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 February 2004
The world’s struggling democracies and democratic activists should not be terribly sanguine about the prospects of a John Kerry presidency. Not if Kerry is serious–and the man aptly described as resembling a dead Abraham Lincoln is nothing if no...
"The worst Democrat is better than the best Republican." That’s what my grandfather, a union man, used to say and it’s still considered political bedrock in my family. I, on the other hand . . . I’m reminded of my grandfatherR...
PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI. As civil war encroaches, civil society implodes and civil political discourse evaporates, one of the few things all Haitians can agree on is their pride in Toussaint L’Ouverture, who lead the slave rebellion in Haiti that establ...
In one of her Wall Street Journal columns last year, Mary Anastasia O’Grady wrote that U.S. lawmakers and State Department officials who criticize the Colombian military’s human rights record are "still fighting the Cold War, on the wrong side.&qu...
US army private Jeremy Hinzman fought in Afghanistan and considers himself a patriot. But when his unit was ordered to Iraq, he refused to go and embarked on a radical journey that could make legal history. Private first class Hinzman left the 504th Parachu...
Watch out for the Democrat backlash, Ralph Nader is running for President as an Independent. Of course most agree Nader’s run will not accrue nearly as many votes as his 2000 tally. Nonetheless these weak-kneed liberals are fearful of their deranged "sp...
I’m included, for some reason, on the email list of Tikkun Magazine, edited by Rabbi Michael Lerner, whom I respect for his involvement in the antiwar movement, including the Not In Our Name Coalition. On the other hand, I sometimes find his pronouncements b...
It’s almost a year since the Iraq war began, and
now that the "official" reasons for the invasion–Iraq’s
storied stockpiles of weapons, the imaginary ties between Saddam
Hussein and Osama bin Laden–lie ...
Before the Democratic Party and its "liberal intelligentsia" unleash its expected vindictiveness upon Ralph Nader’s candidacy for president in 2004 it might consider the following: * Al Gore (with an able assist from the U.S. S...
Jerusalem. Imagine a domestic terrorist cell loose in the city. They have already murdered a few people. The intelligence agency claims that members of the black community are harboring them, and their victims are almost always white. Since the city is more...
In his fifteen minutes or so on 22 February Meet the Press with Tim Russert, Ralph Nader (who with ever-increasing frequency refers to himself in the first-person plural) used some variant of the word "corporation" twenty-one times. Except when referring...
Native Americans had an expression for it. Forked tongue. Now we call them liars, backstabbers, dissimulators. People who say one thing and do another. Cheats, double-dealers, hypocrites. Dirty tricks and skullduggery. For as Mark Twain once q...
When I heard that the New York Times correspondent Judith Miller was going to be speaking at a local campus last week, I was eager to check her out. Ever since I read Pulitzer Prize winner Samantha Power’s atrocious review of Noam Chomksy’s "Hegem...
There is a boy dead in a city morgue. A teenager. Thomas "TJ" Hickey. Dead at 17. How do you write about death? About riots? About an issue no-one in power seems to want resolved? The mad scramble of Australia as it is today. Inner city Sydney Redfern. P...
Buenos Aires. President Nestor Kirchner of Argentina is emerging as the leading nemesis of the International Monetary Fund and the private financial speculators in South America. Assuming office in May 2003 with less than a quarter of the popular vote, he ...
By all rights John Kerry should have been at the top of his form, the night he won the Wisconsin primary. Even though the six biggest states, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Florida, New York and California have yet to vote, he’s been hailed as the Democratic nom...
AN AIR THAT KILLS: How the Asbestos Poisoning of Libby, Montana, Uncovered a National Scandal...
Going back all the way to the Bush administration’s build-up for invading Iraq, there has been much written and said about the reasons for the invasion. Now Paul O’Neill’s revelations that the Bush administration planned to invade Iraq long befor...
President Fox, Something remarkable has happened in Guatemala. You owe it to your country to take notice. On January 20, the Guatemalan Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a senior military officer, Col. Juan Valencia Osorio, for plotting and orde...
In the post 9/11 world there has been strong concern about nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists or "rogue" states. The pretext for the initiation of the US war against Iraq was the concern that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, including...
The Sharon government is widely regarded, even by Israel’s friends, as a negative force in the current politics of the Middle East. Its brutal repression of the Palestinians, its intransigence over engaging in the peace process and its defiance of world opin...
Mohammed offered me a cigarette. I wasn’t about to refuse. I dont normally smoke, and a choked a little after inhaling. Then the nicotine seared through my veins. Relaxed. I was suited up to join Alpha ‘Attack’ company on a night time miss...
SLAVE POWER. Two hundred years before Stokely Carmichael called for black power, the black slaves in the United States elected a President. How? The much hailed blueprint of justice, the American Constitution, gave each of them, man, woman, or child, status in the...
[Editors' Note: During February the Texas Civil Rights Review uncovered documents from a specially appointed ta...
If we want to understand the Bush Foreign policy in Iraq, we only have to look at Afghanistan. The basic principles are identical. There are approximately 11,000 American servicemen currently in Afghanistan, most of whom are stationed at military facilities...