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Commentary and Opinions
on a Changing World

Other Voices is a series of articles, commentary and opinion from writers and critics on the state of the world in 2004. Most of the articles published in this series are from journalists and writers who are not regularly published in the mainstream media.

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NEW - No 196 – December 6

FALLUJAH:PENTAGON PLANS HIGH-TECH HAMLET
By Kurt Nimmo, kurtnimmo.com
It is now official – the United States does not learn from history. It is destined to make the same mistakes over and over again. In 1962, the Strategic Hamlet program was introduced in Vietnam, based on a British counterinsurgency program used in Malaya from 1948 to 1960. In a dismal attempt to prevent the National Liberation Front from “influencing” peasants in South Vietnam, the United States turned villages into concentration camps – they erected stockade walls and patrolled the villages with armed guards. According to figures compiled by the United States, 39 percent of the South Vietnamese population was housed in these restrictive hamlets.

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NEW - No 195 – December 6

MICHAEL MOORE: MADE OVER AND MOVING ON
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
On the evening of November 29, a made-over Michael Moore appeared on the Tonight Show. With a haircut, cleanly-shaved and dressed in a smart looking suit, dress shirt and striped tie, Moore had shed his familiar baseball cap, ill-fitting jeans and baggy jacket, and the unshaven, shaggy-haired look that has been his inimitable fashion statement and sartorial calling card for years. Tonight show host, Jay Leno, stirred by the newly made over Moore, joked that the filmmaker looked like Denny Hastert, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives. When Leno asked Moore if he had turned Republican, Moore responded, “If you can’t beat ‘em,” he said, “you might as well try to look like ‘em.”

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NEW - No 194 – December 3

MILITAINMENT GONE AMOK
By Ted Rall, tedrall.com
"America is a strange country. All of its best generals are journalists,” Defense Undersecretary Douglas J. Feith told the San Francisco Chronicle in recent interview. Now the generals have their own cable channel. As the Fourth Estate continues to morph into what General/Journalist Tommy Franks calls the “Fourth Front” in the ongoing and endless war on terror, and as the lines blur ever-further between military public affairs – disseminating accurate information to the media and the public – and psychological and information operations – using often-misleading information and propaganda to influence the outcome of a campaign or battle – the inevitable has finally happened.

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NEW - No 193 – December 1

IF IT'S 2005, IT MUST BE TIME FOR ANOTHER WAR
By Rory O'Connor, roryoconnor.org
You’ve heard this song before. There’s this country, see, and they hate America. They’d nuke us if they had the chance, you bet they would. Damn Muslim religious fanatics! Guess what? They have weapons of mass destruction! Either that or their scientists are about to develop them. Whatever – we can’t let that happen. We’ve gotta hit them before they hit us! What’s that? Of course we’re sure! Our intelligence says so. Huh? No. We can’t show you the proof. We’ll say this much...a little bird told us. A little exile bird that wants to run the country after we overthrow the current regime. They wouldn’t lie, and neither would we. And while we’re at it, can we borrow your son for the next few years?

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NEW - No 192 – November 25

CHICKENS A LA KIEV
By David Rubinson, drrant.blogspot.com
Let’s take a look at this Ukraine thing. Who on this Earth can begin to swallow the sanctimonious self-righteousness of the Bush Government, not to mention their Obsequious Oreo Gofer Passe Colin Powell, piously bleating on about open elections, democracy, and the Rights of The People. Puhleeeeeze. Not while I’m breathing. These guys act from one and only one motivation – insatiable self-interest.

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NEW - No 191 – November 17

WELCOME TO THE ONE-PARTY STATE
By Sheldon Rampton & John Stauber, prwatch.org
One of the biggest mistakes made by the Democratic Party during the recent election is that, once again, it “misunderestimated” George W. Bush. Rather than focusing on the big picture – the growing power of the conservative movement in the United States – much of the liberal rhetoric during the campaign focused on Bush’s incompetence, his character flaws and the failings of his administration. These themes found expression in books with titles such as “The Lies of George W. Bush,” the “I Hate Bush Reader” and the “Bush Hater’s Handbook.” In “Fahrenheit: 9/11,” Michael Moore dwelt on Bush’s rich-kid background, his frequent vacations, his Saudi connections and the frozen, deer-in-the-headlights way he continued reading “My Pet Goat” to schoolchildren after he first heard about the attacks on the World Trade Center towers.

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NEW - No 190 – November 17

WELCOME TO THE ONE-PARTY STATE
By Sheldon Rampton & John Stauber, prwatch.org
One of the biggest mistakes made by the Democratic Party during the recent election is that, once again, it “misunderestimated” George W. Bush. Rather than focusing on the big picture – the growing power of the conservative movement in the United States – much of the liberal rhetoric during the campaign focused on Bush’s incompetence, his character flaws and the failings of his administration. These themes found expression in books with titles such as “The Lies of George W. Bush,” the “I Hate Bush Reader” and the “Bush Hater’s Handbook.” In “Fahrenheit: 9/11,” Michael Moore dwelt on Bush’s rich-kid background, his frequent vacations, his Saudi connections and the frozen, deer-in-the-headlights way he continued reading “My Pet Goat” to schoolchildren after he first heard about the attacks on the World Trade Center towers.

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NEW - No 188 – November 8

THE NEWS SHIFT FROM FLORIDA TO FALLUJAH
By Danny Schechter, mediachannel.org
One minute, we are still debating election returns in Ohio and Florida. And then, in a flash, the story largely disappears and the subject changes. Quickly, we have moved on as the news media converges on Falluja to report on, and in the view of many, support what may be the bloodiest chapter to date of the Iraq war. Media coverage lurches from event to event, and from spectacle to spectacle as a substance deficit disorder hyperactively drives the news agenda. No sooner are we focused on one major story, than another intrudes to change the subject and insure that there is no time for follow-up, much less thoughtful processing.

