Sunday, June 17, 2007

Bleat the devil: Alexander Cockburn

I never understood how, back in the pre-net days, Alexander Cockburn became a leading -- downright inescapable -- figure within the left-wing mafia.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Cockburn was one of the few progressives allowed access to the newspaper editorial pages, and he routinely found ways to come to conclusions mirroring those offered by the right-wing columnists. His attacks on Bill Clinton repeated many of the most inane conspiracy tales offered by the reactionary paranoids. Did Cockburn take Scaife cashola? Probably not, but only because the conservatives saw no reason to pay for something available for free.

Beyond all that, Cockburn's repellent nature always comes through. Even if he were to write about puppies and blueberry muffins, his acidic and unlovable personality would permeate the text. At times, I have liked his positions, but I have never liked him.

Cockburn attacks the very idea of a consensus on global warming, translating the Limbaugh line into progressive-ese. Yet again. Kos diarist Eternal Hope has done some research into the "experts" cited by Cockburn, and the results are startling. (See also what Michael Byron has to say here.)

Cockburn relies on one Peter Sciaky, who has written: "I do not know a single geologist who believes that it is a man-made phenomenon." Not a single geologist? Even though the US Geological Survey and the American Geophysical Union support the idea? Sciaky can argue that the members of those two societies are wrong, but he cannot argue that they do not exist.
Next, Cockburn cites Zbigniew Jaworowski. But it turns out that googling up Jaworowski opens up an even bigger can of worms. Boojums points out 20 things that are wrong with one particular paper, but let us dwell on two -- one, that he lied about testifying before the Senate; records show that he did not. The second is that he is a LaRouchite and has been published in their literature.
Worse:
Next, Cockburn points out Dr. Patrick Michaels. But it turns out that he is funded by Exxon, who has funneled millions of dollars towards junk science theories.
Cockburn quotes Christopher Landsea, even though Landsea does accept the theory of man-made global warming. The main figure whose writings inform Cockburn's thinking on global warming is Dr. Martin Hertzberg.
This has prompted accusations from other writers that he has lowered himself to the level of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists he has himself roundly criticized for failing to provide real evidence of their claims... In fact, Dr. Hertzberg is a semi-retired explosives expert who does not claim to be a climatologist.
Perhaps the readers can refresh my memory. I seem to recall that there was a scandal, back in the early 1980s or late 1970s, involving pay-offs made to Cockburn by Arab interests who supported his anti-Israel stance. Is my memory correct? I cannot find confirmation on the net. (I've criticized Israel myself, but nobody ever paid me to do so.)

Another question, perhaps unrelated, perhaps not: Can someone tell me where Cockburn gets his egg-and-cheese money these days?

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Michael Crichton's recent novel "State of Fear" also pooh-poohs global warming (let alone whether humans have caused it). As one of his faithful readers, I was dismayed by his attack on the science of it. His story casts proponents of global warming as--literally--terrorists.

Supposedly Crichton has acted as a "science advisor" on the subject for Bush.

Hyperman said...

Who's surprised that some geologists don't want to admit the existence of "climate change". It's quite logical when you think about it. Who is a good supplier of contracts and funding for geologists ? the oil industry...

Joseph Cannon said...

Crichton has a history of associations that most don't know about. You should look up the real story behind "The Terminal Man"...

Anonymous said...

Said's close connection with Alexander Cockburn goes back to at least the early 1980s, when a scandal broke concerning an undisclosed $10,000 "grant." In 1982, the now-defunct Institute of Arab Studies secretly gave Cockburn a $10,000 "grant" to write a book on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.10 When the payment was exposed, Cockburn, who had never disclosed it to his editor or readers, was sacked from the Village Voice. Meanwhile his friend Edward Said, Chairman of the Board of the Institute of Arab Studies, under questioning arising out of the scandal, defended its work in the New York Times.
found here

# The incident was reported in the Boston Phoenix (January 10, 1984), New York Times (January 12, 1984), and Washington Post (January 13, 1984).

[20] "Village Voice Suspends Alexander Cockburn Over $10,000 Grant," Wall Street Journal, January 18,1984, p. 12.


more

from Finkelstein's site

Anonymous said...

I think Cockburn still has his Nation column, and then of couse, he has Counterpunch, which has subscribers to a delivered hard copy, and subscribers on line. He's also written several books.

BTW, Cockburn was about the first one to publish on the Mena AR airstrip in the Clinton gubernatorial era (during the Clinton presidency), and I believe what he reported was correct in that case. I think it's well established that Ollie and Max Gomez were active out of there, and that then-boy-wonder-governor Clinton helped cover things up there (whether or not he got the purported laundering fees through the Arkansas Development Agency).

