• Radical anti-American journalist
• Son of British Stalinist Claud Cockburn
• Writes for CounterPunch, Anti-War.com, and The Nation
• Refers to America’s War on Terror as the “Tenth Crusade”

Alexander Cockburn (pronounced COE-burn) should be put into the Smithsonian Museum as "the last Stalinist," wrote columnist George Will. Today Cockburn's unreconstructed Communist worldview is on display in at least 25 books and in the newsletter and website CounterPunch, which he and fellow radical Jeffrey St. Clair have co-edited since 1996.

Cockburn was born in Scotland in 1941, and, like his journalist brothers Patrick and Andrew, was the son of Patricia Cockburn, the third wife of the British Stalinist Claud Cockburn, after whom Alexander has modeled his life, ideology, and journalism. Raised in County Cork, Ireland, Alexander later studied at Oxford and worked as a London reporter, commentator, and editor at the Times Literary Supplement and the socialist New Statesman.

Cockburn became a permanent U.S. resident in 1973 and wrote articles for The Village Voice, The New York Review of Books, Esquire, and Harper's Magazine. During the 1980s he was a regular columnist for the Wall Street Journal. Today he writes for CounterPunch and produces three different columns each week -- one syndicated by the Los Angeles Times, a second for the anti-American website Anti-War.com, and a third for The Nation called "Beat the Devil," whose name derives from a novel written by his father and later turned into a Hollywood film.

Books which Alexander Cockburn has authored or co-authored include Idle Passion: Chess and the Dance of Death (1975); Corruptions of Empire (1988); and Al Gore: A User's Manual (2000). Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, Cockburn has referred to America's war on terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq as the "Tenth Crusade," a term calculated to inflame the passions of Muslim readers.

As a tag at the end of his April 2004 CounterPunch tribute to his father (who died in 1981), titled "Claud Cockburn at 100: The Greatest Radical Journalist of His Age," Alexander Cockburn wrote: "And being a great connoisseur of propaganda techniques, Claud would certainly have enjoyed CounterPunch's savage new dissection of the propaganda blitzes surrounding the [American] Empire's attacks on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia…."