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NEW - No 187 – November 8

TEAM BUSH'S NOVEMBER SURPRISE
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
Forty years after Senator Barry Goldwater crashed and burned as the Republican Party’s conservative presidential candidate, a consolidated conservative movement spearheaded by evangelical Christians carried George W. Bush to victory. The re-election of the president wasn’t so much determined by Soccer Moms, NASCAR Dads, or military voters as it was by Karl Rove’s army of “Values Voters” – an unwaveringly loyal bloc of Republican Party voters that marched to the polls and provided President Bush the votes necessary in a number of key states, including the pivotal battleground state of Ohio.

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NEW - No 186 – November 8

WHO, WHAT'S TO BLAME?
By Rory O’Connor, globalvision.org
It was the Ground War. Ir was the Air War. It was the youth vote. It was the ‘Yalla’ vote. It was the hundreds of thousands of newly registered voters. It was the millions of newly registered voters. It was George Soros. It was the felons’ list. It was voter suppression. It was voter fraud. It was the mystery bulge, and the wired President. It was the swing states. It was the battleground states. It was the computer voting machines. It was the media.

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NEW - No 185 – November 4

KERRY WON!
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
I know you don’t want to hear it. You can’t face one more hung chad.  But I don’t have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage called American democracy, it’s my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry. Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. At 1:05 a.m. Wednesday morning, CNN’s exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. The exit polls were later combined with – and therefore contaminated by – the tabulated results, ultimately becoming a mirror of the apparent actual vote. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio’s male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.

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NEW - No 184 – October 26

LUNTZ ON THE LOOSE
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
From helping craft Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America,” to advising Republicans to take the gloves off in going after President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky affair, to frequent memos on how to politically use 9/11, to reams of advice for Republicans on how to talk about the war on terrorism, the environment and other hot-button issues, to being a consultant to NBC’s The West Wing, to being named by Time magazine as one of “50 of America’s most promising leaders aged 40 and under,” Frank Luntz has been massaging the GOP’s messages, occasionally putting a kinder, gentler spin on GOP core issues, and taking the pulse of the nation’s voters for more than a decade. Regardless of the outcome of November’s election, Frank Luntz will be giving advice to the Republican Party and its candidates for a long time to come.

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NEW - No 183 – October 26

BBC TO REVEAL NEW FLORIDA VOTE SCANDAL
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
A secret document obtained from inside Bush campaign headquarters in Florida suggests a plan - possibly in violation of US law - to disrupt voting in the state’s African-American voting districts, a BBC Newsnight investigation reveals. Two e-mails, prepared for the executive director of the Bush campaign in Florida and the campaign’s national research director in Washington DC, contain a 15-page so-called “caging list”

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NEW - No 182 – October 24

5,000 ELEPHANTS MUST DIE. HERE'S WHY
By David Rubinson, drrant.blogspot.com
We sat down to a hot meal of maize porridge and elephant and onion mince, swigged down with Castle lager, at the end of a hard day. I had spent it with Kruger Park game ranger Jack Greef, who had been dispatching African elephants with high-velocity 7.62 bullets fired behind their ears and into their brains. “Don’t ask me if I enjoyed today,” Jack warned me gruffly. “Elephants are beautiful creatures. Of all the animals in the Kruger Park I respect the elephant most. We play God, but we are not God. Every time you cull it takes something away from you. This is not a nice job, but it has to be done.”

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No 181 – October 22

COLLATERAL DAMAGE
By David Rubinson, drrant.blogspot.com
Boston’s Finest Police and Boston’s Numbskull Mayor finally got what they have been training for and arming for, what they have been bigtime bragging about, what the papers and stooges on TV have been crowing about. First, they got what they paid those federally subsidized, Ashcroft Authorized millions of dollars for: the very very finest in state-of-the-art anti-riot and anti-people weapons. And then their plastic shielded black helmeted Nazi Storm Trooper Motherfuckers finally got their b-i-i-i-i-i-g chance – the one they'd been itching for and hoping for these many months – to really, actually SHOOT the fancy pepper pellets and plastic bullets and stun guns that had lain amoldering in their holsters since the Republican National Convention.

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No 180 – October 18

TRIAL WAS A MUGABE MASTERSTROKE
By Fred Bridgland, sundayherald.com
The judge who presided at opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai’s 20-month treason trial in Zimbabwe is a corrupt placeman who last year grabbed a prize white-owned farm for himself. Paddington Garwe was promoted by President Robert Mugabe to the second highest post in the land – Judge President – three years ago after a purge of independent-minded judges who had, until then, ruled that land grabs and the eviction of mainly white commercial farmers were illegal. Judges who have refused to toe the line have been arrested, attacked and toppled. Several have fled into exile.

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No 179– October 18

CONTRARY ON MARY
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
After more than two decades of unremitting gay-bashing, using gays and lesbians as fund-raising fodder for right wing organizations and candidates, demonizing gays at every turn and, in this election cycle, calling for a constitutional amendment that would deny gays and lesbians the right to marry, conservatives have finally found the outrage. You’ll remember that in 1996, the Republican Party’s Presidential candidate, Senator Bob Dole, spent much of his time during the campaign looking for the “outrage.” Outraged by Hollywood’s immorality, and outraged by the failure of the nation’s voters to stand behind the GOP’s effort to dump President Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair, Sen. Dole trucked around the country and demanded to know: “Where’s the outrage?”

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NEW - No 178 – October 18

CAUGHT IN A CROSSFIRE
By Rory O’Connor, roryoconnor.org
Talk about ‘cheap and tawdry’ political tricks! How would you feel if you were sitting at home watching television with your family when your privacy was invaded, your love life scrutinized ... and you suddenly found yourself being compared to a Nazi? That’s what happened to my longtime friend Winona LaDuke during a recently televised drive-by shooting on CNN’s Crossfire. Bow-tied Junior-Leaguer and George-Will-wannabe Tucker Carlson gratuitously slandered LaDuke last week following the endorsement of Kerry by Ralph Nader’s one-time running mate. And co-host Paul Begala chimed in ignorantly (from the left???) to compare Native American leader LaDuke – a prominent human and earth rights activist – with Nazi-lover David Duke!.

