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Today's Stories April 26,2006 Gary Leupp Wilkerson Speaks Out About the Coming War on Iran 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 26, 2006 Wilkerson Fingers the Neo-Cons on Iran "The Secret Cabal Got What It Wanted: No Negotiations." By GARY LEUPP It was May 2003. President Bush had declared “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq. The State Department, which had been unenthusiastic about that war, was not inclined to provoke another with Iran and indeed had been calling for diplomatic engagement with the reform-minded Khatami regime. That regime for its part asked the Swiss ambassador to Tehran to forward to the United States a request for talks. These would address U.S. concerns about its nuclear program, as well as the lifting of sanctions and normalization of relations. Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage were inclined to accept the offer. Vice President Cheney, soon to declare, “We don’t negotiate with evil, we defeat it,” was not. Nor was Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and his Office of Special Plans. Indeed, Cheney and his neoconservatives had the State Department rebuke the Swiss intermediary as they began to ratchet up the tension level between the countries to its present near-breaking point. This is the extraordinary narrative provided in large part by a highly reliable source, Powell’s former chief of staff, General Lawrence Wilkerson. He minces no words. ”The secret cabal got what it wanted: no negotiations with Tehran,” he told Gareth Porter of Inter Press Service last month. “As with many of these issues of national security decision-making, there are no fingerprints. But I would guess Dick Cheney with the blessing of George W Bush [is responsible].” Feith, who quietly vacated his office in August 2005 after the war for which he’d tirelessly campaigned had been exposed as one based on lies, hired neocon ideologue and Iran-Contra principal Michael Ledeen to work for the OSP in 2002. A longtime friend of fellow Iran-Contra plotter Manucher Ghorbanifar, Ledeen had met with the Iranian arms dealer several times from December 2001 to June 2002. These contacts, opposed by the CIA which has long distrusted Ghorbanifar, are thought to have some relation to the forged Niger uranium documents used to bolster the case for the attack on Iraq. But Ledeen states that his business with Ghorbanifar related to Iran, not Iraq. Ledeen, as an American Enterprise Institute scholar and journalist for the neocon National Review, has repeatedly called for an immediate U.S. attack on Iran. Meanwhile Ghorbanifar has been returned to the U.S. government payroll, working with the Vice President’s Office and the Defense Department. He’s assigned among other things to provide intelligence on Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. Ghorbanifar and one of his associates are thought to be the source of much of the information in the book Countdown to Terror: The Top-Secret Information that Could Prevent the Next Terrorist Attack on America... and How the CIA has Ignored it written by his friend Congressman Curt Weldon and published last year. It declares that Iran is hiding Osama bin Laden, preparing terrorist attacks on the U.S., has a crash program to build nuclear weapons and is the chief sponsor of the insurgency in Iraq. Shades of Ahmad Chalabi! This is all so déjà vu. At least for all with eyes to see. The rejection of the Iranian proposal in 2003 reminds me of the Iraqi peace proposals made to the Bush administration from December 2002 to March 2003. On February 19 Saddam’s regime indicated to Washington through intermediaries that in exchange for a U.S. promise not to attack it would (1) cooperate in fighting terrorism; (2) give “full support” for any U.S. plan “in the Arab-Israeli peace process; (3) give “first priority [to the U.S.] as it relates to Iraq oil, mining rights;” (4) cooperate with US strategic interests in the region; and (5) allow “direct US involvement on the ground in disarming Iraq.” The highest-ranking U.S. official directly involved in the discussion was the chairman of the Defense Policy Board at the Pentagon, Richard Perle. The “Prince of Darkness” (as the neocon is sometimes known) regarded Iraqi pleas for a deal as “all non-starters because they all involved Saddam staying in power.” The neocons wanted regime change and they got it. Now they want it in Iran. Why settle for a diplomatic resolution of issues between the U.S. and Iran when you can defeat “evil”? In 2002, Cheney and Rice spoke authoritatively about Iraq’s attempts to import aluminum tubes “only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs” citing intelligence reported by Judith Miller in the New York Times. Nowadays the press reports about a laptop computer stolen by an Iranian citizen in 2004 with designs “for a small-scale facility to produce uranium gas, the construction of which would give Iran a secret stock that could be enriched for fuel or for bombs” and “drawings on modifying Iran's ballistic missiles in ways that might accommodate a nuclear warhead.” In 2002, unbeknownst to the public, the U.S. intelligence community was divided, with many in the CIA skeptical of the neocons’ claims. In 2006, that community---even though purged in Cheney’s effort to scapegoat the CIA for “flawed” (as opposed to faked) intelligence---is still probably divided. With that assumption I read the comments of U.S. intelligence chief John Negroponte to the National Press Club on April 20. “The developments in Iran,” he declared, “clearly they’re troublesome. By the same token, our assessment at the moment is that even though we believe that Iran is determined to acquire or obtain a nuclear weapon, that we believe that it is still many years off before they are likely to have enough fissile material to assemble into, or to put into a nuclear weapon; perhaps into the next decade. So I think it’s important that this issue be kept in perspective.” Negroponte’s career highlight before acquiring his present Homeland Security post was his ambassadorship in Honduras from 1981 to 1985. During that time (which too few Americans remember) he supervised the training of Nicaraguan Contras and covered up vicious human rights abuses. I wouldn’t suggest that he’s personally opposed to a brutal illegal attack on Iran sometime soon. I don’t know. But by urging that the nuclear issue “be kept in perspective” he may reflect a concern within the “intelligence community” that once again the disinformation apparatus is proceeding unchecked. The neocons may disparage the “reality-based community” in favor of their Nazi-like penchant to create their own alternative reality But there are professional analysts who still highly valuate things like facts and reality and perspective. So maybe we see here again some conflict within the administration---between those merely morally compromised by their very involvement in such a regime (and inclined to say, “Hey wait, let’s try to be honest here”) and those who lie though their teeth---without any moral qualms---to obtain their world-transforming objectives. Of course, the Iran attack advocates aren’t saying that Iran’s 45 minutes away from nuking New York. They’re saying that it has a secret nuclear weapons program (despite IAEA claims that there is no evidence for one), and that the program must be terminated (at some unspecified point) before Iran builds its first nuke. Those acquainted with the science estimate that Iran is anywhere from three to 15 years away from constructing a nuclear weapon if it so desires. The neocons would like us to imagine the mullahs producing nukes sooner rather than later, because they’re hell-bent on regime change in Iran while their man is in office and want to sell their attack as justifiably preemptive---as an attack to defend the American people. The power structure is obviously divided on the Iran issue, if not as deeply as one might hope. Democratic Party leaders have indeed competed with the Bush administration to embrace a hard line on Iran. The president’s recent visit to the Hoover Institution to talk with foreign policy wonks who favor an attack suggests the plan’s still on track. But recently there’s been a trend towards advocating negotiations. I would just suggest those doing so note that such negotiations might have begun three years ago----had Cheney and his neocon acolytes (still dangerously occupying key positions) not sabotaged any diplomatic initiatives standing in the way of their imperial ambitions. Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu

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