Author Archive

Purge Those Holy Books

Written by Alexander Cockburn on February 19, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

It’s another chapter in the war on terror. Los Angeles school officials are pulling an edition of the Koran from the district’s libraries because of charges that the footnotes are anti-Semitic. This particular edition of Islam’s Good Book dates from 1934. An example of one such offending footnote: "The Jews in their arrogance claimed that
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Bestiality on Trial; Kandahar; Gitlin Alert!

Written by Alexander Cockburn on February 5, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Weird Couple, Killer Dog West of the Rockies people may pretend an interest in Enron, the treatment of the Al Qaeda prisoners in Guantanamo, even the volcano in Congo–but where their attention is truly fixed is on an L.A. courtroom where the dog-maul trial is in its opening throes. Since day one, which was almost
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The New Afghan Justice: Smaller Rocks at Stonings; Black Hawk Bilge; Hitchens Reminds Me of Lunchtime O’Booze

Written by Alexander Cockburn on January 22, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Stone Him! (But Lightly) The disjuncture these days between reality and what one reads in the press here is pretty much absolute. The other day I opened up the San Francisco Chronicle and found a piece hailing what the writer described as something most unusual for Afghanistan, a "peaceful" transfer of power. Now granted, the
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Once Again: Beware the Identity Card; Reminiscing on the Donner Party During Christmas in Truckee; Peggy Noonan’s the Silliest Person of the Year, Maybe the Decade

Written by Alexander Cockburn on January 8, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Card of Identity Welcome to 2002. How time flies! It seems only yesterday, though actually it was in the early 90s, that urban sophisticates were sniggering at our homegrown rural militiamen for fretting about supposed Defense Dept. plans to imprint a secret bar code on the forehead of every American. A couple of months ago,
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As Enron Goes, So Goes Social Security? Rumsfeld’s Omelet; Analyzing the Geezer Glaze on The Nation Cruise

Written by Alexander Cockburn on December 25, 2001. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Has the collapse of Enron finally pushed Social Security "reform" off the political agenda for the foreseeable future? Half the stock in Enron employees’ 401(k) retirement plans was Enron paper, contributed as "a company match," for which of course Enron took tax deductions. Then, when Enron went into its final plunge its executives froze the
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Phew! Katrina vanden Heuvel Found the War on Terrorism’s Silver Lining

Written by Alexander Cockburn on December 11, 2001. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

It had seemed to me that one absolutely certain fact, beyond all dispute or question, is that here at home the terror attacks of Sept. 11 had no silver lining, no unexpectedly beneficial fallout. It was, is and will be a terrible business with endlessly terrible consequences. It killed thousands, impelled a punitive expedition that
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Harry Potter and the Al Qaeda Network; More on Torture; Missed You at the March, Hitch; Oooh, Eurosluts!

Written by Alexander Cockburn on December 4, 2001. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

"We’re passing from appalling human loss and suffering, live in the front yard of the media capital of the world, to the traditional parameters of imperial retribution. I can’t imagine it will be long before the Taliban are chased out…" That was me, right here in the Oct. 10-16 issue, in a column that drew
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Blind Predator Fools Seymour Hersh; That National ID Card

Written by Alexander Cockburn on November 13, 2001. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

The usual bosh is getting into the press about the technological prowess of U.S. weaponry as deployed against Afghanistan. He’s been getting some great scoops in his New Yorker dispatches, but Seymour Hersh ran some amazing rubbish in that magazine a couple of weeks ago about the capabilities of the Predator unmanned reconnaissance vehicle. So
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Assassination Got Legal Okay Long Ago; FBI Eyes Torture

Written by Alexander Cockburn on October 30, 2001. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

The mathematics of imperial retribution for the crimes of Sept. 11 now include somewhere near 1000 dead civilians, according to the Taliban (Rumsfeld says he hasn’t been able to count them personally), killed by the bombing of Afghanistan, and here at home more than 800 people of Mideast descent being held incommunicado without charges. Some
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Bin Laden: The End Is Near

Written by Alexander Cockburn on October 16, 2001. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

As he gave an official debut to the bombing of Afghanistan with high explosives and food packages (a day’s worth of food for 37,000 was dropped on a land of 27 million people, by some estimates seven million of whom are on the verge of starvation) Bush’s performance on Sunday was a reversion to his
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