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What You're Missing in our subscriber-only CounterPunch newsletter WHO RULES: THE ISRAEL LOBBY OR UNCLE SAM? The answer at last! Uri Avnery, former Knesset member, assesses the Lobby's power. "If the Israeli government wanted a law tomorrow annulling the 10 Commandments, 95 U.S. Senators (at least) would sign the bill forthwith." But, yes, in the end the dog wags the tail. Fifty years ago Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" blew the cobwebs out of millions of young minds and drove a stake through the heart of Eisenhower's America. Lenni Brenner remembers Ginsberg in the East Village. Dr Mengele died in exile, in disguise. Dr Ishii died rich and recognized, in his own Tokyo home. Christopher Reed on Japanese WW2 medical tortures and how the U.S. covered them up. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! Get CounterPunch By Email for Only $35 a Year

Today's Stories May 15, 2006 Alexander Cockburn Abe Rosenthal's Times May 13 / 14, 2006 Vijay Prashad The Indian Road: Left Triumph Joan Roelofs Why They Hate Our Kind Hearts, Too Kathy Kelly Imagining Survival Michael Neumann On the Value and Stability of Israel Dr. Susan Block Hookergate Daniel Cassidy How the Irish Invented Poker Christopher Reed Rebel Journalist: the Memoirs of Wilfred Burchett Mike Roselle The Fallacies of Greenpeace Saul Landau Up the Mekong to Cambodia Robert Fisk The Inescapable Beat: US Military Bases in Brazil Ralph Nader Sally Mae and the Student Loan Swindle Evelyn Pringle Rove and Fitzgerald Play Monopoly Fred Gardner The Marketing of "Cannabis Americana" Stanley Heller Is Another Mass Murder of Arabs in the Offing? Conn Hallinan China: a Troubled Dragon Valentina Palma Novoa "They Ordered Me to Lay My Head in a Pool of Blood" David Krieger Why Nuclear Weapons Should Matter Col. Dan Smith The Senate's Peace Quilt Christopher Brauchli Mister Bush and Mister Zarqawi: Video Stars Jeffrey St. Clair Playlist: What I'm Listening to This Week Poets' Basement Davies, Ford, Engel, Guthrie, Orloski and Louise Website of the Weekend Not Your Soldier!   May 12, 2006 Michael Snedeker Death by Snitch: the Attempted Murder of Michael Morales Dave Lindorff What Fourth Amendment? Leah Fishbein / RJ Schinner Santorum vs. Santorum-Lite: In Pennsylvania, Abortion is Absent from the Debate Brian Kwoba The Immigrant Rights Movement: Birth of a New New Left? Chris Kromm Why Southern Progressives Should Support an Estate Tax Kai Diekmann 45 Minutes with Bush: the BILD Interview David Swanson Bush Tops Nixon: the Most Despised President in History Virginia Tilley Hamas and Israel's "Right to Exist" Website of the Day The CounterPunch Story That Made the Front Page of the NYT Today   May 11, 2006 Sunsara Taylor Battle Cry for Theocracy: Meet the Shock Troops of the Christian Youth Jonathan Cook A Short History of Unilateral Separation Tariq Ali High-Octane Rocket-Rattling Against Iran Won't Work Wayne S. Smith Recycled Non Sequiturs: State Dept. Presents No Evidence Cuba is a "Terrorist State" Mike Whitney Secretary of Lies Pratyush Chandra The Royal Nepalese Army and the Imperialist Agency Joshua Frank Save Darfur? Not So Fast Mickey Z. Does Property Destruction Equal Eco-Terrorism? Francis Boyle Abe Rosenthal Stole My Kill Fee! Edward S. Herman / David Peterson US Aggression-Time Once Again: Target Iran Website of the Day The Missing Papers of John Roberts   May 10, 2006 Werther Axiom of Evil Larry Birns / Michael Lettieri Is Venezuela the New Niger?: the Bush Administration is Trying to Link Hugo Chavez to Iran's Nuclear Program Ramzy Baroud Iran and the US: Nuclear Standoff or Realpolitik? Kevin Zeese The Corporate Takeover of Iraq's Economy Evelyn Pringle Peter Rost vs. Goliath: an Ex-Pfizer VP Takes on Big Pharma Amira Hass Hungry and Shell-Shocked Michael Donnelly Nature Loses a Champion Ron Jacobs Singers in a Dangerous Time: Dylan and Haggard Take the Stage Sharon Smith Abstinence Backfires Website of the Day Camp In with Ray and Cindy   May 9, 2006 Ray McGovern My Encounter with Rumsfeld M. Shahid Alam The Muslims America Loves Moshe Adler Mayor Bloomberg: Even Worse Than Giuliani Walter MIgnolo Beyond Populism: Natural Gas and Decolonization of the Bolivian Economy Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor Blacks, Latinos and the New Civil Rights Movement William S. Lind The Other War Heats Up: Fighting on Afghan Time Todd Chretien Does It Really Matter Who Runs the CIA? Dave Lindorff Pelosi is in for a Big Surprise in November Ishmael Reed Furor Over the "Colored Mind Doubles" Website of the Day Two Years for One Joint   May 8, 2006 Kate McCabe "No Less Courage": Political Prisoners' Resistance from Ireland to Gitmo Paul Craig Roberts A Nation of