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 September 2004
As new Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Tories prepare for their party political conferences in Bournemouth and Brighton in the coming weeks, Palestinians from Balata to Beit Jibrin will be locked up in their homes and refugee camps for the fourth consecutiv...
Former CIA Analysts A few weeks spent in Palestine is always an assault on the senses, on the emotions. And after three trips to the West Bank in the past eighteen months, it is impossible not to draw some conclusions. For most Americans, the eleventh commandm...
As the 1 million-strong March for Women’s Lives came to a close in April, a young woman who’d traveled from Vermont to Washington, D.C., said to me, "So now what do we do?" It’s the key question. How we answer that question–...
Remember in the waning days of the 2000 election when the Democrats bussed around Gloria Steinem to dispense fear that George W. Bush would overturn Roe v. Wade if elected? I do. In fact she came to Portland State University in Oregon, where I was a student, to co...
"He who saves the life of one saves the entire world." The Talmud Even one life is worth working to save…or is it? Using arguments that sound more like utilitarian philosophy than Christianity, purportedly C...
The unit knew it would soon be shipped to the front. Some soldiers responded by deserting. Others got drunk and fought. In response, officers locked the unit in its barracks, allowing the troops out only to drill, not even to smoke a cigarette, until it could be p...
The war against terror continues to be accompanied by critical acclaim from its authors, George W. Bush, Richard Cheney and John Ashcroft and criticism from much of the rest of the country. A study of its successes explains why. One of the administration...
Baghdad. The US has detained for...
When John Lee Hooker died three years ago, my friend Joe said, "I KNEW the heroin would get to him sooner or later!" It was a good joke, because John Lee Hooker died at the age of 83. It’s like the joke about how Osama Bin Laden and the Mullah Omar...
Daniel Gross is the lead organizer in the ongoing IWW IU/660 effort to establish the only unionized Starbucks in the United States. He’s a worker at the 36th and Madison Starbucks in New York City, the immediate focus of the campaign. During a demonstration ...
Back in the 1800s New Yorkers had a modest nickname for their corrupt metropolis. They called it the "Corporation." It was a telling name, indeed. Although the city at the time was a filthy, hog-infested cesspool, the Big Apple was nonetheless a vibrant ...
The Times says hurrah!–we’ve now had "the start of the kind of serious and useful debate the American people deserve." Well, goody, but how did the two opponents differ? We’ve been here before, in another war that everybo...
Baghdad. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is...
Even though three years have passed since 9/11, most political leaders have failed to seriously probe the implications of the horrific attacks. One of the key questions that could have been asked following 9/11 is how the absence of certain international ...
The buzzards are circling, the scent of fresh kill wafts through the newsrooms, trickles down and spreads, engulfing talk radio and sweeping through the internet. The sharks are poised and the operatives sharpen their daggers. Dan Rather, the logical successor to ...
I just finished reading two recently published books that deal with the deteriorating state of democracy in the United States. One is written by radical journalist David Lindorff and the other is a composition by rock musician/free speech advocate Krist Novoselic ...
Coda: The House Rules Even Laura...
The rules are simple. I provide a quote and you guess which Stupid White Man (or wannabe) is responsible. QUOTE #1: "The destruction was mutual." (Explaining why the U.S. should not apologize to Vietnam) a) Richard Nixon b) Ronald R...
Until last Monday, I was an undecided voter. I agreed with friends, Republicans and Democrats alike, that Iraq is the central issue of this election. But I teetered nonetheless, as put off by the Bush administration’s determination to stay the course when th...
Every September for the last two decades Palestinians and sympathetic friends memorialize the Sabra-Shatila massacre in Lebanon. It occurred when Ronald Reagan was President and Israel had conquered half of Lebanon. In the all news magazine articles about Reagan&#...
The U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting in Richmond, Virginia, stayed true to its tradition of being to the right of the Supreme Court in the decision handed down on September 13, 2004, in the case of the United States vs. Zacarias Moussaoui. The ...
Kofi Annan, who replaced Egypt’s Boutros Boutros-Ghali as UN Secretary-General in 1996 (due solely to a U.S. veto of a second Boutros-Ghali term, probably resulting from the secretary-general’s support for Palestine) has for the last eight years avoide...
Excuse me, but the story is not CBS and the George W. Bush National Guard documents. The story is: How did the US Congress, the opposition party, the news media, and the US public let the Bush administration start a war based on phony documents? If s...
America in November will disappoint the world. We will elect either a war criminal or one of the lawmakers who gave him the power to wage such an unlawful war (i.e. an accomplice). What we now know (and what was assumed by many at the time) about the intelligence ...
Nineteen months of scorched-earth assaults–conducted by mounted Arab militias in concert with government planes and helicopters–have forced most of the African population in Sudan’s western Darfur region to flee. According to UN estimates, 50,000...