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 February 2002
The war drums are beating, louder and louder. Iraq, Iran, and North Korea have been forewarned. Plans have been laid and, for all we know, already initiated, for the overthrow and assassination of Saddam Hussein. There’s been talk of sabotage, psychological w...
It’s time to start saying that the Sharon government is irresponsibly cooperating in the slaughter of its citizens. True, no statement can be more damning. But for some time now, the prime minister has practically been inviting it. His guilt for not preventi...
Chalk up another milestone for sex ed. The University of California at Berkeley has put a “male sexuality ” class on ice after the campus newspaper, The Daily Californian, published allegations that as part of their course students were taken to a stri...
Samuel Huntington peddles a culturalist thesis about the sources of conflicts in The Clash of Civilizations. He builds on the premise that the “most important distinc-tions among peoples are not ideological, political, or economic. They are cultural.”...
Baghdad was not being bombed when I visited the war-ravaged city during the early spring of 1992, but thousands of Iraqi children were still dying every month due to disease and starvation. Food and medicine were scarce, dead babies could be found in abundance and...
Baghdad was not being bombed when I visited the war-ravaged city during the early spring of 1992, but thousands of Iraqi children were still dying every month due to disease and starvation. Food and medicine were scarce, dead babies could be found in abundance and...
When I first read the script to Black Hawk Down, I didn’t think it was the greatest thing in the world–far from it. But I thought the script at least raised some very important questions that are missing from the final product. I was misled to think th...
As bad as September 11th may have been, it could have been far worse. Had terrorists attacked with nuclear weapons, the death toll could have risen into the millions. It is likely that even one crude nuclear weapon would have left Manhattan utterly destroyed, and ...
The 20th century was the most murderous in recorded history. The total number of deaths caused by or associated with its wars has been estimated at 187m, the equivalent of more than 10% of the world’s population in 1913. Taken as having begun in 1914, it was...
“Imagine that scene for a moment–you are an Ecuadorian farmer, and suddenly, without notice or warning, a large helicopter approaches, and the frightening noise of the chopper blades invades the quiet. The helicopter comes closer, and sprays a toxic po...
The year 2002 is a palindrome–meaning a word or number decipherable the same way backward and forward. Palindromes in calendar years are often the subject of mathematical proofs demonstrating the rarity of their occurrence. I have begun contemplating ...
While Internet stocks may have crashed, Internet optimists still abound. In Next: The Fu...
Daniel Pearl’s dispatches reminded me somewhat of Peter Kann’s in the days when he was the Journal’s most light-heartedly stylish reporter, before assuming the imperial purple and becoming the company’s CEO. It was Kann, back in the late 19...
For a third day high-placed Russian and Georgian politicians have been pronouncing loaded phrases, in the deparaging sense, which are not acceptable in diplomatic protocal. In reply to the suggestion of Igor Ivanov that bin Laden might be hiding in the Pankisi gorge, a mo...
Using Shadowy “527 Groups,” Corporations Give Unlimited Dollars Directly to Members of Congress Groups Allow Companies to Influence Legislation, Underscore Need for Reform CounterPunch Wire Report Corporations are using shadowy and little-notice...
On December 13, 2001, President George W. Bush gave notice that the United States was going to withdraw from the ABM Treaty in six months. There are several issues to be dealt with. 1 Does a President of the United States have the Constitutional pow...
The wheel of fortune turns and Afghanistan’s longest-serving prime minister of recent times sits in a modest flat on a council estate near Clapham Junction. Unfortunately, the open-mindedness with which John Major’s government gave refuge to Sul...
I offer these brief remarks today as a prayer for our country, with love of democracy, as a celebration of our country. With love for our country. With hope for our country. With a belief that the light of freedom cannot be extinguished as long as it is inside of ...
There were no streetlights down the long back-road; the arms of the yellow gates were left open just enough for a car to fit through. The darkness of the hidden stretch of road left the Muslim community center of north Tampa secluded from the outside world. ...
My name is John Clarke and I am an Organizer with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP). In the early afternoon of February 19th, 200...
In 1993, the District of Attorney of San Francisco
released 700 pages of documents implicating the Anti-Defamation
League, an organization that claims to be a defender of civil
rights, in a vast spying operation directed aga...
John Ashcroft, Attorney General of the United States, recently repeated an old chestnut about America being a Christian nation whose founders were Christian gentlemen. The claim is common among the country’s fundamentalist Christians, but it is so ign...
Bush rallies America in a perpetual war against “evil ones” and the “axis of evil.” Ronald Reagan used the cold war to lambast the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union. Their administrations are strikingly similar not only in their use of ...
You knew the evening would turn weird when NBC’s cameras momentarily lost track of Hungarian figure skater Julia Sebestyen. With the eyes of everyone on the planet, with the apparent exception of the network’s director, trained on the “long program,̶...
To date, 272 officers and soldiers of the Israeli army have signed the initiative to refuse to serve the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinians, while thousands of other Israeli citizens have expressed their support. Those that have signed are not pacifists no...