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NEW - No 177 – October 14

IS TEAM BUSH SUPPRESSING THE VOTE?
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
These days, schemes to suppress the vote are coming down the pike at a NASCAR-like clip: In July, Michigan State Rep. John Pappageorge told a gathering of party officials at an election strategy meeting of the Oakland County Republican Party that “If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we’re going to have a tough time in this election cycle.” In Orlando, Fla., members of the Orlando League of Voters – an African-American civic group made up of mostly elderly women that has helped turn out large numbers of Democratic voters in the city – were the subject of an intimidating house-to-house investigation by Governor Jeb Bush’s state police, who were supposedly checking out charges of electoral irregularities. The Rev. Jesse Jackson recently charged Republican Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell with “trying to reverse gains made by the civil rights movement by limiting where some Ohioans can cast their ballots,” the Palm Beach Post recently reported.

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NEW - No 176 – October 12

STOLEN HONOR: THE MOON CONNECTION
By Rory O’Connor, roryoconnor.org
The Sinclair Broadcasting Group – that wonderfully fair and balanced media firm that made news in April for refusing to run a Nightline program in which Ted Koppel read the names of American soldiers killed in Iraq – is up to its old political tricks again. This time the controversy centers on what WILL appear on as many as 62 television stations owned or managed by Sinclair: a suspect documentary highly critical of John Kerry’s antiwar activities thirty years ago.
The film, “Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal” is produced by Carlton Sherwood, a former reporter for the Washington Times, which of course is subsidized and controlled by the controversial Reverend Sun Myung Moon and his followers in the Unification Church.

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NEW - No 175 – October 10

HOROWITZ'S CAMPUS JIHAD
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
At Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, “WANTED” posters with a headshot of Professor Abel Alves appeared on campus a few weeks back; a student who took Associate professor David Gibbs’ “What is Politics?” class at the University of Arizona claimed that Gibbs “is an anti-American communist who hates America and is trying to brainwash young people into thinking America sucks”; a political-science professor at Metropolitan State College of Denver in Colorado says she has been the target of death threats and hate e-mail in the wake of the recent debate in the state over an Academic Bill of Rights; a University of Georgia professor is being investigated after allegations he bullied a conservative student. Revenge of the Nerds? Twenty-first century Gipper brigades? No, and No. It’s the Horowistas — a small, hearty and growing band of followers of right wing provocateur David Horowitz and his Students for Academic Freedom.

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NEW - No 174 – October 7

THE CREDIBILITY GAP
By Danny Schechter, mediachannel.org
There are two debates going on in American politics. The first is between and about the candidates. Who is ahead? Who is behind? The horse race metaphor frames the mainstream narrative as in years past. Alongside it, another debate rages about the role of the media itself. Is it being fair? Is it covering what it should? Is it biased – not just toward individual politicians but also against the democratic process itself? With the credibility of leading news organizations in question – with a coterie of partisan bloggers digging up media controversy at every political twist and turn – there seems to be a growing popular rejection of the traditional news machine.

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NEW - No 173 – October 1

SHOOT THE MESSENGER, BUT NOT THE MESSAGE
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
When Dan Rather went down for airing a document he couldn’t source, he did the courageous thing: blamed someone else. In this case, Rather and CBS loaded their corporate guilt on a guy you’ve probably never heard of before, rancher Bill Burkett of Abilene, a retired Lieutenant Colonel from the Texas Air National Guard. CBS did a no-no – used a document on air without fully checking out its source. No excuses. Shouldn’t have done it. They got the document from Burkett. Once CBS hung out its source and painted a target on him, Rove-ing gangs of media hit men finished him off. Burkett’s an evidence “fabricator,” “Bush-hater,” and even, suggests William Safire in the New York Times as he fantasizes a dark left-wing conspiracy, a felon ready for hard time.

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NEW - No 172 – October 1

MR TALL AND MR SMALL
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
Our President told the debate audience, “You cannot lead if you send mexxed missiges.” I certainly hope not. But that’s exactly what we got. You watch our President, the nervous hand-hiding, the compulsive water-glass-fondling, the panicked I-wish-I-had-a-whiskey look, and you think, “My god, this is the guy who’s supposed to save us from al Qaeda.”

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NEW - No 171 – September 30

BUSH SAYS KERRY 'EMBOLDENED ENEMY'
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
With President Bush and Senator Kerry preparing to square off in their first debate – covering foreign affairs – widespread insurgent attacks and US casualties continue to mount. Have the Bush Administration and its surrogates crossed the line by charging the Kerry campaign with undermining the war effort? Dusting off the “watch what you say, watch what you do” mantra from its post-9/11 playbook, Team Bush appears confident it can level these charges without suffering any significant damage. With Iraq’s un-elected transitional Prime Minister Ayad Allawi at his side during a White House Rose Garden press conference on September 23, President Bush claimed that critics of his policy in Iraq were encouraging the enemy: “I understand... what mixed messages do. You can embolden an enemy by sending a mixed message. You can dispirit the Iraqi people by sending mixed messages. That’s why I will continue to lead with clarity and in a resolute way.”

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NEW - No 170– September 26

IN THE SHADOW OF THE WALL
By David Pratt, sundayherald.com
Having passed with flying colours, Tuval returns to the main gunshop attached to the shooting gallery, where the owner renews the licence for the Beretta, and sells him a fresh box of bullets. WINCHESTER – FULL METAL JACKET says the writing on the box. In the display case beneath the counter is an assortment of other guns, saw-toothed “special forces” knives, knuckledusters and telescopic batons for sale. Next to us an elderly woman, who a few seconds earlier was going though her own locked-and-loaded routine like a veteran SAS man, is now perusing a selection of “discreet gun pouches” which the manufacturer insists are the “Best home your weapon will ever find”.

