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 'Libya'
Further my speculation that Edward Snowden, as a CIA guy, may have chosen Hong Kong because the PRC would be less eager than most jurisdictions to assist the CIA in whatever derring-do it might try to practice on Snowden in Hong Kong, Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch...
I am not naïve. Embassies have been centers of intrigue, propaganda disseminators, bases for political intervention in a nation’s internal affairs, intermediaries for the promotion of markets and investments, etc., practices not confined to those representing the US,...
Two years after the failed NATO intervention, Libyan society is in chaos. Over 50,000 were killed in a mission that was meant to protect civilians, and there are reportedly more than 1,700 competing militias marauding the streets. One outcome of this chaos was the attack ...
When congressional Republicans complete manipulating the Benghazi tragedy, it will be time for the virtually silent Senate intelligence committee to take up three major issues that have been largely ignored. The committee must investigate the fact that the U.S. presence...
The West’s hypocrisy and oil-greed are coming home to roost with a vengeance in Libya as the Arab spring in that country turns into a nightmarish winter characterized by armed gangs, economic collapse, a decline in services by an incompetent government and increasing po...
This weekend, marking the second anniversary of the start of protests that would usher in a bloody and prolonged NATO-led coup to overthrow the Libyan Jamahiriya and Muammar Gaddafi, offers many reasons to celebrate for those whose intention was the demolition of Libyan s...
The armed Islamists who fled to Mali after the fall of Qaddafi’s government are significant, but they do not represent a complete rationale for French intervention. The Tuareg rose up in revolt partly due to Islamist influence, but also through nationalist impulse due t...
“France no longer recognizes its children,” lamented Guillaume Roquette in an editorial in the Figaro weekly magazine in Paris. “How can the country of Victor Hugo, secularism and family reunions produce jihadists capable of attacking a kosher...
Almost immediately after the armed attack in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012, which resulted in the death of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, along with Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods, and Glen Doherty, added to the destruction and looting of the U.S. facility in Ben...
Professor Noam Chomsky is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was educated at the University of Pennsylvania and at Harvard University as a Harvard Junior ...
Let me see if I’ve got this right.
Back on September 11, 2001, a bunch of Muslim fanatics working for a terrorist outfit called Al Qaeda attacked the US. They had been trained to take over and fly several fully loaded and fueled wide-b...
On 3 December 2012, BBC News reported on the plight of Libyan activist Magdulien Abaida. When the Libyan revolution...
In his new book, Slouching Towards Sirte, which will be released in December, Maximilian ...
The boredom of travel is frequently understated by travel writers. They dwell on the exhilarating time spent on the Nile and the Grand Canal or seeing the wonders of Istanbul and Damascus rather than the hours of tedium in airport lounges and hotels bedrooms.
...
Cairo.
Some former Gadaffi officials, among the hundreds lying low in Egypt these days, continue to express remarkable interest in contributing to uncovering the truth surrounding the August 31, 1978 disappearance of Lebanon’s Imam Musa Sadr, Sheik Mo...
On the Friday after Election Day, November 9, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, General David H. Petraeus announced his immediate resignation and admitted to an extramarital affair (with his biographer Paula Broadwell), which had been exposed (officially by...
When I studied law at Columbia in the early 1990s, I had the fortune of studying under Louis Henkin, probably the world’s most famous human rights theoretician. Upon his passing in 2010, Elisa Massimino at Human Rights First stated in Professor Henkin’s New Y...
Nearly two months ago, on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11, a group of militants attacked the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, killing the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans.
The Romney campaign has accused the Obama administration wi...
“Take the profit out of war,” said Kevin Zeese, one of the more important activists of the Occupy Movement in the United States, “and you take out war.” His audience was made up mainly of U.S. war veterans gathered in New York to observe — and protest — the 11...
What did we learn from the Presidential foreign policy debate? Not much specific or of substance. China did not make an appearance in the first hour. This is not surprising – for three reasons. These debates are more about self- presentation than candid statements of ...
There was this young Israeli who was captured by cannibals. They put him in the cooking pot and were about to light the fire, when he expressed one last wish: “Please box my ears!”
When the cannibal chief obliged, the Israeli jumped up, leveled his Uzi and mowe...
Damascus
The half hour drive from the Lebanese border at Maznaa to Damascus is always pleasant with the wide, well paved and maintained highway, cutting through rolling hills often with large herds of goats and sheep lazily watching the traffic below. As t...
Nothing is going to plan in Libya. It took the death of the US ambassador in an attack on the consulate in Benghazi on 11 September to turn western media interest to the security situation, even though it has been deteriorating since the fall of Gaddafi’s regime. Back ...
The month of October 2011 stands as an historical monument to heroism and apocalypse in the Libyan desert as the people of Sirte, hometown to Col. Gaddafi, staged a desperate, doomed fight to protect their families and homes from the might of NATO and its allied b...
Are the days of American predominance in the Middle East coming to an end or is US influence simply taking a new shape? How far is Washington, after refusing to try to keep Hosni Mubarak in power in Egypt, facing the same situation as the Soviet Union in 1989, when ...