Some time in early or mid-1949 a CIA officer named Bill (his surname is blacked out in the file, which was surfaced by John Kelly in the early 1990s) asked an outside contractor for input…
Posts published by “Alexander Cockburn”
Robert McNamara, who died last week, on July 6, served as Kennedy’s, then as Johnson’s Defense secretary. He contributed more than most to the slaughter of 3.4 million Vietnamese (his own estimate). He went on…
Hail to the Chief of Staff The first trumpet blast of change ushers in Rahm Emanuel as Obama’s chief of staff and gatekeeper. This is the man who arranges his schedule, staffs out the agenda,…
The presidential campaign plummeted into imbecilic tedium last night in Nashville as Barack Obama and John McCain faced off in the second debate. The encounter took place against the vivid backdrop of economic catastrophe, the…
“Change” and “hope” are not words one associates with Senator Joe Biden, a man so ripely symbolic of everything that is unchanging and hopeless about our political system that a computer simulation of the corporate-political…
We bid a sad adieu to Gerald Ford. Here at CounterPunch it has always been our position that Gerald Ford was America's greatest President. Transferring the Hippocratic injunction from the medical to the political realm,…
“The FBI has a long, ignoble tradition of monitoring and harassing America’s top intellectuals. While people ranging from Albert Einstein, William Carlos Williams to Martin Luther King have been subjected to FBI surveillance, there remains…
Jeff Weise, teen slayer of 10 including himself at the Redlake Indian reservation in northern Minnesota, was on Prozac, prescribed by some doc. How did the consultation go? “Here Jeff, take these, they may help…
How lion-like the Democrats sound as they circle around Social Security, bellowing their defiance! After years of servility some of them even presume to shake their fists at Alan Greenspan and hurl insults at the…