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 June 2006
In the most significant rebuff to George W. Bush’s assertion of executive power since he declared his "war on terror," the Supreme Court called a halt to Bush’s kangaroo courts at Guantánamo Bay. Justice Stevens wrote for the 5-...
On the excuse of rescuing one kidnapped soldier, Israeli is now bombing the Gaza Strip and is poised to re-invade. It has also arrested a third of the Palestinian parliament, wrecking even its fragile illusion of capacity and reducing the already-empty vessel of t...
The Bush Administration has it right. The Democratic Party is the party of cut and run. It used to be the party where progressives could find a home. No longer. Cut and run has turned it into the party that stands for total disarray, desertion of core values, or n...
There’s nothing more wonkish than intellectual-property regulation. But intellectual-property enforcement may well turn out to be the lever for government intrusions into private life every bit as profound and extensive as the better-known secret-police init...
Say "the return" when discussing Haiti, and people who follow events in the country know you are talking about former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide returning from his exile in South Africa. Mr. Aristide was ousted in a coup d’etat in February 20...
Beyond the barren Judean Mountain range, east from Jerusalem, lies the Jordan Valley, an area which receives almost no media coverage, despite being home to 52,000 Palestinians and accounting for 30% of West Bank territory. I am taken there by Stop the Wal...
As a graduate student at Yale in the fall of 1993, I once attended a seminar with Barber Conable, former president of the World Bank. Following his talk, an audience member eagerly asked Conable whom, among Latin American leaders of the time, he considered to be h...
To their credit, top US Pentagon officials cautioned journalists and the public, since the Iraq war’s early days, that the dissemination of misinformation would be a vital weapon in their war strategy. Needless to say, they have certainly held true to their ...
The public refusals here at Fort Lewis (Washington) of Army 1st Lt. Ehren Watada, Sgt. Kevin Benderman and Spc. Suzanne Swift to deploy to Iraq are the most recent chapter of a long and noble history of resistance within the U.S. armed forces. To understand this h...
Back in January, the jobs picture in Eloy, Arizona wasn’t looking so good. Thanks to federal budget cuts, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) announced it would cancel a contract with the town’s biggest employer, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) at...
The 50th anniversary of President Eisenhower’s signing of the Interstate Highway Act is a good time to dust off this review of the PBS documentary, "Taken for a Ride" that I wrote 10 years ago when President Clinton visited my city during the 1996 ...
Chet Richards is the spider of the d-n-i.net web site, which is the best source for material on Fourth Generation war. He is also the onl...
At the southern tip of Texas on the Mexican border across from Matamoros lies the city of Brownsville. According to the official visitors’ bureau website: "Brownsville, Texas is a truly international city located in a semi-tropical paradise where two cu...
What explains the gullibility of Americans, a gullibility that has mired the US in disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and which promises war with Iran, North Korea and a variety of other targets if neoconservatives continue to have their way? Part of t...
I am so tired of hearing Tel Aviv complain that certain Palestinian factions do no represent Israel’s right to exist. While some certainly may have this opinion, even Hamas leaders have stated that the fact is that Israel does exist. Meanwhile, Israel is onc...
A brilliant documentary by Rachel Boynton, released this year, chronicles the adventures of one of America’s most influential public relations firms as it applies the most advanced polling, advertising, and focus group techniques to the 2002 presidential ele...
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." – Mark Twain Over the course of the past year, it has been discovered that President Bush, during his five ye...
Saturday I joined some volunteers and helped gut the home of one of my best friends. Two months after she finished paying off her mortgage, her one-story brick home was engulfed in 7 feet of water. Because she was under-insured and remains worried about a repeat o...
The topic under discussion was grim – "The Politics of Starvation: The Humanitarian Crisis in Palestine." In Room SC-6 of the U.S. Capitol, the Council for the National Interest (CNI) authored a public forum, the 18th in a series over the last few ...
The Iraqi reconciliation plan unveiled by Prime Minister Al-Maliki on Sunday had the potential to mark a turning point the in the war. But thanks to U.S. interference, instead of a road map for peace, the plan that emerged looks more like a bump in Iraq’s to...
The Iraqi reconciliation plan unveiled by Prime Minister Al-Maliki on Sunday had the potential to mark a turning point the in the war. But thanks to U.S. interference, instead of a road map for peace, the plan that emerged looks more like a bump in Iraq’s to...
The topic under discussion was grim – "The Politics of Starvation: The Humanitarian Crisis in Palestine." In Room SC-6 of the U.S. Capitol, the Council for the National Interest (CNI) authored a public forum, the 18th in a series over the last few ...
IF PRESIDENT Bush wanted to deal with Iran by "bombing them back into the stone age", (as an American general once put it during the Vietnam War), now would be the time. With everybody riveted to the World Cup, who would notice? The Israeli govern...
After sitting on its story for a year and after consultation with the Bush Administration, The New York Times published its report on NSA warrantless spying, and in his December 19, 2005 press conference, President Bush denounced release of the report. "My pe...
"The idea is to put Palestinians on a diet but not make them die of hunger," commented Dov Weisglass, senior advisor to Israeli Prime Ministers Sharon and Olmert, when asked how Israel should deal with the new Hamas government. Even these disgustingly ca...