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 February 2005
President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is pushing full speed ahead with land reform, an issue that has been one of the most divisive and perennially debated topics in Latin America. Land reform poses perhaps the greatest challenge yet to Chavez’s stormy presiden...
Twenty-six years ago this month, an Islamic government replaced a pro-U.S. dynasty in Iran. In the process, Iran declared America its No. 1 enemy. At the time, I was a graduate student at Fordham University in New York. The students were enraged by the deve...
It was an appropriate setting for two of the world’s most loathsome individuals: a medieval Bratislava castle overlooking the Danube River. "President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin sought common ground Thursday on keeping conventional and nu...
The murder of Dorothy Stang, a 73 year-old American nun who helped peasants engage in sustainable agriculture in the Amazonian rain forest, comes as oligarchic interests and the parliamentary right are on a political offensive against the government of Luis Inacio...
The Vietnam war was finally ended when the House of Representatives voted to cut off money for the war. The antiwar movement ought to take the lessons to heart. Will the present House do that? Not a chance. There are simply too many hawks, both Republican and Demo...
On February 20 I flew from Boston to Panama City, and had a seven-hour layover in San Salvador. I was going to go to the beach, but then I saw a full-page ad for a Mass marking the 13th anniversary of the death of one of Latin America’s most notorious butche...
Given its small population, the rural northern California county where I live is home to an extraordinary number of successful artists. Two of these artists, Jan Hoyman and Doug Browe, also participate in a remarkable organization, Potters for Peace (...
India and Britain have supposedly stopped their military help to Nepal in response to the 1 Feb Royal Coup. Even the US has expressed its displeasure on the events in Nepal. Immediately two sets of questions come to any rational mind, familiar with the South Asian...
The ashes of the 2004 election battle have finally settled, and sadly the Green Party is buried in the rubble still grasping for air. Even so, if you have heard any of the sordid mutterings from staunch Green loyalists, they are spinning quite a different tale. ...
Scots steel tempered wi’ Irish fire, Is the weapon that I desire. -Hugh MacDiarmid You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God! the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, ther...
Talk about your roosting chickens! While the U.S. government spends hundreds of billions of dollars on the much ballyhooed "War on Terror", creating vast secret intelligence networks, organizing a whole new government department, and reassigning r...
I think that I shall never see A president as great as he. A Bush upon whose bristly limbs War hawks sit singing Gospel hymns. A Bush which lifts its limbs to pray No same-sex marriage gets away From laws that halt stem cell resear...
Some leaders of the American Indian Movement and quite a few mouthpieces on the left are currently seeking, on what I am sure they consider morally justified grounds, to counter the efforts to fight the witch-hunt against University of Colorado Professor Ward Chur...
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face…forever. George Orwell Nearly a year has passed since the lurid photographs of Abu Ghraib first surfaced, briefly capturing the attention of...
One of the Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo tortures recently revealed is US women smearing menstrual blood on Islamic prisoners and fondling or rubbing them sexually to defile them. The tactic includes taunting prisoners that they will then have no ...
It is unfortunately a little-known fact that thousands of high school and college students across the country organized walkouts against the war on January 20, marching as organized contingents to counter-inaugural demonstrations in Boulder, Colo.; Los Angeles; Ch...
Today the USA is the largest producers of marijuana in the world and it’s not enough. Marijuana has been quasi legal in Mexico the past 50 years and is grown commercially and exported to the US. Canadians would love to make marijuana legal and for th...
I guess I can call myself one of the Dylan generation since, at 63, I’m the same age as the troubadour from Hibbing but the prose stylists that allured an Anglo-Irish lad hopelessly strapped into the corsets of Latinate gentility were always those of America...
The mass media in the US and Europe has given prominence to the "new style" foreign policy approach of the Bush Administration: Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice visits European capitals and meets with European leaders, declaring that a new era of co-op...
Hunter S. Thompson shot himself in the head on Sunday. He was 67. While the reports don’t refer to a suicide note, it is safe to assume that a lifetime of drugs and booze had taken their psychic toll. Since he had also been in severe pain from back surgery, ...
The designation of John Negroponte as the first director of national intelligence recalls the Central American wars of the 1980s, where he played a critical, if deeply controversial, role as U.S. ambassador to Honduras, 1981-85. Despite feigning amnesia while ques...
* "The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past." –William Faulkner Since the attacks of 11 September 2001, the American public has endured an astounding avalanche of official lies, half truths, p...
When newly appointed CIA Director Porter Goss recently warned that China’s modernization of its military posed a direct threat to the U.S., was it standard budget time scare tactics? Or did it signal the growing influence of hard-liners in the Bush administr...
President Bush’s invasion has turned Iraq into a recruiting and training ground for anti-US terrorists, according to CIA director Porter Goss in testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on February 16. Goss’ report was supported by ...
The tragic assassination of Lebanon’s former Prime Minister, Rafiq Hariri, in Beirut on Monday, February 14, 2005, reverberated across the region, as it evoked vivid memories from Lebanon’s 14-year civil war. In itself, the act is a political earthquak...