Lost plot After Lobster 35 I received a long letter from John Pilger, followed by a revised version of it, complaining about my review of his recent book, Hidden Agendas in 35. With the second version came a note asking me to publish his letter without comment. I replied that I was happy to publish … Read more
[…] intelligence community – as well as Source #69, who is a retired official of the United States Customs Department and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (now the Drug Enforcement Administration), and Source #70, who is a former Southeast Asian Border Police officer, and Source #71, who is a retired CIA official […]
[…] even to some extent fraud, for more legitimate business. This last statement should be qualified by saying that legitimate business hides dealings in illegitimate commodities, such as drugs. A few serious professional criminals who saw the sign of the times moved into new technology. However, I think that one could say that a great […]
[…] regimes which tolerate or participate in the drug traffic? The last decade has seen two more, Afghanistan and Kosovo, in which the new wrinkle is that the drugs trade co-exists with Muslim Jihadists. ‘Afghanistan is now the world’s largest exporter of heroin, and the opium used to produce it, supplying 87 percent of the […]
[…] pp2/3 of the P.D. Scott essay in Lobster 12. Anslinger was the primary originator of the basic US foreign policy move of accusing your enemies of running drugs into the otherwise innocent bodies of the US citizenry (China, Cuba, Nicaragua), while allowing your political allies (KMT, anti-Castro Cubans, Contras) to fund-raise by dope-dealing. This […]
[…] on the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which operated out of a base in Cyprus. Coleman alleges that the DEA is supervising, and the DIA is manipulating, the drugs and arms trafficking which is a part of the currency of power in the Syria-dominated part of Lebanon, as well as Syria itself. He tells us […]
Before he went on the run, in the wake of Ernie Elliot’s murder in 1972, former British soldier and UDA member David Fogel gave an interview to the London Times.(1) In it he denounced sectarianism and said that he hoped that one day ‘the Official IRA and the UDA would work together, because both organisations … Read more
[…] the following sentence of the author’s: ‘Under a top-secret CIA research project, code-named MK-Ultra, British and American scientists began carrying out experiments using psychedelic and other mind-altering drugs.’ That bit is true (though the British role was tiny, and only as subcontractors). But the next paragraph states: ‘By the mid 1960s the project resulted […]
Henry McDonald and Jim Cusack London: Penguin, 2004, £12.99, p/b Henry McDonald’s highly readable recent book with Jim Cusack on the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) is everything that other recent offerings on the subject were not. On the one hand, it avoids the kind of borderline homo-erotic sensationalism, in which the atrocities of self-serving … Read more
[…] clear that the mainstream media have themselves often championed doubtful and sometimes ludicrous fantasies. In the 1950s it was widely accepted in the American media that the drugs trade was driven by a conspiracy between Chinese communists 6 and organised crime sometimes in the form of left-wing trade unions 7 in the […]