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NEW - No 169– September 25

EXCLUDED FROM THE USA
By Yusuf Islam, yusufislam.org.uk
First, I thank God for relieving me of my ordeal and delivering me home safe; also, thanks to all those who prayed for me and supported me through this whole dark episode, from eminent politicians, the press and religious leaders, to plain, everyday people. Never would I believe that such a thing could happen in the ‘land of the free’ – unfortunately, it did. But it’s warming to have such a wave of sympathy from my friends and my worldwide well-wishers. After the experience of my dramatic deportation from the U.S.A. it feels like I am on a different planet from the one I was on a couple of days ago; certainly the world has changed, not for the best.

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NEW - No 168 – September 25

WELCOME TO ALLAWI'S
By David Rubinson, drrant.blogspot.com
Welcome to Allawi’s White House Grill Room. My name is AYAD, and I will be your server. Our menu tonight features our famous Bullshit Buffet, a miraculously mendacious menu of meretriciously delicious cuisine. But first, we do have a few specials I’d like to tell you about, OK? For appetizers, we have Abu al la Ghraib, which is fresh young Sunni, handcuffed and stuffed with vegetables, and roasted in a plastic bag.

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No 167 – September 23

BUSH'S IRAQ FALLU-CINATION
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
On the campaign trail earlier this summer, President Bush was fond of saying “We are turning the corner, and we are not turning back.” According to the president, under his stewardship the US had turned the corner on the economy, education, health care and national security. Along about mid-August, he “apparently turned a corner in his use of what had been a popular refrain in recent campaign stump speeches,” CNN reported, dropping the “turning the corner” catchphrase from his repertoire. Well, the president has turned another corner and this time he has smashed into a brick wall of criticism about his failed policy in Iraq. If he follows the advice of the mow-’em-downers and the flush-’em-outers, President Bush will turn Fallujah – a cauldron of Iraqi resistance – into rubble; fill the city’s under-staffed and under-equipped hospitals with the pulpy remnants of men, women and children; and unleash US bombers that will create a rebuilding project that even Bechtel might have second thoughts about taking on.

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No 166 – September 23

WHAT WOULD HEWITT HAVE DONE?
By Rory O’Connor, mediachannel.org
Why didn’t anyone ask Don Hewitt what he thought? Of all the unanswered questions raging over the CBS News/Bush National Guard service memo flap, this remains one of the most puzzling. After all, Hewitt is the acknowledged creator of the 60 Minutes “brand” that is now endangered by the controversy. Moreover, for all his obvious flaws – he’s famously mercurial, abusive, demanding, and profane – Hewitt is a certified broadcasting legend, and his decades of experience might have spared CBS News the painful public embarrassment it now faces.
In other words, if I had been in the room with Jeff Fager – Hewitt’s successor at the helm of 60 Minutes -- or program producer Josh Howard, or field producer Mary Mapes, or the now-beleaguered Dan Rather, or senior executive Betsy West, or CBS News head Andrew Heyward (and there was any question or doubt at all about whether or not to move forward with the broadcast) I would have suggested taking advantage of the experience and wisdom of Hewitt. So why didn’t anyone ask Don Hewitt what he thought?

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No 165 – September 22

IN A LATHER OVER RATHER
By Danny Schechter, newsday.com
CBS’s most popular program “CSI” can now investigate a crime scene close to home. The reputation of veteran news anchor Dan Rather is lying on the floor, bloodied by a mistake he has now admitted, flanked on the political right by “we told you so” finger-pointers led by GOP operatives demanding his head. A news outlet once headed by “the most trusted man in America” is accused of being the least trustworthy. With Rather apologizing for airing a story based in part on memos that CBS cannot verify, it looks bad for network news in general and critics of President George W. Bush in particular. And that fits the M.O. of the people behind the hit. The story that “60 Minutes” ran charging that Bush had not completed his Texas National Guard duty has now been pronounced a “mistake.” CBS News added that “a source had misled the network on the documents’ origins.” The network promised “an independent review of how the report was prepared to help determine what actions need to be taken.”

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No 164 – September 21

THE RAPTURE RACKET
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
What if the Book of Revelation doesn’t mandate death, destruction and the annihilation of all but true believers? “The rapture is a racket,” writes Barbara R. Rossing in the first sentence of her recently published book The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation (Westview Press, 2004). Rossing, a New Testament scholar and an associate professor at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, maintains that the Rapture is a fraud of monumental proportions, as well as a disturbing way to instill fear in people.

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No 163 – September 20

PUT AWAY YOUR HANKIES
By Michael Moore, michaelmoore.com
Enough of the handwringing! Enough of the doomsaying! Do I have to come there and personally calm you down? Stop with all the defeatism, OK? Bush IS a goner – IF we all just quit our whining and bellyaching and stop shaking like a bunch of nervous ninnies. Geez, this is embarrassing! The Republicans are laughing at us. Do you ever see them cry, “Oh, it’s all over! We are finished! Bush can’t win! Waaaaaa!” Hell no. It’s never over for them until the last ballot is shredded. They are never finished – they just keeping moving forward like sharks that never sleep, always pushing, pulling, kicking, blocking, lying.

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No 162 – September 20

THE LYNCHING OF DAN RATHER
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
"It’s that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions,” the aging American journalist told the British television audience. In June 2002, Dan Rather looked old, defeated, making a confession he dare not speak on American TV about the deadly censorship – and self-censorship – which had seized US newsrooms. After September 11, news on the US tube was bound and gagged. Any reporter who stepped out of line, he said, would be professionally lynched as un-American.

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No 161 – September 19

BUSH AND BLAIR: SECRETS AND LIES
By Neil Mackay, sundayherald.com
Tony Blair’s secrets are out, and this is what he knew a full year before the invasion of Iraq: the war was illegal, it would turn into a quagmire that could last for generations and it was more than likely that, once Saddam was overthrown, a new Iraqi government, even a democratic one, would start developing weapons of mass destruction. These warnings were contained in a series of top-secret documents that Blair read and digested long before the invasion. It’s little wonder that Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, says these revelations are ‘the crown jewels’.

