morales: the Early Days Seth Sandronsky Economy on Ice Website of the Weekend Just Say Know   February 10, 2006 Carl G. Estabrook A US War Plan for Khuzestan? Sen. Russell Feingold A Raw Deal on the Patriot Act Roxanne Dunbar----Ortiz How Did Evo Morales Come to Power? Saree Makdisi The Tempest Over the Hamas Charter Website of the Day The New York Art Scene: 1974----1984   February 9, 2006 Dave Lindorff Bush and Yamashita: War Crimes and Commanders----in----Chief Mike Marqusee The Human Majority was Right About Iraq Paul Craig Roberts How Conservatives Went Crazy: the Rightwing Press Peter Phillips Inside the Global Dominance Group: 200 Insiders Against the World William S. Lind Rumsfeld the Maximalist: the Long War Christine Tomlinson Innocent Targets in the "Long War": False Positives and Bush's Eavesdropping Program Will Youmans Church of England Votes to Divest from Israel Robert Robideau An American Indian's View of the Cartoons Richard Neville The Cartoons That Shook the World: All This from the Danes, the Least Funny People on Earth Peter Rost The New Robber Barons Website of the Day Eyes Wide Open   February 8, 2006 Ron Jacobs The Once and Future Sly Stone: Soundtrack to a Riot Stan Cox Making and Unmaking History with General Myers Sen. Russ Feingold Why Bush's Wiretapping Program is Illegal and Unconstitutional Robert Jensen Horowitz's Academic Hit List: Take a Class from One of the CounterPunch 16 Rep. Cynthia McKinney Bush Should Have Wiretapped FEMA and Chertoff Niranjan Ramakrishnan Alberto Gonzales Channels Mark Twain Don Monkerud Covenant Marriage on the Rocks David Swanson Inequality and War C.L. Cook Nuking Ontario Christopher Fons Chill Out Jihadis: They're Just Cartoons! Jeffrey Ballinger The Other Side of Nike and Social Responsibility Website of the Day Encyclopedia of Terrorism in the Americas   February 7, 2006 Edward Lucie----Smith An Urgent Plea to Save a Small Estonian Museum from Neo----Nazis Robert Fisk The Fury: Now Lebanon is Burning Paul Craig Roberts Colin Powell's Career as a "Yes Man" Neve Gordon Why Hamas Won Joshua Frank The Hillary and George Show: Partners in War Peter Montague The Problem with Mercury: a History of Regulatory Capitulation Jackie Corr The Last Best Choice: Public Power and Montana Jeffrey St. Clair Rumsfeld's Enforcer: the Secret World of Stephen Cambone Website of the Day Negroes with Guns   February 6, 2006 Christopher Brauchli Spilling Blood: Two Sentences Robert Fisk Don't Be Fooled: This Isn't About Islam vs. Secularism John Chuckman What Did Stephen Harper Actually Win? Jenna Orkin Judge Slams EPA for Lying About 9/11's Toxic Air Paul Craig Roberts Who Will Save America: My Epiphany   February 4 / 5, 2006 Alexander Cockburn "Lights Out in Tehran": McCain Starts Bombing Run Mike Ferner Pentagon Database Leaves No Kid Alone James Petras Evo Morales's Cabinet: a Bizarre Beginning in Bolivia Alan Maass Scare of the Union: Dems Collaborate with Bush on Surveillance Fred Gardner Annals of Law Enforcement: a Look Inside the San Francisco DA's Office Ralph Nader Bush's Energy Escapades Bill Glahn RIAA Watch: Speaking in Tongues Saul Landau Freedom 2006: Buying Sex on the Net or Those Older Freedoms? Laura Carlsen Bad Blood on the Border: Killing Guillermo Martinez James Brooks Our Little Shop of Diplomatic Horrors Mike Roselle Hippies and Revolutionaries in Carcacas John Holt Black Gold, Black Death: Canada's Oil Sands Frenzy Sarah Ferguson Cops Suing Cops ... for Spying on Cops William S. Lind Beware the Ides of March Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Price of Globalization: Free Trade or Free Speech? Seth Sandronsky The Color of Job Cuts in the Auto Industry Derrick O'Keefe Rumsfeld's Hitler Analogy Michael Donnelly Hop on the Bus Ron Jacobs Religion and Political Power Elisa Salasin RSVP to Bush St. Clair / Vest Playlists: What We're Listening to This Week Stew Albert God's Curse: Selected Poems Poets' Basement Guthrie, LaMorticella and Engel Website of the Weekend Killer Tells All!   