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
My wife and I were playing cards with four old friends (CAUTION #1: Old friends should be remembered as they were; seen in memory, but not heard; like nudie photographs of old lovers, NOT to be revisited except in moments of utmost nostalgia/despair) and this one ...
Probably the most significant utterance made by General Pervez Musharraf during the press conference that followed his Camp David meeting with President George Bush went completely unnoticed by the press. At one point, after President Bush declared that he is &quo...
Now that the official case for attacking Iraq made by the US and British governments has started to unravel, the question of the real reason for unleashing this death and destruction has become a hot topic of conversation again. During the run-up to the inv...
This is the text of JULIAN BOND’s dramatic speech to the 2003 NAACP Convention held on July 13, 2003 in Miami, Florida. It is of course a pleasure to be in Florida–the state whose motto is, "It ain’t over until your brother counts th...
Gilad Atzmon is an exile, a Jewish refugee, compelled to flee his homeland for friendlier terrain. He emigrated not from Europe or the American South, but from Israel itself. That’s what compulsory service in the Israeli military can do: turn you into a mart...
Thomas Friedman has put forward the idea in his op-ed "Winning the Real War"(July 16, 2003 New York Times) that last Sunday was the most important day in modern Iraq, due to the convening of the Governing Council for Iraq. Friedman even goes so far as to...
At least North Korea won’t have Bush droning about fake documents for the sale of uranium from Niger. He’s already played that role, and it wasn’t well received. Besides, North Korea reprocesses spent nuclear-reactor fuel to extract plutonium, an...
When George Tenet, the director of the CIA, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week about dubious intelligence data on the Iraqi threat that made it into President Bush’s State of the Union address in January, he said an ad-hoc committee...
In 2002, journalists were involved in 111 incidents related to the Colombian internal armed conflict. Such incidents have caused the Press Freedom Foundation to declare that Colombia is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for practising journalism....
I don’t remember the date in 1963 when I met Charles Mingus, but historians will have no difficulty locating the exact spot: I was coming out of Tim Leary’s crapper, he was coming in. Although everyone refers to him as Charlie, I don’t. He...
The elephant in the living room isn’t just standing there pretending to be invisible anymore. It’s trumpeting, stamping, swinging its trunk and knocking over lamps and furniture. It’s dropping dung faster than the handlers can shovel. Even the mo...
There has not been an Administration in recent memory that has stood for so little of what we hold to be self-evident American truths. Our Declaration of Independence, the founding document of our Republic, declares that there are certain unalienable rights...
The Washington Post editorial of Wed., July 16, is too profound a work of art to consign to the parrot’s cage without proper salute. Let us gaze upon it (head tilted upward, of course, toward the executive suites) a moment longer to fully appreciate the seve...
[Editors' Note: This essay is an excerpt from the excellent new book PowerTrip: U....
Both the critics and the supporters of neoliberal globalization had, in the years before September 11, 2001, assumed that neoliberal globalization had made obsolete the nationalist militarism and imperialism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There i...
I’d emailled an old high school friend. We used to share final year art classes. I told him of a photography exhibition. One of his favorite old Australian photographers–Max Dupain. He used to like him a lot. I told him how I liked Olive Cotton’s...
"It is 16 words, and it has become an enormously overblown issue." That’s Condoleezza Rice’s official assessment of the scandal over White House deception regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction....
Is George W. Bush another Hitler? James Taranto, writing in the Wall Street Journal...
Suppose I seize The ship, make it my own and, bit by bit, Seize yards and docks, machinery and men, As others have, and then, unlike the others, Instead of building ships, in numbers, build A single ship, a cloud on the sea, the la...
On July 17, 2003, U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair addressed a joint meeting of the U.S. House and Senate. The subject of WMD, of course, was on the front burner. "If we are wrong, then we will have destroyed a threat that was at its least responsible fo...
The University of North Carolina summer reading program for incoming students has done it again. You may recall that last summer it stirred up national controversy by encouraging students to read and discuss Michael Sell’s ...
The United States demanded that Liberian president Charles Taylor leave the country before they agreed on the deployment of a UN international force. The Liberian president, who has been indicted by war crimes prosecutor David Crane, another of those retired US ar...
Kuwait City. Three months after the US-led "intervention" in Iraq, the automobile has leaped to the top of the wish lists of the liberated peoples of Iraq. For those opponents of the war that cried that the war itself was waged on behalf of the fu...
Efrain Ríos Montt, the genocidal general known as the Pinochet of Guatemala, is suddenly back in business. On July 14, the supreme court of Guatemalan overturned a 1985 constitutional ban and permitted the former military dictator to run for president of th...
Tony Blair’s refusal to acquiesce to Ariel Sharon’s demands to sideline Arafat signals a recognition that sidelining one terrorist who has limited capacity to stop Hamas pales by comparison with Sharon’s total control of the IDF and other renegad...