Author: Alexander Cockburn (Alexander Cockburn)

  In the wake of the lethal rampage by a U.S. sergeant who killed 16 Afghans in the early hours of March 11, the Taliban have put a halt to talks with the Americans and President Hamid Karzai, who has demanded that NATO troops pull out of the villages and return to their camps. As...

  Too bad Kim Jong-il kicked the bucket last weekend. If the divine hand that laid low the North Korean leader had held off for a week or so, Kim would have been sustained by the news that President Obama had signed into law a bill that puts the United States not immeasurably far from...

  Pose a threat to the stability of Saudi Arabia, as the Shiite upsurges are now doing in Qatif and al-Awamiyah in the country’s oil-rich Eastern Province, and you’re brandishing a scalpel over the very heart of the long-term U.S. policy in the Middle East. The fall of America’s ally, the Shah of Iran, in...

  He blew it. Two days before the United States was officially set to default on its debts on August 2, President Barack Obama had the Republicans where he wanted them. All he had to do was announce that he’d trudged the last half mile towards a deal, but that there is no pleasing fanatics...

  In these scandal-sodden weeks, it’s been tough to write passionately about the fight here over deficit reduction. I look up from some wearisome bulletin on the latest maneuvers of the Gang of Six, and here’s Tristane Banon’s mother admitting to consensual, albeit “clearly brutal,” sex with Dominique Strauss-Kahn amid the filing cabinets in an...

Barack Obama, who pledged to restore ethical honor to the White House after the Bush years, is now burying himself under an active volcano of lies, mostly but not exclusively concerning the assassination of Osama bin Laden. There was scarcely a sentence in the president's Sunday night address or in the ...

The war on Libya now being waged by the U.S., Britain and France must surely rank as one of the stupidest martial enterprises, smaller in scale to be sure, since Napoleon took it into his head to invade Russia in 1812. Let's start with the fierce hand-to-hand combat between members ...

Americans read the increasingly panic-stricken reports of deepening catastrophe at Fukushima 1, speed to the pharmacy to buy iodine and ask,

By the end of this week, the air was so thick with pieties about the need for tolerance and respect for all creeds that one yearned for the Rev. Terry Jones, mutton chop whiskers akimbo, to toss those Qurans in the burn barrels outside his Gainesville church in Florida and ...

The brave hope of the soldier who sent 92,000 secret documents to WikiLeaks was that the disclosure of willful, casual slaughter of civilians by coalition personnel (with ensuing cover-ups), the utter failure of

You can see how seriously Obama is taking the hot populist temper of the American people and their eagerness to strangle every banker with the entrails of every insurance executive. In an altogether welcome departure from past presidential form in State of the Union addresses at least since 1973 (the ...

A year after Obama's triumphant election, hauling substantial majorities in the House and Senate on his coattails, the progressive sector sits trying to warm its hands before the bonfire of all its hopes. An awful

When, sometime in the 1960s, the late Frank Stanton, overseeing news operations at CBS, asked his boss William Paley, the network's founder, for more time for newscasts, Paley shook his head.