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 April 2007
Justice in Berrien County, Michigan, took a big step backwards into the darkness of fear and bigotry. On March 21, 2007, an all-white jury convicted a black community activist, Reverend Edward Pinkney, of five counts of improprieties in connection with a 2005 reca...
Every season, citizens of the world thank those who had the courage and foresight to designate Yellowstone, Glacier, Bob Marshall, Absaroka-Beartooth and other national parks and wilderness areas. The Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness in Idaho and the Lee...
On April 19th in San Francisco, activists, protesting what they called moves by U.S. and British petroleum corporations to take greater control of Iraq’s oil, staged a mock celebration which began at a downtown Chevron station. In front of a banner reading &...
Some things interest the media, others don’t. Since the fall of the USSR, the United States has sought another menace to designate as the ultimate evil, a world threat the Americans desperately need to take on. The 9/11 attacks gave them that enemy. And when...
Since there undoubtedly will be a next time, probably in the not so distant future, what useful counsel on preventive measures can we offer students and faculty and campus police forces across America? There have been the usual howls from the anti-gun lobby...
Three items, then a response: (1) A photo-journalist friend returns from trips to Jordan, Israel and the West Bank, and describes his experiences being graciously received in Arab homes, and his shock at seeing the "separation wall" — really...
For all his chauvinistic, misogynistic and racist drivel, old man Imus finally got the boot. I can’t say I feel particularly bad, considering his confederate-style punditry and his perpetuation of negative imagery of the non-white males our society, but I st...
A violent confrontation between America and the Sadrist movement, popular among the Shia majority, would mark a new stage in the four-year war in which the US has hitherto been fighting the minority Sunni community. Last week the nationalist Shia cleric Muqtada al...
A open response to the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association’s Open letter to the News Industry on the Don Imus firing. Dear fellow NLGJA members and others in the media: While I strongly support NLGJA President Eric Hegedus’s...
"Few cities anywhere have created wealth faster than Shenzhen, but the costs of its phenomenal success stare out from every corner: environmental destruction, soaring crime rates and the disillusionment and degradation of its vast force of migran...
The French presidential elections will be followed by elections for the National Assembly, whose composition will largely determine the extent to which the new president can keep her or his domestic promises–within the limits of European Union regulations an...
Since February 26, the Cucapa Tribe in El Mayor, Baja California has organized an historic Zapatista peace camp to defend their fishing rights against harassment and intimidation by the Mexican government on the Colorado River Delta. The idea for the camp o...
Pakistan’s army suffered losses of 700 killed in its unsuccessful effort to push Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters from Afghanistan out of their tribal sanctuaries in Pakistan, an Islamabad-based journalist reports. That defeat may explain Islamabad’s relu...
The lard-assed cops at Virginia Tech spent two hours interrogating the wrong suspect and failed to prevent the massacre. Now they’re "investigating." What is there to investigate – which brand or brands of anti-depressant Seung Hui Cho was ta...
When President Bush announced "Mission Accomplished," and the end of the war in May 2003, he also said we would help the citizens of Iraq rebuild their country. "Now that the dictator’s gone," he stated, "we and our coalition partner...
In 1946 the United States detonated two atomic weapons in the Marshall Islands. In 1947, the United Nations designated the Marshall Islands a United States Trust Territory, and over the next eleven years the territory hosted another sixty-five atmospheric atomic a...
Back in 1989 and the early 1990s, when the Stalinist states of Eastern Europe ceased to exist as such, there were many triumphant crows of triumph from the various cocks of capitalism . I t was, said that staunch old intellectual rhetorician of reaction, the "...
As Democratic and Republican leaders alike pile on to demand Alberto Gonzales’ resignation, only George W. Bush is singing his praises. Deputy press secretary Dana Perino said Bush was happy with Gonzales’ testimony. "The attorney general continue...
Former Prime Minister Aznar dragged Spain into a war of aggression by the United States and the United Kingdom against Iraq. Shortly afterwards, his political party lost the elections thanks to Spain’s illegal and damaging behaviour. But the final account ha...
The other day I was walking in downtown Missoula when a new ad campaign on the newspaper boxes of our daily paper, the Missoulian, caught my eye. The ad features a businessman silhouetted against a sunrise with the words: "Start your day informed: Missoulian....
More detainees at the U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are so desperate to end their suffering that they are going on hunger strike–willing to risk death if it means an end to their imprisonment. According to press reports, at least 13...
Already condemned to a life of imprisonment by the Israeli Government for just being a Palestinian in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, every Palestinian lives in fear of being arrested and imprisoned in Israel for wanting to be free. And, international law an...
When I first heard of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision this week banning D&E late term abortion without exception to the woman’s health, it literally took my breath away. The sweeping indictment against women from this Supreme Court decision sudde...
It has become clear now that the visit of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Syria has raised an unprecedented outcry by American officials and in American and British Media. The excuse was that it sends "Mixed signals" to Damascus and the reality is that it ...
Dubai. There is an Iraq surge, but it is a surge in deaths. The year up to March 2007 has been the worst 12 months for civilian fatalities since the invasion was launched. Almost 50 per cent of all violent civilian deaths since the March 2003 invasion occur...