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 January 2005
Baghdad. "What an extraordinary election, quite extraordinary," said Adnan Pachachi, the elder statesman of Iraq and a man not easily impressed after seeing his country convulsed by war and dictatorship for half a century. It is a strange a...
On December 17, 2004 Turkey’s long-awaited dream took a critical turning point. After 41 years of tease, the European Union winked and offered a date for initiating membership negotiations. This relationship, and the Turkish ambition to join the European Uni...
In his confirmation hearing earlier thi...
In live internet broadcasts last week, ...
The words "libelous" and ‘the New Republic" have a proud history of walking arm-in-arm. Now, in the esteemed tradition of [former TNR writer who peddled fiction as fact] Stephen Glass, The New Republic has stooped to a new low, ...
The Independent Baghdad. Even as the explosions thundered over Baghdad, the people came in their hundreds and then in their thousands. Entire families, crippled old men supported by their sons, children beside them, babies in the arms of their mothers, ...
The appearance of Dick Cheney at the 60 year commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz is an affront to anyone who has even minimal regard for the horrendous suffering of the victims of the Holocaust. Cheney is the driving force behind America’s global re...
Among other things, the question that has echoed through my ears several times in the last few days is: what is the difference between the Aymara people those from the countryside and those who live in the city of El Alto and the autonomists from the c...
"But isn’t it passe?" Mark Garsin responded when I phoned him recently in New York for an interview about the political assassination of Patrice Lumumba. I was not surprised. Much progress has been made in the last five years in getting to the bo...
First it was the Rev. Jerry Falwell describing purple Teletubbie Twinky Winky as a gay role model, because Twinky Winky carries a purse. Then it was Focus on the Family founder Dr. James Dobson, in a Washington dinner talk attended by Republican congressmen, accus...
Well, so much for the myth that the victors in the elections in Iraq will demand that the US set a timetable for the removal of its troops. In fact, so much for the myth that they’ll even ask their colonial overseers to consider such a move. According to a ...
Editors’ Note: Paul Shanley is now on trial in the most notorious of all priest abuse cases. The criminal charges against Shanley, 73, are rooted in the "recovered memories" of one man whose claims will never be tested in court. The initial accuser...
Manuel: I still can’t believe the horrible, horrible homicide and suicide that took place at the DaimlerChrysler Stickney Avenue plant last night, Wednesday, 26 January, on the second shift. Peter: Yeh, say it. Let’s try to think about it. ...
A new and extensive investigation into Haiti’s human rights situation has found conditions in the country have sharply deteriorated under an interim government that replaced ousted President Jean Bertrand-Aristide in February 2004. "Life for the impover...
Condi proudly invoked the name of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during her recent Senate confirmation hearings. Yes, the same Dr. Condoleezza Rice who’s consistently burnished her conservative career by bashing the Civil Rights Movement craftily told Sen...
On January 12, 2005 NASA launched its latest space probe, Deep Impact, named after the recent Hollywood science fiction film. Recall, in the cliffhanger a team of courageous astronauts (led by tough guy, Robert Duvall) sacrifice their lives to deflect a speeding c...
Now that President George W. Bush has outlined his plans to "bring freedom to the world," it would seem urgent that the world look closely at what Bush calls his successful mission to bring freedom to Haiti in 2004. Yet with Iraq dominating the news, mos...
Sixty years after liberation, Auschwitz became an international political event. It is no coincidence, and I feel that we should spare a moment asking ourselves: why now, why Auschwitz? Living in a scientific technological environment, it is natural for mos...
I only know the lyrics to two songs. The first is ‘Happy Birthday To You’ and the other is ‘Thunderball’, from the movie of the same name. Why I know the lyrics to ‘Thunderball’ but not to "Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer&qu...
On Thursday, January 20, I listened to ...
Innumerable commentators have made comparisons between President Woodrow Wilson’s internationalism and his alleged missionary zeal with the ideas of the neoconservatives now so influential in the Bush Administration. But any analogies are essentially inaccur...
In 1996, a senior official in the Catholic church confided to a friend of CounterPunch, the Catholic church in America had thus far paid out $500 million to settle priest abuse cases. On July 24, 1997, a Dallas jury imposed a $119.6 million in overall damages R...
The bomb was delivered by a USAF F-16. (Don’t you warm to that word, ‘delivered’ – it’s so wonderfully innocuous : "I delivered some flowers"; "You delivered a baby" ; "They delivered a 500 pound GBU-30 bomb t...
The United Nations’ January 24th holocaust commemoration came & went with little impact on the worldwide public’s understanding of that era’s politics. The slaughter of between 5 and 6 million Jews has become history’s best known black ...
Baghdad. In the hours before tom...