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 March 2006
On Wednesday, March 1, 2006, at the Maryland state legislature, during a hearing in Annapolis on the proposed Constitutional Amendment to prohibit gay marriage, Jamie Raskin, professor of law at American University, was requested to testify. At the end of h...
The Pentagon isn’t alone in handing out plump no-bid contracts to politically wired corporations. The new Department of Homeland Security, a collage of 22 sub-agencies sprawling across the federal bureaucracy, is sluicing billions into the coffers of a few f...
He is referred to as "official one" and he is the mysterious senior Bush administration official who unmasked the identity of an undercover CIA operative to Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Bob Woodward in mid-June 2003 and conservative columnist Robert N...
Oftentimes the most complex circumstances catch you by surprise, leaving you in a myriad of thoughts with a feeling of utter perplexity. Frail are the human mind and spirit, unable to surrender themselves to the reality of pain and suffering, giving way to such no...
Imagine knocking on America’s door and being told, "Americans don’t live here any longer. They have gone away." But isn’t that what we are hearing, that Americans have gone away? Alan Shore told us so on ABC’s Boston Legal ...
As I write, the US Senate is debating legislation that would make migrant peoples a felonized, legally scapegoated racial and cultural under-caste, a move with deeply dangerous implications for us all. Maybe it wasn’t such a lie, what the German peopl...
The Committee to Protect Journalists, located in New York, calls itself "An Independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to defending press freedom worldwide". In December it issued a report that said that "China, Cuba, Eritrea, and Ethiopia are th...
Former CIA analyst (Author’s note: As a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, an organization of former US intellligence officers from the CIA, DIA, Department of State and Department of Defense, I took part in 2002 in the...
Some time ago, I ceased reading Christopher Hitchens’s output, for the very simple reason that he’s full of shit and in violent denial about it. The man has become so infantile and ridiculous that I saw no serious point in following anything else he sa...
Arbil, Iraq. The US military is investigating two incidents in which American soldiers killed at least 26 Iraqi civilians and then claimed that they were either guerrillas or had died in cross fire. The growing evidence of retaliatory killings of una...
Could it be possible that the Israeli army raid on a Jericho prison on March 14 was done without careful coordination between Israel, the United States and Britain? Could it also be possible that the timing of the onslaught was equally innocent, of no political co...
The Congressional Research Service has produced a new report on "earmarks" in appropriations bills. Otherwise known as "pork," defense appropriations earmarks continue to climb in both number and cost. Congress’ self-appointed "pork ...
There is tragedy and irony in the nationally aired videotaped shooting of Air Force policeman Elio Carrion in an area east of Los Angeles and the subsequent indictment of San Bernardino County Sheriff’s deputy Ivory Webb, Jr. The tragedy is that the shooting...
"As successive imperialist powers have shown, the bottom line in combating the hopes and dreams of ordinary people is to resort to spreading terror through the application of extreme violence." "For Iraq, the ‘Salvador Opt...
In Cleveland yesterday Bush gave a delusional speech that shows he is detached from reality. "We’re going to help the Iraqis build a strong democracy that will be an inspiration throughout the Middle East, a democracy that’ll be a partner in the g...
The news of right-wing assaults on higher education keeps coming: The state of Pennsylvania has a congressional board set up to investigate cases of bias in the classroom, the State University of New York System’s Board of Trustees voted unanimously to allow...
As he and his wife Sheila drive me through downtown San Diego in the glare of mid-day, he suddenly exclaims, "Look at that structure!" I glance over and just across the blue expanse of the harbor is an enormous aircraft carrier. "It’s the U.S....
I haven’t heard from you for a while. Three years ago you called me a "traitor", just before the invasion of Iraq. You also wrote, "Your voice against our elected government is a voice against its people, a voice against this nation."...
On the third anniversary of America’s invasion of Iraq broadcast in full shock and awe to the world via green TV screens that all might see the night devastation of the city, another invasion was underway in Gaza, a silent invasion of human rights that, in i...
As the new Hamas government is sworn into power in the Palestinian Authority, we might ask: What would bring a people, the most secular of Arab populations with little history of religious fundamentalism, to vote Hamas? Mere protest at Fatah ineffectualness in neg...
Dublin. While the Democratic Party has given the global Left little reason to believe it would make significant changes if it were to take power in Bushland, there is at least one European ‘republican’ who cannot wait for the big-R Republicans t...
On Saturday, during her national radio response to the president, Senator Dianne Feinstein accused the Bush administration of "incompetence" in the Iraq war. What would be a competent way to pursue the war in Iraq? How would you drop huge bombs on...
I got an personal email from Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean today. On a Sunday morning, the DNC chief wrote me to take issue with what I wrote on March 7 in this space. I said that pressure from Democratic party...
The Zogby poll which shows that 85% of American soldiers in Iraq believe Saddam was part of the 9/11 attacks startles. The general public in the US knows that isn’t so. In the movie Wag the Dog the DeNiro political character says ‘what do people rememb...
The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center finds that President Bush’s support among the American people has fallen to 33%. Even more devastatingly, the survey finds that people’s most frequently used one-word description of President Bush i...