Alexander Cockburn

Jeffrey St. Clair

The CIA, Drugs and the Press

Whiteout

An award-winning final book by the late founding editor of CounterPunch offers insight into his literary spirit and capacity for incisive understandings of key political situations and includes pieces on Washington political inconsistencies, the ego displays of people in power and the dilemmas of oppressed groups.

A Road Trip Through Scandal, Political Corruption, and American Culture

A Colossal Wreck

This work is an account of the most intense popular uprising since the protests against the Vietnam War, exploring the convergence and victory of trade unionists, environmentalists, human rights advocates and farmers over the WTO in Seattle.

Seattle and Beyond

Five Days that Shook the World

Chess and the Dance of Death

Idle Passion

Susanna Hecht

Developers, Destroyers and Defenders of the Amazon

The Fate of the Forest

The author discusses his background, movie making, England travel, the U.S., and American politics

Life Studies & the Reagan Era

Corruptions of Empire

Chronicles the lies that are now returning almost daily to haunt the liars in Washington and London, the secret agendas and the under-reported carnage of these wars.

Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia

Imperial Crusades

A road trip through the ruins of modern America from the most influential journalist of his generation Alexander Cockburn was without question one of the most influential journalists of his generation, whose writing stems from the best tradition of Mark Twain, H.L. Menchken and Tom Paine. Colossal Wreck, his final work, finished shortly before his death in July 2012, exemplifies the prodigious literary brio that made Cockburn's name. Whether ruthlessly exposing Beltway hypocrisy, pricking the pomposity of those in power, or tirelessly defending the rights of the oppressed, Cockburn never pulled his punches and always landed a blow where it mattered. In this panoramic work, covering nearly two decades of American culture and politics, he explores subjects as varied as the sex life of Bill Clinton and the best way to cook wild turkey. He stands up for the rights of prisoners on death row and exposes the chicanery of the media and the duplicity of the political elite. As he pursues a serpentine path through the nation, he charts the fortunes of friends, famous relatives, and sworn enemies alike to hilarious effect. This is a thrilling trip through the reefs and shoals of politics and everyday life. Combining a passion for the places, the food and the people he encountered on dozens of cross-country journeys, Cockburn reports back over seventeen years of tumultuous change among what he affectionately called the “thousand landscapes” of the United States.

A Road Trip Through Political Scandal, Corruption, and American Culture

In "Guillotined," Alexander Cockburn sets out to save the English language from abuse by journalists, politicians, and bloggers. Cockburn lines up a most wanted list of cliches, over-used phrases and tedious words and consigns them for execution. In his lethally sharp prose, the co-editor of the popular website and political newsletter CounterPunch inveighs against the corruption and debasement of common speech. He ridicules the use of hackneyed terms like "national conversation," "international community," and "sustainable development." This short, scorching pamphlet was Alexander Cockburn's final work; "Guillotined" was literally written on his deathbed. But the prose is fiery as ever. From the pen of one its greatest practitioners, Guillotined is a lucid and funny polemic about saving the English language from extinction.

Being a Summary Broadside Against the Corruption of the English Language

Guillotined

How did a term, once used accurately to describe the most virulent evil, become a charge flung at the mildest critic of Israel, particularly concerning its atrocious treatment of Palestinians? Edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, the print and online journal CounterPunch has become a must read for hundreds of thousands a month who no longer believe anything they read in the mainstream press beyond the sports scores. On the subject of Israel and Palestine, the Israeli lobby in the U.S., the current Middle East crisis, and its ramifications at home and abroad, CounterPunch has been unrivaled. Herein, you’ll find CounterPunch’s most compelling reporting and commentary on this topic. Contributors include: former U.S. Representative -Cynthia McKinney, famed British foreign correspon-dent Robert Fisk, former seniorCIA analysts Bill and Kathy Christison, the trenchant and witty philosopher Michael Neumann, seasoned Capitol Hill staffer "George Sutherland," Norman Finkelstein, the leading Israeli dissident Yuri Avneri, Shaheed Alam (who became a target of the fanatical Daniel Pipes), and Israeli journalists Neve Gordon and Yigal Bronner. In addition are: Will Yeoman's path-breaking essay on Israel and divestment, on the hysterical attacks on AmiriBaraka for his poem on 9-11, Anne Pettifer’s Zionism Unbound, Jeffrey St. Clair on the (Israeli) attack on the USS Liberty and the suppression of the investigation, and ’s caustic and lightheartedmemoir of his own experiences of being attacked as an anti-Semite, consequent upon his criticisms of Israel. This first book in the new CounterPunch series, is a timely anthology on the compulsion of silence and complicity in crimes against a betrayed people. Nationally syndicated journalists Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair have co-authored numerous bestsellers, including Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs And The Press, Washington Babylon and Al Gore: A User’s Manual.