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No 160 – September 17

BUSH'S HOLLOW NARRATIVE ON IRAQ
By Bill Berkowitz, workingfor change.com
The occupation of Iraq is spiraling out of control, averaging more than three US deaths a day since the beginning of September. Yet despite the cascading bad news – the US casualty count has jumped from 1,000 on the morning of September 7 to 1,029 at press time – President Bush is steadfastly sticking to his narrative. The occupation of Iraq is muddled, confused, and messy and the prospects for the future are bleak. That isn’t spin from the DNC’s latest press release. It’s the current assessment of two highly-respected Republican Senators and the conclusion of a highly-classified report produced by the National Intelligence Council that, according to The New York Times, forecast “a dark assortment of prospects for Iraq.”

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No 159 – September 17

WAS THE IRAQ WAR LEGAL, OR ILLEGAL, UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW?
By Evan Augustine Peterson III
During a BBC radio interview on Wednesday, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan created a controversy by reiterating his long-held position that the Iraq War was illegal because it breached the United Nations Charter. On Thursday, the imperial leaders of the “Coalition of the Willing” retaliated by vehemently arguing that their Iraq War was, to the contrary, legal. Obviously, this dispute raises a legal question: “Whose opinion is correct, and whose is incorrect?” Additionally, we should be asking ourselves: “Who decides? (i.e., ‘Whose jurisprudential opinion shall be dispositive for purposes of resolving this dispute?’)”

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No 158 – September 16

PAKISTAN PLAYING BALL WITH BUSH
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
I f Joseph Cofer Black, the U.S. State Department coordinator for counterterrorism, is correct, al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden might be in the hands of U.S. authorities sometime before Election Day, thanks to Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf. Black, emerging from a September 2nd/3rd meeting of the Pakistan-U.S. Joint Working Group on Counterterrorism and Law Enforcement in Islamabad, Pakistan, told the private Geo television network that bin Laden’s time was clearly running out: “Osama bin Laden is probably the most hunted man in the planet now. Osama bin Laden and his associates at that level are primarily defensive, they spend most of their time trying to keep from getting caught. If he (bin Laden) has a watch, he should be looking at it because the clock is ticking. He will be caught. Programs are in place and what I tell people (is) I would be surprised but not necessarily shocked if we wake up tomorrow and he has been caught along with all his lieutenants.”

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No 157 – September 15

WHEN THE RABBITS GET A GUN
By William Rivers Pitt, truthout.org
This is the comforting fiction: Osama bin Laden is a monster who sprang whole from the fetid mire. He had no childhood, no influences, no education, no experiences to form his view of the world. He did not exist, and then he did, a vessel into which the universe poured the essence of evil. It is a simple, straightforward story of a man who hates freedom and kills for the pure joy of feeling innocent blood drip from his fingers. This is the fairy tale by which children are put to bed at night. As frightening and terrifying as bin Laden may be, it is a comfort to imagine him as having been chiseled from the dust. The fiction of his existence, absent of detail, makes him unique, a singular entity not to be replicated. Osama bin Laden becomes truly scary only when the actual context of his life is made clear, where he is from, what he has seen, and why those things motivated him to do what he does.

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No 156 – September 15

SEVERE THREAT TO FREEDOM OF INFORMATION
By Lucy Dalglish, mediachannel.org
In the days immediately following September 11, the U.S. government embarked on a disturbing path of secrecy. The atmosphere of terror induced public officials to abandon this country’s culture of openness and opt for secrecy as a way of ensuring safety and security. At first, we hoped that the move toward secrecy would be short lived. The actions would be viewed as temporary” or “emergency” measures. Unfortunately, that has not been the case. Led by secrecy-loving officials in the executive branch, secrecy in the United States government is now the norm. Over the past three years, the administration of President George W. Bush has taken a variety of actions designed to restrict information from reaching the public.

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No 155 – September 13

NEW - THE HIJACKING OF 9/11
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
I first heard the phrase “I am a September 11th person” during a 2003 interview on the Fox News Channel. At the time, actor Ron Silver told Neil Cavuto, host of the daily afternoon program Your World with Cavuto, that “There are two kinds of people. There are September 10th people and September 11th people, and I am a September 11th person.” Silver, who likely still considers himself a liberal Democrat, admitted that his politics changed forever on 9/11 and that he supported President Bush’s prosecution of the war on terror (he has since said that he’s always been a hawk on national security issues). At the Republican Party’s national convention Silver reiterated his support for President Bush: “I think there are September 10 people and there are September 11 people. I’m one of the latter. Everything changed for me. Since then I see everything through the prism of what happened that day,” he said.

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No 154 – September 12

A FRIGHTENING WEEKEND FOR MARK THATCHER
By Fred Bridgland, sundayherald.com
Margaret Thatcher’s controversial son, Mark, must be a nervous man this weekend as his friend and close Cape Town neighbour, Simon Mann, begins a seven-year jail term in Zimbabwe’s notorious Chikurubi Jail for offences related to an attempted mercenary coup d’etat in Equatorial Guinea. Mark Thatcher is under house arrest in Cape Town, facing charges of co-financing the coup and providing a plane that was scheduled to fly an exiled opposition leader into Equatorial Guinea to replace dictator-President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo.

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No 153 – September 10

IS THERE AN ASSAULT RIFLE IN YOUR FUTURE?
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
Despite recent polls showing that most Americans favor it, despite support from a number of major law enforcement agencies, and despite the unqualified support from Senator John Kerry and quasi-support from President Bush – he claims to favor it but has done nothing to push it – the 1994 law signed by President Clinton banning the manufacture and importation of 19 types of assault weapons, including semiautomatic versions of the Intratec Tec-9 pistol and Uzi submachine gun, will expire at midnight Monday, September 13. While some gun manufacturers managed to find ways around the law, and the gun lobby, spearheaded by the National Rifle Association and its congressional allies, repeatedly tried to repeal the law, the ban remained intact and according to a number of studies proved to successfully remove a rash of deadly weapons from the streets. Now, however, unless Congress acts immediately, the 10-year sunset clause written into the law will kick in and the ban on these assault weapons will automatically expire.

