Exclusively in the new print issue of CounterPunch
HOLLYWOOD AND THE CIA — Film historian Ed Rampell details Hollywood’s entangled relationship with the CIA and the Pentagon; HOUSES OF THE DEAD: Nancy Kurshan exposes the cruel human rights offenses taking place inside America’s vast gulag of Control Unit Prisons; BROTHERHOOD OF SUMMER: David Macaray charts the history of the most powerful union in the US: the Baseball Players Association; TAR SANDS COME TO AMERICA: Steve Horn explains how the Keystone Pipeline debates have diverted attention from Big Oil’s other plans to transport Alberta’s oil into the US. PLUS: Jeffrey St. Clair on CONSTITUTIONAL ENTROPY; Mike Whitney on HOW THE BANKS TARGETED BLACKS; Chris Floyd on THE RISE OF BRITAIN’S TEA PARTY; Kristin Kolb on THE NEEDLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE; Kim Nicolini on the FILMS OF WILLIAM FRIEDKIN; and Lee Ballinger on POETS VS. THE ONE PERCENT.
Archives from November 2001
At at time when U.S. journalists could hardly have fallen in line more quickly and completely with government officials, it’s ironic that the most common criticism of the news media has been that they have “gone negative” and been too critical in...
It is time for President Bush to stop the cheer-leading and speak the truth. He said last Thursday, “This great nation will never be intimidated. . . . Life in America is going forward.” Who is he trying to kid? Last Friday at Los Angeles airport...
After floating the idea that Bill Clinton may have been a KGB agent while studying abroad, charging him with the murder of Vince Foster, hounding him through the swamps of Whitewater, all without result, and impeaching him for lying about sex with an intern, only to see...
On the tenth anniversary of the Santa Cruz Massacre in East Timor, the East Timor Action Network (ETAN) called for justice for its victims and the many others harmed by since Indonesia’s invasion and occupation of the territory in 1975. The 1991 massacre —...
November 11. Most people would probably think of this date as the two-month anniversary of “the day that changed everything”. It is also Veterans Day. It used to be called Armistice Day, celebrating the end of World War I, the “war to end all war...
America’s founders, having survived a violent and protracted struggle to break away from England, shared a belief that their fledgling nation should be free from foreign entanglements. Thomas Jefferson’s well-known quote- “Peace, commerce, and ho...
On Thursday, November 1, 2001, I left my farmhouse on the North Coast of Maine, where I’m an organic grower, and headed for the Bangor International Airport in Bangor, Maine. I was dressed conservatively in a long, brown skirt with a matching jacket and turt...
This summer I wrote a book review for an academic journal — one of those terribly important pieces of writing that will be read by tens and tens of people, some of them actually people outside my own family. The book is about the history of governmental rest...
It is inherent in the concept of a terrorist act that it aims at an effect very much larger than the direct physical destruction it causes. Proponents of what used to be called the ‘propaganda of the deed’ also believed that in the illuminating glare of terror...
Bangor Daily News There are two things you need to know about Nancy Oden. She always laughs. She never gives an inch. I’ve known those things for more than a dozen years. So when the story broke last week that someone had been rousted out of B...
To the French, Kenneth Starr is known as the “Ayatollah sexuelle,” but after his recent comments in The Washington Post suggesting that we should cast aside traditional civil liberties in the fight against terrorism, just plain “Ayatollah” seems mo...
Open the November 5 edition of Newsweek and here’s Jonathan Alter, munching coyly on the week’s hot topic, namely the propriety of the FBI torturing obdurate September 11 suspects in the Bureau’s custody here in the United States. Alter says no t...
Last Friday night, a good friend of mine and I were discussing the efficacy of violent property damage as a viable form of civil protest. The discussion began with the trial of Sarah Jane Olsen in Los Angeles and the work of the Symbionese Liberation Army during t...
Q.: How would you characterize the current conflict? Is it a “clash of civilizations”, a “New Holy War”, a national liberation struggle, a conflict between the Arab oil elite and the dollar elite, or none of the above? Tariq Ali: No...
I. The elephant in the living room How do you hide an elephant in your living room? You can’t hide it. So, you pretend it’s not there. If you’re the American news media. Where’s the elephant? In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded A...
Confronted with the prospect of bioterrorism on a massive scale, the Bush administration and the pharmaceutical industry have colluded to protect patent monopolies rather than the public health. When the anthrax scare first hit, Cipro was understood to be t...
Footnotes 1 Does Thornberg’s statement, which sounds so much like Sen. Bob Kerrey’s recent confession about his unpunished massacre of civilians inVietnam, for which he fradulently accepted a gold star, mean that America already does, as a matter of ...
The take-over of the American Embassy in Tehran on 4 November 1979 propelled Howard Bane and the Office on Terrorism into the limelight. Twenty-one years later, the CIA is still reeling from the event, which saw all its files fall into enemy hands, and every one of its ag...
The CIA’s counter-terror network, as established by William Casey, was a direct descendant of the counter-intelligence special operations unit, CHAOS, formed by James Angleton in August 1967, specifically to spy on the New Left and other radical political groups...
Prior to the 11 September terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, two conditions defined American politics. In regard to foreign affairs, the United States was universally recognized as the world’s only super power. And today that condition remain...
For the last few days, a letter written by Walt Sheasby of California has been making the rounds in which the author discounts and seeks to discredit the ordeal faced by Green Party USA co-coordinator Nancy Oden at the Bangor Maine International airport. A press r...
Ledeen is seriously proposing that the Bush Administration conduct a counter-terror campaign against its political opposition in America, through its nascent domestic political police force, the OHS. But this impending attack has yet to begin, and there is still time ...
Michael Ledeen, who was forced from the Reagan Administration after the Iran arms fiasco became public, described George Bush in the 20 August 1987 Boston Globe as “the most powerful man” in America.” And after his election, Bush tried his hardest to pro...
The similarities between the Phoenix Program and the OHS are obvious, and with its computerized database of terrorist suspects, Phoenix is certainly the organizational model for an OHS-style counter-terror program based on “intelligence coordination and exploitation...
Civil liberties are often the first casualties of war, just ask the 15-year old sophomore from Charleston, West Virginia who wanted to start a high school club that opposed the U.S. war on Afghanistan. Katie Sierra, a self-described anarchist, not only wanted to s...