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Today's Stories April 28, 2006 Werther Operation Canned Meat and Its Derivatives April 27, 2006 Winslow T. Wheeler How Much is the War Costing? How Many US Troops are Really in Iraq? Robert Fisk The United States of Israel? Juan Santos Immigration Endgame Robert Jensen Why Leftists Distrust Liberals Dave Lindorff Making America Safer: One Released War Crime Victim at a Time Jose Pertierra Honor and Injustice:the Case of the Cuban Five   April 26,2006 Robin Philpot The Rich Life of Jane Jacobs Sherry Wolf Democrats, Their Apologists and Abortion: the Jig is Up Pratyush Chandra Nepal: a Saga of Compromise and Struggle Joshua Frank Zig-Zagging Through the War With John Kerry Gary Leupp The Neo-Cons and Iran: No Negotiations Bill Quigley Katrina: Eight Months Later   April 25, 2006 Paul Craig Roberts The World is Uniting Against the Bush Imperium Linda S. Heard Is the US Waging Israel's Wars?: the Prophecy of Oded Yinon Ralph Nader Political Science: Gingrich, "Futurism" and the Abolition of the OTA Mike Whitney Preparing for the Economic Typhoon Michael Donnelly Lutherans Betray Michigan's Loon Lake Wetlands for Pieces of Silver Sharon Smith Breathing New Life Into May Day Website of the Day SDS Ver. 2   April 24, 2006 Tim Wise What Kind of Card is Race? John Stanton Strike Iran, Watch Pakistan and Turkey Fall Dave Lindorff Dangerous Times Ahead Steve Shore Berlusconi Defeated: The Long Wait is Over ... Or Is It? Amadou Deme Hotel Rwanda: Setting the Record Straight Mickey Z. 15 Minutes of Radical Fame: America Meets Bill Blum and Ward Churchill Ralph Nader Lee Raymond's Unconscionable Platinum Parachute Alexander Cockburn Obama's Game Website of the Day Too Stupid to Be President?   April 22/23, 2006 Jeffrey St. Clair The General, GM and the Stryker Jeff Halper SUMUD vs. Apartheid: the Elections in Palestine and Israel Jeff Klein How to Manufacture a War Criminal: Saddam and Me, a True Story Thomas P. Healy Out Now: an Interview with Anthony Arnove David Underhill Stuck in Mobile with the Rev. Graham Blues Again Lee Sustar "We are Going to Keep Marching": an Interview with Immigrant Rights Organizer Martín Unzueta Deb Reich The Little Mermaid on Highway Six: Rooting for Ordinary Israelis to Wake Up John Chuckman America's Gulag: Purge at the CIA Fred Gardner More Suppression of Marijuana Research Julian Edney Can Our Economy Run Without Fear? Seth Sandronsky The GOP and California's Levees Brynne Keith-Jennings The Meddlesome Ambassador Trivelli: Undermining Democracy in Nicaragua Dave Lindorff Where are the Frogs? Catherine Ann Cullen and Harry Browne Springsteen Polishes His Roots: First Impressions of "We Shall Overcome" Bill Pahnelas Bush Passes the Buck on Soaring Gas Prices Jim French Time to Overhaul US Farm Policy Ron Jacobs "I Know I'm Not Dreaming, Because I Can't Sleep Any More" David Krieger The Courage of Sophie Scholl: Resisting Hitler Jeffrey St. Clair Playlist: What I'm Listening to This Week Poets' Basement Buknatski, Engel and Ford Website of the Weekend Eye of the Storm   April 21, 2006 Jonathan Cook The Sinister Meaning of Olmert's "Hitkansut": Deporting Hamas MPs Lawrence R. Velvel Physical Courage, Moral Courage and American Generals Evelyn Pringle How to Out a CIA Agent Christopher Brauchli The Rich are Different Pratyush Chandra Pure-and-Simple Revolutions in Nepal and Venezuela Michael George Smith This is What a Movement Looks Like Missy Comley Beattie Serving at the Decider's Pleasure Sarah Hines The Bracero Program: 1942-1964 Website of the Day Hunger Strike at U. of Miami April 20, 2006 Chris Kutalik As Crisis Deepens, Is Labor Finally Showing Signs of a Comeback? Gary Leupp Cheney, the Neocons and China Joshua Frank Stop the War! Dump the Democrats! Diane Christian The Authority to Kill William S. Lind Sweeping Up: the Real Problem Wasn't the Execution of the War, But the Enterprise Itself Ramzy Baroud A Case for the Palestinan Government 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 28, 2006 When Governments Deceive and Provoke Operation Canned Meat and Its Derivatives By WERTHER “Mundus vult decipi” (“the world wants to be deceived”) Martin Luther (1483-1546) Item: On the evening of 31 August 1939, members of the S.S. took a concentration camp prisoner, Franciszek Honiok, to a German radio station in Gleiwitz (now Gliwice), on the border with Poland. S.S. operatives then broadcast a message in Polish urging Poles living in Silesia to attack Germans. After administering a lethal injection to Honiok, the operatives shot the corpse to simulate his having been shot while attacking the radio station. The German government invited police officials and the members of the press corps to view Honiok’s corpse as evidence of a Polish attack. As the S.S. referred to concentration camp inmates used for this purpose as “canned goods,” the operation became known to history (once it was revealed during the Nuremberg Tribunal) as “Operation Canned Meat.” Item: During the late 1940s through the mid-1950s, the Strategic Air Command ordered RB-29s, RB-36s, and RB-47s into Soviet air space, ostensibly to test Soviet air defenses and reconnoiter defense installations. The appearance of those aircraft being identical to their nuclear weapon-equipped stable mates, it raises the question of precisely what the United States government intended, given that the country whose sovereignty was being violated by military aircraft was nuclear armed, declared hostile, and presumed to be paranoid. Stalin was in power at this time.