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Today's Stories April 20, 2006 Justin E.H. Smith Doctors and Lethal Injection April 19, 2006 P. Sainath More Kids? Pay More for Your Water Norman Solomon When Diplomacy Means War: Bait-and-Switch on Iran Anthony Papa When Justice Isn't Blind: Double Standards for the Rich and Poor in New York Mike Ferner Movement Blues Stanley Heller The Massacre at Qana, 10 Years Later: Still No Justice Rifundazione "We Defeated Berlusconi" Christopher Reed Secrets of the Garden of Bliss Alexander Cockburn The Pulitzer Farce Website of the Day Bunker Busters: the Movie April 18, 2006 Paul Craig Roberts How Safe is Your Job? Eric Wingerter Washington Post vs. Venezuela Juan Santos What Immigrants Need to Learn from the Black Civil Rights Movement Greg Weiher The Zarqawi Gambit Revisited Sam Bahour Is Hamas Being Forced to Collapse? Behzad Yaghmaian In the Gaze of New Orleans Website of the Day The FBI and the Jack Anderson Files   April 17, 2006 Kevin Zeese An Interview with the First Arab-American Senator: Jim Abourezk on Bush's Lies and the Dems' Complicity Uri Avnery Olmert the Fox Norman Solomon Why Won't Moveon.Org Oppose the Bombing of Iran? John Ross A Real Day Without Mexicans? Laila al-Haddad The Earth is Closing in on Us: Dispatch from Gaza Jeffrey Blankfort A Tale of Two Members of Congress and the Capitol Hill Police Website of the Day Dixie Chicks: Not Ready to Back Down   April 15 / 16, 2006 Jeffrey St. Clair How Star Wars Came to the Arctic Ralph Nader Remembering Rev. William Sloan Coffin Thaddeus Hoffmeister The Ghost of Shinseki: the General Who Was Sent Out to Pasture for Being Right Kevin Prosen / Dave Zirin Privilege Meets Protest at Duke Thomas P. Healy Taking Care of What We've Been Given: a Conversation with Wendell Berry Kristoffer Larsson Are 40 Percent of All Swedes Anti-Semitic?: Anatomy of a Statistical Flim-Flam Fred Gardner Continuing Medical (Marijuana) Education Edwin Krales New York's Katrina: the Hidden Toll of AIDS Among Blacks and the Poor Brian Cloughley Don't Blitz Iran: Risking the Ultimate Blowback John Holt Walking Off Vietnam with Edward Abbey's Surrogate Son Seth Sandronsky What Billionaires Mean By Education Reform: Oprah, Bill Gates and the Privatization of Public Schools Rafael Renteria Making It Plain About New Orleans Michael Ortiz Hill In the Ashes of Lament: an Easter Meditation William A. Cook An Israel Accountability Act Gideon Levy Shooting Nasarin: a Story About a Little Girl Andrew Wimmer Stopping the Bush Juggernaut: a New Citizens Campaign Madis Senner Talking Points for Easter Weekend: Jesus Didn't Lie, Mr. Bush Michael Kuehl The Sex Police State: Women as "Rapists" and "Pedophiles"? Mark Scaramella When Even God Can't Follow His Own Commandments: the Timeless Scarcasm of Mark Twain Nate Mezmer 187 Proof: Living and Dying Hip-Hop Jesse Walker Playlist Poets' Basement Engel, Laymon and Subiet Website of the Weekend Pink Serenades Bush   April 14, 2006 Col. Dan Smith Candor or Career?: Why Few Top Military Officials Resign on Principle Saul Landau Ho Chi Minh City Moves On Without Regrets Stan Cox The Real Death Tax Kevin Zeese Hersh vs. Bush on Iran: Who Would You Believe? Brian McKinlay Bad Times for Bush's Buddies Howard Meyers Dwarves, Knives and Freedom: Bush, Jr. is No LBJ Ishmael Reed The Colored Mind Doubles: How the Media Uses Blacks to Chastize Blacks Website of the Day Asshole: a Film Strip   April 13, 2006 CounterPunch News Service Powell's "Bitch"? Norman Solomon The Lobby and the Bulldozer Stanley Heller Time to Shake Up the Peace Movement Jeff Birkenstein Bush and Freedom of Speech Evelyn J. Pringle Not So Fast, Mr. Powell Michael Donnelly The Week the Bush Administration Fell Apart Kamran Matin Synergism of the Neo-Cons: What's Going On In Iran? Website of the Day "Don't Be Afraid of the Neo-Cons"   April 12, 2006 Vijay Prashad Resisting Fences Alan Maass The Suicide of Anthony Soltero Dave Lindorff Bush's Insane First Strike Policy: If You Don't Want to Get Whacked, You'd Better Get Your Nation a Nuke ... Fast Ron Jacobs Resistance: the Remedy for Fear Ramzy Baroud The Imminent Decline of the American Empire? Randall Dodd How a Wal-Mart Bank will Harm Consumers Missy Comley Beattie The Boy President Who Cried "Wolf!" P. Sainath The Corporate Hijack of India's Water Website of the Day "The System is Irretrievably Corrupt"   April 11, 2006 Al Krebs Corporate Agriculture's Dirty Little Secret: Immigration and a History of Greed Lawrence R. Velvel The Gang That Couldn't Leak Straight Sonia Nettinin