A journalist since the early 1980s, Cobain was the senior investigative reporter for British newspaper
The Guardian until August 2018. He has reported on six wars, including the
war in the Gulf, and the
wars in
Afghanistan and
Iraq. In September 2005, he revealed that the
British government had been supporting the
CIA's
"extraordinary rendition" programme. In 2006, he joined the
BNP as part of an
undercover investigation, and ended up being appointed
central London organiser for the party, a position he swiftly resigned. Cobain published a book in 2012,
Cruel Britannia, which documented the British government's use of torture in the last 70 years.
David Hare described it as "one of the most shocking and persuasive books of the year",
Peter Oborne in
The Spectator said, "Carefully researched and well-written… [Cobain] should be congratulated for addressing a subject which much of the rest of Fleet Street has been determined to ignore", and the
Sunday Times identified it as a "must-read" and declared it, "a fine study of the role Britain has played in the business of torture". The book won the Paddy Power/Total Politics Debut Political Book of the Year award. Throughout his journalistic career, Cobain has taken a close interest in
the Troubles and the legacy of the conflict. As a result, in 2012, he was retained as an expert witness by lawyers seeking to overturn the murder conviction of
Liam Holden, who had been the last man to be sentenced to hang in Britain before his sentence was commuted to life. Also in 2012, Cobain investigated allegations of collusion between Northern Irish police and Loyalist
paramilitary gunmen who had shot dead six men in a bar in the village of
Loughinisland in 1994. A subsequent report by the
Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland,
Al Hutchinson, confirmed the findings of Cobain. In 2014, Cobain drew upon contemporary police records, witness statements and pathologists' reports to reconstruct the events of the
Ballymurphy shootings in
west Belfast in August 1971. A fresh inquest into the deaths was held between late 2018 and early 2020, and on 11 May 2021, this coroner's inquest found that the 10 civilians killed were innocent, and that the use of lethal force by the British Army was "not justified". The 11th death was not part of the inquest. , Cobain was a journalist at the
Middle East Eye. ==Rejection from the DSEI==