CounterPunch

"I agree that Bush should be kicked out of the White House ... but I don't believe that will be meaningful unless there emerges in the United States a significant anti-empire movement. ... This doesn't mean voters can't judge one particular empire-building politician more dangerous than another. It doesn't mean we shouldn't sometimes make strategic choices to vote for one over the other. It simply means we should make such choices with eyes open and no illusions." [more]

"By making Syria a pariah nation, Bush has helped to realize a goal of current Israeli policy: to secure US help in weakening its unfriendly neighbors. In addition, by getting Congress to condemn Syria for alleged weapons development, Israel refocused attention away from its own nuclear arsenal." [more]

"Have the neo-conservatives had dual agendas, while professing to work for the internal security of the United States against its terrorist enemies?" [more]

"After 27 years as a CIA analyst, Ray McGovern knows a few things about propaganda. He notes that 'the "investigation" is slated to go past the election. Members will be picked by the president, and the scope is unconscionably wider than is necessary.' McGovern contends that 'the key question for 2004 is whether the administration's stranglehold on the media can be loosened to the point where the electorate can wake up, take away the president's driver's license and put an end to the reckless endangerment.'" [more]

"When Bush was elected, activists had employed irony ... we'd deconstructed traditional protest models, reaching the limits of play and camp. By the time Resolution 909 came along, we were faced with the painful question: What do you do after post modernism? You can't live on irony alone; there is too little to show for it. So we re-embraced a canonical narrative of 'straight' protest ... If we are going to suggest that another world is possible, we'd better be able to suggest that this world is more than simply ridiculous." [more]

"Canada was the first country to pass a virtual mirror of our Patriot Act, within weeks of ours. Australia and Great Britain followed shortly, and South Africa is struggling with one now. Unlike the U.S., Australia, Great Britain, and Canada, countries that did not bother to debate the merits of curtailing liberty, there is a strong movement of dissent in South Africa. Blacks, and concerned whites there, see the specter of apartheid returning under the guise of 'national' security." [more]

"The first evidence that the home-team body count is being whitewashed has to do with the 'cause of death.' There are increasing reports that soldiers killed due to hostile action are listed by the Pentagon as killed in accidents." [more]

"They searched by bag and one officer found my copy of the constitution and asked if I always carried it with me. I told him 'Yes, you never know when you might need it.'" [more]

"The Bush administration had developed an uncommonly twisted way of discussing deception itself. In his own way, Rumsfeld is uncommonly candid about his willingness to deceive and about his techniques for doing so. But even the deceptions are delivered in a convoluted manner-usually through insinuations or evasive language games rather than outright falsehoods." [more]

"In fact Ekeus was perfectly well aware from the mid-l990s on that Saddam Hussein had no such weapons of mass destruction. They had all been destroyed years earlier, after the first Gulf war. Ekeus learned this in 1995 from the lips of General Hussein Kamel, who had just defected from Iraq, along with some of his senior military aides." [more]

"The 'Nader factor' then, is akin to the antiwar movement of the last year in that they both robbed the 'victors' of moral legitimacy. Nader drove Democrats to get out the vote and kept Bush from winning election outright, much like the antiwar movement in the US, and much more so around the world, kept the UN from giving legal sanction to the Iraq invasion. Nader didn't stop Bush, but he helped put a cloud of illegitimacy over him; the antiwar movement didn't stop the war (which was unlikely in any event), but made Bush go ahead with it despite the opposition of practically the entire world." [more]

"The emptiness of the policy is clear from the way the aims have been put forward in public relations terms. Phrases like 'axis of evil', or 'the road map' are not policy statements, but merely sound bites that accumulate their own policy potential. The overwhelming newspeak that has swamped the world in the past 18 months is an indication of the absence of real policy. Bush does not do policy, but a stage act." [more]

"The military economy drains the civilian economy and this trend has been accelerating into what Melman called a 'huge change' in the American economy. He writes: 'This deindustrialization has happened so quickly that America's capacity to produce anything is seriously undermined.' " [more]

"Hopes have been affixed to a revival of progressivism within the Democratic party, when it was the Democrats themselves who proposed the Homeland Security Department, endorsed the Patriot Bill for the most part, and earlier failed to stand up to a stolen election that was predictably going to usher in the dictatorial actions that we've seen this regime engage in." [more]

