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 February 2006
The jailing of Holocaust denier David Irving in Austria is a reminder of how easy it is to imitate evil even as one excoriates it. The law that convicted Irving is of the sort the Nazis would have invoked, albeit for far different purposes, and was a routine offen...
"We gave him [Saddam Hussein] a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in." Bush Press Conference, 7/14/2003 Fact: On September 21, 2002, Saddam said the UN inspectors could return to Iraq to search ...
Although they’ve done their best to keep their spinning from public scrutiny, several major incidents have exposed the Bush administration’s manipulation of news media: The " sell job" for the invasion of Iraq. Payola pundits Armstrong Willia...
I regularly read and appreciate the writings of Paul Craig Roberts on CounterPunch. Indeed, after reading his article "The True State of the Union," which Roberts wrote soon after President Bush’s January 31 State...
It’s doubtful if there us a more sycophantic admirer of the Bush/Cheney clique than John Howard, Australia’s P.M. The reasons are obvious. Howard is an arch-conservative, close to Bush on every policy that matters. Anti-abortion, hostile ...
OK, you got me. Dallas doesn’t have a port. But if it did, it would likely be among those given over to be run by a Dubai company, as are the ports of New York, Newark, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Miami and New Orleans. Arguments are flying about ...
The vice president was tanked when he confused his hunting companion, Texas Republican stalwart Harry Whittington, for a quail, according to Capital Hill Blue reporter and editor Doug Thompson. In an article in Capital Hill Blue, Thompson, who worked for se...
President Bush’s Middle East policy is without rhyme or reason. According to Bush and his neoconservatives, the only way to make America safe from terrorists is to force democracy upon the Middle East. Only ideologues completely ignorant of the Middl...
Nearly six months ago, my wife Debbie and I boated out of New Orleans. We left five days after Katrina struck. Debbie worked as an oncology nurse in a New Orleans hospital. She volunteered to come in during the hurricane so that other nurses with children ...
The reports are coming in from all over the nation. The Democrats are getting pilloried as they shuck and jive on the war. They have an election coming up in fall of 2006 and they want to take back Congress. They are scrambling to find their footing. The Dems thin...
The sad truth is to do good for humanity is one of the best ways to do evil. Régis Debray Once upon a time, there was a country founded on the principles of liberty, equality and justice for all. That same country was...
and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR Few law enforcement institutions have been so thoroughly discredited in recent years as the FBI’s forensic lab. In 1997 the Bureau’s inspector general of the time issued a devastating report, stigmatizing one instance after an...
The Hamas team had not laughed so much in a long time. The team, headed by the prime minister’s advisor Dov Weissglas and including the Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, the director of the Shin Bet and senior generals and officials, convened for a discu...
The stunning victory of Evo Morales in the presidential election of December 18, 2005, exceeded nearly everyone’s expectations, and it has been followed by a succession of other unexpected triumphs in Europe, in Asia, and on the fashion pages. Having an indi...
Stories of sons murdering fathers or brothers (or fathers murdering sons who may steal the throne) are found throughout history and literature. Remember the story of Oedipus? He fulfills a prophecy by unknowingly killing his father and having children by his mothe...
The right-wing media hordes, in a mad dash to deflect attention from Dick Cheney’s shooting spree, may have found their target of mass distraction: Bryant Gumbel. At the end of his HBO show "Real Sports," Gumbel unleashed a prolonged rant about the...
Many eyes are on the U.S. real estate market. "During the past five years, home prices have risen at an annual rate of 9.2 percent," according to the 2006 Economic Report of the President released on February 13. Was this growth normal? We need the histo...
It is well established that Menachem Begin’s Likud government of Israel helped to give birth to Hamas by giving it financial aid in the late 1970s in order to provide the Palestinians with a Islamic alternative that would offset and weaken the secular PLO. I...
For a fleeting moment it looked as though Cindy Sheehan was going to toss her antiwar weight into the election ring and confront Senator Dianne Feinstein of California in the Democratic primary. But instead Sheehan has subtly withdrawn herself from the race. ...
Lost amid all the heavy breathing by the mainstream press reporters who have gotten so worked up over the vice presidential shooting is the story of the vice-presidential ambulance. How many of us knew that the country’s vice president–a man tha...
I was startled to hear Prime Minister John Howard of Australia exclaim in a BBC interview last night that he could not understand why pictures of starving Jewish interns of Bergen Belsen, Dachau, and Aushwitz had been aired, yet again, by an Australian TV station ...
Recently, the United States has been anxiously trying to pre-empt every possible uncomfortable situation in South Asia. Its ambassadors are actively intervening in internal political debates in South Asian countries. Of course, it is nothing new for the US, but in...
I was ready to learn from Stanley Fish about the insensitivity, not to mention the global dangers, of mocking your neighbor’s Religion. His NY Times Op-Ed (2/12/06) is billed as a response to the furor over Danish publication of cartoons of Mohammad. But as ...
Last week’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference signaled the transformation of American conservatism into brownshirtism. A former Justice Department official named Viet Dinh got a standing ovation when he told the CPAC audience that the rule of l...
In 1972, the United States Supreme Court invalidated all existing death sentences in its decision Furman v Georgia. Since then, 38 States have reinstituted death penalties that conform to the constitutional standards set forth in Furman. 1011 people have been exec...