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 'drones'
Paris.
As I write this, we still don’t know who was responsible for the horrific bombing attack in Boston. Perhaps it will turn out to be the work of home grown rightwing nuts; perhaps it’s the act of foreign terrorists. But, whatever the source, what ...
An Associated Press photograph brought the horror of l...
Bina Shah has written an excellent ...
Again we hear (NYT ed., 4/6) about “the damage wrought by the gun lobby,” as though a cabal of manufacturers and other interested parties was responsible for the diseased mentality centered on gun violence in America. What a convenient scapegoat, when in real...
Hundreds of prisoners of the US War of Terror languish in prisons around the world, in Guantanamo and on the US mainland. Some have been there as long as 12 years some have sentences that extend beyond the span of their life; many have never been charged with a cri...
On the internet there have been photographs going round of a row of puffy-faced North Korean generals with flabby chests covered in medals. Their decorations are absurd, of course, because none of these chubbies has heard a shot fired in anger. And western propaganda m...
When Barack Obama first appeared on the national scene, he was a Rorschach inkblot upon whom gullible liberals projected their hopes and anxious “conservatives” their fears.
The scare quotes are justified because then, as now, there was not much that is genuine...
One thing you can say about Kentucky Senator Rand Paul is that he’s a crafty politician. His thirteen-hour filibuster to protest President Obama’s nomination of National Security Advisor John Brennan as CIA...
In today’s Washington Post (Mar. 27) Greg Miller and Julie Tate report on John Brennan’s facing “a quandary over clandestine service appointment,” the term “quandary,” in this case, ordinarily signifying perplexity or doubt, is really not quite accurate...
Drones are still hovering over the capital – figuratively, for the time being. The images generated by Eric Holder’s disquieting testimony and Rand Paul’s filibuster are lingering. They have not ignited an uproar of protest against targeted assassinations, signature...
“Fascism is capitalism plus murder.”
― Upton Sinclair
“If the president does it, it isn’t illegal.”
― Richard M. Nixon
In a 5-4 ruling labelled “Kafkaesque” the Supreme Court refused an application by ...
Frogs in the marsh mud drone their old laments.
— Vergil, Georgics
It is wonderful how a new weapon can rejuvenate a word that has long been something of a dullard. The reinvigorated word is “drone.”
In days...
This week marks the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. As one of the longest and one of the most costly wars in U.S. history, the true costs in dollars, lives, environmental contamination and opportunity costs may never be fully appreciated. This “preventi...
Yes, I mean it: the worst ever!
We’ve had James Monroe and his doctrine of supremacy over Latin America. We’ve had Theodore Roosevelt and his invasion of Cuba; Nixon, Reagan, Bush-Bush and their mass murder, and all the war crimes and genocide committed by most...
In democracies, the demos rules. According to the original meaning of the term, that means the popular masses, as distinct from social or economic elites. More usually nowadays, the term has no class content; “demos” denotes an undifferentiated citizenry....
In the supposed controversy over Brennan’s confirmation as CIA Director, the elephant in the room that everyone has stepped around is the CIA itself. Massive evidence of torture (under the impersonal designation, E.I.T.) should, were democracy truly applicable to the ...
Michael T. Klare is the author of the book, The Race for What’s Left (2012), in which he...
When Senate Democrats such as Harry Reid praise Brennan to the heavens, as America’s savior, and Diane Feinstein settles for OLC legal memos confined to the killing of Americans, but not the basis for the entire armed drone program for targeted assassination, it ...
Most Americans do not realize the extent to which the U.S. is becoming involved militarily in the welter of conflicts throughout Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa (check out the chaos as mapped ...
Drone warfare has become one of the key weapons in the United States government’s global “war on terror.” But drones especially present a moral challenge for all Americans in this manufactured war. They are the glaring tip of American imperialism, and must be ca...
Drones are the latest step in the application of high-tech electronics to armaments. The much heralded Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) first appeared on the world stage in the Gulf War of 1991where precision-guided smart weapons were used with devastating effect. The...
The announcement (Feb. 22) that the US has opened a drone base in Niger has been deliberately couched in abstract counterterrorism terms: unarmed Predator drones for reconnaissance purposes in order to track Al Qaeda and, never to be missed, “its affiliates.” Who co...
Today’s New York Times (Feb. 21) features an article on White House strategy for pushing through John Brennan’s appointment as CIA Director, with a photograph of him standing alongside an admiring Diane Feinstein, aka Madame Apologist for CIA-JSOC Paramilitary ...
Is liberal fascism a misnomer? Perhaps Sinclair Lewis’s antecedent question is more basic, Can it happen here?
Fascism comes in several varieties without losing its distinctive structural-ideological-political features, all of which point to an hierarchical soc...
“Covert” drone warfare requires a level of confidence in politicians that they will never deserve.
In the ...