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 June 2003
We need a new name for WMDs. I for one am sick of hearing about Weapons of Mass Destruction–those alleged chemical, biological and dirty nuke bombs that the likes of Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden are supposed to covet for use against us innocent American...
On June 28, an important event took place in Ramallah. Three hundred personalities, half of them Palestinians, half of them Israelis, took part in the founding conference of the first wholly integrated joint peace organization–the Joint Israeli-...
On June 26, 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Texas the right to prosecute consenting gay couples engaging in sex. That’s all it did. If you read Justice Scalia’s scathing dissent (3 pages longer than the majority opinion deftly written by J...
If you feel frustrated and think Americans are losing ground on issues like the right to choose safe and legal abortion, environmental protection, electing more progressive women to public office and civil rights – you’re right. The reason: The Do Noth...
The new peace initiative called the "Road Map" has a few advantages. In contrast to the Oslo A...
I don’t know why these things amaze me, but for some reason they always do. Before the ashes were even cool from the recent riots in Benton Harbor, Michigan, much of white America had decided that it knew what was behind all the mayhem; at least if th...
So now we know. After all the mountains of commentary and speculation, all the earnest debates over motives and goals, all the detailed analyses of global strategy and political ideology, it all comes to down to this: George W. Bush waged war on Iraq because, in h...
Between May 1, when President Bush declared that major combat in Iraq was over, and June 26, 57 U.S. and eight UK military personnel have died in Iraq. That is more than one death every day. To the U.S. and UK toll must be added the sometimes tens or scores of Ira...
It’s a miracle, Brothers and Sisters! A miracle long overdue wrapped up in a Love Supreme. That is, the United States Supreme Court issued a number of just and liberating decrees in the last week of June before the 2003 summer break, but the most prominent ...
I took the weekend off and visited old friends in Lexington, Kentucky. I had intended to write from there so as not to miss two days of posting to this blog, but the distance between Washington, D.C. and Kentucky consisted of much more than miles alone. Sim...
Seven months before two-dozen or so al-Qaida terrorists hijacked four commercial airplanes and flew three of the aircrafts directly into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, killing 3,000 innocent civilians, CIA Director George Tenet...
Nothing is so robustly American as the condemnation of terrorism. Here is something that Chomsky and Donald Rumsfeld...
On September 11, 2001, after being told that America was under attack, George W. Bush sat quietly doing nothing in a Florida photo-op appearance for more than five minutes, before flying first to Louisiana and then Nebraska, leaving Americans to guess whether...
The Bush Administration appears to have a few clear priorities. First, although he often does not act like it, the President wants to be seen as complying with at least some aspects of international law (even if he interprets those laws quite differently from the ...
My son, only 6, has been puzzled by the closure of the US Embassy in Nairobi. It has reached him through the kindergarten grapevine that American children are at risk of being attacked by Kenyan children. The word ‘terrorist’ has been mentioned by tong...
Back in the early 1970s I worked at an International House of Pancakes in a suburban Maryland town. The pay was lousy, the work was hot and rapid-fire, and my fellow workers were all pretty cool. There was one in particular who sticks out in my mind. He was the ma...
Camouflage. Boots. Automatic weapons. Real Vietnam stuff: spooky fetid atmosphere; scared, bored troops who don’t really know why they’re there in that hellish jungle. Fat commanding officers, confident in overwhelming victory, hitting on female troops...
Fifty years ago I was also young, and a student in Tehran. Those days most student strikes and political demonstrations began at senior high school level, and then gathered momentum in the streets of the Capital. Iran’s population was somewhere around eighte...
It would appear from the fulsome praise heaped by mainstream reviewers on Bernard Lewis’s most recent and well-timed book, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (Oxford University Press, 2002), that the demand for Orientalism has reache...
Steven Griles is finally on the run. Griles is Interior Gale Norton’s top lieutenant, the man who holds the keys to the nation’s oil and mineral reserves. For the past two years, he’s used those keys to unlock nearly every legal barrier to e...
With prisons filled to overflowing, it’s no wonder that state governments are seeking to cut costs. The goal of rehabilitation was long ago replaced with that of warehousing, and now the only real goal is to warehouse cheaply. The Michigan prison syst...
Three years ago Mexico’s one-party system was finally cracked open by the election of Vicente Fox. Since then Mexico has rushed from euphoria to apathy in record time. The change from over seventy years of Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) rule to a pr...
We asked the captain what course of action he proposed to take toward a beast so large, terrifying, and unpredictable. He hesitated to answer, and then said judiciously: "I think I shall praise it." Robert Hass...
More and more Americans are buying organic food. But is our government matching this groundswell of support with federal and state agricultural dollars? No. Organic farmers work with nature to control pests, weeds and disease. No synthetic fossil-fue...
1. THE CEREMONY Besides costing enough to feed a village in Madagascar, the traditional wedding ceremony is a conglomeration of ancient leftovers from every culture we’ve destroyed, absorbed, aped, or inherited on the way to our present pinnacle of en...