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 by Tag 'CIA'
Paul Craig Roberts is in terminal denial. The entire basis of his defense of the Reagan Administration rests on the need to preserve his source belief: it had to be good, I was in it. I un...
[Editor's note: Information in this article pertaining to the Phoenix Program was derived primarily from the ground-breaking investigative work conducted by Douglas Valentine, author of ...
With its foundations irreparably cracked and its edifices of power crumbling the Ethiopian regime headed by Meles Zenawi is turning more and more to the CIA to make the critical decisions in the ministries of power in the capital Addis Ababa.
Faced with growing nat...
They call it the New Spice Route, an homage to the medieval trade network that connected Europe, Africa, and Asia, even if today’s “spice road” has nothing to do with cinnamon, cloves, or silks. Instead, it’s a superpower’s superhighway, on which trucks and sh...
America’s “war on terror” now has brought us deep into tropical Africa and the Sahel. We learned last week that Washington is engaged in an expansive project to hunt down an array of local “terrorists”, could-be “terrorists” and mayhem makers in general. Nea...
If history proves anything, it is that nothing can be taken for granted. Men and parties that rule nations fall all the time—as witnessed today in much of the Middle East, a region that was once considered stable. The American Central Intelligence Agency, a huge, ...
The article, “Pakistan: Concubine among nations,” in the Toronto Sun by Taraq Fatah (for...
Ajijic, Jalisco, Mexico.
Intelligence agencies throughout the world could save a lot of money by simply interviewing taxi drivers. They know the secrets of their cities and countries. Somehow, they know the truth whether or not it has been officially deni...
In an extraordinary article in Tuesday’s New York Times, “S...
Until 1982, Philadelphia had three daily newspapers, and the surviving two, the Inquirer and Daily News, are owned by the same company. Both are hurting. Fewer and fewer readers force extreme cost-cutting measures that reduce the quality of each rag, whi...
US civilian and military employees regularly target and fire lethal unmanned drone guided missiles at people across the world. Thousands of people have been assassinated. Hundreds of those killed were civilians. Some of those killed were rescuers and mourners.
...
Some years back, when I was doing location rewrites on a movie, I was cornered on the set by an anguished limo driver. We were in a Spanish-speaking nation, and my command of that loving tongue is poor, but I was able to glean a rough idea of what was troubling the driv...
“Hegel remarks somewhere that history tends to repeat itself. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”
Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonapart
On April 9, 194...
“Show me where Stalin’s buried, and I’ll show you a communist plot.”
– Edgar Bergen
For 53 years exiles from Miami and US officials have tried to assassinate Fidel Castro 638 times, overthrow his revolutionary g...
Some of us pause on Good Friday to mark the torture and death of a high-value detainee rendered, extraordinarily, to Roman occupiers.
Although the charges against Jesus of Nazareth were trumped up, the Romans decided to err on the safe side by going to the ...
Great empires, such as the Roman and British, were extractive. The empires succeeded, because the value of the resources and wealth extracted from conquered lands exceeded the value of conquest and governance. The reason Rome did not extend its empire east into Germany wa...
When the “international community” blames Haiti for its political troubles, the underlying concept is usually that Haitians are not ready for democracy. But it is Washington that is not ready for democracy in Haiti.
Haitians have been ready for democracy for ...
History repeats itself, Marx famously warned, first as tragedy and then as farce. In the case of U.S. torture psychologists, the ” tragedy” occurred half a century ago when CIA-funded psychological research on electroshock treatment, sensory deprivation and the like f...
The stupid Attack Iran obsession seems to have infected virtually all discussion of the Middle East.
Marc Lynch of G.W. University said something stupid…then Amnesty International said something stupid…and how about those stupid Islamic terrorist plots?
...
With the United States now well into the second decade of what the Pentagon has styled an “era of persistent conflict,” the war formerly known as the global war on terrorism (unofficial acronym WFKATGWOT) appears increasingly fragmented and diffus...
I just had the pleasure of reading an important new book entitled, Cocaine, Death Squads and the W...
Guatemalan prosecutors announced January 26 that 85-year old Efraín Ríos Montt, military dictator in 1982-1983, was going to trial in March. He’s accused of responsibility for killing and disappearing thousands of mostly poor and indigenous Guatemalans.
Gratifi...
The definition of “shooting yourself in the foot” is generally accepted as “doing something unintended that spoils things for you.” The Marx Brothers had a sketch in which one of them did just that, and politicians and bureaucrats have been doing it for centurie...
Let’s see now. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence who oversees both the FBI and the CIA, is warning that Iran’s leaders have “changed their calculus” and, as the Wall Street Journal puts it, “now appear willing to conduct an attack within the U...
If you ask Iranians, they will tell you that the war against Iran has already begun. Some will take you back to 1953, when the US fired its first shot across the bow, taking out a democratically elected government in a CIA coup. Others will point to the political and fina...