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 'Iraq'
Iraq is edging closer to all-out sectarian war between Sunni and Shia Muslims as a series of car bombings and shootings killed at least 90 people and left many others injured.
Casualty figures are returning to a level not seen since the civil war of 2006-7. M...
‘I am not afraid of anything except for God and poison gas,” said an Iraqi officer who had fought in the Iran-Iraq war. “It’s like a ghost. You have no defence against it.” Though not a target of poison gas as a member of the army using...
In the aftermath of the First World War, Britain and France famously created the modern Middle East by carving up what had been the Ottoman Empire. The borders of new states such as Iraq and Syria were determined in keeping with British and French needs and interests. The...
Erbil, capital of the Kurdistan Autonomous Region, in the north of Iraq, is booming. Brick houses are giving way to shopping malls, hotels and apartment buildings, while in the suburbs, there are villages newly built or under construction to house the new Kurdish middle c...
In keeping with its absurd mantra of All the News that’s Fit to Print, on March 25th, 2013 the New York Times decided to dedicate a section of its front page to the declaration that former president Bill Clinton now supports the rights of gay people to...
On Wednesday, some 2,000 Turkish Kurd guerrillas will begin their withdrawal from Turkey to an inaccessible mountain stronghold in northern Iraq. Moving in small groups, the fighters will take one to two months to retreat, assuming the Turkish army sticks to a de facto ce...
“TERROR” is a word that terrorizes us. To pronounce it is to evoke fear and dread. Americans experience all the nightmarish sensations of 9/11. The visible horror of the Boston marathon bombings was intensified by the event’s association with “terror” – an ...
Iraqi leaders fear that the country is sliding rapidly into a new civil war which “will be worse than Syria”. Baghdad residents are stocking up on rice, vegetables and other foodstuffs in case they are prevented from getting to the shops by fighting or curfews. “It ...
In doing background research for an article on the Jews of the Maghreb (North Africa), I learned of the existence of a 2002 documentary on Iraqi Jews titled “Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs – The Iraqi Connection”. Among Jews, the term Mizrahim (Hebrew for Orient...
Boston’s religious leaders provided admirable concern for the victims of the horrific Boston Marathon bombings, but abdicated their no less important prophetic role. In fact, their pastoral care, while critical, apparently provided a safe way of avoiding the more risk...
Soldiers are deserting a beleaguered Iraqi army as it struggles to keep its hold on the northern half of Iraq in the face of escalating hostility from Sunni Arabs and Kurds who dominate in the region.
Around the oil city of Kirkuk Kurdish troops have advanced so...
Has Syria crossed the “red line” that warrants a U.S. military invasion? Has it not? The political establishment in the United States seems at odds over itself. Obama’s government cannot speak with one voice on the issue, and the U.S. media is likewise ...
Confirmation by the Constitution Project nearly a decade late that the George W. Bush administration and the U.S. military and ‘intelligence’ services committed acts of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere appears a Rorschach test for the ‘sentiments’ of the...
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...
Reading an assortment of commentaries (“retrospectives”) on the tenth anniversary of the U.S. war on Iraq, and onset of the horrific occupation, I find most center their discussion on the now almost universally conceded fact that the war was based on false pretexts. T...
When a US-led coalition invaded Iraq the forward-looking Canadian government stayed out of the war. And if you believe that I have a bridge for sale in Moose Jaw at an excellent price.
As part of the tenth anniversary of the invasion many media outlets lauded Canad...
This weekend marked the 33-year anniversary of the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero. An unofficial saint to much of Central America, Romero was killed shortly after petitioning then U.S. president Jimmy Carter to halt aid to the Salvadoran government, as w...
Americans have forgotten about the Iraq war, which began 10 years ago this week, and the Afghan war, the longest in American history, but the U.S. government is still throwing its weight around in both countries.
The Iraq war, the pretext for which was nonexistent ...
On March 19 Donald Rumsfeld, former US “Defense” Secretary and ongoing sociopath and moral leper, celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War with this tweet: “10 yrs ago began the long, difficult work of liberating 25 mil Iraqis. All who played a role in histo...
Children are innocent and often the innocent victims of U.S. warfare. Despite protections, most written after the carnage of masses of civilians during World War II, the U.S. quickly jettisoned its commitment to the protection of civilians and children by the rules of int...
Ten years ago the US launched its indiscriminate “shock and awe” attack on Bagdad. Much of the country opposed the war, the so-called justifications for the war were full of holes and non-sequiturs, and today we see the war as a calamity. Seymour ...
The news had come overnight. US planes were raining a shock and awe of murderous destruction on the people of Baghdad, rendering parts of the city into ruins. The residents hid in shelters if they could and prayed their children would survive. Meanwhile, soldiers and ma...
This week marks the tenth anniversary of the “Shock and Awe” US invasion of Iraq. The ravages of that invasion continue at home and in Iraq, the US is still at war in Afghanistan (troops and contractors remain in Iraq) and unofficially waging war on countries...
Roaming through the al-Jazeera Arabic headquarters in Doha, Qatar, last month, I was struck by its wall of relics. Behind glass lay the remains of their journalists who were either killed in action or else held...
Ten years ago today the Bush regime invaded Iraq. It is known that the justification for the invasion was a packet of lies orchestrated by the neoconservative Bush regime in order to deceive the United Nations and the American people.
The US Secretary of State at...