And Alexander Cockburn, the longtime journalist, columnist and publisher of the progressive website of news and analysis, CounterPunch, has died at the age of 71. Cockburn was a prolific writer who authored columns over the years for the Village Voice, the Wall Street Journal and The Nation magazine. In a 2007 interview with C-Span, Cockburn said he believes liberal U.S. media pundits who backed the U.S. invasion of Iraq should go to Baghdad to hear from the war’s victims.

Alexander Cockburn: “From 2003 to 2007, this country is gone, and people’s lives irretrievably. I mean millions of lives destroyed. It would have been better if they had not gone in. So I had said I’d like these people to be in Baghdad, you know, having to answer a few very serious questions from these poor women and family people constantly searching for their own. So I think we — I say at the end of that piece, it was the people accused of being the hard left, or the left, and also the libertarians — we should not forget the libertarians, people like on antiwar.com — who were against the war, clearly, and said this is a terrible idea.”

Democracy Now! interviewed Cockburn several times over the years.