The Politics Of Anti-Semitism

The explosive truth behind the CIA and its dirtiest secrets. On March 16, 1998, the CIA’s Inspector General, Fred Hitz, finally let the cat out of the bag in an aside at a Congressional Hearing. Hitz told the US Reps that the CIA had maintained relationships with companies and individuals the Agency knew to be involved in the drug business. Even more astonishingly, Hitz revealed that back in 1982 the CIA had requested and received from Reagan’s Justice Department clearance not to report any knowledge it might have of drug-dealing by CIA assets. With these two admissions, Hitz definitively sank decades of CIA denials, many of them under oath to Congress. Hitz’s admissions also made fools of some of the most prominent names in US journalism, and vindicated investigators and critics of the Agency, ranging from Al McCoy to Senator John Kerry. The involvement of the CIA with drug traffickers is a story that has slouched into the limelight every decade or so since the creation of the Agency. Most recently, in 1996, the San Jose Mercury News published a sensational series on the topic, "Dark Alliance", and then helped destroy its own reporter, Gary Webb. In Whiteout, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair finally put the whole story together from the earliest days, when the CIA’s institutional ancestors, the OSS and the Office of Naval Intelligence, cut a deal with America’s premier gangster and drug trafficker, Lucky Luciano.

The CIA, Drugs, and the Press

A shocking expose of the CIA’s role as drug baron. On March 18, 1998, the CIA’s Inspector General, Fred Hitz, told astounded US Reps that the CIA had maintained relationships with companies and individuals that the Agency knew to be involved in the drug business. More shocking was the revelation that the CIA had received from Reagan’s Justice Department clearance not to report any knowledge it might have of drug-dealing by CIA assets. Many years’ worth of CIA denials, much of it under oath to Congress, were sunk. Hitz’s admissions made fools of some of the most prominent names in US journalism and vindicated others that had been ruined. Particularly resonant was the case of the San Jose Mercury News, which published a sensational series on CIA involvement in the smuggling of cocaine into black urban neighborhoods, and then under pressure conspired in the destruction of its own reporter, Gary Webb. In Whiteout, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair finally put the whole story together, from the earliest days, when the CIA’s institutional ancestors cut a deal with America’s premier gangster and drug trafficker, Lucky Luciano. This is a thrilling history that stretches from Sicily in 1944 to the killing fields of Laos and Vietnam, to CIA safe houses in Greenwich Village and San Francisco where CIA men watched Agency-paid prostitutes feed LSD to unsuspecting clients. We meet Oliver North, as he plotted with Manuel Noriega and Central American gangsters. We travel to little-known airports in Costa Rica and Arkansas. We hear from drug pilots and accountants from the Cali Cartel. We learn of DEA agents whose careers were ruined because they tried to tell the truth. Cockburn and St. Clair show how the CIA’s complicity with drug-dealing criminal gangs was part and parcel of its attacks on labor organizers, whether on the docks of New York, Marseilles, or Shanghai. They trace how the Cold War and counter-insurgency led to an alliance between the Agency and the vilest of war criminals like Klaus Barbie, or fanatic opium traders like the mujahedin in Afghanistan. Cockburn and St. Clair horrifyingly affirm charges of outraged black communities that the CIA had undertaken enduring programs of experiments on minorities. They show that the CIA imported Nazi scientists straight from their labs at Dachau and Buchenwald and set to work, developing chemical and biological agents, tested on blacks, some of them in mental hospitals. Cockburn and St. Clair dissect the shameful way American journalists have not only turned a blind eye to the Agency’s misdeeds, but also helped plunge the knife into those who tried to tell the truth. Fact-packed and fast-paced, Whiteout is a richly detailed excavation of the CIA’s dirtiest secrets. For anyone who wants to know the real truth about the Agency, this is the book to start with.

