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 September 2006
School workers, strikes appear to be the new canary in the mine of society, measuring levels of exploitation, oppression, and freedom. Teachers in two of the most devastated cities in the U.S., Detroit and Gary, Indiana, joined teachers in Oaxaca, Mexico, and Pale...
Need to know where your neighborhood meth dealer lives? I think not. But the current trend in law enforcement thinks so. Six states including New York are considering joining Tennessee, Illinois, Montana and Minnesota in enacting a methamphetamine offender registr...
War talk is in the air again, and because of the looming November election, it has to be taken extra seriously. The latest to warn about a Bush War III is former Democratic senator and failed presidential contender Gary Hart, long an expert on national secu...
Did anybody notice that there was hardly any black people in attendance for the grand re-opening of the New Orleans Superdome on Monday Night Football? Except for, of course, most of the players on the field, ESPN announcer Mike Tirico, a small section of B...
Where would you expect conspiracy theories about 9/11 to be disseminated in Cairo? A coffee house in Sayeda Zeinab, Al-Azhar or any of the multitude of so-called "popular" quarters of the city–filled with Shisha smoke, and permeated by the smell of...
Federal Judge Jeremy Fogel is conducting hearings in San Jose this week to examine California’s lethal injection procedure. The intended outcome of these hearings is to determine whether condemned prisoners in this State are being properly anesthetized so th...
For Vietnam War veterans, the pending court-martial of Lt. Ehren Watada is déjà vu "all over again." Watada may be the first commissioned officer to refuse deployment to Iraq, but he is hardly the first American soldier to face trumped-up c...
The world is in tumult, but here in the heart of Empire the level of creative political energy runs flat along the bottom of the graph. As Iraq disintegrates amid frightful slaughter, US generals propose to bring to life the mad plan they once ascribed to Saddam H...
Nazareth. In a CounterPunch article criticising Human Rights Watch for singling out Hizbullah rather than Israel for harsher condemnation of its military actions during the Lebanon war, I made sure to quote the organisation f...
On Friday evening I was released from 10 days in Turkish Police custody, following my arrest for ‘insulting the dignity of the higher powers in Turkey’ by publicly displaying a collage of the Turkish Prime Minister as a dollar-eating dog held on a star...
Aaron Dixon isn’t accustomed to selling out his ideals for career or political gains. Despite decades of community activism, as a former Black Panther and now a Green Party candidate for US Senate, Dixon’s legacy has yet to be tainted by concessions or...
Diyala, Iraq. Civil war is raging through the Iraqi countryside. Sunni insurgents have largely taken control of the province of Diyala, where local leaders believe the insurgents are close to establishing a "Taliban republic". Officials in ...
Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania David Horowitz, the former wacky-left editor of Ramparts magazine turned wacky right smear-monger and foundation pimp, came to Bloomsburg University in rural central Pennsylvania to pick up a $7000 check and spout lies and misinform...
The mass media, wildlife film industry, wildlife filmmakers, Hollywood celebrities and wildlife agencies need a good dressing down. The proliferation of "el cheapo," entertainment-oriented wildlife films causes drastic impacts on wildlife species worldwi...
After appearing on FOX News this weekend to defend Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s speech at the United Nations, I got the usual assortment of fair-and-balanced emails from viewers, many of whom were critical of my support of "this Satanic barbarian,...
A number of experts have concluded that despite the Bush administration’s desire to attack Iran, the aggression would be too rash and the consequences too dire even for the irrational Bush administration. Military experts point out that at a time when...
The Sept. 25 edition of Time magazine illustrates how the U.S. news media are gearing up for a military attack on Iran. The headline over the cover-story interview with Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is "A Date With a Dangerous Mind." The b...
William C. Taylor was a rosy-cheeked Princeton intern when he began his rise to fame and fortune, working with the Multinational Monitor magazine. As a freshly minted Princeton graduate, he worked on the book ...
On a chilly July morning on the Alaskan tundra, the first Interceptor missile was lowered into a silo at Fort Greeley. Over the following weeks, five more missiles were planted into their silos, as the Ballistic Missile Defense System, once known as Star Wars, wen...
The death this week of journeyman blues guitarist, singer and songwriter Jerry Lightfoot, in an Austin hospital, went virtually unnoticed in both the press and the blogosphere, rating only a brief mention in the Houston Chronicle. Lightfoot , 55, died ...
Baghdad. I have a big family. My eldest two are already dentists and both abroad. I have one daughter just married one month ago. so I am not yet a grandpa. Although I have perfect job satisfaction, Full Professor, with MRCP, FRCP and a couple more degrees ...
The Democrats need to win just 15 seats in the House and six seats in the Senate to win majorities in both houses of Congress, making George Bush a badly battered lame duck for the next two years. This is Hillary Clinton’s, Al Gore’s, John Kerr...
Divergent political camps have found common ground in support of "energy security" and "energy independence." As high gas prices and intensifying conflicts in the Middle East focus attention on U.S. dependence on petroleum imports, progressives...
On September 16, over one million people raised their hands in a vote to recognize center-left leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador as the "legitimate president" of Mexico. Gathered in Mexico City’s historic center, the delegates to the National Demo...
On August 24, the online magazine Salon published my opinion piece "Why I Need to See Child Porn." It argued that we need a government system to vet researchers’ and journalists’ qualifications, allowing them to test government claims about t...