Palestinian Health Care Conditions Under Israeli Occupation Willliam S. Lind The Fourth Plague Hits the Pentagon: Generals as Private Contractors Robert Ovetz Endangered Species in a Can: the Disappearance of Big Fish Pratyush Chandra Nepalis Say, "Ya Basta!" Grant F. Smith The Bush Administration's Final Surprise? Laray Polk Loud, Soft, Hard, Quiet: Marching Through Dallas for Immigrant Rights Francis Boyle O'Reilly and the Law of the Jungle: How to Beat a Bully on His Home Turf José Pertierra A Glimpse into the Mindset of Terrorists: Posada Carriles, Orlando Bosch and the Downing of Cubana Flight 455 Website of the Day The Dead Emcee Scrolls   April 10, 2006 Ralph Nader Tinhorn Caesar and the Spineless Democrats Heather Gray Atlanta and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Uri Avnery The Big Wink Joshua Frank Big Greens and Beltway Politics: Betting on Losers Seth Sandronsky Immigration and Occupations Michael Leonardi The Italian Elections: "Reality is No Longer Important" Evelyn Pringle Did Bush Pull a Fast One on Fitzgerald? Tom Kerr FoxNews Does Ward Churchill Lucinda Marshall The Lynching of Cynthia McKinney Website of the Day Brown Berets April 7 -9, 2006 Alexander Cockburn If Only They'd Hissed Barack Obama Jeffrey St. Clair The Saga of Magnequench: Outsourcing US Missile Technology to China Patrick Cockburn The War Gets Grimmer Every Day David Vest The Rebuking and Scorning of Cynthia McKinney Dave Lindorff The Impeachment Clock Just Clicked Forward Gary Leupp "Ideologies of Hatred:" What Did Condi Mean? Elaine Cassel The Moussaoui Trial: What Kind of Justice is This? Saul Landau Vietnam Diary: Hue Without Rules James Ridgeway "This is Betty Ong Calling": a Short Film Ron Jacobs Why Iran was Right to Refuse US Money John Walsh Kerry Advocates Iraqization: Too Little, Too Late Ramzy Baroud The US Attitude Toward Hamas: Disturbing Parallels with Nicaragua Christopher Brauchli Bush Finds Democracy Has Its Limits Todd Chretien What the Pentagon Budget Could Buy for America Jonathan Scott Javelins at the Head of the Monolith John Bomar What They're Saying About Bush in Arkansas Michele Brand Iran, the US and the EU Ronan Sheehan Remember When the Irish First Met the Chinese? Mickey Z. Let Us Now Praise OIL Don Monkerud March of the Bunglers Michael Dickinson The Rich Young Man: a Miracle Play Website of the Weekend The Case Against Israel and Munich: Compare and Contrast

April 20, 2006 "Appropriate Medical Care" and the Paradox of Sanitized Execution Doctors and Lethal Injection By JUSTIN E. H. SMITH In a recent ruling, Judge Malcolm Howard of the Federal District Court in Greenville, North Carolina, determined that the execution by lethal injection of Willie Brown Jr. may not proceed unless appropriate medical supervision of the process can be ensured. This ruling followed upon the presentation of evidence that all too often executioners without medical training do a poor job of administering the cocktail of chemicals required, and that as a consequence the prisoner often suffers needlessly. North Carolina prison officials have been ordered to tell the court by this week how they will comply with its order requiring medically trained personnel to ensure that Brown is unconscious during his execution, currently scheduled for April 21. The officials have been asked a question they cannot possibly answer, and we can only hope that their conundrum will lead to a stay of execution for the prisoner. As Adam Liptak reported recently in the New York Times ("Judges Set Hurdles for Lethal Injection," April 12, 2006), increasingly the drug protocol used nationwide since the 1970s --originally devised by the Oklahoma Department of Corrections in consultation with the state medical examiner-- is being denounced by critics as too complex and as medically unjustifiable. The first drug administered in this procedure is the barbiturate sodium thiopental. As Liptak reports, "properly administered... it is sufficient to render an inmate unconscious for many hours, if not to kill him." (Sodium thiopental, it is interesting to note, is the sole drug administered in the routine euthanization of pets and farm animals.) The second drug is pancuronium bromide which, if administered by itself, would bring about paralysis without unconsciousness. If the prisoner suffers after this drug is injected, his anguish can generally not be detected by external observers since he is unable to move and thus unable to register pain. The bromide thus serves to obscure from view the effect of the third and final drug, potassium