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 'NATO'
Syria and the Phantom
CONN HALLINAN
What was that Turkish F-4 Phantom II up to when the Syrians shot it down? Ankara said the plane strayed into Syrian airspace, but quickly left and was over international waters when it was attacked, a simple case of carelessness on the part of the Turkish pilot tha...
Body Counts
M. REZA PIRBHAI
In the early days of the ‘War on Terror,’ US General Tommy Franks declared, “We don’t do body counts.”  He was referring, of course, to the dead of Afghanistan. That the names of 9/11 victims have been appropriately written in stone, only makes it doubly striki...
Convulsions in Libya
VIJAY PRASHAD
Fifteen days from now, the Libyan people will go to the polls. It will be the first election of its kind in Libya, but not the first election in the country. Qaddafi’s Jamahiriya held elections, but these turned out to be very large rubber stamps for a regime t...
To the Pacific We Go
BINOY KAMPMARK
The Joint Force will be prepared to confront and defeat aggression anywhere in the world - Leon Panetta, ‘Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership’, Jan 5, 2012 Empires huff and pu...
Outraged Over Atrocities (Unless They’re Ours)
JOHN LaFORGE
In the war fever being ramped up against Syria, there is broad public indignation over the massacre of more than 100 civilians in the town of Houla last weekend. Would that the U.S. diplomatic corps and the commercial press were equally outraged over our own milita...
The American Agenda in Afghanistan: a Civilian’s Review
IAN POUNDS
Kabul. One thing true we can say about war is that truth is its greatest casualty. I am a volunteer teacher. Four years ago I responded to a call from then candidate Barack Obama for a new kind of soldier to wage peace, one without a uniform, withou...
Libya, Africa and Africom
DAN GLAZEBROOK
The scale of the ongoing tragedy visited on Libya by NATO and its allies is becoming horribly clearer with each passing day. Estimates of those killed so far vary, but 50,000 seems like a low estimate; indeed the British Ministry of Defence was boasting that the onslaught...
The Tentacles of Empire
RON JACOBS
This past week the world watched while Chicago police and their allies militarized the city of Chicago as part of what was primarily a show of force.  The only “terrorists” arrested in the entire operation were three men who had filmed police harassing them earlier i...
Graveyard Humor in Belgrade
DIANA JOHNSTONE
Paris Since graveyard humor is a Serbian specialty, it seems appropriate that Serbs just played a little joke on everybody by electing a former undertaker as President. In the May 20 runoff, affable former funeral home manager Tomislav Nikolic won s...
Being There
MISSY BEATTIE
Do protests and marches accomplish anything?  Should I go?  These questions collided in my head.  One friend advised against.  Another said I should.  My children phoned, “If you do, be careful.” I knew.  I just knew. I knew I would be in Chicago. I arriv...
Should NATO Be Handling World Security?
LAWRENCE S. WITTNER
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (better known as NATO) is in the news once again thanks to a NATO summit meeting in Chicago over the weekend of May 19-20 and to large public demonstrations in Chicago against this military pact. NATO’s website defines the a...
The End in Afghanistan is Totally Predictable
DAVE LINDORFF
John Kerry, back before he was a pompous windsurfing Senate apologist for American empire, back when he wore his hair long and was part of a movement of returned US military veterans speaking out against the continuation of the Vietnam War, famously asked the members of t...
Police Entrapment of Nonviolent Movements
JAKE OLZEN
The old trope of the bomb-throwing anarchist is back in the news, with a round-up in Ohio on May 1 and the ...
The Arab Spring is Part of the General Strike of the South
PRATYUSH CHANDRA
Vijay Prashad’s new book, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter ...
Walk to the NATO Summit
BUDDY BELL
On what is now the 17th day of our walk from Madison to Chicago, the
number 165 does not seem to encapsulate all the progress we have made.
We are 17 days and 165 miles away from the day I drove into Madison,
 where news arrived that Air Force One had descended on p...
NATO in the Dock on Libya Bombing
VIJAY PRASHAD
On May 14, 2012, Human Rights Watch released an important report, Unacknowledged Deaths: Civilian Casualties ...
What’s NATO Ever Done?
JOHN LaFORGE
Wondering why anyone would confront NATO’s summit in Chicago this month? A look at some of its more well-known crimes might spark some indignation. Desecration of corpses, indiscriminate attacks, bombing of allied troops, torture of prisoners and unaccountable dr...
The Lutfallah II Arms-Smuggling Scandal
FRANKLIN LAMB
Tripoli, Lebanon It would be an incautious stretch to suggest any sort of parity between Watergate and the unfolding Lutfallah II arms shipment-to-Syria drama, that each day brings more revelations. But some of what we are daily learning about the who, wha...
Why Obama is Not Ending the War in Afghanistan
GARETH PORTER
The optics surrounding the Barack Obama administration’s “Enduring Strategic Partnership” agreement with Afghanistan and the Memorandums of Understanding accompanying it emphasise transition to Afghan responsibility and an end to U.S. war. But the...
Presidential Understatement on Afghanistan
JUDITH LeBLANC
On May 1, in a televised address from Afghanistan, President Obama said, “There will be difficult days ahead. The enormous sacrifices of our men and women are not over.” That’s an understatement. In fact the current US policy in the region demands of ...
The Afghan Train Wreck
CONN HALLINAN
The recent decision by the Taliban and one of its allies to withdraw from peace talks with Washington underlines the train wreck the U.S. is headed for in Afghanistan. Indeed, for an administration touted as sophisticated and intelligent, virtually every decision the Whit...
SOS From Emergency in Afghanistan
MICHAEL LEONARDI
For several days the NATO war lords in Afghanistan have been heavily bombing the village of Mirbandao in the Helmand province of the south of Afghanistan. The Italian medical aid and anti war group called Emergency has a hospital for war casualties located in the Helmand ...
Above the Drone of War, Voices for Peace
DAVID SMITH-FERRI
In 1876, at the so-called Battle of the Little Bighorn when U.S. Cavalry regiments attacked an Indian village along the Little Bighorn River in Wyoming, the first casualty was a ten-year old Lakota Sioux boy named Deeds. Unaware that U.S. troops were nearby planning an at...
Rebellious Spring, Murderous Winter
RON JACOBS
The last twenty or so months have certainly been months of insurrection.  This is perhaps no truer anywhere on earth than in the Middle East and northern Africa.  Indeed, there is even a phrase describing this fact.  That phrase is “the Arab Spring.”  Exactly what...
Won’t You Still Please Come to Chicago?
PAUL STREET
Vetoed by the recent White House announcement that the 2012 G8 meetings had been moved to Camp David, the original and provocative idea of combining the G8 and the NATO summits in Chicago this May belonged to the city’s authoritarian, militaristic, and left-loathing cor...