Alexander Cockburn – författare

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 forests. But is it truly in peril? And 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 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.

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.

"The implied narrative of this collection is the journalist's background, the imperial myths that helped to shape him, the impulse to exile and his encounter with the Reagan era. The background, the myths and the impulse to exile form the first three sections of this book, whose overall architecture will, I hope, give some sense of the terms in which I have viewed my trade."-Alexander Cockburn, from the introduction

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. Mencken 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.

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 admisstions, 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.They show that many of even the most seemingly outlandish charges leveled against the Agency have basis in truth. After the San Jose Mercury News series, for example, outraged black communities charged that the CIA had undertaken a program, stretching across many years, of experiments on minorities. Cockburn and St. Clair show how the CIA imported Nazi scientists straight from their labs at Dachau and Buchenwald and set them to work developing chemical and biological weapons, tested on black Americans, some of them in mental hospitals.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, or of Marseilles and Shanghai. They trace how the Cold War and counterinsurgency led to an alliance between the Agency and the vilest of war criminals such s Klaus Barbie, or fanatic heroin traders like the mujahed in in Afghanistan.Whiteout is a thrilling history that stretches from Sicily in 1944 to the killing fields of South-East Asia, 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 Medillin Cocaine Cartel. We learn of DEA agents whose careers were ruined because they tried to tell the truth.The CIA, drugs ... and the press. Cockburn and St. Clair dissect the shameful way many American journalists have not only turned a blind eye on the Agency's misdeeds, but helped plunge the knife into those who told the real story.Here at last is the full saga. Fact-packed and fast-paced, Whiteout is a richly detailed excavation of the CIA's dirtiest secrets. For all who want to know the truth about the Agency this is the book to start with.

The war on Iraq didn't begin with the lethal pyrotechnics of Shock and Awe, and it didn't end with George W. Bush's made-for-TV aircraft landing. Undetected by the mainstream press, the US campaign against Iraq began many years before, featuring cruel sanctions, weekly bombardments, and assassinations. With Saddam deposed, the US now finds itself mired in a grinding occupation, its troops under constant attack with no exit in sight.Iraq was just one of three major imperial crusades in the last decade, orchestrated by a new generation of American politicians, both Democrat and Republican, who backed pre-emptive strikes to overthrow unruly regimes in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan under the pretext of humanitarian intervention. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair reported on these wars as they happened. Years ahead of the pack, they exposed the economic motives behind the wars and how fraudulent intelligence, a spaniel press corps, a servile United Nations, and corporate propaganda techniques were used to sell them to the public. Imperial Crusades 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. It is a ripely vivid, blow-by-blow commentary from Cockburn and St. Clair, and regular CounterPunch writers such as the late Edward Said, former marines Chris White and Scott Cossette, historians Gary Leupp and Doug Lummis, psychologist Carol Norris, economist Paul de Rooij, human rights lawyer Joanne Mariner, and former senior CIA analysts Bill Christison and Ray McGovern.

This expose of Washington politics revives the disreputable profession of muckraking, scrutinizing with an unforgiving eye the political culture of the Clinton era. Paying open tribute to the tone and illustrative style of Kenneth Anger's "Hollywood Babylon", the authors provide, in words and pictures, the scoop on the nefarious goings on in the capital city, the out of town arrivistes in the White House and on Capital Hill, and the corrupt stew of permanent officials and hangers-on which surrounds them: the lobbyists, the lawyers, the officials and the journalist elite. The book opens up the heart of American government, inside the Oval Office. It charts the rise of Bill Clinton, from the heady days of dope, group sex and anti-war movements snooping at Oxford, through the scandals of Whitewater and Paula Jones, and on to the political cowardice that led to the debacle of the 1994 mid-term elections. The book takes in members of the Clinton set, such as Robert Rubin of Goldman Sachs, whose officers donated $1.2 million to the Clinton campaign and were amply repaid when their man became the President's chief economic officer. It peers into the murky activities of the liberal elite, whose foundations-MacArthur, Pew and Rockefeller-deploy upwards of $3 billion per year in shaping government policy on issues ranging from the environment to penal reform. It exposes the supremely influential role of the "Wall Street Journal", virtual inventor of the cult of Gingrichism, and the other media institutions whose myths the American public has no choice but to endure. The book also scrutinizes Congress, prostrate before the overwhelming power of the big bureaucracies and at the mercy of lawyer-lobbyists who oversee the crossroads of power and manage the necessary traffic of money and favours.

"In the annals of popular protest in America, these have been shining hours, achieved entirely outside the conventional arena of orderly protest, white paper activism and the timid bleats of the professional leadership of big labor establishment greens. This truly was an insurgency from below in which all those who strove to moderate and deflect the turbulent flood of popular outrage managed only to humiliate themselves."