Waitresses and Bartenders Col. Dan Smith Privatizing West Point: "Duty, Honor, Trademarks..." Norman Solomon Gag and Smear: the Misuses of "Anti-Semitism" Ingmar Lee Bush's Destabilizing Nuke Deal with India Robert Jensen "Covering" and the Law Ricardo Alarcon The Struggle for Immigrant Rights in a Neo-Liberal Economy Will Youmans / M. Kay Siblani The Danders of Misunderstanding Sudan Alexander Cockburn The Row Over the Israel Lobby Website of the Day Labelle Does The Who: We Don't Get Fooled Again   May 6 / 7, 2006 Jeffrey St. Clair The Rise and Possible Fall of Richard Pombo Ariel Dorfman Mission Akkomplished: the Secret History of George W. Bush Joe Allen Death Row at the "Castle": Inside the Military's Judicial System Fred Gardner From Ritalin to Cocaine: Steve Howe's Untold Story Jeff Taylor Democratic Masqueraders: Plutocracy and the Party of the People Saul Landau The Immigration Malaise Stephen Philion Lessons from the Fordham 9: Challenging CIA and Military Recruiters on Campus Trish Schuh Islamophobia, a Retrospective Ralph Nader The Tragedy of False Confessions Robert Fisk Through a Syrian Lens: Is the US Provoking Civil War in Iraq? Paul Cantor Parody of a Protest: We Came, We Marched, And ... ? John Holt "This Goddamn Place Looks Like Hell" James Ryan When is a West Point Grad, No Longer a West Point Grad? Lawrence R. Velvel Harvard and Its Presidents: Plagiarism, Ghostwriting, and the Character of Larry Summers Greg Moses Canto for a Cinco de Mayo Weekend Laray Polk Homeland Security Spending: a Dallas Case Study Ron Jacobs Subterranean Fire: a Review Ben Tripp No News is Good News Mickey Z. 9/11 Movies, Anti-War Protests and "Illegal" Humans Jeffrey St. Clair Playlist: My Own Private, Springsteen-Free JazzFest (Week Two) Poets' Basement Kirbach, Landau, Davies, Engel, Buknatski, Subiet, Ford and Thoreau Website of the Week Lawrence Welk Meets the Velvet Underground   May 5, 2006 Vijay Prashad The Charmless Inconveniences of the Bourgeoisie Robert Fisk Sy Hersh versus the Bush Administration (and the DC Press Corps) David Swanson Washington Post Writer Rushes to Rummy's Defense Against Ray McGovern Mearsheimer / Walt The Storm Over "the Israel Lobby" Dave Lindorff They're Back!: The Looters of Social Security Sarah Ferguson A Day Without Gringos: Immigrants Flooded the Streets of NYC on May, But Where Were the White Peaceniks? CounterPunch News Service Costs of US Wars: Bush's GWOT Now Fifth Most Expensive in US History Corporate Crime Reporter David Sirota: Still Shackled to the Democrats Website of the Day Watch Ray KO Rummy   May 4, 2006 John F. Sugg Sami al-Arian's Final Persecution Will Potter Green is the New Red: How the Bush Administration is Using Terror Laws to Prosecute Nonviolent Environmental Activists Jonathan Cook The Long Path Back to Umm al-Zinat Roger Burbach Bolivia's Radical Realignment Chris Dols Colbert's Moment (And Why the Beltway Gang Didn't Get It) Christopher Brauchli Sen. Frist Without Clothes Tony Swindell "Our Descent into Hell has Begun" Website of the Day The Two Lobbies   May 3, 2006 Robert Bryce The Self-Locking F-22 Paul Craig Roberts John Kenneth Galbraith, a Great American James Petras The Rise of the Migrant Workers' Movement Lee Sustar Democrats and Immigrants: the Grand Evasion David Bolton The War on Drugs is a War on Ourselves Joshua Frank Challenging Hillary Jeffery R. Webber Evo Morales' Historic May Day: Bolivia Nationalizes Gas! Website of the Day Happy Birthday, Pete Seeger!   May 2, 2006 Evelyn Pringle Gouge and Profit: Will Big Oil Destroy Tariq Ali On the Death of Pramoedya Ananta Toer: Indonesia's Greatest Writerthe US Economy? Saul Landau Life in the Mekong Delta Paul Craig Roberts Endgame for the Constitution Gary Leupp "Out of Iraq, Into Darfur?" Ron Jacobs May Day in Asheville Sen. Russell Feingold Our Presence is Destabilizing Iraq Anthony Papa Rush Limbaugh and the Politics of Drug Addiction Website of the Day Rainbow Books     May Day, 2006 Norman Finkelstein The Israel Lobby: It's Not Either / Or Christopher Reed Mercury's Message, 50 Years On Michael Donnelly Rummy's Not the Only One Who Should Go: What About the War's Liberal Enablers? Dave Zirin A Day Without Pujols Mike Whitney The "N' Word: Take Back the Oil Companies! Gilad Atzmon Self-Haters Unite! Missy Comley Beattie Marching for Peace Alexander Cockburn The War on Terror on the Lodi Front Website of the Day In Your Face, Mr President   April 29 / 30, 2006 Peter Linebaugh May Day with Heart Ralph Nader Break Up the Big Oil Cartel Robert Bryce The Scandal of the V-22: It Kills, It Crashes, But It Won't Die Rev. William Alberts Praying for Peace or Preying on Peace? Time for People of Faith to Censure Bush Lee Sustar Opening a New Movement John Chuckman Xenophobia in a Land