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 August 2003
On August 14th the largest electrical blackout in history caused sixteen nuclear plants to automatically shut down in the U.S. and Canada. Nuclear power plants run on offsite power, not their own reactors. If the electrical grid fails, reactors are d...
Just how cheap and easy are the muckity-mucks of the Bushist Party? How much scratch does it take for a high official of the Regime to overrule his own intelligence officers and support the Potomac Empire’s propaganda line? What’s the going rate for se...
California be damned. Every rich moron and pathetic doofus in the Golden State may be running for governor these days, but a howling mob of good Christian people in Alabama is doing its level best to turn them all into yesterday’s news. Their leader, Chief J...
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This week, I had the great pleasure of leaving the Washington D.C.area and traveling to Chicago. I took every opportunity to find out what people west of the beltway were thinking about Bush and Company. And, much to my surprise, they were thinking more like me th...
The recolonisation of Iraq is not proceeding smoothly. The resistance in the country (and in Palestine) is not, as Israeli and Western propagandists like to argue, a case of Islam gone mad. It is, in both cases, a direct consequence of the occupation. Befor...
The most common mistakes made by Israelis are as follows: 1. To fail to realize that there is no essential difference between Tel Aviv and a Jewish settlement in the West Bank. 2. To believe that the creation of the state of Israel was a...
The word "bum" has two major meanings. One is pejorative and refers to the unfortunate among us who find themselves homeless and out of work. That particular term has properly fallen out of use. However, there is another definition of "bum." We...
If you want to know why the U.S. campaign to pacify Iraq and make the country into a docile puppet state is doomed to failure, just look at what happened to 17-year-old Ali Muhsin. Shot and killed by American soldiers on Tuesday, he died on his family’...
Palestinian suicide bombings are vicious and grave abuses, clearly war crimes under international law for intentionally killing civilians. They have also been a strategic disaster for Palestinian national aspirations. They have driven the Israeli public to embrace...
Falling from Mt. Jefferson’s vista to Oregon’s spectacular Metolius River, a tattered blanket of brown and black forests still carpets the foothills of the Eastern Cascades a year later. I see where towering flames must have jumped this last free-flowi...
Every few days the U.S. Department of Defense issues a terse press release of US military deaths in Iraq from non-combat causes. These lack drama or narrative so they are hardly ever noted in newspapers or television newscasts in places other than the hometowns of...
War so far has not returned to the Korean peninsula. Negotiators from six countries–North and South Korea, China, Japan, Russia, and the United States–are about to sit down in Beijing to keep it that way. In a world dominated by military "solution...
Tariq Ali is an editor of New Left Review and the author of The Clash of Fundament...
The other day, I conducted a continuing legal education seminar for attorneys in Virginia. The group consisted of a varied lot of practitioners_patent attorneys, corporate lawyers, and government attorneys. Among the government attorney was an employee of the Just...
You cannot possibly have a broader basis for any government than that which includes all the people with all their rights in their hands, and with an equal power to maintain their rights. William Lloyd Garrison I...
Remember that $400 family credit that you got from the IRS (assuming you weren’t one of those 8 million poor families that the Republicans and the president decided didn’t deserve a tax rebate)? Well, if your family has the typical two cars and ...
Sixty pages and several months into Daniel Wilkinson’s journey into Guatemala’s heart of darkness, the author spends an evening in a coffee worker’s cinder-block, tin-roofed home, trying to coax from him the barest information about civil conflic...
Everyday, women mill about crying outside the
courtyard of Baghdad’s Institute of Forensic Medicine at Bab
al Muadam Square, so overcome with grief that they are unable
to stand. The men stand grim and silent, the sleepless night...
KB Toys has released a George W. Bush "Action Figure" entitled "Naval Aviator," produced by Blue Box Toys in China. It sells for $39.99 and it commemorates the "historic" May 1 Bush dressed-as-combat-pilot landing on the USS Lincoln. ...
Although it is cliché to say so, her beauty and serenity evoke an aging Virgin Mary, especially in this setting. She sits on her donkey expression unchanged as she bounces along among the olive trees through the rocky valley pass eyes glancing outward, watc...
The Independent Kerbala, Iraq. Across the marble floor of the Shrine of the Imam Hussein in Kerbala scampers Suheil with his plastic bag of metal. He points first to a red stain on the flagstones. “This was a red smoke grenade that the Americans fired,...
"First of all, you know, size of protest, it’s like deciding, well, I’m going to decide policy based upon a focus group. The role of a leader is to decide policy based upon the security — in this case, the security of the people...
South Dakota’s lone congressman and former two-term Governor William Janklow stands accused of vehicular homicide by the friends of a Minnesota motorcyclist named Randolph Scott. Scott, named after the late actor by his parents, was killed earlier thi...
It was a putsch. Like any classic putsch, it was carried out by a group of officers: Sharon, Mofaz, Ya’alon and the army top brass. It is no secret that the military party (the only really functioning party in Israel) objected to the hudna (truce) fro...