[…] was founded by David McMichael as the organ of the Association of National Security Alumni after he had resigned from the CIA over its politicisation under Ronald Reagan. It is worth remembering that the Reagan administration actually tried to persuade its population that the U.S. was threatened – and threatened militarily. 9 4 industrial […]
[PDF file]: […] 1 2 In London, Frum will be meeting up with his old friend and director of Policy Exchange, Dean Godson.1 3 Godson was a member of the Reagan Administration for which Frum campaigned as a volunteer in 1980. Godson, the son of former US labour attaché in London Joe Godson,1 4 was himself memorably […]
[PDF file]: The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong about Islam Peter Oborne London: Simon & Schuster, 2022, £25 (h/b) John Booth If you need a revival of spirit and energy this summer, Peter Oborne’s ambitious new book could help top up your political Vitamin D. For in its telling of some of the history […]
[PDF file]: […] South Africa. The restrained optimism of the essay’s conclusions, written in the first year of the Carter presidency, may sound a little odd after six years of Reagan. Support for drug-running criminals has moved from being the dark underside of U.S. foreign policy to (in the case of the Nicaraguan Contras) being at that […]
[…] the 1980s via the Mena airstrip, when Bill Clinton was governor and controlled the state police. But the story goes further. Mena was the hub for the Reagan administration’s secret operation to supply Contra rebels in Nicaragua, which interested me because I had spent four years covering the Sandinista Revolution and the guerrilla insurgencies […]
[PDF file]: […] American conservatism ‘has delivered much more harm than good, from the Iraq War to the financial crisis to the Trump presidency’. (p. 6) Frum admits that Nixon, Reagan and both the Bushes ‘may sometimes have drawn power from deep and dark energies in the American soul’, but they were Paul McGuire and Troy Anderson, […]
[PDF file]: Dark Quadrant Organized Crime, Big Business, and the Corruption of American Democracy From Truman to Trump Jonathan Marshall New York and London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021, $29.95/£22.95, h/b Robin Ramsay In 1958, the US attorney for the southern district of New York told an audience of his peers: ‘In this country today, we have a […]
[PDF file]: […] the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), was heavily involved with the IRC, as was William Casey, who went on to become CIA director under Ronald Reagan. Of particular interest is John Whitehead, a former cochair of Goldman Sachs, who was IRC treasurer from 1960 until 1979, when he became its president, a […]
[PDF file]: […] useless and powerless (or, for some on the libertarian right and the Marxist left, a source of evil and tyranny). This wasn’t how things looked before the Reagan and Thatcher-led counterrevolution. Yes, the world has changed since then. But if it came to a serious conflict between a major multinational and the UK government, […]
[PDF file]: […] complicity? Does the closeness of the CIA to Pakistan, with its intelligence service’s ties to the Afghanistan ‘freedom fighters’ dating back at least to the Carter and Reagan years, point in a slightly different direction? Many Israel-supporting figures around Bush thought only a ‘catastrophic and catalysing event – like a new Pearl Harbour’ would […]
