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 March 2004
So Condy will take the oath, after all, to tell the truth so help her god. Right out in public. When she met privately with the commission, not under oath, she said nobody ever warned her that airliners might be hijacked and turned into bombs. She’s had to a...
There is a lake near Webster, Massachusetts called Chargoggaggoggmanchaugagoggchaubunagungamaug. Translated from the original Nipmuck, it lays down this thoughtful code for keeping the peace: "You fish on your side, I fish on my side, nobody fishes in the mid...
Beginning in early February 2004, the democratically elected President of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, faced an armed rebellion starting from the North of his country and moving South. The rebel leaders, whom U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell characterized as...
Here is the lesson to be learned from the fall of Martha Stewart: Don’t ever, under any circumstances, answer questions put to you by the FBI or any other federal agent unless you have a competent criminal lawyer at your side. And it would be better i...
"The flag is a symbol of the fact that man is still a herd animal." Albert Einstein Michael Newdow deserves credit for persevering in his crusade to have the "under God" clause removed from the Pledge of ...
A nation which enslaves another forges its own chains. -Karl Marx Politics, being the art of deception, must certainly recognize Israel as its Da Vinci. Its smug self-portrait as a ‘civilized democracy’, rendered...
March 27 marked the one year anniversary of the death of my beloved son Jesus Alberto, my Aztec warrior. A year since Bush’s lies about the cause of this death and a year since Bush’s insult to my son’s memory when the government initiall...
An extensive discussion has already taken place in Israel regarding the cost-benefit ratio of Yassin’s assassination. But the question of justice has hardly been raised. According to international law, the execution of any person in an occupied territ...
So the White House has finally, reluctantly, grudgingly agreed that national security adviser Condoleezza Rice will testify in public and under oath before the 9/11 Commission. John Lehman, a Republican panel member, says that it is important for Rice to te...
The announcement by the newly elect Socialist prime minister of Spain, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, that his government will pull Spanish troops out of Iraq by the end of June lest the UN take over the operation has elicited the predictable charge that he is hand...
The dashing face of Alexander Hamilton, first Treasurer of the United States, is a fitting portrait for the $10 bill because back in 1790 he engineered what became the great insider trading scam that founded the United States of America. Although the ...
"There is an odor to any press headquarters that is unmistakable…the unavoidable smell of flesh burning quietly and slowly in the service of a machine." -Norman Mailer I keep telling myself to stop wast...
About two weeks ago, the world’s attention suddenly turned to a dramatic battle in Pakistan. The Pakistani Army, we were told, had trapped a large force of al Qaeda, including a "high-value target," possibly Ayman Zawahiri. The Pakistanis brought i...
Many are wondering why there is no unified opposition party in Venezuela … this is perplexing, especially since there is a large section of society which actively seeks the replacement of the elected government. I began my recent discussions, ove...
Massive mobilizations, strikes, street conflict, hysterical mass media, social and economic disruption: Chile in 1972-73 Venezuela in 2002-04. The AFL-CIO is once again on the scene, this time in Venezuela, just as it was in Chile in 1973. Once again, its o...
former CIA analyst The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, chaired by former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean and better known as the 9/11 Commission, entertained news junkies across America with two full days of hearings last week....
During the dark days of the Reagan and Bush I regimes, grassroots forest activists forced the DC politicians and the big green DC groups to take notice of what was happening to the precious Ancient Forest ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest. They elevated the fate...
I don’t believe this is the Third World War. Nor is it a "war on terror". Nor is it a "war of civilizations". But our own leaders are willfully leading us into a period of appalling suffering because they will not address the...
Jerusalem. A few hours after the Israeli military assassinated Hamas’s spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, I entered the classroom in order to teach my politics of human rights course. Everyone had already heard about the extra-judicial executi...
For 30 months, 9/11 was a huge political blessing for George W. Bush. This week, the media halo fell off. Within the space of a few days, culminating with his testimony to the Sept. 11 commission Wednesday afternoon, former counterterrorism chief Richard Cl...
This weekend, I’m preparing for an April 6, 2004 entry into the Pekin FCI (Federal Correctional Institute) in Peoria. I’m one of several dozen people who, on November 22, 2003, crossed the line at the US Army’s military combat training school in ...
"Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today?" –Samuel Beckett’s Vladimir "For many, the theatre is the abode where dreams are c...
Riding the new commuter train from Los Angeles to Pasadena, I think about the powers that turn history forward and back. Half a century ago, these tracks were torn up and replaced by freeways. The "Red Cars" of Pacific Electric were laid off ...
The Non-Proliferation Treaty, which entered into force in 1970, is the centerpiece of international efforts to control the spread of nuclear weapons. Perhaps the treaty was given the wrong name when it was created because the treaty is about nuclear disarmament as...
Once upon a time in a country very different from today’s, sending an E-mail was like making a telephone call or mailing a first-class letter: the sender had a reasonable expectation of privacy in his message. Today, with terrorists under every bed and a gov...