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 January 2002
Throwing the book at people is nothing new, but in our post 9/11 world the screws are tightening. Take San Francisco, whose District Attorney is Terence “Kayo” Hallinan, regarded by many with some justification as a progressive fellow. Indeed in his 20...
Noam Chomsky, one of America’s greatest philosophers and linguists, has become the target of Turkey’s chief of “terrorism prosecution”. Scarcely two months after the European Union praised Turkey for passing new laws protecting freed...
[Testimony Before Congressman John Conyers' Forum on National Security and the Constitution] The American Civil Liberties Union is a non-partisan, non-profit organization consisting of nearly 300,000 members dedicated to protecting the principles of freedom...
“The third quarter is going to be great.” That’s what Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay said last September to a room full of workers who had come to hear about the company’s prospects after a recent wave of bad news had sent the stock pri...
First we had Osama bin Laden telling Pakistani journalists that the death toll in the World Trade Tower attacks was far greater than the U.S. government was letting on. An interview in UMMAT, published on September 28 and reported in CounterPunch, made it clear th...
Some people are born victims. As in the case of Abu-Ali Abdhur Rahman who, beginning at age three, was a victim of extremely violent and horrific sexual and physical abuse at the hands of his parents. Often times he would be hung and locked in a closet with tortur...
I can recognise the conditions that prisoners are being kept in at the US camp at Guantanamo Bay because I have been there. Not to Cuba’s Camp X-Ray, but to the darkened cell in Beirut that I occupied for five years. I was chained to a wall by my hands and ...
But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly do...
The press tells us that regulations are in draft to fill out the president’s Nov. 13 order establishing a military commission to determine the fate of people the government thinks might be terrorists. A special ABA committee just issued a report calling for procedur...
There are about 2,700 faculty members at the University of Texas at Austin, the largest campus in the United States. It’s easy to get lost in the crowd here. But this fall, UT President Larry Faulkner made me feel special. In September Faulkner...
Lawyers with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a leading constitutional rights and international human...
On Dec. 18, the Senate Commerce Committee heard from former employees and shareholders of the collapsed energy trading company Enron, who watched retirement plans tied up in the company’s stock vanish while executives cashed theirs out. Mary Baines Pe...
A black out is in effect. Discussion and action on issues of race, class, human and civil rights, poverty and disparate wealth that were moving to the top of the world political agenda prior to 9/11 are off the table. And many of the people trying to resurrect tho...
We the corporations of The United States, in order to make more money, establish our profits with campaign contributions and lobbying, insure a revolving door of greedy executives, provide pink slips for our employees and steal their retirement, promote theft from...
No evidence is more damning than the confession of a defendant in a criminal case. Attorney John Ashcroft has announced that the federal government will charge John Walker, who was found in the company of the Taliban in Afghanistan, with conspiracy and aiding terr...
It is almost forty years since Dr. King made his landmark speech in which he spoke of his famous dream. By drawing attention to the plight of the African-American people in the US, he helped establish the Civil Rights movement that serves as a beacon of hope for m...
The punitive action executed by Israel at the weekend in the Gaza Strip, and in particular the mass demolition of homes in Rafah on Thursday morning, constitute a war crime. There is no other way to describe and define the collective punishment of hundreds of innocent civ...
The farther the Bush administration tries to distance itself from Enron, the Houston-based energy trader now in bankruptcy, the more apparent the ties become. Treasury secretary Paul O’Neill and Secretary of Commerce Don Evans admitted they talked w...
This morning, an angel–yes, that’s right, an angel– appeared to a gathering of reporters at the National Press Club in Washington. The stunningly beautiful creature with satiny white wings and glowing pink skin announced that it was appearing on behalf o...
The chiefs of the three big parties in Israel–the Likud, the Labor Party and the army–were sitting on the stage. They were frustrated. They knew already that they had not succeeded in selling the great show that they had prepared with so much effort: t...
Some of the terms used by America to describe the prisoners, such as “battlefield detainees”, have no legal meaning, the Red Cross says. (Kim Sengupta The Independent, U.K., Jan. 14, 2002) How does the song go? ‘Y...
Is there anyone out there who’s not yet totally cynical about US foreign policy and the propaganda that accompanies it? For months we’ve been told that Mohamed Atta, the alleged ringleader of the September 11 attacks, had met an Iraqi intellige...
Environmentalism as an argument has been comprehensively won. As a practice it is all but extinct. Just as people in Britain have united around the demand for effective public transport, car sales have broken all records. Yesterday the superstore chain Sainsbury’s a...
director Voices in the Wilderness Dear Mr. Perle, I am writing to you from a faraway land, Iraq, and yet I sense ...
It’s no wonder George W. Bush is having fainting spells. Everyday he has to worry that Osama bin Laden’s angry young men are stalking him. But it’s Dick Cheney who is in hiding. And now Bush is just a bombshell memo away from politi...