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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'
All-Out Civil War in Iraq?
PATRICK COCKBURN
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...
Syria Has No Reason to Use Chemical Weapons
PATRICK COCKBURN
‘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...
History Lessons the West Refuses to Learn
PATRICK COCKBURN
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...
Inside Iraq’s Boom Zone
VICKEN CHETERIAN
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...
Bill Clinton: The Unimportance of Being Earnest
JOSEPH GROSSO
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...
After Decades of War, Can the Kurds Finally Find Peace?
PATRICK COCKBURN
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...
Terrorized by “Terror”
MICHAEL BRENNER
“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 ...
The Civil War in Iraq has Already Begun
PATRICK COCKBURN
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 ...
Voices of the Mizrahim
LOUIS J. PROYECT
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...
The Boston-Baghdad Connection
MEL KING and Rev. WILLIAM E. ALBERTS
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...
Is Iraq on the Cusp of Partition?
PATRICK COCKBURN
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...
Obama and U.S. Military Divided Over Syria
SHAMUS COOKE
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 ...
The High Crime of Torture
ROB URIE
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...
Prisoners of the War on Terror
JUDY BELLO
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...
The Neocons Won
GARY LEUPP
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...
Canada’s Secretive Role in Iraq
YVES ENGLER
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...
Remembering Oscar Romero, El Salvador and Iraq
MICHAEL McKEE
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...
The Disasters that U.S. Intervention Created
SHELDON RICHMAN
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 ...
Hey Iraqis: How’s that “Liberation” Stuff Workin’ Out For Ya?
KEVIN CARSON
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...
The Legacy of Horror for Children in Iraq
HOWARD LISNOFF
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...
The USA Attacked Iraq Because Saddam had W$D
BART GRUZALSKI
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 10 Year Mark in Iraq
RON JACOBS
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...
From Shock and Awe to Wall Street
KEVIN ZEESE and MARAGAET FLOWERS
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...
Bombs Over Baghdad
VIJAY PRASHAD
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...
Killing is Winning
PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
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...