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Read Cockburn and St. Clair's Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press and discover how the CIA gave a helping hand to the opium lords who took over Afghanistan, thus ushering the Taliban into power.


CounterPunch: Complete Coverage of 9/11 and the War on Afghanistan

 New Print Edition of CounterPunch Published February 20: the Lie That Won Bush the Election; Harvey Matusow: the Death of a Snitch; an Honest Outlaw, the Legacy of Waylon Jennings; Jack Henry Abbott and the New Anti-Crime Wave; Debating Liberal Laptop Bombers. Subscribe Now!

March 3, 2002

Bernard Weiner
War on Terrorism for Dummies

Paul Cox
Boycott Mel Gibson's
"We Were Soldiers"

Frederick Hudson
Toward a Nonviolent Africa:
Bill Sutherland's Quest

Eric Schaeffer
Dear Christie Whitman:
Take This Job and Shove It

John Chuckman
Why the Rest of Planet is Unnerved by America

March 2, 2002

Alexander Cockburn
Sweat, Sex, Feet and
the Working Class

March 1, 2002

Brendan Sexton III
What's Wrong With Black Hawk Down: an Actor Speaks Out

Terry Diggs
Why Twain's Pudd'nhead
Wilson Still Matters

David Krieger
Nuclear Terrorism
and US Nuclear Policy

February 28, 2002

James T. Phillips
Baghdad, Spring 1992

Gideon Samet
Sharon Must Go

Rep. Ron Paul
Before We Bomb Iraq

M. Shahid Alam
Samuel Huntington:
Peddling Civilizational Wars

St. Clair / Cockburn
Rumble from the Jungle:
Ecaudorian Farmers Fight
DynCorp's ChemWar

February 27, 2002

Eric Hobsbawm
The Future of War and Peace

John Troyer
About that WTC Memorial

Mokhiber / Weissman
Wired for Democracy
or Business?

Alexander Cockburn
Daniel Pearl: Should His
Editors Have Sent Him There?

February 26, 2002

Jonathan Steele
Kabul's Loss

Vasily Streltsov
The Pentagon in
the Transcaucusas

CounterPunch Wire
How Corporations Use Shadowy "527" Groups to Influence Politicians

Lt. Col. Robert Bowman
ABM Treaty: Alive or Dead?

Rep. Dennis Kucinich
A Prayer for America

February 25, 2002

John Clarke
Interrogated at US Border

Blankfort, Poirier, Zeltzer
ADL Blinks, Settles Spying Case

Alex Lynch
Naked from Sin:
The Ordeal of Nahla
and Sami Al-Arian

John Chuckman
Ashcroft Speaks in Tongues

February 24, 2002

David Vest
Skate Date

February 23, 2002

Tom Turnipseed
Axis of Evil and
Media Monopolies

Bahour/Dahan
Cracks in the Occupation

February 22, 2002

Alexander Cockburn
Axel of Evil: Sex Crimes
and the Constitution

February 21, 2002

Gary Leupp
The Philippines: Second Front in US's Global War

David Vest
Reagan Clone Project?

Mokhiber and Weissman
Chicago School and Corporate America: Rotten to the Core

February 20, 2002

Bernard Weiner
The Shallow Throat Document

Kay Lee
The Prison Guard Who Never Owned Up to His Crimes

February 19, 2002

David Orr
Waylon Jennings, the Duke,
and the Navajo

John Chuckman
The Devil and Georgie Bush

Prudence Crowther
Giblet Gravitas

Ramzi Kysia
Caught in the Iraq DMZ

February 18, 2002

Ron Jacobs
The US and Iran

George Lewandowski
Empire in Declline

Lenni Brenner
Life and Death of a Folk Hero

February 17, 2002

Robert Fisk
Lost in a Pit of Desperation

February 16, 2002

Phillip Cryan
Colombia in War Time

February 15, 2002

C.G. Estabrook
From New York to Porto Alegre

Robert O'Brien
The View from Porto Alegre

Mokhiber/Weissman
Resisting the Assassins

February 14, 2002

Levy and Easton
Ante Pavelic
Real Butcher of the Balkans

Joan Claybrook
Dear Jeb Bush,
About You and Enron

John Chuckman
Time for a Woman Prez

Alexander Cockburn
Banning the Koran

February 13, 2002

Sen. Russ Feingold
War Powers and
the War on Terror

Tom Turnipseed
Bush's Folly

George Monbiot
American Imperialism

February 12, 2002

Uri Avnery
The Great Game:
Oil, Sharon and Iran

Tommy Ates
Black Land Loss

February 11, 2002

Walt Brasch
The Synergizing of America

John Troyer
Enron's Deep Throat?

