Jeffrey St. Clair

Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His new book is Bernie and the Sandernistas: Field Notes From a Failed Revolution.

Cancer as Weapon: Poppy Bush’s Radioactive War on Iraq

If George Bush Sr., Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Bill Clinton are still casting about for a legacy, there’s a grim one that will stay around for an eternity.

Gulf War | Iraq | George H. W. Bush

At the close of the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein was denounced as a ferocious villain for ordering his retreating troops to destroy Kuwaiti oil fields, clotting the air with poisonous clouds of black smoke and saturating the ground with swamps of crude. It was justly called an environmental war crime. But months of bombing of Iraq by US and

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51 Years Ago Today and Still No Justice for Israel’s Attack on the USS Liberty

The IDF’s strike on the Liberty served to weld the US and Israel together, in a kind of political and military embrace. Now, every time the IDF attacks defenseless villages in Gaza and the West Bank with F-16s and Apache helicopters, the Palestinians quite rightly see the bloody assaults as a joint operation, with the Pentagon as a hidden partner.

uss liberty

In early June of 1967, at the onset of the Six Day War, the Pentagon sent the USS Liberty from Spain into international waters off the coast of Gaza to monitor the progress of Israel’s attack on the Arab states. The Liberty was a lightly armed surveillance ship. Only hours after the Liberty arrived it was spotted by the Israeli military. The IDF

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From Madison Avenue to Pennsylvania Avenue: How They Sold Operation Iraqi Freedom

The same techniques (and often the same PR gurus) that have been used to hawk cigarettes, SUVs and nuclear waste dumps were deployed to retail the Iraq war.

President Bush announces he has reached an agreement with House leaders on a resolution giving him authority to oust Saddam Hussein, in the Rose Garden, Wednesday, Oct 2, 2002. Bush is joined by, from left to right front row, Speaker of the House of Representatives Dennis Hastert, R-Ill, Bush, Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., and House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo. As part of the deal with the House, Bush bent to Democratic wishes and pledged to certify to Congress that diplomatic and other peaceful means alone are inadequate to protect Americans from Saddams weapons of mass destruction. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds)

The war on Iraq won’t be remembered for how it was waged so much as for how it was sold. It was a propaganda war, a war of perception management, where loaded phrases, such as “weapons of mass destruction” and “rogue state” were hurled like precision weapons at the target audience: us. To understand the Iraq war you don’t need to consult

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