[1] Item: On 13 March 1962, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Lyman Lemnitzer, submitted a document to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. It proposed as part of an anti-Castro program (Operation Mongoose), staging the assassinations of Cubans living in the United States, developing a fake “Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,” including “sink[ing] a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated),” faking a Cuban air force attack on a civilian jetliner, and fabricating a major incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage. The attack on the jetliner was an elaborate false-flag operation that involved unmanned drones. [2] The specific plan was dropped; however, covert operations under the rubric of Mongoose continued. These included poisoning the Cuban sugar cane fields. Item: On 5 August 1964, President Johnson announced in an address to the nation that U.S. naval vessels on routine patrol were attacked on the high seas by North Vietnamese forces. He thereupon ordered bombing attacks on North Vietnam. Subsequently, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (78 Stat. 384), officially recognizing the presumed fact and authorizing use of military force. The North Vietnamese attacks, however, were apparently imaginary. And the ships in question were covering South Vietnamese fast boats on raids into North Vietnamese territorial waters; the operation was known as OPLAN 34-A. Daniel Ellsberg, who was on duty at the Pentagon the night of the incident, claims the U.S. vessels were on a so-called DeSoto mission inside territorial waters to probe North Vietnamese radars. Item: According to a British government memo seen by Phillipe Sands, a Queen’s Council and professor of international law at University College, London, discussions between the President of the United States and the British Prime Minister prior to the invasion of Iraq included discussion of provocations. The President told the Prime Minister that “the U.S. was so worried about the failure to find hard evidence against Saddam that it thought of ‘flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft planes with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colors.’” [3] The evident intent was to provoke a military reaction, justifying an invasion. Item: For more than a year, the press has reported, with gauzy and anonymous sourcing, the overflights of U.S. reconnaissance drones within the Islamic Republic of Iran. The apparent hope of the authors of these operations is that the Iranians would turn on their radars. We also hear stories of special operations into that country, courtesy of the irrepressible Seymour Hersh. New York Times reporter James Risen recounts in his book State of War (published January 2006) the intriguing tale of a U.S. attempt to plant a bogus nuclear bomb recipe on the Iranians--a plan that backfired. There is also the tale of a “found” Iranian laptop brimming with nuclear secrets. Why do one’s thoughts turn to Ahmed Chalabi, Michael Ledeen, and Yellowcake? And there is this latest bulletin, an obscure Reuters dispatch, reproduced in full below. [4] What are we to conclude from this tour d’horizon of history’s dark crevices? We can hardly guess at the implications. Some incidents led to horrifying carnage; some fizzled out; one at least is indeterminate as of this writing. And for every incident like those recounted here, how many others have gone unrecorded? Looking back on our historical period from the perspective of geological time, some ethereal intelligence might disdainfully surmise that the then-dominant species, being after all merely a belligerent primate, had devised deceitful behavior in order to give rise to incidents allowing him to vent his primitive aggressive impulses. At the same time, he could beat his chest in simian rage about being the aggrieved party. That is speculation. But man, the naked ape, has occasionally risen above his degraded condition to make more cerebral conclusions than the norm. In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal deposed the perpetrator of Operation Canned Meat, S.S. Sturmbannfuhrer (Major) Alfred Naujocks, who testified to his role in the incident. Hearing of such outrages against the peace, the chief prosecutor at the tribunal, Justice Robert Jackson, was moved to say this: "We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy." And again this: “Let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law, if it is to serve a useful purpose, must condemn aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment. We are able to do away with domestic tyranny and violence and aggression by those in power against the rights of their own people only when we make all men answerable to the law.” Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst. [1] In his Air University (and thus quasi-official) 225-page tome, A Need to Know: The Role of Air Force Reconnaissance in War Planning, 1945-1953, author John Thomas Farquhar, Lt. Col., USAF (Ret.) claims that he can find no documentation of such flights (page 162, footnote 18). How odd that a retired SAC pilot, Col. Hal Austin, posted a story on the internet asserting he flew such a mission in an RB-47. And Walter Boyne, the unofficial bard of the world’s most expensive flying club, states in Air Force Magazine, the journal of the Air Force Association, that more than 200 SAC pilots were killed in shoot-downs over or on the periphery of Soviet air space: [2] That the United States government was thinking so far ahead, at a period when airplane hijackings were virtually unheard of, may be of interest to scholars on the subject of airline security and may enrich their understanding of the hijacking phenomenon. The JCS document may be viewed here: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/northwoods.pdf [3] http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,,1700881,00.html [4] Iran shells Kurd positions in Iraq: Kurd official Fri Apr 21, 2006 7:16 AM ET SULAIMANIYA, Iraq (Reuters) - Iranian forces shelled Iranian Kurdish guerrilla positions inside mountainous northern Iraq early on Friday morning to repel an attack, a Kurdish official said. "This morning Iranian Kurdish fighters infiltrated the border into the Iranian side and the Iranian army bombed the area and repelled them. The shelling hit Iraqi land at Sidakan," said Saadi Pira, an official of the Iraqi Kurdish, Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, party. There was no word on casualties in the shelling of the Iranian Kurdish rebels of the PJAK movement.

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