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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 'Libya'
This holiday season, as you walk through a public area (any mall, grocery, or restaurant will do), start counting the people you see there. Look in their faces, listen to their conversations, and try to appreciate each of them not just as strangers, but as fellow human be...
Sorman, Libya
It was a warm early Monday morning along the Libyan coast on June 20, 2011.
At approximately 0200 GMT the next day in NATO Headquarters in Brussels and 30 minutes later in its media center in Naples, staffers finished tabulati...
Last month, the main concern in Tripoli was getting your hands on a sheep to slaughter, as tradition requires on Eid al-Adha (feast of the sacrifice). Libyan sheep were 25 dinars a kilo (around $27), about twice the price before the revolution, and many families were only...
The last American troops will withdraw from Iraq in the next three weeks. President Obama and Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, will meet tomorrow in Washington so they can claim that the US emerges from the conflict unweakened and leaves behind an increasingl...
Perils of brinkmanship with Iran are now on open display. As Libyans struggle after the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, and the rebellion against the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria continues, the campaign of sanctions against Iran has triggered events which echo the 1980s ...
These days the humanitarian warriors are riding high, thanks to their proclaimed victory in Libya. The world’s only superpower, with moral, military and mercenary support from the democracy-loving emirate of Qatar and the historic imperialist powers, Britain and Franc...
The last time we met Michael Bérubé on this site was back in 2007, and he was up to his neck in a rubbish dump, where I’d placed him, in the company of other promoters of the 2003 war on Iraq: where, I asked, are those parlor warriors now? Had any of them reconsidered...
A CounterPunch Exclusive
Zintan, Libya
Despite the claims of the National Transitional Council of Libya (NTC) that Saif al Islam Gadhafi, the apprehended subject of an International Criminal ...
Even as NATO celebrates its victory over the Gaddafi dictatorship, there is growing unease about the operation. The Libyan intervention was supposed to be a model of legality, but ended up exceeding the terms set forth in Security Council Resolution 1973, which authorized...
The detention of 7,000 people in prisons and camps by the anti-Gaddafi forces is not surprising. The conflict in Libya was always much more of a civil war between Libyans than foreign governments pretended or the foreign media reported.
The winning anti-Gaddafi mil...
The other day, I was listening to the voice of “liberal” radio, NPR, and was surprised to hear its bizarre, and yet quite candid, report on what it apparently views to be one of the more hideous aspects of the Gadhafi years – a modern welfare state which looked afte...
CounterPunch Exclusive
Benghazi, Libya
An affable gentleman, “Mahmoud” ushered this observer into the Benghazi People’s Court (Mahkamat al-Sha’b) and showed me the freshly painted courtroom where ...
President Bashar al-Assad’s enemies are closing in for the kill. The Arab League is suspending Syria, and Turkey, once a close ally, is leading the pack in seeking to displace the government that has ruled for 40 years. Arab leaders are talking to West European stat...
CounterPunch Exclusive Report
Sirte, Libya
This observer, with his sandaled feet comfortably dug into the sand of a chilly Mediterranean beach and huddled next to a camp fire with a congenial and bright g...
In the early Spring 1982, I accompanied former US Senator Jim Abourezk (D-SD) to Libya. National Geographic had asked him to get Libyan permission to film several sites of Roman ruins.
He met with officials I walked Tripoli’s streets. At a coffee shop near the ho...
The US and NATO used Security Council Resolution 1973, which authorized a “no fly zone to protect civilians” in Libya, to launch the Libyan war. The war was also a war against China. They had to evacuate 30,000 of their citizens who were fulfilling contracts to develo...
CounterPunch Exclusive
Benghazi
The “new Libya” has entered its own “Terror” which is spreading inexorably, aided by NATO member states including American, French and British SAS units known loc...
I first met Ahmed Abdullah al-Ghadamsi in Tripoli last August about seven weeks before he was killed in one of the last battles of the Libyan war.
I was staying in the Radisson Blu, a large hotel that overlooks the harbor and overfilled with journalists who had pou...
On the edge of the Sahel, Niger
“Sahel” in Arabic means “coast” or “shoreline”. Unless one was present 5000 years ago when, according to anthropologists, our planets first cultivation of crops began in this then lush, but now semiarid region ...
“We came, we saw, he died.”
— US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton,
giggling, as she spoke of the depraved murder of Moammar Gaddafi
Imagine Osama bin Laden or some other Islamic leader speaking of 9-11: &#...
On February 23rd, under the title of “The Cynical Danse Macabre”, I set out:
“The policy of plundering imposed by the United States and their NATO allies in the Middle East has gone into a crisis. ”
“Thanks to the treason committed by Sadat at Camp...
To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.
Winston Churchill, remarks at a White House luncheon, June 26, 1954
Where was the dead body found?
Who found the dead body?
Was the dead body dead when found?
How was the...
NATO’s brutal military alliance has become the most perfidious instrument of repression known in the history of humankind.
NATO took on that global repressive role as soon as the USSR, which had served the United States as an excuse for its creation, ceased to ex...
The thoughts in this essay are those touched on in a public conversation with Tariq Ali in The Gower Street Lecture Series, arranged by Waterstones Bookshops and held in University College London. Tariq’s knowledge of the societies of the Arab Spring is won...
Black Libyans by the racist para-militaries who now rule Libya.
Bodies of black men hanging from highways. Bound and tortured bodies of Africans dumped along the roadsides. Am I talking about Libya or Louisiana?
And all under the approving eye of the first B...