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
The current episode of Star Wars is dynamite for the duplicitous Bush administration. Palpatine, a Sith Lord masquerading as a galactic Republican, becomes Chancellor of the Galatic Republic through deception. Palpatine uses wars that he instigates to elevate secu...
Gabriela Flores sat in a South Carolina jail for four months — just for having an abortion. Last fall, the 22-year-old immigrant farm worker and mother of three from Pelion, South Carolina, became pregnant and took misoprostol, a medicine that is used...
It was business as usual last month as the Senate loaded pork into the spending bill President George W. Bush requested for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bill that the Senate passed on April 21 was crammed with essential war-fighting treasures like ...
It is difficult not to be fond of Hugo Chavez’s politics. There is little question that as president, Chavez is attempting to create a radical social-democracy in Venezuela. In many cases his efforts have already been successful. Chavez is seeking to empower...
What to do on "Herzl Day", the anniversary of the birth of the founder of the Zionist movement – officially celebrated this week for the first time? How to honor the memory of this strange man, who still has such an enormous impact on our lives?...
Ronaldo is the Brazilian soccer player, who happens to be the most famous athlete in the world. However, due to the professional soccer blackout in the US sports media, Ronaldo’s name-recognition among American sports fans hovers somewhere between the WNBA&#...
In the Newsweek-Koran-in-the-toilet scandal of the past week, press commentators and pundits have overlooked what they must regard as an inconsequential detail: the ethics of showing a draft of one’s story to a source. Far from being without conseque...
I first tried my hand at political collage in a London bed-sit in early eighties London, using pictures from discarded magazines I’d collected from bins and skips. First efforts were vaguely about poverty and ecology, but as my political awareness increased ...
Cowardice is the only way to describe the recent coverage of George Galloway’s hearing before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Not only did the nation’s two major dailies get many of the facts wrong, they went out of their way to pa...
If politics makes strange bedfellows, then I’m at least fluffing Bob Barr’s pillows. Bob Barr?! The far-right congressman who led the impeachment of Bill Clinton? The NRA board of directors member who believes the Second Amendment is the one tha...
The endless show that seems to fill America’s every waking moment — and many of its nightmares — could be called "Media Jeopardy!" Before proceeding, here’s a reminder of the rules: Listen to the answer and then try to come...
At the Dirksen Senate Office Building this Tuesday, a pack of reporters followed George Galloway, Respect Coalition Minister of Parliament for Bethnal Green, London, before and after his testimony at the Government Committee on Investigations. He had offere...
May 8 marked the third anniversary of the imprisonment of Jose Padilla. Padilla was apprehended at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport in 2002 by Federal officers under the shaky "material witness" provision and trundled off to prison. In a conspicuous ...
Cast aside the nonsensical rhetoric about U.S. President George W. Bush’s ostensibly successful efforts to bolster democratic tendencies "sweeping" the Middle East, and you’ll discover that the facts are not so rosy, with Iraq remaining the m...
For more than two decades James Bamford has been a noted investigative journalist focusing on intelligence gathering in the United States. He exposed the ultra secret National Security Agency two decades ago in ...
The central Asian country of Uzbekistan was on the edge of revolt following a government massacre of as many as 500 demonstrators in the town of Andijon. Sketchy media accounts suggest that the government had quelled unrest in Andijon, but that protests and...
Why aren’t we hearing more about the "Jeff Gannon" (James Guckert) affair? Back in February, always the optimist I wrote, "Perhaps we are on the edge of a major scandal here," and inquiring minds have inde...
"There is a war inside me." With these words, a striving black artist continues writing his journal on the subway-a journal that is a miniature path of the journey he is taking from self-doubt bordering on hatred. His pages chronicle acceptance of...
When most people hear the word ‘filibuster’, they automatically think of Philip Armbruster, inventor of the steam banjo and the self-ladling tureen. In fact the filibuster is a vital tool in the legislative sabretache, used to ensure that a minority gr...
That incriminating "smoking gun" memo proving the Bush and Blair Administrations pre-determined an invasion and occupation of Iraq long before the invasion occurred has apparently come and gone, barely noted in the American press, AWOL from editorial pag...
Mendocino psychiatrist, and sometime CounterPunch contributor, Carol Wolman, MD, one of four openly pro-cannabis doctors placed on probation by the Medical Board of California, is the first to be barred from granting approval to cannabis-using patients. Wolman, 64...
TeenScreen causes suicide? How? This pharmaceutical industry backed pill-pushing scheme cons school kids into taking a survey full of loaded questions and then uses the results to convince parents that their kids need to be on dangerous mind-altering drugs ...
It’s always been an article of faith on the "loony" right that the black helicopters of the Jewish-United Nations fascist government would arrive to take over America and turn it into a hellish police state through the machinations of the liberal D...
My recent CounterPunch exposé ("The CIA’s Campus Spies," ) on the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP) bruised those tender souls in spookworld, also Senator Roberts. After this piece circulated ...
The ongoing Newsweek imbroglio is reminiscent of a joke from Punjab in the 1980′s , when an uncertain and violent political climate in the state gave cover to a number of criminal gangs. A kidnapper has nabbed the son of a rich merchant. After allowing the f...