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 October 2002
A little more than a week ago several hundred college students from all over the United States met in Michigan to further the growing campaign to divest American universities of companies with holdings in Israel. The students gathered because they share recognitio...
For the first time in decades a country on the American continent is set to elect a progressive president, granting him the mandate to form an executive government and lead the country for four years. That this country is Brazil, the continent’s second large...
Oswald Spengler in his mighty tome, “Decline of the West,” had some very prophetic things to say about the press. He wrote that the sentimentalist may beam with contentment about it being “constitutionally free,” but the realist will always...
In the end it was easy. Before the October 19th referendum on the EU’s Nice treaty, much of Ireland’s political establishment was in a panic–unsure if it could trust the opinion polls (which got it wrong in the first vote last year), resentful...
Pop quiz. When you hear the expression “regime change”, which of the following best describes what you think it means: A) bloody coup B) change of government C) leader of regime changes mind If you said A) or B),...
Support for Israel was the major theme of the 2002 Road to Victory conference held by the Christian Coalition in Washington, D.C. October 11-12. Long known as a major source of troops for the right-wing of the Republican Party, the CC has undergone a lot of...
At a recent meeting in Tallahassee, the governor of Florida boasted of his “devious plan” to thwart the class size amendment. What kind of governor boasts about being devious? One who has gotten away with it before. Take the governor’s po...
Americans have tragically learned that vast oceans no longer separate us from the rest of the world. The media have shortchanged us by not providing enough useful information about different countries of the world, leaving us unable to always comprehend our foreig...
In a little movie from a few years ago called “The Princess Bride”, Vizzini, the Sicilian profiteer who kidnaps the young, beautiful Princess-to-be Buttercup in order to cause a war, is finally tracked down by the Dread Pirate Roberts, the masked Man i...
By hiring James Lee Witt to conduct a “public, independent review” of Indian Point’s emergency evacuation plan, Governor George Pataki has guaranteed the outcome: the controversial nuclear plant will stay open. On August 1, 2002, Governor Pataki ...
FADE IN. BLACK AND WHITE EXTERIOR: Ground Zero, NYC. CLOSE ON: The late Rod Serling, looking none too shabby, calm, cool, omniscient, like it’s 1962, and he’s still smoking! SERLING “Submitted for your approv...
The more I juxtapose logical world opinion with the Bush administration’s actions in the war on terror, I realize one overwhelming theme: hypocrisy. No one in any of the branches of government runs a physical risk to themselves by entering a war with Iraq, a...
Finally, a 9/11 for our coalition partners. Something they can stake their cases for preemptive war against the Third World on, at long last. It came out of nowhere, like a midnight phone call from an ex whose voice and smell you can’t shake. Ring, r...
Thank God, I often say, for the Israeli press. For where else will you find the sort of courageous condemnation of Israel’s cruel and brutal treatment of the Palestinians? Where else can we read that Moshe Ya’alon, Ariel Sharon’s new chief of staff, desc...
Last week armed Israeli policemen entered the East Jerusalem YMCA offices and arrested Haytham Hammouri, a YMCA staff member. He was handcuffed and taken into police custody. No charges were made, and he was kept incommunicado for three days. At this point, he wa...
You would think that with all the troubles surrounding George W. Bush and the Republican leadership in Congress from the life-costing bungling of Hurricane responses to the deepening quagmire in Iraq to the front page stories of corruption, self-dealing and ...
The American people have endured a massive marketing campaign this fall. But this campaign isn’t trying to get us to switch to a different long distance company or a new brand of laundry soap. This marketing campaign is designed to prepare us to attack, inva...
As Washington does a soft shoe shuffle to appease its detractors in the United Nations Security Council and agrees to changes in the wording of the proposed new Iraq resolution, American President George W. Bush considers an Israeli proposal to destroy Iraqi missi...
Here we are in the midst of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. And with admirable intentions people wear pink ribbons and buy stamps and walk for the cure. But the people who are walking for a friend, a loved one, or themselves probably don’t realize that while ...
Hitchens, you fucking fat-assed drunken slut. You lying sack of shit. Sir, have you no sense of personal integrity whatsoever? Mother Theresa might have been in the “Missionary Position,” but you are taking it every which way from ...
Any discussion of violence and non-violence in the Israeli-Palestinian context encounters a serious problem of definition of terms. First, each side apparently understands its use of violence as a reaction to the violence of the other. In this regard, whil...
The influence of the hard-line religious right on Bush Administration decisions and policies is everywhere apparent. (One need only think of the choice of John Ashcroft for attorney general, the nomination of anti-abortion judges to the federal courts, or the Admi...
Writers on the Middle East Question by GARETH RUBIN The Independent In 1937, the Left Review, house journal of British progressives, performed a celebrated literary-political experiment. A questionnaire was circulated to the leading writers of the day, askin...
By now the signs are familiar. A build up of rhetoric and demonisation of the ‘other’. Documents and dossiers on horrible threats. Newspapers fill their pages with battle plan graphics. War is looming. At the same time as citizens in Baghdad wa...
ABU GHRAIB, IRAQ. It was a scene that was unthinkable and unbelievable and Iraq is still in a state of stunned jubilation. Thousands of people jammed the streets in front of one of Iraq’s most notorious prisons today just moments after Iraqi President Saddam...