Wishing and hoping I met Tony Benn only once, while researching Smear! He’s a lovely man with a big blind spot about the politics of the early 1980s in general and the Militant Tendency in particular. Here’s Benn in the course of an appreciation of Arthur Scargill on his standing down as President of … Read more
[…] California; and a little petty crime. This is the ‘alternative society’ of the time – or a version of it – but Blum’s obsessions are politics not drugs or rock music. Somehow Blum got a nasty – on the evidence of this book – a terminal dose of the desire to look the reality […]
[…] a picture of him with Oliver North. I mean, he got very involved with us at one time. He liked the fast life. He liked to do drugs. He was big into racing cars. He liked women and he raised money for us among loyal Tories in England. That money would then get funnelled […]
Policing London No 13 July/August Includes 6 pages on the miners, which compliments GLC report (see below); two page summary of recent police harassment of gays; summary of changes to date in Police and Criminal Evidence Bill. Still the best thing of its kind extant. £1 per issue: from Police Committee Support Unit (DG/PCS/602) County … Read more
edited by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones and Christopher Andrew Frank Cass, London/Portland, Oregon, 1997, £15.00 pb There are two kinds of books about the CIA: there are those like William Blum’s, advertised in this issue, which see the CIA simply as part of the US post-war empire, the sharp end of imperial enforcement, somewhere between the … Read more
David Black London:Vision Paperbacks, 20001, £9.99 This a revised edition of the book which was reviewed in Lobster 35. I’m not sure how new it is. I no longer have the original edition but this seems pretty similar to it. What is new is some material on the activities of Steve Abrams, one of the … Read more
[…] of his studies based on his participation in programmes carried out in 1950s.(23) He described biological and hypothetical possibilities regarding psi and also underlined the effects of drugs – consistent with the CIA’s mind control programs and findings of that era.(24) Puharich had a keen interest in parapsychology. In 1956, he brought Peter Horkus, […]
Police use of computers Unreported in the daily papers in this country, Merseyside County Council recently decided to refuse the funding for Merseyside Police’s criminal intelligence computer. (Detailed account in Computing 13th September 1984) This is the most significant step to date in the struggle to get some kind of control established over policing methods. … Read more
[…] classic Tory background. Eton/Oxford, inherited Beaverbrook wealth, writing speeches for Selwyn Lloyd (the Chancellor of the Exchequer) at 19 etc. He was also a libertarian, calling for drugs to be decriminalised, conducting numerous high society affairs and surviving an Official Secrets trial in 1969, having revealed too much about whom Britain was backing in […]
Conspiracy, Conspiracy Theories and Conspiracy Research Robin Ramsay ‘The unexpected and dramatic death of the famous, whether statesmen like John F Kennedy, or media stars like Marilyn Monroe, invariably give rise to conspiracy theories.’ Thus Cambridge historian, Christopher Andrew, during his disgraceful hatchet job on Hugh Thomas’ books about Rudolph Hess for BBC2 ‘s Timewatch … Read more
