The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War by Craig Whitlock

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: […] that many senior U.S. officials privately viewed the war as an unmitigated disaster, contradicting a chorus of rosy public statements from officials at the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department, who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan.’ The various war plans ‘had fatal flaws’ and the […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] Alliance and Daszak declined to comment for this story.’51 This article did not refer to the report that EcoHealth Alliance had received nearly $40 million from the Pentagon which it had tried to ‘bury’ in its accounts.52 So: the man whose organisation is funded by the US military and who has been working with […]

Explaining the Iraq War; Counterfactual Theory, Logic and Evidence by Frank P. Harvey

Lobster Issue 67 (Summer 2014)

[PDF file]: […] regime in perception management and propaganda. This is downplayed by Harvey, as is the avowedly revolutionary transformation in US strategy brought in by Donald Rumsfeld to the Pentagon. The centrepiece here was a declaratory policy of, if needs be, preemptive war.5 Harvey himself, and many other observers, agree that a likely Gore administration approach […]

View from Bridge 88 copy

Lobster Issue

The view from the bridge Robin Ramsay As always, thanks to Nick Must and Garrick Alder for editorial help with Lobster. *new* Broken-down Blighty We’ve had at least a century of essays and books bemoaning British decline. This a nicely surveyed in Andrew Gamble’s ‘Britain’s eternal decline’ in the New Statesman in September last year.1 […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 91 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] let alone all the still secret stuff – this is sort of surprising. But perhaps it hasn’t been trying. Perhaps the large increase in funding for the Pentagon bought off the ‘deep state’. * Related to the above, I asked Google AI for use of the term ‘deep state’ and inter alia it offered […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] the Dog, a ‘threat’ from Albania is created. In the satire-proof America of 2013 the threat is North Korea. The Washington Post reported on 15 March: ‘The Pentagon announced Friday that it would strengthen the country’s defenses against a possible attack by nuclear-equipped North Korea, fielding additional missile systems to protect the West Coast […]

Money laundering in British football

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020)

[PDF file]: […] Bakiyev owed the state over $80,000,000 in unpaid taxes on fuel supplied to US military aircraft at the Manas air base when it was leased to the Pentagon for operations in Afghanistan. The Prosecutor-General said that Maksim Bakiyev diverted $35,000,000 of a $300,000,000 Russian loan for the construction of the Kambarata-1 hydro-electric project into […]

View from

Lobster Issue

[…] let alone all the still secret stuff – this is sort of surprising. But perhaps it hasn’t been trying. Perhaps the large increase in funding for the Pentagon bought off the ‘deep state’. * Related to the above, I asked Google AI for use of the term ‘deep state’ and inter alia it offered […]

Iraq and intelligence

Lobster Issue 65 (Summer 2013)

[PDF file]: […] the required ‘intelligence’ led the neo-conservatives who were leading the push to attack Iraq to create the Office of Special Plans (OSP), a little unit within the Pentagon, which was conceived by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense. OSP’s role was to find or manufacture intelligence which would provide the pretext for invasion. […]

View from

Lobster Issue

[…] let alone all the still secret stuff – this is sort of surprising. But perhaps it hasn’t been trying. Perhaps the large increase in funding for the Pentagon bought off the ‘deep state’. * Related to the above, I asked Google AI for use of the term ‘deep state’ and inter alia it offered […]

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