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 September 2005
"The art of statesmanship is to foresee the inevitable and to expedite its occurrence.". –Talleyrand "What must be done ultimately should be done immediately.". –Henry Kissinger Many&n...
For years, national security experts have warned of a train wreck in the Pentagon’s budget: rising unit costs for weapons to the point where so few can be bought that our forces cannot be supported. The train wreck is here. The current plan in Washington wil...
It appears that General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s military dictator since October 1999, is on a mission to legitimize Israel: and he is going about it with the zeal of a new convert. On September 1, 2005, Pakistan’s foreign minister met his I...
I have a word of advice I would like to offer Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon chieftains who currently preside over the 200 or more hunger-strikers at Guantanamo Bay, 20 of whom are near death. For God’s sake, let them die. What more could you possi...
Had Hurricane Katrina wanted to wreak a maximum of damage designed to highlight deeply entrenched environmental, social and economic injustices in the United States, it could not have picked a better place to make landfall than the Gulf Coast around New Orleans....
Baghdad. One billion dollars has been plundered from Iraq’s defence ministry in one of the largest thefts in history, leaving the country’s army to fight a savage insurgency with museum-piece weapons. The money, intended to train and equ...
Until a couple of days ago I hadn’t heard of Greg Palast in years, the man who claims to have been pursuing me with questions for two months. He has never phoned, written, emailed or made any other contact with me, which is curiously reminiscent of the behav...
The "cakewalk war" is now two and one-half years old. US casualties (dead and wounded) number 20,000. As 20,000 is the number of Iraqi insurgents according to US military commanders, each insurgent is responsible for one US casualty. US troops in ...
"If you fall on the side that is pro-George, and pro-war, you get your ass over to Iraq and take the place of somebody who wants to come home. And if you fall on the side that is against this war and against George Bush, stand up and speak out.&q...
In December 2002, British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell wrote the New York Times to tell Americans that all was well in the BC Forests. A negative article about ancient forest destruction and the impending extinction of the Spotted Owl had appeared in the newsp...
Seven antiwar activists remain on a hunger strike in front of the Farnesina, the Italian Foreign Ministry in Rome, to protest censorship. Leonardo Mazzei, 49, employed by national electric company and spokesman for the Italian "Free Iraq" Committee; Anik...
Many mainstream religious leaders appear to be guardians of the status quo more than agents of peace and justice. Instead of fulfilling their prophetic calling of speaking truth to power, they tend to mutter truth to power- equate truth with power, or defer truth ...
Former CIA political analysts It all quickly comes together traveling through the West Bank: the separation wall encircling Anata; the verdant natural spring in the Israeli settlement of Anatot — the spring, along with the mountains and wadis surrounding...
"Practically no one in the United States knows that we’ve donated millions of dollars to the governorship of Louisiana, to the New Orleans Red Cross. We’re now giving care to more than 5,000 victims, and now we’re going to suppl...
While looking for the opinion of the Fourth Circuit in Padilla v. Hanft, I noticed that the Court’s homepage had a link to celebrate Constitution Day. I think a better celebration of the Constitution would have been not rendering it useless, as the three-jud...
The U.S. ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad says that the U.S. is "running out...
While Pat Robertson’s recent remarks on the Christian Broadcast Network’s The 700 Club that the United States should "take out" Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez certainly caught the media spotlight, the statement by the evangelical minister w...
Sports stars are generally known more for their narcissism than their compassion, but in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, athletes have expressed a tremendous amount of altruism and anguish over the amount of human suffering the storm has caused. That’s not su...
Where to begin? My first foray into the world of job searching, undertaken at my computer on a gloomy December afternoon, is distinctly intimidating. These days, I have gathered from a quick tour of relevant web sites, you don’t just pore over the help-wante...
"The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty." George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara The plight of the poor, caught without the means to escape New Orleans as Katrina swamped the city, fo...
If only corporations could laugh during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings on Judge John Roberts’ nomination for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, they would head for the nearest champagne closet in their executive suites. What a triump...
Weather can wipe out cities forever. It’s what happened to America’s first city, after all, as a visit to Chaco Canyon northeast of Gallup, New Mexico attests. At the start of the 13th Century it got hotter in that part of the world and by the 1230s th...
In recent days, Jalal Talabani, the US-installed president of the US-installed government in Baghdad, told the press that the United States could withdraw up to 50,000 troops by the end of 2005. Talabani continued, stating that there are now enough Iraqi troops tr...
Three cheers for Maureen Dowd for exposing the sham of President’ Bush’s Jackson Square speech to the nation announcing his "recovery plan" for New Orleans, and a big fat raspberry for the electronic media-and for Dowd’s own New York Ti...
During my two-month stay in Bethlehem (in a program called Palestine Summer Encounter, put on by Middleeastfell...