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 August 2005
Not having Cindy Sheehan in Crawford Friday turned out okay. Her absence didn’t stop the media from crowding around a noon prayer vigil. And nobody I talked to was planning to cut short their stay on account of her absence. In fact, as usual, folks were sort...
One of the least discussed but most important aspect of the ‘suicide bombers’ (SB) attacks is the Anglo-American (AA) systematic and profound degradation of that which the Islamic religion holds most sacred: its code of ethics, its mode of spiritual pr...
"Even in midsummer, he wears an overcoat and four jumpers if forced to leave the house. At dinner parties, he usually keeps a fur coat on. Nevertheless, people who greet him are surprised to find how cold his hands are." ...
It is always a shock to discover that the universe as you know it is a tissue of lies. When I was a beardless youth, my Mom told me Jorma Kaukonen never smoked pot, so I shouldn’t, either. How I reeled when informed some years later that not only did the nim...
George W. Bush’s environmental record can be summed up in one simple word: devastating. Not only has President Bush gutted numerous environmental laws — including the Clean Air and Water Acts — he has also set a new precedent by disregardi...
You can tell in five-minutes channel surfing how Cindy Sheehan frightens the pro-war crowd. One bereaved mom from Vacaville, camped outside Bush’s home in Crawford, reproaching the vacationing President for sending her son to a pointless death in Iraq has go...
Former CIA analyst President Bush still refuses to meet with Cindy Sheehan, the Rosa Parks of Crawford, Texas, but there is some good news. While Crawford’s Camp Casey (named after Cindy’s son killed in Iraq on April 4, 2004) continues to be short ...
There is a good reason why the White House is trying so hard to dissociate John Roberts from his Federalist Society affiliation. The Federalist Society has its roots in the College Republicans and derives its membership from them. While I can’t discuss the e...
Tom Hayden is an anti-war activist who most recently was the lead author of "The Peoples Petition for Iraqi Peace." He was a leader of the student, civil rights and anti-war movements in the Sixties, and the environmental and anti-nuclear movements in th...
"Some people are trying to paint her as one crazy woman against the war, and she’s not. A lot of people feel like her and want to know what the noble cause is," Karen Meredith, referring to Cindy Sheehan. ...
"Suppose they gave a war
and nobody came?" is the title of a 1970 anti-Vietnam War
movie whose overuse nearly rendered it trite before that war
ended. As a result, when Iraq war opponents invoke it today,
the quest...
Ramallah. All eyes are on Gaza. ...
Official Washington has changed its criteria for evaluating terrorism. In October 1976, before suspected terrorists had Arab names and received indeterminate sentences without charges, lawyers or trials at the Guantanamo Gulag, Luis Posada and Orlando Bosch plante...
The rebellion within the U.S. armed forces that contributed to the U.S. defeat in Vietnam has been largely erased from public memory. It has been replaced with the "spat-on myth"–that the antiwar movement was preoccupied with spitting on ret...
In exit polls at last Novembers election, CNN asked voters what concerned them most, the war, the economy or moral values. To its apparent surprise the voters chose moral values, which CNN interpreted to mean gay marriage, abortion and some other of the other cult...
It took a Texas jury only a day and a half to sock it to Merck on behalf of Carol Ernst, a widow whose 53-year-old Vioxx-taking husband died of a heart attack in 2001. Texas has a protect-the-corporations cap, so the $253 million award will be reduced to $26 milli...
The courageous witness of Cindy Sheehan and the nation’s response to it has not only moved the antiwar movement to a new level, it has widened it as well. Her speeches and encampment remind one of the Greek plays about war and conscience: Antigone and The Bi...
The past couple weeks have been a hard time here in my home town of Cleveland, Ohio. Third Battalion, 25th Marines, a reserve unit headquartered just ten minutes from my house, lost 20 guys in two days in Iraq. It was a kick in the stomach for the whole city. ...
If those who seek to understand what drives people to commit terrorist acts are vilified as "just one notch less despicable" themselves, we can say goodbye to freedom of speech. By JOHN PILGER Thomas Friedman is a famous columnist on the New York...
On April 4, 2004, a barrage of grenades and small arms fire from Iraqi insurgent groups killed U.S. Army Specialist Casey Sheehan in Sadr City. Two months later, his family went to see President George W. Bush. Mr. Bush walked into the room and said, "Who we&...
Now that the withdrawal from Gaza is underway, and the settlers have failed to transform the personal trauma of the those who are relocated from their homes into a national trauma, it is high time to ask whether or not the dismantlement of Jewish settlements and r...
Was it wrong to experience a kind of satisfaction—I don’t want to call it perverse but maybe wicked in a good way—when I read that the constitutional delegation appointed by Iraq’s "transitional assembly" had failed to meet the Au...
It’s not just Cindy Sheehan. Something has happened in the country in the last few weeks. Suddenly the deaths of Americans in Iraq are being recognized and talked about. You could tell here in Philadelphia when the local TV news programs...
We have rightly heard a great deal of commentary on an important question: What would the confirmation of Judge John Roberts – who would take retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s Supreme Court seat – mean for the right of privacy, and for...
Come now to a Parable of Swine. Not so many years ago in North Carolina, the pig barons sensed opportunity for their ‘right to work’ state. In the traditional hog belt of the mid-west, unions and laws against some forms of agribusiness still pro...