February 9, 2002

John Blair
Criticize Cheney, Go to Jail

 


A Photographic Journal of Life in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann

Resources:
100s of Links About 9/11


CounterPunch:
Complete Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath


Five Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond

By Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula

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Published Oct. 15, 2001

8-Page Special Issue

War Diary

CIA's Assassination Plan a History of Torture in US Prisons

bin Laden and Bush Business Connections

Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype of US Food Bombs

Peter Linebaugh on Pakistan

Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher

Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em


Search CounterPunch

Read Whiteout and Find Out How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden

Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the Press

by Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair

The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism

By Rahul Mahajan

The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff

The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid

Edited by Roane Carey

 

A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair

The Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine

Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair

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Reviews of Gore:
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Private Warriors
by Ken Silverstein

CounterPunch's Booktalk

March 3, 2002

The Rebel Angel

Grammy Ham 'n Jam

By David Vest

Here's what it has all come down to: a studio pick-up band of session players took home the Grammy for Album of the Year.

Granted, it was the Oh Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack's producer, T-Bone Burnett, who gave a bizarre speech in which he appeared to be accepting the award on behalf of James Joyce.

But it was a thrown-together group of bluegrass journeymen, genuine authentic no-namers, whose version of "Man of Constant Sorrow" really brought home the bacon for the album.

None of the musicians who performed music from the soundtrack was allowed to say a word. Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch and Alison Kraus, whose brief number was infinitely sexier than the half-naked young divas from Moulin Rouge, stood silent, temporary no-namers.

Was Ralph Stanley even on the stage? The bluegrass legend, whose definitive recording of "Man of Constant Sorrow" was not used on the soundtrack, performed his acapella version of "O, Death," a song usually associated with Dock Boggs, from a spotlighted position in the audience. Fortunately he was not made to wear a Ku Klux Klan sheet (his number is lip-synched by a Klansman in the movie). In fact, Dr. Stanley looked rather dashing in a tuxedo. For a moment everyone thought he was Tony Bennett or at least Rod Steiger.

Bob Dylan almost threw the evening into complete chaos by actually playing live rock and roll music, complete with blistering guitar solo (when was the last time anyone played a guitar solo on the Grammies? Was it Dylan in 1998? The brief noodling by The Edge that started this year's show does not count).

I don't know about you, but I could hear people screaming all through Dylan's performance of "Cry A While" from Love and Theft. Yet TV showed none of the audience response, other than the briefest glimpse of the standing ovation he received before the show's producers cut the applause off brutally in mid-clap to bring on the next presenters. The abrupt segway, coupled with an inept introduction ("What can I say? Here's Bob Dylan"), seemed a tad on the shabby side for an artist of this stature.

Dylan, whose own recording of "Man of Constant Sorrow" appeared on his first album almost forty years ago, won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Recording.

The Irish artist Enya, who has never recorded "Man of Constant Sorrow," won for Best New Age Recording. Her CD, A Day Without Rain, was not nominated for Album of the Year. It should have been. This is an album that just lay there in the stores when it first came out, getting little air play. It built slowly, by word of mouth, until the single "Only Time" became a huge hit.

Enya is the ultimate stealth bomber. Since early 1989, when Watermark dethroned Roy Orbison's Mystery Girl as the top-selling CD in the world, Enya has quietly sold over 10,000 CDs a day, according to her official web site. Other estimates run even higher.

David Vest writes the Rebel Angel column for CounterPunch. He is a poet and piano-player for the Pacific Northwest's hottest blues band, The Cannonballs.

He can be reached at: davidvest@springmail.com

Visit his website at http://www.rebelangel.com