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 2007
In the administration of George W. Bush, the Republican Party has achieved the greatest combination of idiocy and evil in human history. The Republicans have bogged America down in a gratuitous and illegal war. The war has destroyed Iraq, killed between 650...
The tragic fire at the former Deutsche Bank building in Lower Manhattan on Saturday which took the lives of two firefighters, Joseph Graffagnino, 33 and Robert Beddia, 53, and which has already spawned a criminal investigation, highlights problems about which the ...
Telling us how many dollars have been spent on the war in Afghanistan is fundamental to the Department of Defense’s (DOD) effort to garner public and congressional support for prosecution of the war. It should also be a simple question. It is not. Th...
"I’m scared to return. Too much death. Too many spirits." This is what a friend said to me the week before I left for New Orleans. I had never been to the Crescent City. He had traveled there many times – a "home away from home" ...
Barring a miracle–and miracles are in short order on Texas’ death row–Kenneth Foster is likely to die Thursday. The battle around his case has been a heroic one. Kenneth’s horrifying story of being condemned to death on a misapplication of ...
OK, so the departing Attorney General was not as malevolent as some made out: more a willing pawn of his old friend George W. and the recently departed Karl Rove, and, moreover, of the genuinely malevolent Dick Cheney, and his close associate David Addington. The ...
In Baltimore, the murder toll hit 200 in mid-August, and is expected to easily surpass 300 by the end of the year. Baltimore’s murder rate is slightly down from record highs 10 years ago, though, when the city counted a murder a day. Since the mid 1980s, tha...
The rash and self-defeatist behaviour emanating from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his close circle in the West Bank cannot possibly be intended for the benefit of the Palestinian people or for their internationally sanctioned struggle for huma...
Soon after coming to power, Ariel Sharon started to commission public opinion polls. He kept the results to himself. This week, a reporter of Israel’s TV Channel 10 succeeded in obtaining some of them. Among other things, Sharon wanted to know what th...
One. Build and rebuild community. When disaster hits and life is wrecked, you immediately seem to be on your own. Isolation after a disaster is a recipe for powerlessness and depression. Family, community, church, work associations are all important –...
This year I find myself in Colorado attempting to put a few miles between my overburdened mind and the mechanized drone of Southern California. The allure of the Rocky Mountains has once again compelled an escape. A tempered abandonment from the rat race. This spo...
The bizarre hi-jinks coming out of the upper echelons of New York State politics continues to get stranger and stranger each day. First there was Troopergate, a story broken by NY Post Editor Fredric Dicker This involved Governor Eliot Spitzer’s offi...
Even as the International Atomic Energy Agency is meeting with Iranian officials to discuss increasing the openness of Iran’s nuclear program, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remains defiant about Tehran’s right to pursue such a program — i...
President Bush recently attracted considerable attention and criticism by stating before the Veterans of Foreign Wars that the takeaway from Vietnam was that we cut and ran too soon, and we should not duplicate that mistake in Iraq. Actually, the president ...
Notes from a speech at an anti-war rally in Kennebunkport, Maine. Forty years ago this year, Martin Luther broke his silence and spoke out against the war in Vietnam. He denounced its atrocities and condemned the US government as "the greatest purveyor...
In early November of 1967, the administration of President Lyndon Johnson ratcheted up a media campaign designed to convince the American people that victory in Vietnam was possible. Dubbed the "Success Offensive," it began with coordinated leaks to the ...
When I look at the Bush administration’s actions in Iraq, I can’t help but be reminded of a scene from the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Consider the parallels, for example, in the classic scene between Graham Chapman and Michael Palin, where K...
Let’s be clear. Alberto Gonzales is resigning as attorney general not because he’s become an embarrassment to the Bush administration-which has repeatedly shown itself to be beyond embarrassment-but because he is no longer useful. Exposed as a serial l...
In the coming months, Washington DC, San Francisco, New York and several other cities will be the sites of a number of actions against the US war in Iraq. These protests, which include and encampment and march the week of September 22 – 29, a protest on Sept...
India’s Prime Minister Singh has cut the sweetest deal for his country since it became an independent nation 60 years ago. The Hyde Act, along with the 123 Agreement, will open the U.S. nuclear trade to India and create up to 27,000 jobs and $100 billion in ...
Last week CounterPunch was the only national outlet, to the best of our knowledge, to report the disturbances caused in the Boston suburb of Watertown over denial of the Armenian genocide by the national Anti-Defamation League (ADL...
The Beckhams are struggling. No, not because of David’s own talents, which may be endless and ill-used at a read soccer club one would normally associate with stoned cosmologists, but because of his wife’s, which are finite indeed. Her role, if you rem...
On August 15th, Dr. John W. Gofman died of heart failure at 88. He was the best, and so naturally, the nuclear industry hated him, denounced him, tried to discredit him, and, whenever possible, ignored him. They hated him because they could not dispr...
Correspondence between Carmelita McQuillan and MANUEL GARCIA, Jr.; shared with CounterPunch in the hopes it helps Robert Fisk "de-ju-ju-ize." C Quil wrote: Dear Manuel, I thought this might int...
Jesus was a Jewish martyr not a Christian saviour. Like numerous other Jewish "insurgents" of his time, he sought to liberate the Jewish people from the Roman Empire’s brutal occupation of their country. He did not die on a Roman cross for "th...