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
Iraq’s looting commenced when the cheap-seat crowd swept out of the bleachers to tear up the field. The circling sky-box set waited. With wholesale privatization, the real looting is about to begin. Why settle for souvenirs when you can walk off with the sta...
Interesting Associated Press item buried deep in the Sunday Boston Globe: BAGHDAD, Iraq — A U.S. soldier shot and killed a tiger at the Baghdad zoo after it bit another soldier who had reached through the bars of its cage to feed it, a zo...
One of the reasons the North won the Civil War is that President Lincoln was willing to sack incompetent generals and President Davis was not. Some recent remarks by the American commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, suggest that it is time for President Bu...
Barbara Streisand is typically attacked from the right for her support of liberal concerns. However lately she’s been criticized for her lawsuit against an environmental project,...
Ahmed Qasm Hamed was dumped in a black sack at the mortuary of the Yarmouk hospital last week. Taleb Neiemah Homtoush turned up at the city morgue with three bullets in his head. Amr Alwan Ibrahim’s family brought him to the morgue five minutes later with a ...
I always thought that the idea of a military man facing a court martial and having a military defense attorney was some kind of sick joke. The joke got sicker a few months ago when,with much pride, the government announced it was going to provide the men held in G...
When Israel’s finance minister Binyamin Netanyahu was interviewed for the radio on the morning after the horrific terror attack on Café Hillel in Jerusalem he was asked whether this was the right time for cutbacks in the military budget. In answer to ...
Five days before Charity Ryerson surrendered herself to the minimum security Federal Prison Camp at Pekin, Ill., she spoke nonchalantly about the six months she would serve for cutting a padlock during a protest at the School of the Americas. Curled up on the couc...
A videotape has surfaced in which a man believed to be Vice President Richard Cheney addresses the American people from an unidentified office. The tape is not dated, but analysts have inferred from the speaker’s comments that it was made sometime this summe...
In a three-hour lunch meeting with foreign journalists yesterday, Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez roamed over a wide variety of topics, from the cancellation of his trip to the U.S., to the recall referendum, to the WTO meeting in Cancun, and to Venezuela-...
Shimon Peres is celebrating. Shimon Peres? The whole world is celebrating with him! What has he got to celebrate? Well, he has reached the age of 80. A respectable age. I can’t begrudge him. (After all, I myself am now 80 years old, and I just ...
Judging from the hoopla and hype in the media, from CNN to the NY Times, the decision by retired four-star general Wesley Clark to throw his hat into the ring as a Democratic Party presidential contender is something akin to the second coming. He’s a genuine...
The working class is not particularly high on the agenda of the US left. It is quite telling that many on the left were eager to support Ralph Nader’s campaign for the presidency despite his failure to win any notable support from organized labor. Furthermor...
The world wide assault on internationally accepted legal norms by the United States and its allies develops apace. In a nationally televised speech on September 8th, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe violently attacked human rights defenders, saying, "Every ti...
"Oh, sure, an F-18 roaring nearby across the sky will raise goose bumps on even the most jaded of American patriots, but when an Apache helicopter rises from behind some hillside and hangs in a hover, looking at youWell that’s our enemyR...
Bob Dylan’s new film, "Masked and Anonymous," has met with almost universal condemnation (or worse, condescension) from critics in the corporate media. According to most reviewers, in lieu of a plot the film offers "rambling incoherence" ...
Watching the high school kids tottering up the hiking trail under ridiculous burdens I was reminded of the studies of GIs who jumped into the surf in the Normandy landings with 80 pound packs on their backs and promptly drowned. These days the overloaded back pack...
ABU GHRAIB PRISON. We could see them beyond the dirt yard, standing in the heat beside their sand-brown tents, the razor wire wrapped in sheaths around their compound. No pictures of the prisoners, we were told. Do not enter the compound. Do not go i...
On September 12, 2003, the New York Times defended the Recording Industry Association of America’s recent lawsuits against P2P music file-sharers [Suing Music Dowloaders]. The editorial was based on a number of flawed concepts, which just goes to show that i...
The Bushites love to visit the mass graves in Halabja. That’s where about 7,000 Kurds died after a chemical weapons attack. "I can’t tell you that Saddam Hussein was a murderous tyrant — you know that," said Colin Powell with prosaic ce...
Twenty two years ago, in the hallway of the Washington DC Federal Court Building, Guillermo Novo threatened me. So, when I read that on November 18, 2000 Panamanian cops had arrested him on an assassination charge, I felt the pleasant tingle of relief. Novo has re...
The "road map" in the Middle East is leading nowhere. Even those who were still harbouring some hopes about it in recent weeks must now admit that it is dead for all intents and purposes. This should not surprise anyone who is familiar with the hi...
Jerusalem. The other morning at 7 a.m., I joined Peace Now for an early morning demonstration to ‘wake up’ Ariel Sharon to the fact that his policy of assassinations only feeds the cycle of violence, and does not end terrorism. "You&...
Lots of us had highest hopes about Colin Powell. I was one of many who thought he should be president because I considered he would be a splendid leader for America. This was the man, after all, who wrote in his autobiography that he was "angry that so many o...
Few expect Congress to say No to President Bush’s $87 billion request for the war in Iraq that he said was over. Decent Americans don’t want to abandon the Iraqi people. But we should get more for our money than a guerilla war, and we should limit the ...