[PDF file]: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War 1 to 9/11 Kathryn S. Olmsted Oxford University Press, 2009, £12.99, p/b Robin Ramsay If I was going to be generous I would say ‘Close but no cigar’ to professor Olmsted’s account. She has at any rate identified one of the central issues, expressed in her final paragraph: […]
[PDF file]: […] Acknowledgements (p. viii): ‘This is a history of things that did not officially happen using primary sources that few realise exist.’ If the subheads are familiar – Iran, Suez, Oman, Yemen, Malaya, Indonesia, British Guyana, Northern Ireland etc. – most of the content is new, thanks to an enormous effort at official file reading […]
[PDF file]: […] encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject. It is not the author’s intention to prove who was responsible for the fate of Flight 103, though he is clear that Iran, Syria and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command were involved. But he leaves us in no doubt that the culprit is not […]
[PDF file]: […] been receiving payments from Iraq.7 8 Moreover, by 2008-10 it became abundantly clear that US troops in Iraq served Israel’s security needs – as a bulwark against Iran – judging by the panicked response from Israel and its US supporters as the US withdrawal loomed.79 Given its long history of support for the Jewish […]
[PDF file]: […] to overcome the outrage of the international community. Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz had the answer: go after the so-called state sponsors of terrorism, namely Iraq, Syria, and Iran. A cabal headed by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith, and Gingrich formulated a strategy to crush Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s military and financial support networks in […]
[…] in ‘35,900,145,035 known records breached’.17 Bubbles Consortiumnews carried an interesting piece by Patrick Lawrence on the death of Moorhead Kennedy Jr., one of the U.S. hostages in Iran in 1979/80.18 Kennedy Jnr.’s experience as a hostage led him to understand and empathise with his Iranian captors and, on his return to the US, he […]
The view from the bridge Robin Ramsay As always, thanks to Nick Must and Garrick Alder for editorial help with Lobster. *new* By their omissions . . . Michael Gove, the outgoing Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, passes for an intellectual in today’s Conservative Party. In May he delivered a speech […]
[PDF file]: […] covert operation aimed at Albania is a case in point. Even more remarkable is the fact that when the Labour government decided not to intervene militarily in Iran after the nationalisation of the British- owned oil industry by the nationalist government (because of shortage of troops and US pressure), they instead authorised a covert […]
[PDF file]: […] Carlson Tonight’. (p. 127) Even more astonishing, although Meadows does not recount this episode, on another occasion, in June 2019, when Trump was considering air strikes against Iran, the President actually phoned Carlson to ask his advice on whether to go ahead and decided to follow the Fox News correspondent’s urging not to authorise […]
[PDF file]: […] the intelligence community, and President Biden, all of whom, notes Glenn Greenwald, have declared that “the gravest menace to American national security” is not Russia, ISIS, China, Iran, or North Korea, but “‘domestic extremists’ in general—and far-right white supremacist groups in particular.” The new information regulators failed to win over vaccine skeptics, convince MAGA […]
