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 January 2007
"I prayed for something red and shiny to get around town in," reads the caption on a squiggly New Yorker-like cartoon, "and got this raincoat." That’s how food activists must feel at the end of a mixed year. They asked fo...
Say what you will about Sarah Olson, she got the story. On the ground and armed with only an audio tape recorder, reporter Olson did nothing more radical than dig deep — the first law of journalism. Her interview with Lt. Ehren Watada vividly painted the por...
Residents of Martissant, a sprawling poor section along the southern part of Port-au-Prince, have accused Lame Ti Manchèt (the Little Machete Army), a civilian vigilante group, of having a role in the killing of freelance photojournalist Jean-Rémy Ba...
On Wednesday, January 24, agents of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, (ICE) staged a raid of the largest pork processing plant in the world Smithfield Food’s massive operation in Tar Heel, North Carolina. This plant has been the site of int...
As President Bush took the podium to deliver his State of the Union address Tuesday, there were five American families receiving news that has become all too common: Their loved ones had been killed in Iraq. But in this case, the slain were neither "civilians...
Bush’s state of the union address did not describe the deplorable state of the union. The speech’s importance consists of Bush’s plea to Congress to please let him fool them one more time in order that he can attack Iran and start a bigger war th...
There was a word missing from President Bush’s pathetic State of the Union Address. That word was "domino." With all his arguments for continued war in Iraq now exposed as lies and shams, our "war president" and would-be generaliss...
An article on Haiti that appeared in Time magazine in January 1973–at the end of the dictatorship of "Papa Doc" Duvalier and the commencement of his son "Baby Doc’s harsh rule states: "There is also a sound on the city streets ...
There’s one thing George Bush knows. You don’t get to be the biggest arms merchant in the world by only selling arms to friends. If that were the case the only countries to which we’d sell arms would be countries like Great Britain and Canada and...
The new strategy of the United States in Iraq does not include an extensive overhaul of reconstruction efforts at this critical time. Very little money is now being appropriated for reconstruction. As the Iraq Study Group Report explains, of the $21 billion to dat...
It was as startling an about-face as veteran Latin American political observers could recall. Here was Felipe Calderon, the iconic right-winger and George Bush’s latest Latino poodle dog who was awarded the Mexican presidency in fraud-marred elections last J...
Poor Poe turned white and cold and hollered out into the hollow deep: Where is the tin can that contains my heart? It is full of worms and other organisms. It cannot make a peep. Edgar paints his skin with soil. Poor thing wronged again,...
On January 11, 2007 more than 100 people in orange jumpsuits trudged slowly from the Supreme Court to the Federal District Court in Washington, DC. Black hoods covered their faces. Another 400 protesters followed "the prisoners" as they tried to enter th...
Baghdad. Baghdad is paralysed by fear. Iraqi drivers are terrified of running into impromptu checkpoints where heavily armed men in civilian clothes may drag them out of their cars and kill them for being the wrong religion. Some districts exchange mortar f...
Text of testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,18 January 2007
Good afternoon, Senator Biden, and members of the committee. It is a grave responsibility to testify before you today because the issue, the war in Iraq, is of such monu...
This interview with CounterPunch co-editor Jeffrey St. Clair was filmed last week in Venice, California. The film inaugurates a new weekly feature on CounterPunch called CounterViews. Each Wednesday, filmmaker TAO RUSPOLI will present a new 10-minute interview fe...
George Bush’s State of the Union speech provided every single US resident that opposes the war in Iraq with a reason to take that opposition into the streets. His argument that ending the US military involvement in that nation would lead to extremists runnin...
Article removed. In readying this piece for our website the editors removed a few phrases from Friedman and Tilley’s criticisms of Avnery, a respected, long-time contributor to CounterPunch. Though the elision of these few words in no way affecte...
Three of us are gathered here in Bly, Kan., at the co-op, to talk about the snow. It has been coming down in thumb-sized wet flakes, but by afternoon the sky will be white with tiny dots, giving the impression we have lost our horizons. The ground is still warm, s...
Divisions between red and blue America and between rich and poor are well known. But another one, related but not quite identical, exists as well. There is a deep divide between those who honorably live the traditions surrounding war and those who dishonorably cap...
In recent years American police forces have called out SWAT teams 40,000 or more times annually. Last year did you read in your newspaper or hear on TV news of 110 hostage or terrorist events each day? No. What then were the SWAT teams doing? They were serving rou...
"Affordable healthcare for all" has become a bipartisan rallying cry, echoing from governors’ mansions around the nation, while members of the new Congress have already introduced ambitious proposals for healthcare reform. On January 22, the Wall S...
Prior to the onset of European colonization a century ago, generations of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Palestinians cohabited in the Holy Land with little or no conflict. Zionism’s arrival opened a vein of intolerance that eventually grew into a river of bl...
As George Bush seemingly wants to escalate the war in Iraq, I thought I would share something about my experience in Vietnam to place war somewhat in the context of daily life. The image of war can be so deceptive. This likely is true whether in Iraq, Palestine, L...
This interview with CounterPunch co-editor Jeffrey St. Clair was filmed last week in Venice, California. The film inaugurates a new weekly feature on CounterPunch called CounterViews. Each Wednesday, filmmaker TAO RUSPOLI will present a new 10-minute interview fe...