of Immigrants Eric Ruder An Interview with Camilo Meija on the War and Immigrants Seth Sandronsky Securing the Homeland for Whom Ron Jacobs Neil Young's Call to Arms Ben Tripp A Fork in the American Road Fred Gardner Forgotten Memories: Personal and Political Don Monkerud Corruption Reform in the Age of Abramoff: Not a Roar, But a Whimper Tommy Stevenson JazzFest, Tears and the Renewal of New Orleans Lettrist International Proposals for Rationally Improving the City of Paris Contratiempo Back to the Back of the Yards: the Jungle, 100 Years Later St. Clair, Vest and D'Antoni CounterPunch Playlist: What We're LIstening to This Week Poets' Basement Engel, Orloski and Guthrie Website of the Weekend Survival of the Fattest   April 28, 2006 James Ridgeway What You Won't See in Flight 93, the Film Ramzy Baroud Hamas' Impossible Mission Sarah Knopp An Interview with Nativo Lopez on the May Day Protests William S. Lind Off With His Head!: But Rumsfeld's Should Not be the Only One That Rolls 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 Gary Leupp Wilkinson Speaks Out About the Coming War on Iran 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?         Subscribe Online

May 15, 2006 CounterPunch Diary Abe Rosenthal's Times By ALEXANDER COCKBURN A.M. Rosenthal died last week at the age of 84. There were respectful obituaries describing how Rosenthal "saved" the NYT in the 70s by pepping up its news coverage, introducing the supplements and so forth. By the same token Rosenthal sowed the seeds for the Times' present difficulties. He was a bully with the bully's usual penchant for favorites. A culture of favoritism always produces servility, since the bully affirms his power by conspicuous punishment for the disloyal. So the Times that nourished Judy Miller and blared her lies across its front pages year after year was A.M. Rosenthal's Times. The Times that has painted, in two decades worth of dispatches from Latin America and Asia and the former Soviet Union, its infantile cartoons of a world speeding towards beneficial neoliberal "reform" was also in large part a reflection of the cretinism of Rosenthal's politics, hence of the reporters he favored. One of the most ludicrous passages written to honor Rosenthal's memory was a paragraph in the commemorative column composed by neoliberalism's P.T. Barnum, Thomas Friedman, an epigone of Rosenthal, who wrote last weekend: "Many readers became aware of Abe only after he became a columnist. He was very conservative and supportive of right-wing parties in Israel. But let me tell you this: When he was editor, I reported for him from Israel and the Arab world for many years. I am sure I wrote things that gave him heartburn. But in all those years he never once complained about anything I wrote. I never knew his politics until he became a columnist. As editor, he was obsessed with keeping The Times 'straight,' as he used to say, with no reporters' or editors' thumbs ever on the scale." "Straight"? As CounterPuncher Chris Reed pointed out in his obituary of Rosenthal in The Guardian: In 1981-82 few American reporters realised the extent of secret but crucial US involvement in the war in El Salvador, something the authorities routinely denied. One who knew was New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner, who in early 1982 exposed the rightist Salvadoran government's massacre of nearly 1,000 men, women and children in the small town of El Mozote. The US insisted it had not happened and pressure mounted on the Times. As executive editor, Rosenthal flew to El Salvador to assess the complaints against Bonner. Sympathetic to president Ronald Reagan's rhetoric about the communist threat, Rosenthal began limiting Bonner's coverage and in early 1983 recalled him to the New York business desk. He soon resigned. Today the atrocity at El Mozote is an accepted historical truth, but Bonner's name has faded. Naïve souls often imagine that editors and, behind them, owners, issue orders and reporters click their heels and file the stories imperiously requested. That can happen, but mostly supervision is not such an explicit process. Every reporter and editor in the news business has a compass in their heads which alerts them within the fraction of a degree to the prejudices and preferences of the boss, whether it's Katharine Graham, or Ben Bradlee, or Rosenthal or Murdoch or the Executive Network News Producer, or whoever is construed as ruling the roost. So Rosenthal hired and fostered platoons of editors and reporters who knew survival and advancement depended to an important measure on catering to his prejudices and not causing offense. Offending the Executive Editor, particularly for an overseas correspondent, could bring swift and disastrous retribution, as