Kumbaya Watch: Conspiracy Cockburn
The latest in foolish commentary.

By Ross Douthat
October 18, 2001 2:00 p.m.

riting in the New York Press, Alexander Cockburn offers a typically arch perspective on events. His column walks a fine line: He litters it with snarky digs at America ("We're passing from appalling human loss and suffering, live in the front yard of the media capital of the world, to the traditional parameters of imperial retribution") and the Bush administration (or "the regime in power," in Cockburn's felicitous phrase); yet he stays away from Sontag/Kingsolver territory by cheerfully predicting a relatively quick and cost-free American victory in Afghanistan.

"The bin Laden video of raggedy fellows in a cave," he writes, "looked to me more like a political obituary than a fearsome call to arms. His dark day is done, and it surely won't be long, if the moment hasn't already come, before he's either sitting up there with Allah and the hour's, or writhing in the seventh circle of hell, depending on which God you believe in." The seventh circle, the ever-so-literate Cockburn notes, is reserved for "those who offer violence against self (the suicide bombers), violence against neighbors, violence against God ... As a seventh-circle man, bin Laden is scheduled by Dante to be buried in burning sand forever, which ... is his natural habitat anyway."

But then this insouciant perspective on events collapses, suddenly, when Cockburn turns to the matter of bioterrorism and produces this pricelessly paranoid thought:

Ken McCarthy, our CounterPunch man in Tallahassee, writes the following thought-provoking note: FACTS: 1. The man who died of Anthrax last week was a photo editor at The Sun, a tabloid. 2. A fellow employee there has been recently diagnosed with Anthrax as well. 3. Inhaled Anthrax, the type these men have contracted, is exceedingly rare (only 18 cases in the US in the last 100 years) 4. Anthrax spores have been found in their workplace. The building which houses The Sun, The Globe and The National Enquirer has been closed as a result. 5. American Media Inc., the owner of The Sun etc., has connections to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. 5. Boca Raton, the home of The Sun, is also the location of a plant owned by Product Ingredient Technologies, a company with links to the Bush Sr. White House that manufactured chemical-warfare agents that were exported to Iraq with U.S. government approval in the late 1980s.

Thought-provoking indeed — if you happen to be the sort who believes in CIA conspiracies to use chemical-warfare agents left over from our Iraqi shipments to kill off tabloid writers. Or maybe it's the nefarious corporate bigwigs at Product Ingredient Technologies, trying out their latest batch of anthrax on unsuspecting civilians. Or maybe it's the Iraqis, using the materials that we gave them to kill off the very people who shipped the chemical-warfare agents over in the first place. Because as we all know, there's nothing Saddam Hussein loves more than delicious irony — especially if the irony is visible only to the likes of Alexander Cockburn.

No word on whether Oliver Stone will be hiring Cockburn as the screenwriter for his next paranoia-laced project. Frankly, Kumbaya Watch thinks it would be a match made in heaven. Or in hell, perhaps — specifically the eighth circle, which, as Cockburn himself notes, was reserved for those guilty of "complex and treacherous fraud."

Although calling such tired and trivial conspiracy theories "complex" might be giving them, and Cockburn, far more credit than they deserve.