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 July 2005
In June 2005 I attended the National Media Reform Conference in St. Louis, Missouri. While there I visited the historic St. Louis courthouse and the huge Gateway Arch by the Mississippi River that symbolizes St. Louis as the gateway to the west. It was here that U...
Judith Miller, the New York Times, and some members of Congress picked a bad time to make a stand for journalistic integrity. Miller, a Times reporter, is in jail for not revealing the identity of a White House source in an article (never published) about C...
The day nears for the 50th national convention of the AFL-CIO, opening in Chicago on July 25. The meeting is being heralded as a possibly fateful encounter, in which forces of enlightenment and reaction will wrestle in momentous debate over the future of organized...
"We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush repeatedly said throughout the fall of 2002 to justify the invasion of Iraq. The phrase was so good at frightening the public...
Baghdad. Shall we only threaten and be angry for an hour? When the storm has ended shall we find How softly but how swiftly they have sidled back to power By the favour and contrivance of their kind? Their lives cannot repay u...
More than 40 long years ago, in April of 1959 to be exact, I became the first African-American foolish enough to open a law office in the backwards and dangerous little town of Selma, Alabama. If you were black, Selma, at that time, was an insufferable little...
Three days this month in strife-torn Haiti should have sufficed to show José Miguel Insulza, the brand new Secretary-General of the Organization of American States (OAS), that something is very wrong with both Haiti and his predecessors’ Haiti po...
The world, dear Agnes, is a strange affair. Molière, L’Écoles des Femmes Friends change over time. Consider Albert Gonzales and the FBI. Prior to Judge Roberts’s nomination, liberals wer...
California Nurses Association 1. There are no real ideological disputes, in part because the current AFL-CIO leadership and programs were, mostly, put in place by those now challenging them. It appears to be more about egos and an effort by specific unions to ...
Karl Rove could be in a lot of trouble if what journalists Jason Leopold (and now Murray Waas) have written are true. It was Leopold who first reported in CounterPunch: "It now appears that Rove, Pr...
In the period leading up to the US invasion of Iraq, from many quarters came the warnings of the great chaos and violence this would lead to in various parts of the world, the many new anti-Americans — terrorists and otherwise — who would be produ...
So, it happened that a United Nations seminar on racism was scheduled to take place in the midst of Operation Red Christmas. Was the timing a coincidence or was the purpose to disrupt the UN seminar? The $19.5 million in CIA funding for Red Christmas was announced...
Former CIA analyst By now it should be clear that the White House assault on former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife had much less to do with personalities than with the "particular lie" that Wilson exposed. I believe this helps to explain the h...
So where is the cease-fire? Will Hamas and Islamic Jihad torpedo the withdrawal from Gaza? What is happening to Mahmoud Abbas? Generally, a cease-fire is declared in one of three cases: * When one side beats the other into ...
News that General William Westmoreland, who oversaw the escalation of the catastrophic Indochina War from 1964 through ’68-a pointless and criminal war that cost 58,000 American lives and millions of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian lives-died at the age of...
After he died on Monday, front pages focused on the failures of William Westmoreland as commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam. Overall, the coverage faulted him for being a big loser, not a mass killer. The Washington Post noted that Westmoreland "was ca...
Unless they discover John Roberts dropped acid at Harvard or had been funneling insider stock tips to his wife, it looks as though he’s a shoo-in for confirmation as a member of the US Supreme court. In his last job in the private sector, as a partner at Hog...
Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste just returned to St. Claire’s Church after a morning in the police station. Fr. Jean-Juste was ordered to appear at the Police Judiciary at 10 this morning as a condition of his release from police custody on Friday afternoon. Fr. Jean-...
The United States long ago ceased to be anything like a living, thriving republic. But it retained the legal form of a republic, and that counted for something: as long as the legal form still existed, even as a gutted shell, there was hope it might be filled agai...
On Sunday, Iraq announced that it would try Saddam Hussein and three others for the deaths of 140 Iraqis in Dujail, the site of an attempt on his life in 1982. National Public Radio’s story about the announcement was a masterpiece of understatement. ...
The silver-spooned cowboy in the Oval Office just presented a fine new saddle to the nuclear horseman of the apocalypse. It was a gift worthy of hell. "President Bush agreed yesterday to share civilian nuclear technology with India, reversing decades o...
Edinburgh. One Sunday afternoon at the end of May, I was invited to meet with a small knot of activists formulating strategies to disrupt the G-8 summit set for July 6th-8th at the 886-acre Gleneagles Estate, home of a world-class golf course upcountry from...
Last week two St Louis deejays from radio station KATZ (100.3 FM), were suspended after local police deemed their on air remarks inappropriate and called for a boycott of the Clear Channel owned station known as ‘The Beat’. For some this may seem like ...
Washington is abuzz with speculation that Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Edith Brown Clement is to be President Bush’s Supreme Court nominee, which the White House has announced this evening during a televised address at 9pm EST. Pro-choice adv...
former CIA analyst If he were a thinking person, George W. Bush might today be increasingly concerned that any positive legacy he had ever hoped for was slipping into oblivion. Many observers have long understood that Bush’s first target for solidifying ...