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
One thing you can pretty much count on. When the U.S. charges in with guns blazing and bombs blowing up with the promise of "bringing democracy" to some benighted and oppressed people, the end result will be a corrupt and barbaric regime not much better,...
[Note on the text: While roaming the Internet, looking for a map that would guide me around Washington D.C. during the Inaugural festivities, I came upon a blog that had the following version of the PresidentÅfs Inaugural Address, a vers...
Although President Bush’s uncompromising second inaugural address does not so much as mention the words Iraq, Afghanistan and the war on terror, he and his supporters continue to engage in a planned reordering of the world. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan a...
When George Bush and Tony Blair start talking loudly about defending "freedom" and "democracy" and "ending poverty", people everywhere had better watch out even more keenly than usual for their ever more precarious liberties and econo...
So when did the assault on Americans’
civil liberties get jumpstarted? The current liberal establishment
seems to deem 9/11 the chief catalyst. Many of the most loathsome
specimens within the haughty club imply that drastic inc...
I’ve just had an email from a friend in the Green Zone. He has not set foot outside the compound since he’s been there, and probably never will. Helicopter to and from the airport only. Welcome to free Iraq, and especially to liberated Falluja. ...
In a story titled "Survey Finds Church-Going Americans Less Tolerant" (Reuters, 1/22/05), Michael Conlon writes: Church-going Americans have grown increasingly intolerant in the past four years of politicians making compromises on suc...
A major diplomatic and political conflict has exploded between Colombia and Venezuela after the revelation of a Colombian government covert operation in Venezuela, involving the recruitment of Venezuelan military and security officers in the kidnapping of a Colomb...
After listening to his inaugural speech, anyone who thinks President Bush and his handlers are sane needs to visit a psychiatrist. The hubris-filled megalomaniac in the Oval Office has promised the world war without end. Bush’s crazy talk has even up...
Last November I ran into my buddy Floyd Satan in the Union Club, a bar in Missoula Montana. We were there with a bunch of local activists to watch the election returns. The place was packed. There were three generations of conservationists, party loyalists and oth...
Editor’s Note: The following interview with Spc. Aidan Delgado, a conscientious objector who spent six months of a one-year tour of Iraq at Abu Ghraib prison, appears in the Spring 2005 issue of LiP Magazine. Delgado will be presenting a slideshow and talk a...
A writer at The Times counted 27 references to freedom in Bush’s inaugural speech. The speech contained not one reference to his ugly war in Iraq, but for hundreds of thousands of Iraqis the only freedom established by Bush’s invasion was their freedom...
There are many tragic and self-destructive features of the Occupation for Israel itself. Although the country was founded on the "original sin" of exclusivity and the expulsion of the refugees, it nevertheless had (has?) the potential to develop into a n...
Note: This column was written in April,...
When King George V died, we got a day off from school as a sign of mourning. Palestine was then a part of the British Empire, which ruled the country under a League of Nations mandate. To this very day, a central street in Tel-Aviv, not far from my home, bears the...
Dear ladies and gentlemen: Along with my most respectful greetings, I send my acknowledgement for the work that you do to protect human rights as well as your efforts to make this world a more just place for all who inhabit it. At the end of Novem...
In answering difficult questions, scholars in classical China reserved a modest option for themselves: que yi, "leaving the question answerless." Indicative of the cacophony of the contemporary world, ...
In a few days Connecticut prison officials will take a prisoner out of his cell and inject poison into his veins. He’s been held harmless for 20 years in prisons, but now he’s going to be killed. It will be the first execution in New England in 45 year...
President Bush doesn’t allow negative news to interfere with his predictable rendition of clichés and slogans. "Iraq will be free, the world will be more peaceful, and America will be more secure," he regularly announces, as news of bloody c...
In late December, Texas media headlined the State Attorney General’s announcement that he would go directly to the Texas Supreme Court to overturn a trial-court order for reform in school funding. On that same day, the same media did not report on a motion f...
Imagine, in the same month as the death of the muse of high camp, Susan Sontag, we have England in an uproar about Prince Harry and his silly arm band. All this while The Producers is playing to packed houses in London. They’re even talking of banning the sw...
It has come to my attention that the way to find a mate these days is via the Internet. Now when I was of courting age, you did it the old-fashioned way, by ambushing a remote village and carrying off all the girls. It was an awful way to meet people, especially o...
Michael Chertoff’s record at the Justice Dept. has followed the same downward arc as a belly-flop. He’s managed to botch every major case he’s handled and elicit the well-deserved scorn of civil liberties groups. Only in the gravity-defying world...
There are things that are theorems and things that are rags; they’ll go by like Euclid, arm in arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will flit little harlots. Many are clowns. But many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassi...
GW Pharmaceuticals reported a favorable result last week in a phase 3 trial of Sativex involving 177 patients with severe cancer pain who were not getting adequate relief from opiates. Sativex is a cannabis-plant extract containing approximately equal concentratio...