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 another Woody Allen moment reminiscent of George W. Bush pinning the Medal of Freedom on disgraced ex-CIA Director George Tenet, a third George – General Casey – has taken a page from the Democrats’ troop withdrawal playbook. After bein...
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...
In another Woody Allen moment reminiscent of George W. Bush pinning the Medal of Freedom on disgraced ex-CIA Director George Tenet, a third George – General Casey – has taken a page from the Democrats’ troop withdrawal playbook. After bein...
The recent revelations of the horrors of Haditha (six months after the atrocity–way to go, in-bed media!) have produced the same eerie wall of silence from the politicians and pundits that we witnessed during the unmasking of the Abu Graib torture chambers. ...
Over this past week, I had a few experiences in the course of several book events for The Case for Impeachment which both illustrate the importance of this constitutionally important method of checking the actions of dangerous or criminal presidents, and the diffi...
Over the past six years, ten FDA approved drugs have been withdrawn from the market due to deaths and injuries, leading lawmakers to accuse the FDA of not doing its job in protecting the public from unsafe drugs and to call for measures of improvement. On J...
You have noticed, to be sure, how our nation’s politics gravitates to the binary position year after year. Webster’s dictionary defines "binary" as "something made of two things or parts." So, parties, politicians and voters are ove...
The killing by Palestinian militants of two Israeli soldiers and the capture of a third from an army post close to the Gaza Strip set the scene for Israeli "reprisals" and "retaliation", according to the reports of BBC correspondents in Israel ...
Strangers probably do not go unnoticed in the town of Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, where Mumia Abu-Jamal is incarcerated. Waynesburg is a small rural community of Western Pennsylvania with a total population of 4,000. It is certainly not racially diverse: roughly 97%...
A date to remember will be the night of June 20, 2006. That’s the night Congress was fooled for the second time. Remember October 2002 and Iraq? So much has happened since then that it seems like ancient history. ...
America’s largest Presbyterian church voted to continue policies of economic engagement in the Middle East. It affirmed its willingness to use its investment policies to press for peace in Israel-Palestine. The vote came two years after it’s o...
The Democrats in Congress are having trouble coming up with a position on the War in Iraq because they are so afraid of Republican charges that they are the "cut and run" party. It’s a pathetic spectacle, and they should give it up....
The current debate in Congress over the war in Iraq has put the myth of victory and its opposite– surrender–back on the front pages. These are actually more than myths, they are genuine misrepresentations–lies in other words–of th...
At 4 AM on June 2nd, another grim episode in the war on terror was played out on a quiet residential street in east London. In what the media initially hailed as a major anti-terrorist triumph, 250 heavily armed police descended on a house where, it was ...
In a stunning new report on the F-22, GAO recommends no further funding for the aircraft until DOD provides a relevant justification. GAO also points out that the Air Force’s “cost saving” plan for a “multiyear procurement” w...
Sergeant Patrick R. McCaffrey, Sr. and First Lieutenant Andre D. Tyson died on this day two years ago in Balad, Iraq. Back then, military officials reported that enemy insurgents ambushed them. The Army subsequently conducted an investigation and learned...
National Public Radio foreign correspondent Loren Jenkins, serving in NPR’s Baghdad bureau, met earlier this month with a senior Shiite cleric, a man who was described in the NPR report as "a moderate" and as a person trying to lead his Sh...
In Israeli discourse, Israel is always the side exercising restraint in its conflict with the Palestinians. This was true again for the events of the past week: As the Qassam rockets were falling on the Southern Israeli town of Sderot, it was “leake...
The convenient emergence and sudden disappearance of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi signals an end of an era. Though Washington and London insist on telling us that the ‘good news’ don’t necessary mean an end to Iraq’s bloodshed, the giddiness i...
Just as PNAC or the Project for the New American Century helped us to think about underlying motives for the public shams of the war on terrorism, so might CNAC or the Compact for North American Competitiveness help us to think about drama at the border betwe...
The just-published The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President Geo...
A leaked cable from the US embassy in Baghdad signed by the ambassador paints a grim picture of Iraq as a country disintegrating in which the real rulers are the militias, and the central government counts for nothing.
The cable, signed by...
The foreign minister of Japan, Taro Aso, will receive this week an appeal to his "honor and decency" in the repayment of a small family debt that is now more than 60 years old. The request comes in a personal letter from an Australian reg...
Johnson & Johnson’s Acetaminophen is the active ingredient in Tylenol. McNeil Laboratories first marketed it (in combination with a barbiturate) in 1953 as a safer alternative to aspirin. The big selling point was that aspirin, then the best-selling...