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No 152 – September 9

SEPT 11: WHAT YOU REALLY OUGHT TO KNOW
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
On November 9, 2001, when you could still choke on the dust in the air near Ground Zero, BBC Television received a call in London from a top-level US intelligence agent. He was not happy. Shortly after George W. Bush took office, he told us reluctantly, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the FBI, “were told to back off the Saudis.” We knew that. In the newsroom, we had a document already in hand, marked, “SECRET” across the top and “199-I” – meaning this was a national security matter. The secret memo released agents to hunt down two member of the bin Laden family operating a “suspected terrorist organization” in the USA. It was dated September 13, 2001 – two days too late for too many. What the memo indicates, corroborated by other sources, was that the agents had long wanted to question these characters ... but could not until after the attack. By that time, these bin Laden birds had flown their American nest.

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No 151 – September 8

DON'T LOOK AT THE FLASH
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
On September 11, 2001, we Americans were the victims of a terrible attack. By September 12, we became the suspects. Not one single U.S. citizen hijacked a plane, yet President Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft, through powers seized and codified in the USA PATRIOT Act, fingered 270 million of us for surveillance, for searches, for tracking, for watching. And who was going to play Anti-Santa, watching to see when we’ve been good or bad? A guy named Derek Smith. And that made September 11, 2001 Derek’s lucky day. Even before the spying work could begin, there were all those pieces of people to collect – tubes marked “DM” (for “Disaster Manhattan”) – from which his company, ChoicePoint Inc, would extract DNA for victim identification, work for which the firm would receive $12 million from New York City’s government. Maybe Smith, like the rest of us, grieved at the murder of innocent friends and countrymen. As for the 12-million-dollar corpse identification fee, that’s chump change to the $4 billion corporation Smith had founded only four years earlier in Alpharetta, Georgia).

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No 150 – September 8

IRAQ'S INVISIBLE WAR BECOMES VISIBLE
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
On Tuesday, September 7, sixteen months after President Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq, the 1,000th US service member was killed in Iraq. Within hours, the 1,000th death was followed by death number 1,001, making twenty-three US dead since the beginning of the month. (In August, 66 US service members died in Iraq.) The Bush Administration’s response? On the campaign trail, the president keeps insisting that America was right to go into Iraq. And on the battlefield, according to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, the US is planning an increase in military operations. Blitzer reported that US military officials, in a departure from previous policy, had trumpeted the large number of Iraqi casualties the US has inflicted. (Since March 2003, the Pentagon had insisted that it had no mechanism for, or interest in, counting Iraqi deaths, particularly civilians. Now, it appears that counting the bodies of Iraqi insurgents – a staple of US policy in Vietnam – is back on the Pentagon’s agenda.)

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No 149 – September 7

POLITICAL COVERAGE IS AN ECHO OF WAR
By Danny Schechter, mediachannel.org
During the run-up to the war in Iraq and through the US invasion, it was obvious that our media system had signed up as an unofficial megaphone for war. There was a uniformity of perspective, a reliance on the same “facts,” and a dismissal of critics and dissenters.
Journalists outside America compared our TV coverage to that of a “state-run media” even though most U.S. media outlets are in private hands and nominally competitive with each other. A year and a half-later, some journalists and newspapers took a second look at their coverage and acknowledged it had been flawed. There were admissions of misreporting, especially on supporting the government’s allegations of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

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September 7

RUSSIAN STATE TERROR AND THE BUSH AGENDA
By Milan Rai
President Bush said at the Republican National Convention in New York, ‘We are staying on the offensive – striking terrorists abroad – so we do not have to face them here at home.’ (http://tinyurl.com/55ad3) The tragedy in North Ossetia in Russia, where several hundred people have died in a school siege, demonstrates the end result of such an attitude. ‘Yesterday’s seizure of a school in the southern town of Beslan, about 30 miles west of Chechnya, caps a bloody week for Mr Putin, whose usual take on the [Chechnya] conflict is that it is “getting better”. Two planes and a metro station have been attacked, and now he must achieve what seems impossible: the safe extraction of up to 400 schoolchildren [actually more than twice that number] from a mined gymnasium.’ (Guardian, 2 Sept., p. 4).

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No 147 – September 6

WHY I WON'T BE SEEKING AN OSCAR
By Michael Moore, michaelmoore.com
I had dinner recently with a well-known pollster who had often worked for Republicans. He told me that when he went to see “Fahrenheit 9/11” he got so distraught he twice had to go out in the lobby and pace during the movie. “The Bush White House left open a huge void when it came to explaining the war to the American people,” he told me. “And your film has filled that void – and now there is no way to defeat it. It is the atomic bomb of this campaign.” He told me how he had conducted an informal poll with “Fahrenheit 9/11” audiences in three different cities and the results were all the same. “Essentially, 80% of the people going IN to see your movie are already likely Kerry voters and the movie has galvanized them in a way you rarely see Democrats galvanized.

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No 146 – September 5

THE GRINCH THAT STOLE LABOR DAY
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
In celebration of the working person’s holiday, Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao has announced the Bush Administration’s plan to end the 60-year-old law which requires employers to pay time-and-a-half for overtime. I’m sure you already knew that – if you happened to have run across page 15,576 of last year’s Federal Register. According to the Register, where the Bush Administration likes to place its little gifts to major campaign donors, 2.7 million workers will lose their overtime pay for a “benefit” of $1.53 billion. I put “benefit” in quotes because, in the official cost-benefit analysis issued by Bush’s Labor Department, the amount employers will now be able to slice out of workers’ pockets is tallied on the plus side of the rules change.

