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 December 2004
The Independent Baghdad. The...
Kiev, Ukraine. "The present government, it is known, is corrupt and controlled by the oligarchs," declared Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko in a televised debate against his opponent, Viktor Yanukovych, on November 15. "I ha...
Thomas Paine, the great pamphleteering terrorist-provocateur of the Age of Reason, devoted his final pamphlet, Agrarian Justice (1795), to formulating a publicly financed economic security system. Agrarian Justice proposed that all citizens inheriting property wou...
The following Q&A with CounterPunch readers (who are opinionated and engaging souls) leads to two conclusions: (1) the State Department’s letter of justification for adding Al-Manar to the Terrorist Exclusion List (TEL) should be imm...
"Where you live should not decide whether you live or whether you die." -U2, "Crumbs From Your Table" (from "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb") Charles Bukowski once said: "As we go on with ...
"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons." Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky More evidence of the death of human rights in Haiti has been unfolding this month as additional inform...
As the riptide of voices seeking to drown Kofi Annan and the UN Oil-For-Food Program strengthens, it is interesting to note not only what is being said about the Program’s shortcomings, but also what isn’t being said. In order to do that, however, it i...
On Sunday, December 19, 2004, I had a startling exchange with New York Senator Charles Schumer at the Hofstra University graduation. Schumer has a habit of appearing at graduation at the last minute uninvited, speaking to the audience about his experience as a rec...
For all three groups Christmas came early. For the first group it came in September. For the second group it came in mid-December and for the third group, which got the best present, it came at the end of November. All the gifts came from Merck & Co. On...
Dear Jose Saramago, In recent days, Colombia, (infamous for its government-sponsored death squads and peasant massacres) has become the favorite site from which some of the Western World’s best known intellectuals have dictated moral lectures condemni...
A Palestinian child died in my arms today. It was a young boy; it was a girl. It was an infant; it was a 13-year-old. She had been shot 20 times by an Israeli soldier firing U.S.-made bullets; he had been dismembered by a missile fired from a U.S.-manufactured Isr...
in Baghdad and JEREMY REDMON in Mosul An explosion in a US Army mess tent at lunchtime in a base near the northern city of Mosul killed at least 26 people and wounded 60 others in one of the most lethal attacks on American forces in Iraq since the invasion. Th...
Dublin. "HEIST ALMIGHTY!&qu...
Call me Slothrop. By now everyone knows about the 122mm rocket that slammed into the near-Mosul mess tent, ripping through the ceiling…"in the deadliest single attack against Americans in Iraq since the start of the war." No near-miss, thi...
"Where is the world? Is it dead?" exclaimed the bereaved mother in Rafah on Al-Jazeera. Before her, lied the lifeless body of her little child. Faced with overwhelming Israeli oppression, Palestinians under occupation, in refugee camps and in the ...
In this post-Columbine, post 9-11 era, America has simply lost it. Just this past week, a 10-year old girl who brought a pair of scissors from home to school in her school bag to continue work on a magazine clipping class project, was summarily turned over ...
How did a series of coordinated attacks take place on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon without any apparent warning on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001? What can be done to prevent their recurrence? To answer these vexing questions, the US Congres...
While enjoying Christmas, good food and drink with family and friends in the warmth and comfort of your home, take a moment to remember the falsely imprisoned. Think about how your own family would handle the grief, because wrongful imprisonment can happen to you....
In a speech to the National Endowment for Democracy on November 6, 2003, President Bush stated, "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe – because in the long run, stab...
Humans have a tendency to believe what they want to believe. So it was little wonder that when the "Orange Revolution" broke out in the ex-Soviet republic of Ukraine in late November, many Americans thought a popular movement was on the rise, bringing lo...
They are not even a dozen strong, but the Islamic activists (mostly Shiah women) who posted recent statements at ...
In all of the world nothing is more pliant than water. And yet it has no equal resiliency against that which is hard. It cannot be changed by anything. That which is weak conquers that which is strong; that which is soft conquers that...
Baghdad. The Iraqi authorities ...
Kiev, Ukraine. During the Cold War, the global ‘spy-versus-spy’ atmosphere of rival east-west blocs generated endless assassination plots and political murder stories. One of the most infamous such killings involved a Bulgarian BBC employee, Geo...
When I read that Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the 89-year-old former leader of Chile, had been placed under house arrest earlier this week and declared competent to stand trial for his many crimes, it was no abstract issue for me. This was a man, after all, who had a tr...