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 May 2004
Divert resources from antiterrorism investigations, mandate burdensome government paperwork and forbid families from helping — or even seeing — their relatives. That’s the new U.S. policy toward Cuba. As if four decades of a failed embargo...
Sinbad, step aside. Aladdin and Ali Baba, off with your tawdry tales so we can hear a truly fantastic story from the land of the Arabian Nights. You would have thought by this stage of this United States presidency, that there was little left to shock. But ...
On May 26 the New York Times finally hitched up its pants, took a deep breath and issued an editorial declaration of moderate regret for its role in boosting the case for war on Iraq. There was a bit of dutiful trumpet-tootling at the start ("we found an enor...
For many years, health-conscious Americans avidly consumed margarine as a wholesome substitute for artery-clogging butter. Only later did research shed light on grim effects of the partially hydrogenated oil in margarine, with results such as higher incidences of ...
Already two claims have been repeated about the President’s War College speech, but both claims are misleading. First is the claim that the speech offered nothing new. But this claim is misleading because it fails to take seriously the meaning of the particu...
Now it’s personal. The Bush cabal has begun besmirching the good name of us independent contractors, and I’m pissed. Imagine. They’re saying that some of the most egregious torture and murder of prisoners at Baghram Airbase in Afg...
One of the inequities of the 2001 tax act, insofar as the rich are concerned will be cured by a Bill passed by the House of Representatives before leaving on their third vacation this year, if approved by the Senate. Among provisions in the 2001 tax act that did n...
In our new book, The Exception To the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers and the...
(This interview with Dave Dellinger, wh...
Halleluya! On this 26th day of May, 2004. The New York Times confessed to having helped promote the lies that got us into war with Iraq. This being the Times, it didn’t put it that forthrightly. First it told us how wonderful its coverage had been ...
For Jay Leno, it was a big night, scoring the highest Nielsen rating that The Tonight Show had seen for a Wednesday in more than four years. The big guest was movie muscleman Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was coming on the show to announce whether he would run in Cal...
Caught with its pants down, the New York Times, on 26 May 2004, briefly stepped out of character and, well off the front page, admitted that its editors and journalists, most notably Judy Miller, skewed information to fit a preconceived plan of action by certain g...
Dave Dellinger is dead at 88. He’s the first of my closest 60′s super pals to live to a very ripe old age. The NY Times had an OK obit worth your checking out. Dave’s being correctly portrayed as a person of unyielding beliefs and as a rad...
Steve Kurtz was already suffering from one tragedy when he called 911 early in the morning to tell them his wife had suffered a cardiac arrest and died in her sleep. The police arrived and, cranked up on the rhetoric of the "War on Terror," decided Kurtz...
Accoutered in conspicuous orange jackets, Massachusetts state police officers were deliberating their intentions while filming and pointing at the three of us as we sat quietly among the audience at this year’s Suffolk University commencement ceremony, which...
On its face, President George Bush’s recent endorsement of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s land grab in the occupied territories makes little sense. The plan, under which Israel would abandon Gaza while permanently annexing most of the West Bank,...
The Independent I can’t wait to see Abu Ghraib prison reduced to rubble by the Americans–at the request of the new Iraqi government, of course. It will be turned to dust in order to destroy a symbol of Saddam’s brutality. That’s what Pr...
"One did not know what happened inside the Ministry of Love, but it was possible to guess: tortures, drugs, delicate instruments that registered your nervous reactions, gradual wearing-down by sleeplessness and solitude and persistent questioning...
The new U.S.-British drafted Security Council resolution is a scam. Under cover of a "transfer of sovereignty," it seeks to have the United Nations give the United States legal authority to continue the occupation indefinitely. You wouldn’t ...
I’m in shock. I just received an email from a very good friend here in Vermont telling me that David Dellinger died the afternoon of May 25th. Dave was a lifelong antiwar activist who refused to fight in World War Two and actively opposed every US war since ...
In the aftermath of last week’s raid by Iraqi’s police and US forces on the elegant Baghdad mansion currently inhabited by Ahmad Chalabi (it actually belongs to his sister), his angry spokesman cited as evidence of the intruders’ barbarity the fa...
The United States and Britain make suitable partners. Abuse and torture at the Hola camp in Kenya in the 1950s, Fort Morbut in Aden in the 1960s and the Castlereagh interrogation centre for twenty years in Ireland remain potent symbols of British war crimes. Colon...
The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 ...
April 23, 2004: Lori Berenson stands at a steel table next to a walk-in size oven. She is a baker of some reknown now, at least among the network of political prisoners in Peru’s various dungeons. She is spreading the last bit of frosting on a birthday cake ...
I came home from my war in 1970 with a body still riddled with shrapnel and mind still muddled with a toxic cocktail of rage and guilt and fear. I tried with every fiber of my being to become myself again but always knowing that I would never be that person again....