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No 145 – September 2

NAJAF: TRUCE OR TRAP?
By Milan Rai
The Najaf ceasefire did not resolve the conflict in Najaf. Before the ink was even dry on the agreement signed by militant Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and the supreme Shia religious leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the United States and its client forces were breaking the terms of the truce. In particular, US Marines refused to withdraw from Najaf, as required by the Sistani peace deal. Muqtada al-Sadr may wish to move the conflict over the occupation to the political sphere, but the US and the Allawi do not.

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No 144 – September 2

PRESIDENT DECLARES 'OWNERSHIP SOCIETY'
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
Of all the bone-headed, whacky, breathtakingly threatening schemes George W. Bush is trying to sell us in his acceptance speech tonight is something he and his handlers call, “the Ownership Society.” Sounds cool, “ownership.” Everyone gets a piece of the action. Everyone’s a winner as the economy zooms. All boats rise. Sure. Behind the hooray-for-free-enterprise crapola is that dog-eared game-plan to siphon off Social Security revenues to pay for making Bush’s tax cuts for the rich permanent.

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No 143 – August 31

MICHAEL MOORE MEETS THE SECRET SERVICE
By Danny Schechter, mediachannel.org
With thousands of New York’s finest corralling free speech and hunting for terrorists, it isn’t likely that the NYPD’s Missing Persons Bureau will have time to unravel one of the more intriguing mysteries of the day. This whodunit has nothing to do with: missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; the non-existent link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda; who was responsible for the miserable post-war occupation; how much U.S. taxpayer money has been wasted in Iraq; or who ordered the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. The question that many will be asking by nightfall on Thursday is: Where in the name of Waldo are the Republican Party’s fundamentalist evangelical Christian leaders?

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No 142 – August 31

THE REAL GOP GOES MIA IN NYC
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
With thousands of New York’s finest corralling free speech and hunting for terrorists, it isn’t likely that the NYPD’s Missing Persons Bureau will have time to unravel one of the more intriguing mysteries of the day. This whodunit has nothing to do with: missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; the non-existent link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda; who was responsible for the miserable post-war occupation; how much U.S. taxpayer money has been wasted in Iraq; or who ordered the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. The question that many will be asking by nightfall on Thursday is: Where in the name of Waldo are the Republican Party’s fundamentalist evangelical Christian leaders?

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DID SISTANI COLLUDE WITH US ASSAULT ON NAJAF
By Milan Rai
There are at least three possible accounts of the origins of the recent Najaf conflict. Uncovering the truth requires a close scrutiny of the behaviour of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, now feted as the peace-bringer of Najaf. The standard Western media rendering is that (for some unknown reason) militant Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr decided to launch an uprising against the US occupation on 5 August This flies in the face of the fact that, as the Financial Times reported, it was US forces that ‘went on the offensive’ against al-Sadr’s group, ‘breaking a two-month ceasefire with followers of Shia radical Moqtada al-Sadr’ by surrounding al-Sadr’s home in Kufa, next to Najaf, sparking an exchange fire with members of al-Sadr’s militia.’ (FT, 3 August, p. 9)

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No 140– August 29

MADAME BUTTERFLY AND THE ABSENTEE BALLOTS
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
On Friday, Theresa LePore, Supervisor of Elections in Palm Beach, candidate for re-election as Supervisor of Elections, chose to supervise her own election, no one allowed. This Tuesday, Florida votes for these nominally non-partisan posts. You remember Theresa, “Madame Butterfly,” the one whose ballots brought in the big vote for Pat Buchanan in the Jewish precincts in November 2000. Then she failed to do the hand count that would have changed the White House from Blue to Red. This time, Theresa’s in a hurry to get to the counting. She began tallying absentee ballots on Friday in her own re-election race. Not to worry: the law requires the Supervisor of Elections in each county to certify poll-watchers to observe the count.But Theresa has a better idea. She refused to certify a single poll-watcher from opponents’ organizations despite the legal requirement she do so by last week. She’ll count her own votes herself, thank you very much!

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No 139 – August 29

DEAR MR GANDHI
By Uri Avnery
Dear Dr. Gandhi,
We Israeli peace activists welcome you with all our heart.
We are all deeply impressed by the immortal message of your grandfather, the great Mahatma, who practiced non-violence while fighting with all his strength against a cruel foreign occupation. We are grateful to you for coming here to encourage our commitment to freedom, justice and non-violence. But what IS violence?

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No 138 – August 29

A VERY AFRICAN COUP
By Fred Bridgland, sundayherald.com
Mark Thatcher, son of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, sits under house arrest this weekend in his luxury Cape Town home, overlooking a magnificent bay where southern right whales and their newborn calves swim free, and staffed by 12 servants and a number of rifle-toting bodyguards. He has until at least November 25 to enjoy the comforts of his Dutch Cape-style home, whose two hectares include a swimming pool and tennis court behind 10ft-high walls which currently keep out squads of encamped British newspaper reporters as effectively as they do the Cape’s many part-time and full-time violent robbers.

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No 137 – August 29

ROSE GENTLE'S RAGE
By Susan Flockhart, sundayherald.com
Murder is an ugly word. But Rose Gentle hates euphemisms about falling on battlefields or being ‘killed in action’. Two months ago in Basra, her 19-year-old son, Gordon, died when a roadside bomb exploded, and as far as Gentle is concerned, he was murdered. ‘If somebody puts a bomb under John Prescott’s feet and he stands on it, that’s murder,’ she reasons. ‘It’s like getting stabbed in the street.’ So who is the murderer Gentle isn’t saying the Iraqis are blameless and she’d like to get her hands on whoever planted that bomb. But the bulk of her ire is directed towards the British government, who she thinks used her son as ‘a bit of meat’ in a conflict she describes as ‘a war over oil’.

