Salon.com > Alexander Cockburn

The end of evidence

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 19:30:00 +0000

(This essay appears on the CounterPunch website, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair.)

We're homing in on the tenth anniversary of the destruction of the Wall Street Trade Towers and the attack on the Pentagon. One in seven Americans and one in four among those aged 16-24 (so a recent poll commissioned by the BBC tells us) believe that there was a vast conspiracy in which the U.S. government was involved. But across those 10 years have the charges that it was an "inside job" -- a favored phrase of the self-styled "truthers" -- received any serious buttress?

The answer is no.

Did the Trade Towers fall because they were badly built as a consequence of corruption, incompetence, regulatory evasions by the Port Authority, and because they were struck by huge planes loaded with jet fuel. No, shout the conspiracists, they "pancaked" because Dick Cheney's agents -- scores of them -- methodically planted demolition charges in the preceding days, inserting the explosives in the relevant floors of three vast buildings (moving day after day among the unsuspecting office workers), then on 9/11 activating the detonators. It was a conspiracy of thousands, all of whom -- party to mass murder -- have held their tongues ever since.

Newsreal: Clinton: His nine lives aren't used up yet

Thu, 22 Jan 1998 20:00:00 +0000

It's always been "the end of the Clinton presidency" for as long as I can remember. Certainly it was over at least three times before Bill even got into the White House. Maybe four. It's hard to keep count.

The first official "end" came in 1988, with young Clinton's keynoter at the Dukakis convention in Atlanta. The speech was meant to establish him as a man of vision and promise, but it was so boring and so interminable Clinton became a national joke. He hung in there, took the punishment and thus was still on his feet by March 1992, all fresh for his second End, when the Gennifer Flowers scandal broke in the middle of the New Hampshire primary.

At the time this looked like the End to all Endings. Flowers was obviously telling the truth. Bill looked as guilty as sin. But Hillary carried him through.

By now the Ends were coming thick and furious: pot smoking, draft dodging, the first delicious fragrance of Whitewater. The Clinton presidency was, as a thing of bright promise, over by the time of the Democratic Convention in the summer of 1992.

Media Circus: the ethics of photojournalism

Thu, 04 Sep 1997 19:00:00 +0000

The ethics ... Let's stop right there. The moment I realized that the coupling of the noun "ethics" with the noun "photojournalism" was an exercise best reserved for the more innocent journalism schools came in Northern Ireland sometime in the mid-1970s. A photojournalist had been apprised that a package left in a public place contained a time bomb. He was waiting, his telephoto lens carefully focused, for someone to approach the package and get blown to pieces. The only question on his mind was whether he would be quick enough to get the moment of detonation, and not the smoke-covered aftermath.

All journalists are familiar with the process of psychic hardening: the first time you have to interview the bereaved and try to wheedle the high school yearbook out of them, the first time a subject doesn't exactly realize that he has not really and truly placed his confidences off the record. A decent journalist will try to resist this process, for the good reason that a conscienceless hack won't produce much that is truly worth reading.

The People's Pit Bull

Sat, 10 Feb 1996 17:33:00 +0000

All of a sudden the mainstream press has developed teeth and is busy sinking them into the leg of Patrick Buchanan. In the wake of the new Hampshire primary you can catch the unmistakable tang of panic among the pundits at the sight of a wild man at the gates. So now Buchanan is being depicted as the patron saint of racists, and himself a closet Nazi.

Buchanan is hard-edged in his rhetoric against abortion, same-sex marriages and kindred social
issues. But the panic of the elite derives more from his economic views. Hitherto, a consensus lay over the presidential race like a moist blanket. Between Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, Lamar Alexander and Steve Forbes there was an amiable agreement on the central political-economic issue -- free trade. Like most mainstream pundits, they regard it as an absolute virtue.

Buchanan does not. And for that reason -- far more than his snarls about gays -- he is regarded as dangerous. "Economists tend to hold Pat Buchanan's anti-NAFTA views with the sort of scorn biologists have for creationism, or the contempt doctors have for the theory that HIV is unrelated to AIDS," sneered reporter Paul Blustein in the Washington Post.