A shocking expose of the CIA's role as drug baron, "White-Out" surveys the violent storm provoked by a series of articles written by Gary Webb for the "San Jose Mercury News" which charged the agency with smuggling cocaine into the U.S. for the purpose of undermining the youth in black urban neighborhoods.

Muckrakers pronounce corporate journalism dead. Read all about it!

The Death of the Fourth Estate

End Times

This is a history, a diary, a dossier of a radical's working life and circumstances among some of the most momentous years of the century. Its pages echo with the crash of rubble, of the old regimes of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, of the illusions of the post-Cold War West, of physical landscapes in upheaval. Cockburn's own reflections, both personal and political, are interspersed with letters from Claud Cockburn, Graham Greene, friends and irate readers. There are discussions with Noam Chomsky, dippings into criticism, Colette, transvestism, sexual manners, hate mail.

Journeys and Encounters

The Golden Age Is in Us

This volume is both a diary of a radical's working life and a public chronicle of the recent political past. His own reflections are interspersed with letters from Graham Greene, personal friends and irate readers. There are discussions with Noam Chomsky, and pieces on criticism, Colette, transvestism, sexual manners and hate mail. Cockburn subverts some left totems along the way—satanic abuse, a JFK conspiracy, a Democratic White House—and demonstrates that there are few uncomplicated victims, the Bad Wolf lurks with Red Riding Hood. In his writing on the environment, the three-hour day and other topics, Cockburn also suggests that an age of uncertainty invites new ideas and new allegiances. The left must be utopian or it is nothing. From the Los Angeles riots to Ireland, from Gorbachev to Clinton—this is a history of an age of uncertainty.

Journeys & Encounters, 1987-1994

The Golden Age is in Us

John Reed

When the exiled Snowball the pig returns to the farm to take charge, he implements a new world order of capitalism.

Snowball's Chance

Susanna B. Hecht

The Amazon rain forest covers more than five million square kilometers, amid the territories of nine different nations. It represents over half of the planet’s remaining rain forest. Is it truly in peril? What steps are necessary to save it? To understand the future of Amazonia, one must know how its history was forged: in the eras of large pre-Columbian populations, in the gold rush of conquistadors, in centuries of slavery, in the schemes of Brazil’s military dictators in the 1960s and 1970s, and in new globalized economies where Brazilian soy and beef now dominate, while the market in carbon credits raises the value of standing forest. Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn show in compelling detail the panorama of destruction as it unfolded, and also reveal the extraordinary turnaround that is now taking place, thanks to both the social movements, and the emergence of new environmental markets. Exploring the role of human hands in destroying—and saving—this vast forested region, The Fate of the Forest pivots on the murder of Chico Mendes, the legendary labor and environmental organizer assassinated after successful confrontations with big ranchers. A multifaceted portrait of Eden under siege, complete with a new preface and afterword by the authors, this book demonstrates that those who would hold a mirror up to nature must first learn the lessons offered by some of their own people.

Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon, Updated Edition

Ken Silverstein

Washington Babylon describes in shocking detail the corruption of the political establishment, Republicans and Democrats alike. Journey through Babylon's darkest regions, and you will learn how Babylon's millionaire journalists connived to deny money to disabled children; how House Speaker Newt Gingrich really spells F-A-M-I-L-Y V-A-L-U-E-S, and how he spent his student days at Tulane campaigning for sex photos in a student newspaper; how Commerce Secretary Ron Brown lobbied for Haitian monster "Baby Doc" Duvalier and Guatemalan torturers; how the co-director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory searched for Atlantis, tried to train dolphins in ESP, suspected aliens were impregnating earth women; how Big Oil's tax-exempt foundations bought up the green elite while reaping millions from rape-and-pillage investments; how 80,000 lobbyists have bought out Babylon; and how Bill and Hillary Clinton struck a devil's pact with Big Money nearly twenty years ago.

Washington Babylon

The latest in the award-winning Counterpunch series detonates an explosion of voracious, opinionated and witty fireworks on the unexpected intersections of politics, art, music, architecture and sex. This book showcases essays from the nation's most exciting and radical cultural critics.

Alexander Cockburn

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