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Coming in October
From Common Courage
Press
Today's
Stories
Ron Jacobs
The
Darkening Tunnel
Recent
Stories
August 21, 2003
Robert Fisk
The
US Needs to Blame Anyone But Locals for UN Bombing
Virginia Tilley
The Quisling
Policies of the UN in Iraq: Toward a Permanent War?
Rep. Henry Waxman
Bush Owes the
Public Some Serious Answers on Iraq
Ben Terrall
War Crimes and
Punishment in Indonesia: Rapes, Murders and Slaps on the
Wrists
Elaine Cassel
Brother John
Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Salvation Show
Christopher Brauchli
Getting
Gouged by Banks
Marjorie Cohn
Sergio Vieira de
Mello: Victim of Terrorism or US Policy in Iraq?
Vicente Navarro
Media Double
Standards: The Case of Mr. Aznar, Friend of Bush
Website of the Day
The
Intelligence Squad
August 20, 2003
Robert Fisk
Now
No One Is Safe in Iraq
Caoimhe Butterly
Life and
Death on the Frontlines of Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
UN Bombing: Act
of Terrorism or Guerrilla War?
Michael Egan
Revisiting the
Paranoid Style in the Dark
Ramzi Kysia
Peace is not an
Abstract Idea
Steven Higgs
NPR and the
NAFTA Highway
John L. Hess
A
Downside Day
Edward Said
The Imperial Bluster
of Tom Delay
Jason Leopold
Gridlock at
Path 15: the California Blackouts were the "Wake Up Call"
Website of the Day
Ashcroft's
Patriotic Hype
August 19, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Blackouts
Happen
Gary Leupp
"Our Patch":
Australia v. the Evil Doers of the South Pacific
Sean Donahue
Uribe's Cruel
Model: Colombia Moves Toward Totalitarianism
Matt Martin
Bush's
Credibility Problem on Missile Defense
Juliana Fredman
Recipe for the
Destruction of a Hudna
John Ross
Fox Government's
Attack on Mexican Basques
Sasan Fayazmanesh
What Kermit
Roosevelt Didn't Say
Website of the Day
Tom Delay's Dual
Loyalities
August 18, 2003
Uri Avnery
Hero in War and
Peace
Stan Goff
The Volunteer
Military and the Wicked Adventure
Cathy Breen
Baghdad on the
Hudson
Michael Kimaid
Fight the Power
(Companies)!
Jason Leopold
The California
Rip-Off Revisited: Arnold, Milken and Ken Lay
Matt Siegfried
The Bush
Administration in Context
Elaine Cassel
At Last, A
Judge Who Acts Like a Judge
Alexander Cockburn
Judy Miller's
War
Harvey Wasserman
The Legacy
of Blackout Pete Wilson
Website of the Day
Fire
Griles!
Congratulations to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC
Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 16 / 17, 2003
Flavia Alaya
Bastille New
Jersey
Jeffrey St. Clair
War
Pimps
Saul Landau
The Legacy of
Moncada: the Cuban Revolution at 50
Brian Cloughley
What Has
Happened to the US Army in Iraq?
William S. Lind
Coffins for the
Crews: How Not to Use Light Armored Vehicles
Col. Dan Smith
Time for
Straight Talk
Wenonah Hauter
Which Electric
System Do We Want?
David Lindorff
Where's
Arnold When We Need Him?
Harvey Wasserman
This Grid
Should Not Exist
Don Moniak
"Unusual
Events" at Nuclear Power Plants: a Timeline for August 14,
2003
David Vest
Rolling Blackout
Revue
Merlin Chowkwanyun
An Interview
with Sherman Austin
Adam Engel
The Loneliest
Number
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Hamod
& Albert
Book of the Weekend
Powerplay
by Sharon Beder
August 14, 2003
Peter Phillips
Inside Bohemian
Grove: Where US Power Elites Party
Brian Cloughley
Charlie
Wilson and Pakistan: the Strange Congressman Behind the CIA's Most
Expensive War
Linville and Ruder
Tyson Strike
Draws the Line
Jim Lobe
Bush
Administration Divided Over Iran
Ramzy Baroud
Sharon Freezes
the Road Map
Tom Turnipseed
Blowback in
Iraq
Gary Leupp
Condi's Speech: From
Birgmingham to Baghdad, Imperialism's Freedom Ride
Website of the Day
Tony Benn's Greatest
Hits
August 13, 2003
Joanne Mariner
A Wall of
Separation Through the Heart
Donald Worster
The Heavy Cost
of Empire
Standard Schaefer
Experimental
Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Elaine Cassel
Murderous
Errors: Executing the Innocent
Ralph Nader
Make the Recall
Count
Alexander Cockburn
Ted Honderich
Hit with "Anti-Semitism" Slur
Website of the Day
Defending
Yourself Against DirectTV Lawsuits: 9000 and Counting
August 12, 2003
Ron Jacobs
Revisionist
History: the Bush Administration, Civil Rights and Iraq
Josh Frank
Dean's
Constitutional Hang-Up
Wayne Madsen
What's a Fifth
Columnist? Well, Someone Like Hitchens
Ray McGovern
Relax, It Was All
a Pack of Lies
Wendy Brinker
Hubris in the
White House
Website of the Day
Black
Mustache
Hot Stories
Dardagan, Slobodo
and Williams
CounterPunch
Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison
Bitch
Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use
of Propaganda in the Iraq War
Wendell Berry
Small Destructions
Add Up
CounterPunch Wire
WMD: Who Said What
When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day
Talk: the Daughter I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental
Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim
Aftermath of War: What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach Bush: A
Draft Resolution
Click Here for More Stories.