chloride, which causes the heart to stop beating but also causes unimaginable pain while travelling through the veins. If the first drug is administered correctly, it is sufficient to render the prisoner fully unconscious and to cancel out the painful effects of the two drugs to follow. But poorly trained prison staff often choose the wrong spot on the prisoner's body to inject the barbiturate, resulting in inadequate distribution throughout his system. Why not, then, include well-trained medical personnel in the procedure? The American Medical Association's ethics code explicitly forbids physicians to prescribe the drugs to be used in execution, to select intravenous sites, to administer the drugs, and to pronounce death. As Liptak reports, the code is not legally binding, and anonymous participation by doctors is not uncommon. Collusion by doctors in earlier stage of the process is also a well-known fact, from the various experts who spoke in favor of the guillotine in the 1790s to the Oklahoma state medical examiner's oversight of the recipe for lethal injection in the 1970s. It is not clear whether Judge Howard was aware of the AMA's code of ethics when he ordered that the execution of Willie Brown Jr. could not proceed without the guarantee of supervision by personnel capable of "providing appropriate medical care" should Mr. Brown wake up. The judge did not say that the personnel had to be licensed physicians, but clearly the only other possibility would be to invite unlicensed individuals purporting to be medical experts. This would be to condone medical fraud, a felony in all 50 states. If the personnel are licensed physicians, though, the problem of course is that the "appropriate medical care" they provide could only consist in taking measures to promote the continuation of Mr. Brown's life. Such is the reasoning, in any case, behind many legal defeats of physician-assisted suicide over the years. For instance the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals argued in 1997 that the government has legitimate interests in prohibiting such assistance since it is already obligated to "protect... the medical profession's integrity and ethics and maintain... physicians' role as their patients' healers." While the individual physician who assists at an execution may only be violating a code of ethics, and not breaking a law, it is clear that a state that refuses to legalize physician-assisted suicide in part on the grounds that this would destroy the integrity and ethics of medicine cannot in turn legally require the participation of a physician in an execution. Execution is something that can only be carried out beyond the bounds of proper medical practice. To implicate physicians is to ask them to cease to live up to standards of conduct that the state otherwise expects them to meet. This issue has only come up recently because lethal injection, unlike firing squads and electrocution, simulates medical procedure. But what is happening here is no more "medical" than a shantytown abortion, and if a clumsy prison guard botches the job and the inmate writhes in agony for some minutes, this is not so much a glitch in an otherwise orderly medical procedure as a reminder that to execute is, and always has been, to do harm, and it thus excludes anyone bound by the Hippocratic Oath. Ever the development of the Guillotine, pseudo-humanists have been trying to make killing something other than it can ever possibly be, and more than 200 years later the paradox and futility of this effort is not a bit less glaring. The state has only two options: either to stop feigning humanism, or to stop executing people. Judge Howard's refusal to permit a lethal injection to proceed without medical participation, and his simultaneous inability to arrange for this participation, reveals the worsening paralysis of a system that tries to play both options at once. And the worse, the better. Capital punishment in America will eventually collapse under the weight of such paradoxes-- unless of course those people have their way who openly see execution as a fitting occasion to inflict harm and thereby to exact revenge. This is the principle of capital punishment under Shariah law, and under the absolute monarchies of early modern Europe, where men were flayed in public squares, or torn to pieces by horses made to run in opposite directions. An awesome spectacle, to be sure, but one that does not fit well with our constitutional opposition to cruel and unusual punishment.

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