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No 136 – August 28

BUSH AND VIETNAM; THE UNREPORTED PAY-OFF
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
In 1968, former Congressman George Herbert Walker Bush of Texas, fresh from voting to send other men’s sons to Vietnam, enlisted his own son in a very special affirmative action program, the ‘champagne’ unit of the Texas Air National Guard.  There, Top Gun fighter pilot George Dubya was assigned the dangerous job of protecting Houston from Vietcong air attack.This week, former Lt. Governor Ben Barnes of Texas ‘fessed up to pulling the strings to keep Little George out of the jungle. “I got a young man named George W. Bush into the Texas Air Guard – and I’m ashamed.” That's far from the end of the story.

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No 135 – August 27

PANAMA PARDONS ANTI-CASTRO TERRORISTS
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
President Bush has made a point of repeatedly saying “You’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists.” In 2001, he told thousands of members of the 101st Airborne Division (Screaming Eagles) at Fort Campbell, Kentucky: “If you harbor terrorists, you are a terrorist. If you train or arm a terrorist, you are a terrorist. If you feed or fund a terrorist, you’re a terrorist, and you will be held accountable by the United States and our friends.” These remarks are at the foundation of the Bush Doctrine and his attempts to enlist other nations in the war against terrorism. What then to make of Panama’s recent decision to pardon four Cuban exiles convicted of plotting a terrorist attack?

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No 134– August 26

GOP FEARS AIDS AND PIES IN NYC
By Danny Schechter, mediachannel.org
A year and a half ago, we kept hearing about that fanatical and feared Republican Guard as the force that Saddam was relying on to save his regime. He didn’t have just one Republican Guard, the “Butcher of Baghdad” had two – a SPECIAL Republican Guard. Remember? Now, here in America another Republican Guard is trying to save the Bush Regime. And it is not so special. Iraq’s RG crumbled in the face of superior force. How will ours do in the week ahead? Cry don’t laugh. There are striking similarities. Both Guards relied on deception, manipulation of information and brute force, including torture. The Bathists crushed protests; the Bushists do the same, but they do it stealthfully behind the scenes with FBI intimidation and the refusal to allow demonstrators to assemble in a park that has long been a rallying ground. New York’s Republican Guard mayor toadies up to the party hierarchy.

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No 133 – August 26

THE COURAGE OF PRESIDENT BUSH!
By Michael Moore, michaelmoore.com
Dear Mr. Bush,
I know you and I have had our differences in the past, and I realize I am the one who started this whole mess about “who did what” during Vietnam when I brought up that “deserter” nonsense back in January. But I have to hand it to you on what you have uncovered about John Kerry and his record in Vietnam. Kerry has tried to pass himself off as a war hero, but thanks to you and your friends, we now know the truth. First of all, thank you for pointing out to all of us that Mr. Kerry was never struck by a BULLET. It was only SHRAPNEL that entered his body! I did not know that! Hell, what’s the big deal about a bunch of large, sharp, metal shards ripping open your flesh? That happens to all of us! In my opinion, if you want a purple heart, you’d better be hit with a bullet — with your name on it!

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No 130 – August 16

WHY VENEZUELA HAS VOTED AGAIN FOR CHAVEZ
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
There’s so much BS and baloney thrown around about Venezuela that I may be violating some rule of US journalism by providing some facts. Let’s begin with this: 77% of Venezuela’s farmland is owned by 3% of the population, the ‘hacendados.’ I met one of these farmlords in Caracas at an anti-Chavez protest march. Oddest demonstration I’ve ever seen: frosted blondes in high heels clutching designer bags, screeching, ‘Chavez – dic-ta-dor!’ The plantation owner griped about the ‘socialismo’ of Chavez, then jumped into his Jaguar convertible. That week, Chavez himself handed me a copy of the ‘socialist’ manifesto that so rattled the man in the Jag. It was a new law passed by Venezuela’s Congress which gave land to the landless. The Chavez law transferred only fields from the giant haciendas which had been left unused and abandoned.

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No 129 – August 15

IS OUR MEDIA COVERING UP ITS ERRORS?
By Danny Schechter, mediachannel.org
As more mainstream media outlets admit their failures in covering the Iraq War, a question must be asked: are we seeing a real coming to grips with the media role that helped “sell the war” to the American public? Or could these recent mea culpas be something more insidious, more like what the CIA used to call a “limited hang out?” That phrase translates as “you concede a little to hide a lot.” As the author of a book and maker of a film on Iraq war coverage, I am delighted to see some acknowledgement of errors and omissions on the part of media outlets that, when it really counted, become transmission belts for unsubstantiated government claims and pro-war propaganda.

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No 128 – August 15

THE FUEL FOR FAHRENHEIT 9/11
By Torcuil Creighton, sundayherald.com
Thanks to the First Amendment of the United States constitution, some robust laws that defend writers against libel and principles that enshrine freedom of expression and an open system of government, respected American journalist Craig Unger has been able to write an explosive book about President George Bush and his links to the Saudi royal family. It’s called House Of Bush House Of Saud and in it Unger details the connections between a leading member of the Saudi royal family and the fundamentalist terrorist groups determined to destroy the US. It was this book that formed the backbone of Michael Moore’s much-hyped documentary Fahrenheit 9/11.

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No 127 – August 15

BOERS AT WAR
By Fred Bridgland, sundayherald.com
He might have been laughing as he said it, but Archbishop Desmond Tutu wasn’t joking when he said that South Africa had become a crazy country. On the one hand, he said, look at Pretoria. There, the trial of 22 extreme right-wingers known as the “Boer Force” has heard about their plan to breed a new white super-race and reinstate white rule. When the Nobel Peace Prize winner mentioned this to journalists in Cape Town last week, the response was laughter rather than shock and horror. On the other hand, he continued, look at the demise of the National Party. During its 50-year reign it created apartheid, banned the ANC (African National Congress) and imprisoned Nelson Mandela after narrowly failing to have him hanged. Now, however, it has decided to become … part of the ANC.

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