February 3, 2006 Toufic Haddad A Parliament of Prisoners Heather Gray Working with Coretta Scott King Tim Wise Racism, Neo----Confederacy and the Raising of Historical Illiterates Conn Hallinan Nuclear Proliferation: the Gathering Storm Eva Golinger Rumsfeld and Negroponte Amp Up Hositility Toward Venezuela Daniel Ellsberg The World Can't Wait: Invitation to a Demonstration Dave Zirin Detroit: Super Bowl City on the Brink Robert Bryce The Problem with Cutting US Oil Imports from the Middle East Website of the Day The Chavez Code   February 2, 2006 Winslow T. Wheeler Pentagon Pork: How to Eliminate It Stan Cox Outsourcing the Golden Years Rachard Itani Danes (Finally) Apologize to Muslims (For the Wrong Reasons) Mike Whitney Afghanistan Five Years Later: Buildings Down, Heroin Up Amira Hass In the Footsteps of Arafat: an Interview with Hamas' Ismail Haniya Norman Solomon When Praise is Desecration: Smothering King's Legacy with Kind Words Michael Simmons Stew Lives! Christopher Reed Japan's Dirty Secret: One Million Korean Slaves Website of the Day State of Nature   February 1, 2006 Sharon Smith The Bluff and Bluster Dems: Alito and the Faux Filibuster Jason Leopold Enron and the Bush Administration Cindy Sheehan Getting Busted at the State of the Union: What Really Happened Joseph Grosso Oprah and Elie Wiesel: a Match Made in "Neutrality" Earl Ofari Hutchinson Coretta Scott King was More Than Just Dr. King's Wife Steven Higgs Life After Roe. v. Wade Robert Robideau "God Given Rights": Palestine and Native America R. Siddharth Tales of Power: When Gandhi Rejected a Faustian Bargain with Henry Ford Jim Retherford Remembering Stew Albert: the Quiet Genius Rep. Cynthia McKinney The Legacy of Coretta Scott King Paul Craig Roberts The True State of the Union Website of the Day Candide's Notebooks

February 13, 2006 British Troops Beat Up Barefoot Iraqi Teens The Axis of Child Abusers By LILA RAJIVA British Troops Beat Up Barefoot Iraqi Teens A video shown on BBC TV on February 11, 2006 shows British soldiers savagely beating and kicking unarmed Iraqi teenagers in an army compound. Officials at the Ministry of Defense are said to have investigated and established beyond doubt the authenticity of the video. Shot secretly “for fun” as a home movie from a rooftop in Basra in southern Iraq by a corporal and shown to friends at a home base in Europe, it was given to the News of the World later by an anonymous whistle blower. The footage shows soldiers pulling four Iraqi boys in their early teens into their army base after a riot and beating them with batons, then punching and kicking them repeatedly on the body and head and between the legs. Within the space of one minute, some 42 blows are rained on the four teens whom the whistle blower said “were just kids” who did not even have on shoes. One soldier can also be seen kicking a dead Iraqi in the face. The unidentified cameraman can be heard laughing and urging his colleagues on with vulgarities. (1) This, mind you, is kinder gentler Britain, whose exemplary interaction with the locals at Basra was held up as a model for American forces. The new video shows this up for the nonsense it is; the Brits on tape are every bit as gung--ho and turned--on torturers of detainees as the soldiers at Abu Ghraib were. And underage detainees at that. Nothing new there either, of course. Despite all the breast--beating, the fact remains that the two worst crimes coming out of the prison scandal (assuming one can make a hierarchy of these things) -- the abuse of children and the complicity of medical personnel -- have yet to be given anything like serious examination by the fourth estate here. So now Britain too is a paid--up member of the Axis of Child Abusers. Paid--up member two: The US. In July 2004, Germany’s TV news magazine, Report Mainz, cited accounts by the International Committee of the Red Cross that there were over 100 children in US custody and that soldiers had abused children. An eye--witness, Sergeant Provance, even described how interrogators molested a 15-- year old girl and physically abused a 16--year old boy. (2) More sensationally, in a taped lecture at the ACLU during the same summer, veteran investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh claimed that he had heard tapes of children screaming as they were being sodomized in front of their parents.(3) Hersh was late on the story. Buried in a Denver Post article a few months earlier was a brief but chilling reference to the rape of a young Iraqi boy by an American soldier. (4) Paid--up member one: Israel, whose soldiers routinely mow down Palestinian children in their homes and schools. Just recently, nine--year--old Aya Astal was shot in the neck and had her stomach blown open when she wandered too close to Israel’s “security fence.” (5) But a whole troupe of little ghosts go before her: Fifth grader, Ghadir Mukheimer, a ten--year--old schoolgirl whom Israeli occupation troops shot in the chest and killed in October, 2004 while she was sitting at her desk inside a United Nations school in a Gaza refugee camp. (6) And thirteen--year--old Iman al--Hams skipping to school, left to die in a pool of blood when ambulances were denied access. Her body was riddled with 20 bullets -- 5 to her head -- most pumped into her body after death by Israeli soldiers.