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 January 2004
Introducing Islam Karimov, one of Washington’s most recent allies in the War on Terror. The neo-Stalinist autocrat presides over Uzbekistan, a vast mineral and oil rich country strategically located in central Asia. A country where dissidents are boiled aliv...
"Michael Lerner is one of the major prophetic figures of our time." Cornel West "Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlem...
These are desperate days for Entergy, the big Arkansas-based power conglomerate that owns the frail Indian Point nuclear plant, located on the east bank of the Hudson River outside Buchanan, New York-just 22 miles from Manhattan. First, a scathing report b...
"After I joined they gave me a barbed wire chain to wear on my leg for two hours a day and a whip to hit my buttocks with." Sharon Clasen, former member of Opus Dei "Blessed be pain. Loved be pain. Glorified be pain"...
Martin Luther King, Jr. would have been 75 years old this week had he lived to grow older. At 75, he certainly would have been a wise man. He was already wise well beyond his years at 39 when he was assassinated. How valuable it would have been for our country and...
The seminar on Fourth Generation war that meets each month at my house took as its December topic the following question: You are the commander of the Marine Corps unit that will take over Fallujah in March; what will you do? Army and Marine Corps participa...
"We’ve given up hope," said 20 year old Mohammed Al Katib, a Palestinian student imprisoned in the Umm Qasr prison camp in southern Iraq. "We don’t think we’ll ever get out of here." On January 3, 2004, I traveled with ...
Note: Benny Morris is the dean of Israeli ‘new historians’, who have done so much to create a critical vision of Zionism–its expulsion and continuing oppression of the Palestinians, its pressing need for moral and political atonement...
Film producer and journalist Michael Moore, who has decided to endorse and actively campaign for retired Gen. Wesley Clark for the Democratic presidential nomination, has crossed the line in attacking at least one of Clark’s rivals. Moore, in emails t...
After three months of a strike and lockout, an increasing number of the 70,000 grocery workers in Southern California are growing restless over their union leadership’s conduct of the strike. Since the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) strike began a...
At some point in the interview, when the reader might think that Benny Morris has already said the most terrible things, he brings up, in passing, the extermination of the Native Americans. Morris contends that their annihilation was unavoidable. "The great A...
Thinking people aren’t surprised to be told that failed-oilman George Bush qualifies as a moral and intellectual dry hole. Bush’s halting words come from a mouth so long smugly-set it can scarcely form the shapes of vowels, but enormous ignoranc...
A rat done bit my sister Nell with Whitey on the moon. Her face and arms began to swell and Whitey’s on the moon. I can’t pay no doctor bills but Whitey’s on the moon. Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still while Whitey&#...
We write this, our fifth such memorandum to you since our critique of Secretary of State Colin Powell’s UN speech last February, out of concern that the same advisers who served you so poorly in drafting the Iraq section of last year’s state-of-the-uni...
The very term "Silk Road" is rather magical, evoking images of camel caravans, oases, saffron-clad missionary monks. Silk is the strongest of natural fibers; maybe that’s why China has labeled one of its missiles, exported to Iran among other count...
OK, we admit it: we were wrong. The big news that shook the world last month has finally convinced your humble correspondent to wolf down a huge plate of crow tartare and confess the error of his ways. Like the worst kind of partisan hack, this column completely s...
It is the day before Martin Luther King’s birthday, 2004, and I am reading with great sadness reports of a recent political analysis that says to Democratic candidates for president, "forget the South, white voters will not be coming back to you this ye...
There were plenty of surprises and lessons all around in what was billed by local Upper Dublin Democrats in this mostly white suburban enclave just north of Philadelphia as the first caucus to be held in the nation. With some 150 local Democrats in attendan...
Here we have former US Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill disclosing that George Bush came into office planning to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and MSNBC polls its audience with the question, Did O’Neill Betray Bush? Is that really the big question? T...
The Sixth Amendment was lopped off the Constitution earlier this week. AG Ashcroft can now have you arrested — more accurately, abducted and detained — and thrown in a military brig or sent to the Guantanamo concentration camp. Like military dic...
Anyone who doubts former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s recent claims that President Bush mislead the public and secretly planned the Iraq war eight months before the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 needs to read the two letters sent to then President...
At the beginning of a new year, it is traditional for columnists, commentators and other harmless drudges to take a look at their crystal ball and forecast what the year may bring. Fortunately, I have superior technology. My home telephone was made in 1918. When I...
An article by Eric Schmitt, in the January 2, 2004 edition of the New York Times ("In Iraq’s Murky Battle, Snipers Offer U.S. a Precision Weapon") offered a fine illustration of how heavily conditioned a society we live in. Consider the opening lin...
Lefthook.org If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not...
Translated by Forrest Hylton At the meeting in Monterrey, the president of the United States prepares to "squeeze" Latin American governments, perhaps much more so on political than on economic terrain. In an electoral year, the spectacle occupies...