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August
23, 2003
The Cemetery at Basra
Broken Remnants of
Britain's Imperial Past
By ROBERT FISK
in Basra.
The
soldiers of Britain's forgotten armies of Iraq lie beneath the dirt and
garbage of Basra's official war cemetery, almost 3,000 of them, their
gravestones scattered and smashed, the memorial book long looted from the
entrance, even the names of the dead stripped from the screen
wall.
Only by prowling through the dust and litter can you
find a clue to some of the great ironies of recent Mesopotamian history.
Here lies Sapper GW Curry of the Royal Engineers, for example, who was 31
when he died on 5 May 1943. His gravestone is broken, lying on its side.
Not far away is the stone erected in memory of Aircraftman 1st Class KG
Levett of the RAF, who died on 31 October 1942. Still visible at the
bottom is the inscription: "We shall meet again in a happier place.
Mum."
A few metres further is the memorial to Leading
Seaman FC Smith who died aboard HMS President III in March 1943, a break
in the stone running through the last lines of Binyon's "Poem for the
Fallen": "At the going down of the sun and in the morning/We will remember
them."
The ruined Indian army cemetery opposite contains an
unknown number of bodies whose numbers and names were--to the shame of the
British Empire for which they died--never recorded. But if the great
British and Indian cemeteries at Basra are a disgrace, their fate was
probably inevitable. They came under sustained shellfire during the eight-year war that followed Saddam Hussein's
insane 1980 invasion of Iran, and looters stripped the place of brass and
stones in the aftermath of the Shia Muslim revolt against Saddam in 1991.
The Iraqi son of the old caretaker told me that his father was, for many
years, too frightened to enter the graveyard.
Yet here lie the bones--both literal and
historical--of imperial adventures that have much in common with our most
recent invasion of Iraq. The British cemetery contains 2,551 burials, 74
of them unidentified, of soldiers who stormed ashore in Basra in 1914 at
the start of a British-Indian campaign that eventually captured all of
Iraq from the Ottoman Turks.
Somewhere amid the bracken, for example, lie the
remains of Major George Wheeler VC of the 7th Hariana Lancers, killed as
"this gallant Officer"-- so his official citation says -- single-handedly
charged the Turkish standards at Shaiba on 13 April 1915. After Rashid Ali
had declared an alliance with Nazi Germany in Baghdad in April 1941, the
British stormed Basra again--just as they did in March--and lost hundreds
more men as they drove Iraqi troops from the port city in 1941.
According to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission,
whose director-general visited Iraq two months ago, there are ambitions
plans to restore the Basra cemetery, to re-erect new headstones and place
the names of the 1914-18 war dead back on the wall.
In fact, the commission was preparing the
rehabilitation of the North Gate British cemetery in Baghdad--with the
permission of Saddam's government, of course--when the latest invasion
began. The Basra restoration will take up to five years and cost,
according to the commission's spokesman Peter Francis, "millions". Always
supposing, of course, that "stability"--that quality so hard to find in
Iraq--is restored.
Robert Fisk is a
reporter for The Independent and author of Pity
the Nation. He is also a contributor to Cockburn and St. Clair's
forthcoming book, The
Politics of Anti-Semitism.
Weekend Edition
Features for August 16 / 17, 2003
Flavia Alaya
Bastille New
Jersey
Jeffrey St. Clair
War
Pimps
Saul Landau
The Legacy of
Moncada: the Cuban Revolution at 50
Brian Cloughley
What Has
Happened to the US Army in Iraq?
William S. Lind
Coffins for the
Crews: How Not to Use Light Armored Vehicles
Col. Dan Smith
Time for
Straight Talk
Wenonah Hauter
Which Electric
System Do We Want?
David Lindorff
Where's
Arnold When We Need Him?
Harvey Wasserman
This Grid
Should Not Exist
Don Moniak
"Unusual
Events" at Nuclear Power Plants: a Timeline for August 14,
2003
David Vest
Rolling Blackout
Revue
Merlin Chowkwanyun
An Interview
with Sherman Austin
Adam Engel
The Loneliest
Number
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Hamod
& Albert
Book of the Weekend
Powerplay
by Sharon Beder
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