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
Not long ago I pulled my car up alongside a tiny wooden church in the woods, a stark white frame box my family built in 1840. And as always, an honest-to-god chill went through me, for the ancestral ghosts presumably hovering over the graves there. From the wide o...
"There are always going to be differences of views….The test is what has been decided and what is issued, and then is it adhered to." That was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld this past May 13 en route to Iraq. ...
In a slashing criticism of the Bush White House and Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon leadership, General Zinni, former Commander of Central Command of U.S. Military, and Special Envoy to the Middle East in the Bush Administration until he resigned in disgust, said...
It sure is curious how documents entering the Bush Machine exit with blank pages. It happened with Iraq’s 11,800-page dossier on weapons and now it has happened again with the report on prison abuse produced by Major General Antonio M. Taguba. "T...
On May 22, 2004, Counterpunch published a piece of mine simply titled "Turnaround." This piece was a faux newspaper article written as if a freelance reporter sent it from Baghdad’s Green Zone. The article itself d...
In 1963, well before the American public generally understood where Vietnam was, a young Army captain led a South Vietnamese unit through the A Shau Valley to systematically burn villages to the ground. This was to deprive the so-called Vietcong of any base of sup...
Last week an Iraqi wedding party was bombed in the location of Makr al Deeb near the Syrian border. Approximately 40 members of the party were killed, many of them women and children. So far, there is a great deal of pictorial and anecdotal evidence suggesting tha...
What is, perhaps, most horrific and incomprehensible about the Abu Ghraib photos are the photos themselves. Why would American prison guards take pictures of themselves smiling triumphantly and making fun of Iraqi prisoners as they humiliated, tortured, and in som...
Seth, 24, was in debt after he graduated from Rutgers University in 2002. He joined the army for money and skills that, he was told, would help land him a job with the CIA or FBI — his dream jobs. "Not for patriotism," said his mother, Sue Niederer...
The demented and spiritually tormented Congressman Tom DeLay, House Majority leader, begins his speeches with the words "good evening [morning/afternoon], or, as John Kerry would say, ‘bonjour’." This greeting is meant to indicate that Senato...
The immense might of the Israeli army, assembled from all over the country, has attacked a small Palestinian township on the margin of the destitute Gaza Strip. Palestinians, both fighters and civilians, are being killed by the dozen, homes are being destroyed who...
THE GRUESOME facts of the wine industry are these: It’s wholly dependent on immigrant Mexican labor for whom the industry provides little to no housing or labor protections or fair compensation or anything else that American labor, also on the ropes these da...
"Nuclear weapons give no quarter. Their effects transcend time and place, poisoning the Earth and deforming its inhabitants for generation upon generation. They leave us wholly without defense, expunge all hope for survival. They hold in their sw...
BASSETERRE, St. Kitts. On Feb. 29 the legally elected government of Haiti was driven from power by armed force. Its president, after being taken against his will to the Central African Republic, was given refuge in Jamaica. The Bush administration’s r...
On Thursday I set fire to my Israeli military deferral papers across the street from the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC. This act of civil disobedience took place during a protest organized by a Jewish American peace organization against the atrocities that Isr...
"Our model [neo-liberal economic model] is very good for Brazil, but not so good for Brazilians." – President Emilio Medici, 1971 According to comedian Chris Rock, democracy doesn’t deliver equality. F...
Even a sack of day-old White Castle hamburgers couldn’t help but notice there’s something missing from the administration’s terrorist emergency plans. It’s the same thing missing from all this administration’s plans: the welfare of th...
"You are going to be ...
Troy has gotten a lot of flak over the past few days. Much of the opposition to this film seems to stem from a misunderstanding of the purposes and mechanisms of the Iliad. It is unclear exactly how many critics have actually read Homer, but it seems clear that th...
Across all fronts, Bush’s war deteriorates with stunning rapidity. The death count of American soldiers killed in Iraq will soon top 800, with no end in sight. The members of the handpicked Iraqi Governor Council are being knocked off one after another. Once...
The Abu Ghraib portraits of sexual humiliation and submission have exposed the unbelievably tangled strands of racism, misogyny, homophobia, national arrogance and hyper-masculinity that characterize the US military. Militarized sexual domination is neither "...
The thought of anti-abortion zealots winning appointments to the Supreme Court under a Bush presidency was the one factor that terrified many into staying the course with the Democratic Party in 2000. Voters, many with pinched noses and sick stomachs, pulled the l...
I just saw a picture of Spc. Sabrina Harmon, posing with a dead body, her gloved thumb up, and a bright, Miss America smile on her wholesome face. And I am wondering what it means. Is this the sweet all-american smile of a "bad apple?" There is no...
"Yes, they suffered the holocaust, and yes, they are the victims of anti-Semitism. But no, they cannot use those facts to continue, or initiate, the dispossession of another people that bears no responsibility for either of those prior facts"...
Four years ago, as Americans snored through the early round sparring between presidential candidates George W. Bush and vice-president Albert Gore, insurgent Ralph Nader, an old-fashioned anti-monopolist, had a virtual monopoly on glamour and glitz as movie and TV...