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 July 2003
On July 23rd, my son, who is assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division, was told along with the rest of his company at morning formation, to get his affairs in order. They are going to replace the 3rd Infantry Division in Iraq. Jessie spent his first thirteen ...
THE "FAITH-BASED" APPROACH The scandal over the Niger uranium intelligence, dismissed wishfully by high ranking Republicans in the House and Senate as a fuss about "a flaw here or there," or "nothing but an absurd, media-driven...
There is no doubt that the deaths of his two sons will be a devastating blow to Saddam Hussein, but those who hope that their loss will leave him a broken man are likely to be disappointed. He’ll probably release another audiotape in the next few days...
Charlie’s Angels actress Cameron Diaz recently sought an injunction to stop a photographer, John Rutter, from trying to sell topless photographs and video footage of her. The photos and footage were taken when Diaz, now 30, was a 21-year-old model who had no...
Dublin. The ‘peace process’ in Northern Ireland, held up repeatedly in the last decade as an example for other conflict zones to follow, has less and less to show for it–unless you quite legitimately count a bomb, bullet and body count tha...
Even though it grew at very high rates in the past, Brazil still has one of the most unequal distributions of income in the world. This situation must be reversed. A lack of economic and social democracy threatens democracy as a whole. The values of social solidar...
One of Ché Guevara’s most oft-repeated quotes was "At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love." Author Neil Gordon’s new novel, ...
Arabs have never been squeamish about death. They see too much of it. So on the streets of Baghdad Iraqis will pore over the all-too-soon-to-be-iconic photographs of Uday and Qusay. They will say, some of them, "Yes, that’s them, the terrible bro...
Father Tofiq, an Arabic speaking Roman Catholic priest from Lebanon, recites the Lord s Prayer in Aramaic in the Convent of St. Serge in Maaloula, a town about thirty miles north of Damascus. He affirms that Jesus, his disciples and contemporaries spoke and...
A half-dozen former CIA agents investigating prewar intelligence have found that a secret Pentagon committee, set up by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in October 2001, manipulated reams of intelligence information prepared by the spy agency on the so-called ...
Reeling from one blunder to the next, the New York Times plummeted to new depths on July 25, combining a serious falsehood with possible misrepresentation of authorship. On the op page for 7/25 appeared a column, datelined Havana, under the name Gustavo Ar...
In his "Thoughts" on Chomsky, under the title "My Very,Very Allergic ...
[Speech given by Dr. FIDEL CASTRO, president of the Republic of Cuba, at the ceremony commemorating the 50th anniversary of the attack on the moncada and carlos manuel de cespedes garrisons, held in Santiago de Cuba, July 26, 2003.] ...
Early this summer, a top Wall Street stock picker issued a glowing report about Boeing: buy, buy, buy. The unusually rosy assessment for the troubled company had nothing to do with the need to replenish the Pentagon’s arsenal of cruise missiles depleted by t...
In addition to the pomp and ceremony associated with the second post-apartheid state visit by a U.S. president, a string of protests greeted George W. Bush when he met South African president Thabo Mbeki in Pretoria on July 9. It was a complicated welcome from man...
A jury in the tiny Irish town of Kilrush, Co Clare, has defied a judge’s strong suggestion that it convict Mary Kelly of criminal damage to a US military aircraft. Her action in late January, followed a week later by the Catholic Worker ...
Now here’s a story to shame us all. It’s about America’s shameful prison camps in Iraq. It’s about the beating of prisoners during interrogation. "Sources" may be a dubious word in journalism right now, but the sources for ...
With another Bush Family war of aggression against Iraq staring the American People, Congress and Republic in their face, on Tuesday 11 March 2003, Congressman John Conyers of Michigan, the Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, which would have jurisdiction ove...
Tuesday, July 22, marked a big victory against the Bush/Ashcroft assault on civil liberties, with a federal judge in Manhattan tossing out the terrorism charges the Justice Department had so theatrically leveled against activist attorney Lynne Stewart back in 2002...
What do you call it when George W. Bush, without provocation and based on false pretenses, sends an army to invade a foreign nation; and then, without any attempt to negotiate a surrender, effect an arrest, or put this nation’s leaders on trial and present e...
After two straight nights in Idaho, Bob Dylan and his band rolled into Bend, Oregon on July 23 to find near-100-degree heat, a major fire raging to the southeast within sight of the stage, and an audience that had been waiting for hours in a crowded, shadeless ope...
Democracy gnawed on by vampires anemic and wandering in forgotten dreams of ancient ancestors, stirs a bit some signs of life. The vampires gnaw back contract killings in Iraq. Everything is back on bloody track b...
The philosopher Plato was right when he opined that democracy ultimately leads to anarchy and then tyranny. But he was wrong to dismiss anarchy which, arguably, is the happy medium between failed democracy and treacherous tyranny. The USA has begun its flirtation ...
These are times in which there are many more questions than answers, and many Americans are beginning to form and articulate these questions. Some of the questions on my mind are the following: 1. If the president gives false information to the American peo...
So they are dead. Or are they? Even Baghdad exploded in celebratory, deafening automatic rifle fire at the news. The burned, bullet-splashed villa in Mosul, the four bullet-ridden corpses, America’s hopes–however vain–that the death of Sad...