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 September 2003
Allegations are swirling that Karl Rove, senior political adviser to President George W. Bush, may have committed a felony by blowing the cover of a CIA operative. CIA Director George Tenet has called on the Justice Department to investigate but the White House said Monda...
“The right thing … a magnificent job … heroes … pride”. So off Tony went again yesterday on Breakfast With Frost, spinning and spinning about Iraq. I wonder what he’d think of the city morgue downtown from here when they bring th...
Through a simple campus lecture, Edward Said precipitated a rupture at Ohio’s Oberlin College. But like many things in his life, the debate did not touch the substance of Said’s theory or politics. Instead, his enemies were obsessed by what he sto...
Why does our government want to prevent us from seeing and learning about what is happening in Cuba? It says its purpose is to deny hard currency to Cubans so that they will change the way they have organized their society. If so, it’s the first time in his...
One of the principal tenets of conservative thinking in America is the precept that all government is evil and mettlesome. Another is that we should get government out of our lives altogether and let the free market work its magic. One tends to hear these argument...
The polls are saying President Bush is in trouble. His approval rating, by most accounts, is currently somewhere around 50 percent, down from a high of 90 percent right after the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and down 10 points just over the...
Photos from the February 1977 issue of the now defunct After Dark Magazine, an entertainment monthly targeting gay men. ? ? ...
It is a grey Monday morning. In an hour or so a funeral will start at a church a block away from where I write. Besides the scores of regular worshippers and community activities of Harlem hosted by Riverside Church, enigmatic and provocative figures like Mar...
Cochabamba, Bolivia A new cycle of conflict has developed in Bolivia as worker unions, coca farmers and ordinary citizens unite to prevent the sale of the nation’s gas reserves to the United States through a Chilean port. In a country whose economic i...
Text of remarks by IAIN BOAL at Black Oak Books in Berkeley on September 24 during an evening of readings and discussion sponsored by PEN West in observation of Banned Book Week. "No oppressive regime can press on the hot lid of a boiling pot forever&...
While Democrats from Little Rock to Washington, DC go gaga over retired General Wesley Clark’s recently announced candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination, other Democrats rightly question Clark’s past decisions and his future intentions. I...
A year and a half ago, a small group of Israelis decided to break a deeply entrenched taboo and bring up the subject of war crimes. Until then, it was self-evident that the IDF is "the most moral and humane army in the world", as the official mantra goes...
Has the "newspaper of record" unleashed a leftist? That’s the claim of the Paul Krugman-haters at the conservative National Review Online, where a fanatical "truth squad" attempts to refute the Princeton economist’s columns in the N...
They were at it again last week, the liars of our Western “intelligence” community. John Bolton, the US under-secretary of state for arms control and one of Donald Rumsfeld’s cabal of pro-Israeli neo-conservatives, was giving testimony before the decided...
Let’s start with a passage from Alan Dershowitz’s latest book, The Case for Israel, now slithering into the upper tier of Amazon’s sales charts. On page 213 we meet Dershowitz, occupant of the Felix Frankfurter chair at Harvard Law School, happil...
Only a few days ago, I sent out an e-mail flyer, announcing a November 25th New York panel discussion on CounterPunch’s forthcoming book, ...
If anyone wants to know why Iraqis set bombs for American soldiers, they had only to sit in the two-storey villa in this little farming village and look at the frozen face of Ahmed al-Ham and his angry friends yesterday. Ahmed’s 50-year-old father, Sabah, was...
Two years after September 11, 2001, when the righteous indignation of Americans at the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon had cooled a bit, five Ivy League colleges decided to invite a Muslim sage to talk to them about why such horrible things were done t...
[An Excerpt from The Politics of Anti-Semitism, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Je...
No, I did not read the book, but what words more perfectly describe George Bush making one of the oddest speeches ever made at the UN? There he was–with his designer suit, costly watch, and constantly-manicured haircut–stone-faced and unrepentant for t...
"The world has entered a new nuclear age, a second nuclear age. The danger is rising that nuclear weapons will be used against the United States. Just as bad, the danger is rising that the United States will use nuclear weapons against othersR...
Arasat is a quiet, uneventful suburb of Baghdad, a place of good restaurants serving moderate Lebanese wine, middle class and educated and absolutely unassociated with violence. So the bomb which stopped the clock of the Christian family across the road from the ...
In late September of 1969, the US Department of Justice opened its prosecution of eight men on charges that included "conspiracy to cross state lines and/or us interstate transport with the intent to incite a riot." These eight became known to middle Ame...
At a PTA meeting two weeks ago I learned that all parent-volunteers at my daughter’s primary school are now required to submit to a criminal background check which includes a (thus far) "voluntary" request for the parent’s thumbprint. My scho...
Prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia have asked Judge Leonie Brinkema to dismiss all charges against Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th September 11 hijacker. The unusual move comes with their impatience with her for not making a decision as to how ...