Articles by Alexander Cockburn
We found 7 results.
The CIA’s House of Horrors: Frank Olson’s Fatal Trip
Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn - CounterPunch,
13 Nov 2017
By the early 1950s the CIA’s relationship with drugs stretched from alliances with criminal smugglers of heroin to research in, and application of, lethal or mind-altering chemical agents… Unknown to those round the convivial table, the CIA’s Dr. Sidney Gottlieb had decided to spike the Cointreau with a heavy dose of LSD… Late that night Dr. Frank Olson, the army’s foremost expert on biological warfare, run across the room and jumped through a curtained and closed window, crashing down to the street from the tenth-floor room.
→ read full articleThe Political Economy of Dead Meat: Why Mad Cows are the Least of It
Jeffrey St. Clair & Alexander Cockburn – Counter Punch,
16 May 2016
Intensive meat production–these days mostly of beef, veal, pork, and chicken–is an act of violence: primarily, of course, an act of violence against the creatures involved. But it is also violence against nature and against poor people. The modern livestock industry economy and the passion for meat have radically altered the look of the planet.
→ read full articleA Secret History of the Monarch: How the Biotech Industry Conspired to Knock Off One of the World’s Rarest Butterflies
Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn - CounterPunch,
4 Jan 2016
On May 20 1999, Nature magazine sounded what might have been the death knell of the biotech food industry. John Losey, a professor of entomology at Cornell University, reported the ominous results of his laboratory study: Monarch caterpillars fed on milkweed leaves dusted with genetically modified corn pollen ate less, grew more slowly and suffered a higher mortality rate than those fed on leaves with normal pollen, or with no pollen at all. Nearly half of the GM pollen-fed caterpillars in the study died.
→ read full articleThe People vs. ‘Europe’
Alexander Cockburn – Nation of Change,
12 Dec 2011
The argument against the eurozone is that hard-faced Euro-bankers — their killer instincts honed at Goldman Sachs, Wall Street’s School of the Americas — have the power to act as the bully-boys of international capital and impose austerity regimes from Dublin to Athens, scalping the poor to bail out the rich. Now the end of the eurozone does not mean the end of the European Union. They’re different. There are 17 nations in the former, 27 in the latter.
→ read full articleU.S. and Saudi Relations on Oil
Alexander Cockburn – Nation of Change,
10 Oct 2011
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 1979 only magnified the strategic importance of Saudi Arabia.
→ read full articleHonor the WikiLeakers
Alexander Cockburn – Truthout,
3 Jan 2011
When it comes to journalistic achievements in 2010, the elephant in the room is WikiLeaks. I’ve seen many put-downs of the materials as containing “no smoking guns”, or as being essentially trivial communications to the State Department from U.S. diplomats and kindred government agents around the world. Now, it’s true that the cables were legally available to well over 1.5 million Americans, who had adequate security clearance. But trivial? Don’t believe it. The cables show the daily business of a mighty empire acting in manners diametrically opposite to public pretensions. The cables form one of the most extraordinary lessons in the cold realities of international diplomacy ever made public. Normally, scholars have to wait for 10, 20, even 50 years to gain access to such papers.
→ read full articleTHE COVER-UPS THAT EXPLODED
Alexander Cockburn - Truthout,
12 Apr 2010
Defense analyst Pierre Sprey, who led the design teams for the F-16 and A-10 and who spent many years in the Pentagon, stresses two particularly damning features of the footage. The first is the claim that Noor-Eldeen’s telephoto lens could be mistaken for an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade]. “A big telephoto for a 35mm camera is under a foot and half at most. An RPG, unloaded, is 3 feet long, and loaded, 4 foot long. These guys were breathing hard to kill someone.”
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