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 […]
[…] unambiguous proof that absolutely nothing will deter us, that the entire world arrayed against us cannot stop us.’ (p. 286) Let us not forget that the current Pentagon doctrine is called ‘full spectrum dominance’ and that the US currently has over 1000 military bases around the world. In his recent piece on the subject […]
[…] pull together and examine the anomalies in the 9-11 story. And there is a ton of them. (1) the non-interception of the planes; the hole in the Pentagon apparently too small to have been made by the plane said to have done it; the strange collapse of the buildings themselves; the hijacker passport being […]
The Shadow Warriors Bradley F. Smith (Andre Deutsch, London 1983) The network of close personal connections established in O.S.S. (the fore-runner of the CIA) “helped bridge some of the widest gaps in American society and could be called upon in cases of need long after the war ended. For example, when in 1964 former British […]