My take is that Clinton was likely an Agency recruit out of Georgetown, and therefore part of the Bush machine organized in that same neighborhood. I'm influenced by Terry Reed's book on the subject, 'Compromised.'

sofla

Joseph Cannon said...

kc: I am very grateful for the reminder. Apologies for not being able to remember all of that. $10k isn't a whole lot of money, but AC still should have been up front about it.

sofla: I was following Cockburn's Mena material as it came out. At the time, I knew where he got a lot of his stuff...in fact, in a sense, I knew better than HE did. For example, when he tried to contact Mike Riconosciuto, he called one of the McMartin mothers (who happened to be a friend of mine; she knew Mikey and Mikey's wife -- long story, that), not knowing who she was; Cockburn had insulted the same woman in an earlier column. We got a good laugh out of that. Cockburn published Mikey's material without checking it out. Personally, I would not trust Mikey as far as I could throw him. (I had rejected him as a source well before he got tossed into the clink.)

Cockburn was also getting a lot of material from a fellow in Arkansas I will not name, who was falsely claiming connection to the Christic Institute. I was dealing with the same fellow before AC got to him and eventually decided that he was a fake.

Nothing AC published in those days was previously unknown to me; I had heard it all before, and rejected the allegations as insufficiently sourced. Cockburn's obsessive antipathy for Clinton had him publishing a lot of crapily sourced material. The Nation should have reined him in.

There were LOTS of fake Mena stories floating around in those days, most of them connecting the Clinton family with coke smuggling, and they all fell apart over time. Cockburn never apologized for trafficking in those lies. Basically, he fed the same shit to the left that the Arkansas Project and Sciafe fed to the right.

Cockburn also peddled many of the same lies that John Cummings did in his disgraceful book. I talked to Cummings (he would not remember the conversation) and wondered how he could be so foolish as to accept Reed at face value.

At the time, I called it the Three R syndrome -- the three Rs being Reed, Riconosciuto and Russbacher: All of them were spooked-up covert players in trouble with the law, and willing to say pretty much anything that would lessen their legal troubles.

My god, you don't really BELIEVE "Compromised," do you? I wish I still had the book around. I used to be able to pull out my copy, point to a page at random, and pick out some obvious howler. The one that sticks in my mind was the allegation that Mexican left-wing candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas was CIA -- even though he was actually a long-standing target of the Agency. Yeesh. Who's next? Che as CIA?

You probably don't know that the Reed story had been floating around for years before Cummings got to it, and that in the orignal version (published in Covert Action), Reed hardly mentioned Clinton at all. When Clinton achieved national stature, Reed's story grew like topsy, with Reed "recalling" all sorts of awful, awful things about Clinton that he never divulged before. Suddenly, the governor who had mere walk-on part became a spooked-up key player in a horrible conspiracy.

I got my own take on Mena from talking to a state investigator there, who was furious at George Bush pere (not Clinton) for deep-sixing the prosecution of Barry Seal. This source had amassed boxes of evidence on Mena, and he did NOT confirm any of the more bizarre allegations against Clinton that were floating around at the time, including the Park On Meter stuff and the allegations that Roger Clinton was involved with Seal.

sofla, your "take" on Clinton is nonsense. There is no evidence to back the idea. All you really have are rumors piled on rumors, and an emotion-based unwillingness to accept that you bought into disinfo. I know it is tempting to presume that "Well, there was so much smoke, there has to be some fire." In the 1990s, anyone who considered Clinton innocent of the bizarre charges leveled against him was felt to be lacking in sophistication.

This is a problem Joe Conason talks about in his invaluable book -- a pseudo-sophistication that allows people to say things like "Clinton was CIA" without any proof. "Well, everyone KNOWS..." "Oh, don't be naive..." I heard those phrases all the time from naifs who "knew" a whole buncha Scaife-shit.

Always remember: The neocon campaign against Clinton was of a piece with the later campaign to gin up war against Iraq.

Few would call ME insufficiently cynical, and I am not a huge fan of the Clintons. But I do insist on standards of evidence. I like to think that I try (usually) to maintain a sharp differentiation between rumor, surmise, and established fact. And, yes, I think those standards should be applied to Dubya as well as to Bill C.

Anonymous said...

No problem Joe- good to help out on a slow day. I also wanted to add- that although $10,000 does not amount to much in 2007- this "grant" was given in 1984. Still not a great deal of money, but in today's economy it would probably sum between $30,000-50,000...

I should also add that Cockburn has been disputing global warming for some time-

MARCH 15, 2001
ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Global Warming: The Great Delusion

movers & shakers of the naysayers of 2001

I had read a very good critique on Cockburn and global warming written in that time period--excellent background on him and the Wall Street Journal etc., but unfortunately- I can't find it today.

If I do later, I may email ya....


more Cockburn's inaccuracies found here

Anonymous said...

Joseph, you are an encyclopedia of knowledge in this sort of thing, and I'm glad to hear your take on the conspiracy theories about AR drug smuggling. Clinton does not come across as greed-driven, no matter how imperfect he might be, and I have always found it hard to imagine that he would involve himself with smuggling when he was cared about nothing so much as achieving the Presidency by making people like him.

Anonymous said...

Does Patrick Cockburn suffer from the same problems? I rely on him for a lot of my news about Iraq.