happened to Bonner, publicly disciplined and ultimately returned to overseas duties as a more or less broken soul. The Times that published James LeMoyne and Stephen Kinzer in the 1980s, week after week slanting the news from Central America towards the outlook of the US Embassy, was the Times of A.M. Rosenthal. The idea, bizarrely advanced by Friedman, that Rosenthal's politics remained obscure till his column began to appear on the NYT's op ed page is ludicrous. But it was, nonetheless, a pleasing moment to be able to point to the ravings appearing under his name as vivid confirmation of everything one had been writing about the man down the years. Wal-Mart's Coming Lunge into Organic Food Here we go. Wal-Mart's planning to move strongly into organic food. The company's CEO, Lee Scott said at Wal-Mart's last annual general meeting, "We know that customers at all ends of the income spectrum want organic and natural food. But, frankly, most of them just can't afford the high prices the specialty stores charge. Well, we don't think you should have to have a lot of money to feed your family organic foods". It's a far cry from the 1970s, when organic food meant a bin of expensive potatoes looking like something out of Hieronymous Bosch, in the local hippy Co-op. Wait a decade or two and every potato coming out of the state of Idaho will be labeled "organic", a word already under very serious stress. The process will be entirely predictable. The big food companies will buy federal and state legislation designed to put the small producers out of business, same way the meat companies finished off the small packers and processors years ago, by insisting on hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stainless steel and other "sanitary" equipment, all intended to bankrupt the local sausage or ham maker. Wal-Mart's buying power will drive down organic food prices and start to drive small farmers to the wall. Imports of organic food will go up, as suppliers like Chile turn off some of the pesticide and fertilizer sprays. It's all about the rate of return. CEO Scott exults about the organic cotton yoga outfits sold at his company's Sam's Club division. "We sold out in just 10 weeks...by using organic cotton instead of regular cotton, we saved the equivalent of two jumbo jets of pesticides." says Scott. Business Week cites estimates that "already 10% of organic foods like meat and citrus are imported into the U.S. Silk soy milk, for instance, is made from organic soybeans that are bought in China and Brazil, where prices tend to be substantially lower than in the U. S. Cascadian Farms buys its organic fruits and vegetables from China and Mexico, among other countries." Repositioning of the definition of "organic" is already proceeding apace. Again according to BW, "Last fall, the Organic Trade Assn., which represents corporations like Kraft, Dole, and Dean Foods, lobbied to attach a rider to the 2006 Agricultural Appropriations Bill that would weaken the nation's organic food standards by allowing certain synthetic food substances in the preparation, processing, and packaging of organic foods. That sparked outrage from organic activists. Nevertheless, the bill passed into law in November, and the new standards will go into effect later this year." It's true, of course, that organic food ­ in any acceptable use of the term -- is better for us and good that consumer demand is prompting this huge shift. Last year, California showed an increase of 40,000 acres, or 27%, in organic livestock production. The number of acres dedicated to organic vegetable production increased by 5,000 acres, or 12%. But the priorities of corporate farming are not those of the small organic producer. The bottom line will be premised on large-scale production, relentless lowering of costs and attrition of standards. Wal-Mart doesn't want the Co-op or the farmer's market as competition, any more than Safeway did. Leave the last word to Nietzche, in his second essay in On The Genealogy of Morals "There is a world of difference between the reason for something coming into existence in the first place and the ultimate use to which it is put, its actual application and integration into a system of goals; that anything which exists, once it has somehow come into being, can be reinterpreted in the service of new intentions, repossessed, repeatedly modified to a new use by a power superior to it; everything which happens in the organic world is part of a process of overpowering, mastering, and , in turn, all overpowering and mastering is a reinterpretation, a manipulation, in the course of which the previous 'meaning' and 'aim' must necessarily be obscured or completely effaced."

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