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 August 2006
"The candle kids" grew up and became the "protest movement" of this war. The confused youth who sat crying with their guitars and candles in the city square in Tel Aviv after Rabin’s assassination are now sitting in the Rose Garden opposi...
and WILLIAM WEAVER Recent surveys measuring public opinion and confidence in congress all arrived at the same conclusion: over seventy percent of Americans have lost faith and confidence in the United States Congress. The public no longer trusts this body of ...
On a trip to Fairbanks to participate in a ceremony for a memorial of the Alaska-Siberia Lend Lease program, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld spoke with families of the 172nd Striker Brigade, a unit of 3,800 troops. About 300 American soldiers from the unit ha...
I was at a conference titled Build the Left, Fight the Right this past June. The speakers and workshops at the conference ranged from the war in Iraq to the immigrant rights movement in the United States. One of the most interesting (and there were many) and hopef...
Houla, Lebanon. Yesterday, I shed my first tears for Lebanon. Yesterday, I visited Houla, a stone’s throw from the Israeli border. Yesterday, I was discovered by Zainab Fawqi-Sleem – a young, Lebanese woman who was killed in Houla...
Merchandising -the most powerful force in the universe, according to Mel Brooks- can even restore the dead to life. On August 22 the New York Times carried an ad for a new book published by a division of Time Warner, Inc., called "Dr. John Lee’s Hormone...
No, this is not about "Snakes on a Plane". According to neurologist Dr. Paul MacLean, researcher at the National Institutes of Health, you have three brains, not just one. (the primitive, the limbic and the neocortex or rational) The brain stem, ...
"How can the deployment of the expanded UN force in southern Lebanon, brought about by Israel’s attack on its northern neighbor, facilitate the broader goal of achieving regime change in Iran?" That’s surely ...
Gary Tyler, at one time the youngest person on death row, turned forty-eight years old this July. He has spent thirty-two of those years in jail for a crime he did not commit. The case of Gary Tyler is one of the great miscarriages of justice in the modern history...
On August 17 we published a very interesting interview with Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. A CounterPunch reader had found it on the Marxmail list, moderated by Louis Proyect, and passed it along to us. The i...
When I was small, my family lived in a little community not far from where I live now. Often I drive the two-lane blacktop through the remains of that town. Past the cemetery where my parents lie, past the school where I began first grade (now a private home), pas...
In the aftermath of the Lebanon disaster you can open up the Israeli press, particularly the Hebrew language editions, and find fierce assaults on the country’s elites from left, right and center. The overall panorama is one of chickens of all ages c...
Ralph A. Saggiomo is an affable sort of fellow, one you probably wouldn’t mind having a couple of beers with, swap a few tales, and discuss just about anything. He grew up in one of the most rural, most remote parts of the country, and considers hims...
Some of you relics are waiting for the new Dylan cd, but here’s what I’m listening to while awaiting shipment of Face the Promise, the first Bob Seger record in more than a decade. Freddie King: ...
It had been over three weeks since Katrina made landfall, but when David Bailey and his group of Virginia firefighters arrived in St. Bernard Parish to help, it looked like the storm had only hit days ago. "The whole parish is a soup bowl," said Bailey, ...
George W. Bush-the master of fabricated distractions-as with the false pretense invasion of Iraq-has turned the national television news media away from the United States. So it was a sobering reversal of direction to watch ABC’s August 24th Primetime...
A small band of determined warriors takes on and fights off the mightiest army of the region: this is the stuff history is made of. Thermopylae, move over, Bint Jbeil is coming in! Bishop Philip of Antioch compared the levelling of this small Lebanese town with th...
Former CIA analyst Like many people, I find it extremely difficult to believe that President Bush could actually do anything so crazy as to launch a military attack against Iran, and that even if he wanted to, the Congress, the Pentagon, and the American publi...
In his latest speech, which infuriated so many people, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad uttered a sentence that deserves attention: "Every new Arab generation hates Israel more than the previous one." Of all that has been said about the Second Leb...
Those who have been following the story of Tom Cruise’s breakup with Paramount Pictures will have encountered references to his religion, Scientology, as well as speculation about whether his involvement in the Church of Scientology played any role in the co...
I recently received a letter from long-time nuclear disarmament activist from Sweden, which he began by quoting something that I had said earlier this year: "A powerful state, such as the US, has everything to lose and very little to gain from the possession ...
As the intensity of internal conflict mounts, Mexico awaits the verdict of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (variously known as the TEPJF or the Trife), and the streets of Mexico City are occupied by encampments of protesters demanding a full recount of the ballots ...
Journalist: When the war started, you said that Nasrallah would remember the name of Amir Peretz for years to come. Peretz: Who’s Amir Peretz? The mock interview, above, reflects how the Israeli minister of defence spo...
The U.S. State Department, we hear, is investigating Israel’s use of U.S.-produced and U.S.-supplied anti-personnel weapons against civilian populations in Lebanon. It seems U.N. and Human Rights investigators have found nearly 300 sites where unexploded exa...
By simply returning to their homes Lebanese civilians played a key role thwarting Israel’s plans in its most recent war in Lebanon. As the Associated Press reported on August 14, immediately upon the start of the UN sponsored cease fire tens of thousands of ...