As a number of people have pointed out, in the first 5 Lobsters – something like 100,000 words – there has been hardly a mention of the Soviet and Soviet satellite intelligence activities. There are reasons. No-one has offered us anything on this subject, and neither of us (ie Ramsay/Dorril) know much about it. What […]
[…] adequate and timely intelligence of Argentinian intentions concerning the Falkland Islands”. As a thesis it has its antecedents. Peter Dale Scott (and others) have demonstrated that the Pentagon Papers were systematically skewed to show the CIA in a favourable light vis a vis the Vietnam War – always right, and ignored by the politicians, […]
[…] run from the White House. In the face of a congressional ban on American aid he relied on a corrupt Iranian arms merchant (Albert Hakim), a scandal-tainted Pentagon officer (Richard Secord), a shady CIA veteran connected to the drug-linked Nugan Hand Bank (Thomas Clines), a convicted Syrian arms-and-drugs dealer (Manzer al-Kassar), a fugitive wanted […]
Nicholson Baker London: Vintage books, 2002, pb, £7.99 See note (1) In the third voyage of Gulliver’s Travels, Swift describes a visit to the Academy of Lagado, where ‘Projectors’ work at bizarre schemes like making silk from spiders’ webs. Whenever they meet problems, rather than admitting the futility of their efforts they clamour for […]
[…] and, of course, many of God’s children find ways to fake them. An absolute classic of the genre was reported by AP on 6 June 2001: ‘The Pentagon agency charged with rooting out fraud destroyed documents and substituted fakes to win a passing grade in an audit of its own operations, according to an […]
See Note (1) Introduction In The Wealth of Nations, a book supposed to underpin modern free-market philosophies, Adam Smith thought that the separation of management from ownership would inevitably gave rise to negligence and corruption. The owners of Enron were the shareholders, represented by pension funds, banks and trust funds. The chief managers of Enron […]
Mr Tony was a spook? Issue 7 of Larry O’Hara’s Note from the Borderland () includes a section from the Anne Machon and David Shayler book, Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers (reviewed in Lobster 49), which was apparently dropped by the publisher. The key section is this, from an unnamed MI5 officer: ‘Blair was recruited early […]
[…] Gaulle in this period. But it is difficult to believe that any of the powerful elements in the U.S. state apparatus — the intelligence agencies or the Pentagon, for example — would have felt it necessary to ambush Kennedy if they just wanted to get rid of him or change some of his policies. […]
Bernard Porter London: Yale University Press, 2006, £18.99. h/b Porter is one of our leading historians of the British empire. He is also a friend of mine. Generally I wouldn’t try and review a friend’s book but this arrived too close to my deadline to find someone else – and someone more competent – […]
[…] and remains, far more imperialistic than the West has generally been, and that it was this that inspired the Al-Qaeda attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, rather than any resentment against American aggression towards Moslem countries. In other words, 9/11 would have happened even without those US bases in Saudi Arabia. Islam […]
