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 October 2007
A classic denial of reality is seen in the defensive reactions of CBS "60 Minutes" reporter Scott Pelley in his September 23, 2007 interview with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Pelley’s defensiveness is an attempt to deny the reality of an ...
One of the "solutions" we often heard in Guatemala to the growing gang violence there was "social cleansing." Repeated by officials and common people alike, this literally means what it says: the active and violent removal of alleged gang membe...
A suicide bomber riding a bicycle detonated explosives packed with iron balls in a crowd of police recruits in Baquba yesterday, killing 28 people and wounding at least 20 others. "I saw many bodies covered in blood," said Ali Shahine, a shopkeepe...
There are a lot of scary things in the world. There’s the "fun-scary"-kids who dress up as clowns, monsters, or fairy princesses once a year to get a month’s supply of candy, which they’ll finish off by morning. There̵...
Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice is at her mushroom-cloud hyperbolic best, and this time Iran is the target. Her claim last week that "the policies of Iran constitute perhaps the single greatest challenge to American security interests in the Middle Ea...
Four Russian diplomats were expelled from Britain this summer as a pressure tactic to try to force Russia to extradite Andrei Lugovoi, the key suspect in the death of a former KGB officer and proud new UK citizen, Alexander Litvinenko. The expulsion came shortly a...
"We are faced with the daily reality of an imminent collapse of our criminal justice institutions." New Orleans Police Chief Warren Riley Some say crime causes a city to be under siege; others say crim...
If Rudy Giuliani doubts that sleep deprivation and waterboarding are torture, why doesn’t he try them himself? As the tough-talking Republican advocate of "aggressive questioning," he thinks the "liberal media" exaggerate torture,...
In a fascinating article for the Washington Post, "The Smart Way To Shut Gitmo Down," Matthew Waxman, a teacher at Columbia Law School, who was deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs in 2004-05, calls for the closure of Guantán...
President Bush has been a busy man. Even though the quagmire in Iraq threatens to worsen as Turkey prepares to invade the Kurdish north, Bush has time to undertake the arduous task of preventing World War III and begin the transition to democracy in Cuba. How does...
Conscious or not conscious of your own bad intentions, you suspect theirs to be still worse. Their notion of your intentions is the same. Measures of mere self-defense are naturally taken for acts of aggression. The same causes produce, on both sides,...
Last week President Nicolas Sarkozy expressed the wish that Lycée instructors read the celebrated letter of Guy Môquet on October 21 to commemorate the anniversary of that young student’s death in WWII. At 17 years, Moquet was the youngest of 27...
Robert Chambers served 15 years in prison for the notorious murder of Jennifer Levin in 1986. He claimed that he accidentally strangled Levin during rough sex. Despite his horrific crime, Chambers was allowed to plead guilty to first degree manslaughter and was se...
Editors’ note: This expose of the stolen scholarship in the Army’s new manual on counterinsurgency to which General David Petraeus has attached his name also runs in our current newsletter sent by US mail or as a pdf to our newsletter...
In January 2002, when President Bush named Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the first targets in his ‘global war against terror’–the putative ‘axis of evil’–few noticed a curious omission. Pakistan was not on the list. The t...
America’s Byzantine campaign financing system is like the slave auction block in days of yore. As a corporate finagler, you buy and pay for your politician and put him to work for your corporation or in your industry’s behalf. A good day’s...
In the Brazilian state of Paraná, Valmir Mota de Oliveira of Via Campesina, an international peasant organization, was shot twice in the chest at point blank range by armed gunmen on an experimental farm of Syngenta Seeds, a multinational agribusiness corpo...
Dog stories sell newspapers, they say. As the winds were fanning the flames towards San Diego last Sunday, the Union Tribune ran one purporting to describe how a pro-cannabis doctor authorized an undercover police officer to buy some pot for his Labrador Retriever...
The Supreme Court has decided to rule on the humanity of using lethal injection in executions, in Baze v Rees, a Kentucky case in which two inmates scheduled to be killed by the State have questioned the method of their punishment. Death penalty opponents have sei...
Iraqi Kurdistan Masoud Barzani, the leader of the Kurds of northern Iraq, expressed defiance yesterday in the face of a threatened invasion by 100,00 Turkish troops, and was scornful of Turkey’s claim that it wants only to pursue Turkish-Kurd rebels....
Dan Keating, who died peacefully in his native Kerry on October 3rd, aged 105, was the last of the Republican irreconcilables. The sole survivor of Ireland’s 1919-1921 War of Independence, he refused ever afterwards to recognise the legitimacy of any ...
Don’t they really fancy Islam? The Danes show their love for the Prophet again. On October 25, the rightwing Danish People’s Party used a hand-drawn picture of Prophet Mohammed under the slogan "Freedom of expression is Danish, censorship is not&q...
"Just as Mrs. Phelps, in Sidney Howard’s 1926 The Silver Cord, destroys the relationship between her younger son and his fiancee, Congress (among other things) destroys the relationship between democracy and justice. And just as the ol...
Should the United States, seeking to recalibrate the balance between security and liberty in the "war on terror," emulate Israel in its treatment of Palestinian detainees? That is the position that Guantanamo detainee lawyers Avi Stadler and John ...
James Dewey Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, recently resigned as chancellor of Long Island’s Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for making racially insensitive remarks. But don’t expect Ann Coulter to step down from the public spotlight anytime soon. ...