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 May 2003
Memorial Day is the day we set aside to honor those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for the freedoms of life that the Bush Administration is taking away. In that respect, this Memorial Day is most poignant. Can it be that those hundreds of thousands of sacrif...
It would be a mistake to view the Israeli cabinet’s narrow approval of the Bush administration’s "road map" on Sunday, (or Sharon’s use of the word "occupation") as steps towards resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict or as a...
The terrorist attacks attributed to al-Qaida are succeeding better than Osama bin Laden can ever have expected, thanks to the co-operation of the US administration. Whether it comes in the form of bomb attacks or assassinations the aim of terrorism is most ...
While I find those images on the Internet of a blunt little mustache digitally-scribbled onto President Bush’s upper lip feeble and unhelpful, still, there are parts of Bush’s character and behavior that strikingly resemble at least one major biographe...
On May 20, Cambodians marked the anniversary of the day in 1973 when the Khmer Rouge began their drive to remake Cambodian society by recalling family members and friends who were killed during this Maoist-inspired agrarian revolution. On the same day but h...
"An American soldier was wounded and Iraqis also by the enemy who fired a flare into an ammunition dump." CNN early summary of a huge explosion of ammunition in residential Baghdad, 26 April 2003 Who is the enemy? ‘...
The evening of May 21 witnessed the lowest point for the American people since they stood idly by when a rich over-privileged frat boy from Texas stole their White House from under their very noses. This past Wednesday night, millions of people were glued to their...
Three weeks ago, my colleague in the University of Haifa, Dr. Asa d Gahnim of the department of political science suggested convening a conference on the 1948 historiography. We agreed to present in the conference the recent developments in both the Israeli and Pa...
The nation’s journalists were surprised, shocked, and outraged. Jayson Blair, a 27-year-old New York Times national correspondent, had lied and cheated his way through a four-year career at the paper that not only claims to have the highest journalistic stan...
For the neocon cabal running the country, recent news hasn’t been entirely good. The successful invasion of Iraq has met with unexpected opposition (from a people with a dignified capacity to resist occupation that the aggressors, in their arrogance, didn...
Make a list of all persons harmed, become willing to make amends to all. And make amends to such people whenever possible except when it would injure others. In 1989, I took part in a spiritual retreat of reconciliation between Vietnam veterans and Vietnam...
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness That to secure these Rights, Governm...
"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." Niels Bohr The newly democratic Iraq has descended into chaos and feminist Afghanistan must be in pretty sorry shape if the media never crows about it. T...
Activist attorney Lynne Stewart, who was court-appointed to defend the blind Sheik Abdel Rahman in charges arising out of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, is charged with aiding and abetting her client’s "acts of terrorism" by speaking to the p...
Unlike most military commentators, I do not think the war in Iraq is over. On the contrary, the real war is just beginning. America destroyed not merely Saddam’s government but the Iraqi state, and a vast array of non-state actors are filling the vacuum with...
Jacques Derrida: Talking Out Of Both Sides of His Mouth This weekend the noted French philosopher Jacques Derrida will be getting an honorary doctorate from Hebrew University. Philosophers are notoriously agile at squaring moral and political circles, a n...
All historians acknowledge John Brown’s towering stature. Yet few modern Americans recognize May 24-25 as the night of his 1856 execution of five pro-slavers at Pottawatomie Creek in "bloody Kansas." It was Pottawatomie which brought him to world a...
As Colin Powell shuttles from place to place and person to person around the mid-east, as he qualifies more and more the details and purpose of the touted roadmap to peace in Israel and Palestine, as he runs into ruts and berms, snubbing and insults, it becomes ob...
U.S. Ambassador John D. Negroponte called the lifting of sanctions "the turning point of a historical page that should brighten the future of a people and a region." It simply will not do so. Thirteen years of sanctions has drastically altered the fundam...
"The plant must spring again from it’s seed, or it will bear no flower–and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel." –Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Defense of Poetry." "Sez who?" ̵...
Hannibal crossed the Alps with his division of combat elephants and terrorized mighty Rome for years. He commanded the army of Carthage, originally a Canaanite Phoenician colony, spoke a kind of Hebrew and bore a Hebrew name ("God has been gracious"). In...
During the last few years there has been an endless stream of windy rhetoric in U.S. journalism about the so-called "clash of civilizations." And the tone became much more shrill after 911. The clash–we are told–is the inevitable fault-line t...
Despite criticism from Democrats and a number of influential opponents of his new tax cut plan, President Bush announced that a man was employed as a result of his 2001 tax cut of $1.35 trillion. The discovery is expected to stem criticism that the wealthy ...
I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: The era of classified documents and backroom scheming has gone the way of the elected president. U.S. leadersÐRepublican, Democrat, or corporate (pardon the redundancy)Ðfeel little need to conceal their cri...
The Shi’a of Iraq are a mixed bag at this time, caught between Najaf of Iraq and Qom of Iran. Imam Hakim, by far the most powerful Imam, who spent several years in exile in Iran, has spoken for an Iraqi government, with Islamic principles, but not asked for ...