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 May 2005
Even before the Bush administration invaded Iraq in March 2003, human rights organizations were raising allegations of torture at U.S. prisons in Afghanistan. At the time, the State Department dismissed their allegations as "ridiculous" (just as t...
The Independent Egyptian plain-clothes police beat up demonstrators in central Cairo – in some cases groping women protesters – as Egyptians voted over constitutional changes that would theoretically allow more than one candidate to stand for presi...
Days after the 9-11 attacks, George W. Bush informed Americans, "This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take awhile." As a Yale history major, he ought to have known what the medieval Crusades were all about: Christians against Muslims, mostly ...
To kill with no pain Like a dog on a chain He ain’t got no name But it ain’t him to blame He’s only a pawn in their game. ...
The annual secret meeting of the Bilderberg group determines many of the headlines and news developments you will read about in the coming months. But the Establishment media completely black it out. With the exception of half-a-dozen high ranking members of the p...
On the evening of May 25 the U.S. House of Representatives considered an amendment offered by Representative Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) calling for an exit strategy from Iraq. Amendment No. 26 simply stated: "It is the sense of Congress that the ...
It is an axiom among activists working in the area of counter-recruitment that the enlistment contract isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. What this means in practical terms is that whatever a recruiter promises to deliver to a new recruit-specific ...
Ever since the U.S. charged in 1999 that the European Union (EU) trade preferences given to developing African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries were not in accordance with World Trade Organization (WTO) regulations, the economies of many Caribbean Community ...
In April 2004, some seventy-five friends and colleagues co-signed an appeal for a progressive EU Parliament "For A Different Europe — drafted by Joep Leerssen, Michael Krätke and myself.* We are now a year further, and the immediate issue befo...
Is there anyone who still believes in the independence of the American media? After the spectacle of embedded journalism, the evisceration of Dan Rather, the sordid saga of Judith Miller and the New York Times, and the emasculation of Newsweek Magazine, if you req...
In 1995 Kenneth Trentadue was murdered by federal agents in a federal prison in Oklahoma City. A coverup immediately went into effect. Federal authorities claimed Trentadue, who was being held in a suicide-proof cell, had committed suicide by hanging himself, but ...
The firebombing of Tokyo, or for that matter the bombing of any city, whether it be Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, or London, cannot be fully comprehended unless it is examined in the context of the history of indiscriminate bombing throughout the twentieth century...
Former CIA Analyst Few have more at stake in the expected Senate approval of John Bolton to be U.S. representative at the UN than the remnant of demoralized intelligence analysts trained and still willing to speak truth to power. What would be the point in con...
Legislation aiming to prevent counties, towns and cities from making local decisions about our food supply is being introduced in states across the nation. Fifteen states recently have introduced legislation removing local control of plants and seeds. Eleven of th...
(Remarks made May 15th upon receiving a 2005 Upton Sinclair Award from the South Bay chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union–the date commemorates the arrest of Upton Sinclair on Liberty Hill in San Pedro, California as he read the First A...
When a wolf and a fox agree on a modus vivendi, the rabbits and woodchucks had better be on their guard. The same is true about the March 23 agreement reached by 14 "moderate" Democratic and Republican Senators which undermined the looming confron...
Two weeks ago, a small, single-engine plane inadvertently strayed into the closed air space above Washington. The result was panic. Both the White House and the Capitol were evacuated, with police shouting "Run! Run!" at fleeing staffers and visitors. Se...
Seymour Hersh, chronicler of American madness from the My Lai Massacre to Abu Ghraib, tells a chilling story of the lingering aftermath of atrocity. As the revelations of brutal torture by the victors were first spilling from conquered Iraq, Hersh was cont...
With the popularity of such documentaries as Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott’s The Corpor...
Just about a year a go I was tried by a special Court-martial at Fort Stewart, Georgia. The charge: desertion with the intent to avoid hazardous duty. My case received a lot of attention from the media, mainly because I was the first Iraq veteran to have been to c...
On May 4th, an article, "Board’s Amazon Appeal," appeared on Jewish News, a Zionist website. It reported that the Board Of Deputies Of British Jews, pro-Zionist religious Jewry’s central organization, had complained to Amazon re a book I edit...
"He was a murderer from the beginning , and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar and the father of it." The Gospel according to St John, VIII, 44....
I am astonished that the Kansas state school board would once again make itself a world laughing stock. Like a little boy caught with his pants down, it tries hard to conceal the face of science. It is a difficult task when you expose the source of speciation. At ...
Armchair warriors often fail And we’ve been poisoned by these fairy tales The lawyers clean up all details Since daddy had to lie… Don Henley and Bruce Hornsby Gormer Mother Jones editor Mark Dow...
As the saying goes, no matter how much lipstick you apply to a pig, it is still a pig. Such is the case of media reform. In the final analysis, it is a discussion about making the jail cell more comfortable. No matter the nature or degree of reform proposed...