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 July 2006
For all the cries of outrage and shock over what is happening in the Middle East, is there really much difference between the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the Israeli attacks on Lebanon? A familiar parody of the Cartesian mindset is on display once mor...
A timeless clique regarding politicians, as heard in old Brooklyn (before its current awful phase as a yuppie haven) minus several expletives goes something like this: "All dem bums are crooks". One would like to believe the statement is too general and ...
Nablus. For anyone who witnessed the results of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center buildings in New York City, the scene was horrifyingly familiar, albeit on a smaller scale. The first evidence of the devastation was seen and felt blocks...
Beirut. Watching the news today in my grandfather’s home in Lebanon, all I want to do is weep. Until today, I was cautiously optimistic. Until today, there were some positive developments in the politics of this war. It seems almost obscene to...
John Bolton has proved to be the right man for the job. As UN ambassador, Bolton has clearly and consistently projected the White House’s Middle East policies, especially the administration’s unwavering support for Israel. As international crit...
New Orleans. Thirsty in New Orleans On Sunday, August 29th of last year, the hurricane we’d been watching metastasize in the Gulf of Mexico crossed from sea to land, disfiguring and permanently altering the city of New Orleans. Our beloved and ...
Israel’s indiscriminate-yet thoroughly systematic-slaughter of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians should be a moment of truth for the U.S. left. The fact that "about 55 percent of all casualties at the Beirut Government University Hospital are children ...
Tel Aviv. Beirut is burning, hundreds of Lebanese die, hundreds of thousands lose all they ever owned and become refugees, and all the world is doing is rescuing the "foreign passport" residents of what was just two weeks ago "the Paris of th...
The world’s second biggest economy is still Japan, yet for all its apparent modernity and embrace of the latest technologies, when it comes to politics the nation remains entangled in a twilight world of ghosts gone by. Its most recent example is remi...
Televised contemporary events marginalize the role of history. TV broadcasts death from Lebanon, Gaza and Israel, but paid scant attention to the 53rd anniversary of Cuba’s revolutionary beginning. On July 26, 1953, Fidel Castro led 150 plus men to capture t...
Indiana, once deemed by National Lampoon to be the country’s most boring state, is nevertheless the hatchery of two notable American bards, Booth Tarkington and Theodore Dreiser. Based on recent news reports, a third Hoosier spinner of tales is poised to joi...
Thirteen years ago, my encounter with an Israeli family in the US left me with a hope for peace and a better tomorrow for all. Today, it pains me to think that their child, who played for countless hours with my son, may be the one who is dropping bombs on the chi...
The dramatic Supreme Court decision last month declaring the Bush administration’s Guantanamo military tribunals scheme to be lawless and unconstitutional, is a landmark ruling that strikes a powerful blow for liberty. Hamdan v. Rumsfeld represents our democ...
Dude, n.,a dapper dandy; a ‘swell,’ an affected, fastidious fop; a city slicker at a dude ranch. “Origin unknown.” (Barnhart Dictionary of English Etymology, 305.)
Dúd, (pron. dood),...
Syndicated columnist Richard Cohen declared in the Washington Post on Tuesday that an-eye-for-an-eye would be a hopelessly wimpy policy for the Israeli government. "Anyone who knows anything about the Middle East knows that proportionality is madness,&...
Tel Aviv – "IT SEEMS that Nasrallah survived," Israeli newspapers announced, after 23 tons of bombs were dropped on a site in Beirut, where the Hizbullah leader was supposedly hiding in a bunker.
An interesting formulation. A few ...
Beirut. How brave our warships looked at dawn. Spread over the pale blue Mediterranean, bristling with cannons and machine guns and missiles, it was an armada led by the destroyer HMS Gloucester and the USS Nashville and York and the sleek French anti-subma...
AMMAN – On a bend in the Tigris river in north Baghdad people try to prevent their children seeing the headless and tortured bodies which drift ashore every day. The number of civilians being killed in Iraq may top 1,000 a week in July after reachi...
There are times when I think that this tired old world has gone on a few years too long. What’s happening in the Middle East is so depressing. Most discussions of the eternal Israel-Palestine conflict are variations on the childR...
On June 15 we published GABRIEL KOLKO’s essay on the enormous instability of the world’d financial system. In the ensuing weeks Professor Kolko has enlarged his analysis, and here we offer our readers his updated version. AC / JSC
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As Lebanon continues to be pounded by Israeli bombs and munitions, the justification for Israel’s invasion is treading on very thin ice. It has become general knowledge that it was Hezbollah guerillas that first kidnapped two IDF soldi...
On the 9 July, 2006 Professor Ghazi Walid Falah–a professional geographer who holds dual Arab-Israeli and Canadian citizenship and is a University Lecturer at the University of Akron in Ohio–was arrested by the Israeli authorities near Haifa in norther...
Instanbul. Queuing to pay for my lunch on Monday at the cash register of a diner here in Istanbul where I live, the customer in front turned to me and said|: "You’re that Englishman, aren’t you? I saw you on the TV last night. You work at Y...
NAZARETH – This week I had the pleasure to appear on American radio, on the Laura Ingraham show, pitted against David Horowitz, a "Semite supremacist" who most recently made his name under the banner of Campus Watch, leading McCarthyite witch-...
The Bush administration, Congress, and the press repeatedly echo the Israeli government’s position that the current warfare between Israel versus Palestinians and Lebanese is a consequence of the “kidnapping”...