(7) And four--month--old Iman Hajjour, killed at Khan Younis refugee camp in southern Gaza Strip by Israeli shelling that also left her mother and sister seriously injured. (8) Officials have deliberately withheld the name of the regiment to which the perps in the British video belong. But maybe the public should demand it. Here’s why. In May 2004, when photos surfaced in the Daily Mirror (UK) of members of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment beating up and urinating on a hooded Iraqi detainee, General Sir Michael Jackson, Chief of the General Staff, rushed to claim that they only showed an isolated incident caused by the "ill discipline of a few soldiers." But as The Independent pointed out immediately, by May 2004, the QLR ( as well as the Royal Fusiliers and Black Watch) was already involved in six cases of death or severe abuse that the Royal Military Police had not yet completed investigated and that dated back more than a year. In May 2004, it was also eight months since the killing of 26--year--old Baha Mousa, a hotel receptionist beaten to death in September 2003 by members of the same QLR. (9) The QLR was at the time also facing a charge of having murdered an Iraqi detainee. But in May 2004, the editor of the Mirror, Piers Morgan, was actually forced to resign over the abuse photos published in his paper. A government investigation -- never actually documented publicly -- found that they were hoaxed. The Mirror’s owners, Trinity Mirror, and several prominent US corporations which held shares in Trinity, had opposed the Mirror’s anti--war stance long before the publication of the photos and it was their pressure that led to Morgan’s sacking on May 14. Whatever the merits of the hoax allegation -- and mind you, it could plausibly have been a piece of government disinformation intended to muddy the whole business -- what it effectively accomplished was to take the spotlight off the QLR and other British troops in Basra and distance them from the Abu Ghraib torture scandal which was at the time just breaking in the world press. The new video shows just how important it was for the spot--light to be shifted somewhere else. Should it turn out that the QLR was also involved in child--abuse in Iraq, some one just might want to go back and check out the real story behind those “hoaxed” pictures. There just might be more to it than what the government supposedly found. And Piers Morgan just might be due an apology. Lila Rajiva is a free-lance journalist and author of "The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American media," (Monthly Review Press). She can be reached at: lrajiva@hotmail.com (1) “British troops videoed 'beating Iraqis',” Jo Revill and Ned Temko, The Observer, February 12, 2006. See also “Blair Promises Iraq Abuse Probe,” BBC, February 12, 2006. According to one progressive website, the cameraman is caught on tape gloating, "Oh yes! Oh yes! You're gonna get it. Yes, naughty little boys! You little f***ers, you little f***ers. DIE! Ha, ha!" (2) “Iraq’s Child Prisoners,” Neil Mackay, Sunday Herald, August 1, 2004. “Iraqi Children Among Abused Prisoners at Abu Ghraib,” The Scotsman, May 7, 2004. (3) “US Silent on Torture of Children,” Lisa Ashkenaz Croke, New Standard, August 16, 2004. “Sy Hersh at ACLU Convention,” Linda Wymore, Mother Jones, July 16, 2004. (4) “Sex Assault Cases in Iraq Often Stall,” Miles Moffeit, Denver Post, April 12, 2004. (5) “Israel's shooting of young girl highlights international hypocrisy, say Palestinians,” Chris McGreal in Khan Yunis, The Guardian, January 30, 2006. (6) “Israel Kills Palestinian Girl in Classroom: Doctors tried in vain to save fatally wounded Ghadeer,” Islam Online, October 13, 2004. (7)“The Blood of Iman Al-- Hams,” Amira Hass, Haaretz, February 9, 2005. See also http://www.palestinemonitor.org/ (8)“3 more die in Mideast, Israel takes arms ship,” Dispatch Online, May 8, 2001. (9) “Seven Iraqis die in British custody. How many soldiers are charged? None: This is not the first incident to involve the Queen's Lancashire Regiment and allegations of brutality,” Andrew Johnson and Severin Carrell, The Independent, 2 May 2004

Now Available from CounterPunch Books! The Case Against Israel By Michael Neumann Click Here to Advance Order Philosopher Michael Neumann's Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz Coming This Fall Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair