[…] of the inability of Labour and Democratic politicians to look reality in the face. Tunes and pipers Phil Chamberlain alerted me the reference in the blog of BBC Chief Political Correspondent Nick Robinson to Gordon Brown reading Frances Stonor Saunders’ Who Paid The Piper?, her long account of the CIA’s ‘cultural war’ in the […]
[…] country’s most expensive PR firms.’ (The Journalist, November 2007). Declaration of Interests: I am a supporter of the Campaign for Press & Broadcasting Freedom which supports the BBC. See Independent on Sunday, 16 September 2007 See admission by former SIS Chief Sir Richard Dearlove of sympathy with what he called ‘initial use’ of rendition […]
[…] them up the Anglo-Americans assembled an ‘invasion fleet’ on the English east coast and launched 3215 fighter and bomber sorties against ‘invasion targets’.(3) On 17 August the BBC announced ‘the liberation of occupied countries has begun’. But the Germans did not believe any of it. Indeed they actually moved some divisions out of France […]
[…] of the bug was for fear that Stalker might discover that MI5 had also bugged the car in which McTerr, Toman and Burns were killed. According to BBC reporter Chris Moore, ‘the security forces involved in the covert surveillance operation were able to listen to the conversation going on in the car.’ (21) An […]
Tony Blair will be remembered not just for the slaughter in Iraq, and the subsequent collapse of Labour in Scotland in face of a resurgent SNP, but as the Labour leader who could have forged common links across Europe but chose to side with one of the continent’s most despised figures. Charles Clarke, one of […]
Introduction There are a couple of interesting chapters in Chapman Pincher’s recent The Truth About Dirty Tricks, (Sidgwick and Jackson, 1991), especially the one about Harold Wilson’s ‘spymaster’, the late George Wigg; but, despite the usual shower of interesting fragments, mostly it is junk. Pincher’s primary strategy is clear enough. During the mid 1970s bureaucratic […]
[…] study: Murphy’s Law……. Notes Robert Verkaik, ‘The Freedom of Information Act misused’, The Independent, 22 March 2007. The complete text can be read at . For a BBC version of the original ‘Israeli art students’ story from 2002 see . Or, rather, don’t see that URL for it evoked a 404 when I tried […]
Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World Mark Curtis London: Vintage, 2003; p/b, £7.99 This latest analysis of British foreign policy by Mark Curtis could not be better timed. With more than a million Britons on the streets of London protesting against the Iraq war earlier this year there is a potentially large […]
IRD, home and away The creation of the Information Policy unit in HQ Northern Ireland in 1971 may have been the last occasion on which the classic IRD psy-war operation was created. Evidence of previous examples is hard to find, but skimming through Charles Foley’s Legacy of Strife: Cyprus from rebellion to civil war (Penguin, […]
[…] twenty years ago Ken Livingstone took a sustained interest until the researcher who was generating the questions he was asking in the House of Commons joined the BBC. Now we have Norman Baker, the Liberal-Democrat MP, who has kind of inherited the ‘awkward squad’ mantle from Tam Dalyell. He has had a short Commons […]