"How tempting it must look for Bush and his political managers! Amid the war cries against Saddam they could stage a reprise of Reagan's onslaught on the air traffic controllers, with Bush waving the flag and deriding the longshoremen as Al Qaeda's auxiliaries, overpaid and bent on resisting modern technology that could fortify America's competitiveness on the battleground of world trade." [more]

"Yet along with the rapidly growing union opposition to war comes a disconcerting non-position to war. The AFL-CIO Executive Council is refusing to take a stand on the topic of Iraq. Their silence on the 'war on terrorism' leaves a gaping whole that local unions are starting to fill. The national labor leadership's silence represents a lack of opposition to Bush's war plans. They might as well be shouting labor's approval of the Bush Administration. Yet all is not lost. Perhaps now that local unions are speaking out against a possible war on Iraq, the national leaders will be brave enough to add their voices to the anti-war movement by following their rank and file members." [more]

"Here the movement will continue. And when the bombs begin to drop there will be acts of non-violent civil disobedience all over the country. We need the same in the United States." [more]

"The desire to rush to war glides over the tremendous costs and risks involved, including the dangers for American servicemen and women and for Iraqi civilians, as well as the potential destabilization of the Middle East. War would likely derail any chance at a Palestinian-Israeli agreement, while trampling international law and U.N. principles and setting a terrible international precedent. It would also sidetrack efforts to prevent terrorism. Moreover, it would divert some $200 billion from our own profound domestic needs, including health care, prescription drugs, education and homeland security." [more]

"I have never considered myself instinctively anti-Israel any more than I am anti-American or anti-Papua New Guinean, for that matter. I don't believe that nation-states are the arbiters of behaviour, therefore I believe it is a ruse to start using such language ... it is very Pro-Israel, in a tangible way, to advocate an end to the occupation, a just solution to the refugees, a two-state solution that is federated so that within a few decades and dissipation of religous extremism, the border will dissipate, and justice for the extremists in both Hamas and Likud." [more]

"In Afghanistan as in every war, corporations play a central role to protect their interestsówhether those interests are the profits from waging war or the geostrategic spoils of war." [more]

"A call to Spinosa by the Secretary of Labor would not be surprising, given the stakes, but a call from the man in charge of coordinating the battle against terrorism on America's home turf confirms all the Left's deepest fears that, as so often throughout the twentieth century, national security is being used to justify strike-breaking, invocation of the Taft-Hartley Act and declarations of national emergency to shut down labor activism and if necessary throw labor organizers in jail." [more]

"Said Karzai, "In Afghanistan, we have the loya jirga. In the United States, you have your own process -- as we understand, it's traditional over there for corporations to play a large part in electing officials and writing legislation. We're very interested in looking into that kind of system ourselves."" [more]

"This is not a tyranny, as Mr. W. has claimed. It is justice, it is true equality among human beings, it is general learning and culture without which there is not, there cannot be nor will there ever be true independence, freedom and democracy anywhere on Earth." [more]

"And we should maintain a bit of humility. Instead of claiming, 'America is the greatest nation on Earth,' we might say, 'I live in the United States and have deep emotional ties to its people, land and ideals, and I want to highlight the many positive things while working to change what is wrong.' " [more]

"With the White House still publicly committed to a 'regime change' in Iraq, is there any doubt that the Bush Administration is undeterred by the lack of support anywhere in the international community for a war against Iraq?" [more]

"On Saturday, thousands of American citizens gathered in Washington, DC to challenge the open-ended war the United States is now waging. They are right to do so, and the broader American public would do well to listen." [more]

"Never again will the Palestinians wonder if they have friends in the United States. This march and others like it around the country have proven to them that they do. Furthermore, the tremendous diversity of philosophiesópolitical and religiousóamongst the people who participated (and those that were there in spirit) showed the world that Washington's war on the world is not popular here either." [more]

"We gather here today and we speak with one voice. And let us remember, that one person can make a ripple. One ripple can make a movement. One movement can make a voice. And one voice can make mighty change." [more]

"So what will happen if an Israeli bullet kills Arafat now? After Moses, no second Moses appeared, but Jehosuah, the merciless warrior who committed genocide. (This, by the way, is also a myth. All serious scholars believe that this holy genocide never actually happened.) After Arafat, the heir will not be Abu-this or Abu-that. It will be Brother Kalachnikoff - like the song we used to sing in our youth, during the fight against the British occupation: "Give the floor to Comrade Parabellum, Give the floor to Comrade Tommy-gun." Parabellum was a pistol, tommy-gun a sub-machine-gun." [more]