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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 'nuclear weapons'
A Second Cold War, This Time in Space
OLIVIER ZAJEC
Perhaps there should be a statue to the anticommunist US senator Joseph McCarthy in Beijing, since he’s the inadvertent father of China’s nuclear programme. Just after the second world war, a young engineer from Hangzhou, Qian Xuesen, was working for the Pentagon at C...
The Consequences of Gun-at-the-Head Diplomacy
MIKE WHITNEY
“The US kill rate in the 1950-53 Korean War equaled more than one 9-11 every day… for the whole 1,100 day war…The US may have killed 20% of the population of Korea, said General Curtis Lemay, who was involved in the US air war on Korea. If so...
Nuclear War Careers Don’t Get Any Respect
JOHN LaFORGE
Some of the Air Force’s self-styled nuclear “missileers” — sitting at launch controls in Minot, North Dakota — recently earned a “D” on their intercontinental ballistic missile firing (ICBM) skills. More than 10 percent of the Minot Air Force Base’s 91st ...
How to Stop Nuclear Proliferation
MELVIN A. GOODMAN
The nuclear imbroglio with North Korea has cooled off considerably, and the nuclear issues with Iran remain on the back burner.   At home, however, there is a new nuclear concern that involves the removal of 17 Air Force officers in April 2013 assigned to stand watch ov...
Protecting the Fiction of Legal H-bombs
JOHN LaFORGE
“The Defendants may not present a defense of necessity or justification … evidence that the operations at Y-12 violated international or domestic law, evidence that their actions were compelled by the Nuremberg Principles or evidence of their motives”. This A...
The Weapons Oligarchy
JOHN LaFORGE
With the Pentagon having secured its annual 47 percent of the April 15 federal tax haul ($1,335 billion out of a total of $2,890 billion) it’s a good time to consider the mountains of money being wasted on useless weapons or just plain stolen. Without a public up...
Obama’s Flawed Korea Policies
CONN HALLINAN
In the current crisis on the Korean Peninsula the Obama administration is virtually repeating the 2004 Bush playbook, one that derailed a successful diplomatic agreement forged by the Clinton administration to prevent North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons? While the ...
Ike’s “Chance for Peace,” Revisited
N.D. JAYAPRAKASH
Delhi. Sixty years ago, on 16 April 1953 – soon after he had assumed office as the 34th President of USA, President Dwight Eisenhower had delivered an address before the Am...
Testing Hegemony
NORMAN POLLACK
Realpolitik, its claims to the contrary, has usually been a fraud, dealing neither with practical politics, in contradistinction to an ideological posture, worldview, or weltanschauung, nor with a pragmatic grasp of reality, in contradistinction to a ...
Inhuman Radiation Experiments
JOHN LaFORGE
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the declassification of top secret studies, done over a period of 60 years, in which the US conducted 2,000 radiation experiments on as many as 20,000 vulnerable US citizens.[i] Victim...
The Mad Man Theory of Diplomacy
JACK McCARTHY
There may well be a very simple answer to explain the so called “crazy” behavior of North Korean helmsman Kim Jong-un: Kim Jong Un is a subscriber to Richard Nixon’s “Mad Man Theory” of diplomacy. As revealed in 2003 by the National Securi...
North Korea’s Justifiable Anger
STANSFIELD SMITH
The corporate media reduces the DPRK (North Korea) to the Kim family and prefaces their names with the terms “madman”, “evil” and “brutal”. Such vilifications of foreign leaders are used here not only to signify they are target for US o...
What’s Annoying the North Koreans?
GREGORY ELICH
Relations between the United States and North Korea have reached ...
What North Koreans Think
STANSFIELD SMITH
I recently returned from a late March trip to North Korea [Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, DPRK], along with 45 others, through Koryo Tours. On that tour I had the opportunity to discuss with the Korean tour guides their views on the current situation.  I only reca...
Missed Opportunities in North Korea
PETER LEE
China’s influence on North Korea’s nuclear policy is minimal.  The DPRK knows that the PRC values North Korea both as a buffer and as a profitable hinterland for cheap labor and raw materials that it is completely unwilling to cede to South Korea.  Therefore, the ...
I’m Already Against the Next War and You Should Be Too
THOMAS KNAPP
This week, the boogeyman is North Korea. Is anyone surprised? The Stalinist “Hermit Kingdom” is right out of central casting. Isolated, always bellicose, unpredictable, and on a war footing for decades: If the Korean War was an American citizen, it would be deciding a...
The Second Iran Hostage Crisis
NILE BOWIE
From talk of “red lines” and cartoon bombs to having “all options on the table”, an undeniably delusional logic emanates from leadership in Washington and Tel Aviv regarding the alleged threat posted by Iran’s nuclear program. When Israeli P...
The New Generation of Hypocrisy on Iran
TED SNIDER
Though the recent nuclear talks with Iran ended with an apparent whiff of progress, and though the two sides have agreed to meet for further technical negotiations this month and then for political level talks next month, the U.S. continues to approach Iran with a hostili...
Nuclear War Through North Korean Eyes
NILE BOWIE
There is little doubt that civilians on both sides of the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) are weighed down with anxiety as both countries carry out provocative large-scale military drills amid threats of nuclear war. North Korea has recently announced that it will no long...
The Iranian Dilemma
MICHAEL BRENNER
Iran looms on the horizon.  Resumption of technical talks with Iranian officials does not alter the gloomy outlook for resolution of the dispute’s underlying issues.  Sanctions clearly are not forcing Tehran leaders to yield to American demands. While there is no evid...
The Iranians and Unconditional Friendship
FRANKLIN LAMB
Tehran Truth be told, this American observer has attended his share of international  conferences and has traveled in more than 70 countries. But never has he  visited such a complex, evolving, striving and energized society, populated by idealistic peop...
The Whitey Report
MICHAEL MCDAETH
Don’t get me wrong I like whitey. They are fun to hang with at a barbecue. They can grill a steak I’ll give them that but beyond running the grill or picking out jewelry I wouldn’t put them in charge of anything. They are way to overconfident about everything they...
Has Obama Abandoned His Commitment to a Nuclear Free World?
LAWRENCE S. WITTNER
In a major address in Prague on April 5, 2009, the newly-elected U.S. president, Barack Obama, proclaimed “clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” On January 24, 2013, however, ...
Nuclear Weapons Waste in Your Water Bottle, Hip Replacement, Baby’s Toys, Jungle Gym?
JOHN LaFORGE
Even the deregulation-happy Wall St. Journal sounded shocked: “The Department of Energy is proposing to allow the sale of tons of scrap metal from government nuclear sites — an attempt to reduce waste that critics say could lead to radiation-tainted belt buckles, surg...
Our Intolerable Risk
PETER G. COHEN
In a 2012 Status of World Nuclear Forces report, The Federation of American Scientists (FAS, founded in 1945 by many of the original group of scientists who invented and built the first atomic bombs and who later came to oppose them) estimates that 1,800 Russian and U.S. ...