Alexander Cockburn's Blog

One of the first big show trials here in the post-9/11 homeland was of a Muslim professor from Florida, now 49, Sami al-Arian. Pro-Israel hawks had resented this computer professor at the University of South Florida long before Atta and the hijackers flew their planes into the World Trade Center towers, because they saw al-Arian, a Palestinian born in Kuwait of parents kicked out of their homel ...

Updated: Fri Jan 29, 2016

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It requires no special skill to sell Michael Gordon, chief military correspondent of the New York Times, the Brooklyn Bridge. All you have to do is whisper down the phone to him that the transaction will occur at a background "briefing" by anonymous intelligence sources and a "senior official" or two.

One would think that it would require astonishing rhetorical ingenu ...

Updated: Fri Jan 29, 2016

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President Nixon, a very good poker player, once defined the art of brinkmanship as persuading your opponent that you are insane and, unless appeased by pledges of surrender, quite capable of blowing up the planet.

By these robust standards George Bush is doing a moderately competent job in suggesting that if balked by Iran on the matter of halting its nuclear program, he'll dump a couple ...

Updated: Fri Jan 29, 2016

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The Bush presidency is finished, whether or not he takes us all down with him. A State of the Union address is always a pitiless register of where exactly the White House incumbent stands, in terms of political power. As Bush plodded through a list of doomed political initiatives, the news cameras kept swiveling away from him, like people seeking escape from a bore at a cocktail party.

T ...

Updated: Fri Jan 29, 2016

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Suppose the movers and shakers in the Israel lobby here — Abe Foxman, Alan Dershowitz and the rest of the crew — had simply decided to leave Jimmy Carter's "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid" alone. How long before the book would have been gathering dust on the remainder shelves? Suppose even that Dershowitz had rounded up his unacknowledged co-authors in all their tens of tho ...

Updated: Fri Jan 29, 2016

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A make-or-break speech by a beleagured American president is usually preceded by a demonstration of American might somewhere on the planet, and the run-up to Bush's address last night was no exception. The AC-130 U.S. gunship that reportedly massacred a convoy of fleeing Islamists on Somalia's southwestern border, apparently along with dozens of nomads, their families and livestock, was deploye ...

Updated: Fri Jan 29, 2016

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No task is more important for any newspaper than to impart the news convincingly to the people and their government that a war is wrong, futile or, ultimately, lost. The United States has been militarily defeated in Iraq. It has no sane options left. All talk of troop "surges," of the need for a "continuing presence," of the feasibility of training an Iraqi army, of any cons ...

Updated: Fri Jan 29, 2016

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Adieu, Gerald Ford! It has always been my view that he was America's greatest president. Transferring the Hippocratic injunction from the medical to the political realm, he did the least possible harm. Under Ford's tranquil hand the nation relaxed after the hectic fevers of the Nixon years. He finally pulled the United States out of Vietnam.

As a visit to the Ford Presidential Library di ...

Updated: Fri Jan 29, 2016

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This last Sunday, Harry Reid, the incoming Democratic majority leader in the U.S. Senate, went on ABC's Sunday morning show and declared that a hike in U.S. troops in Iraq is OK with him. Here's the evolution of the Democrats' war platform since Nov. 7, 2006, the day the voters presented a clear mandate: "End the war! Get out of Iraq!" and took the U.S. Senate and the House of Represe ...

Updated: Fri Jan 29, 2016

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These days, a hefty slab of the teenagers alive in America will supposedly live to be 100 (presumably working till they drop to pay for the rest, jobless and dying from diabetes). Given the reproductive shadow hanging over America — poor semen quality, cryptorchidism, impaired fecundity — they won't have that many children, although the sparse litters will contain people likely to l ...

Updated: Fri Jan 29, 2016

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