The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] down mentioned it at every opportunity as proof of the Sandinistas’ immorality. “High level officials” of both Nicaragua and Cuba “have been personally implicated” in drug smuggling, Reagan said during the 1985 debates over contra aid (Reagan 1987:673–76). The State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy, which managed the administration’s public-relations campaign against the Sandinistas, […]

Knightley

Lobster Issue

[…] 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 […]

Knightley

Lobster Issue

[…] 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 […]

The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong about Islam by Peter Oborne

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022)

[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 […]

Transnationalised Repression; Parafascism and the U.S.

Lobster Issue 12 (1986)

[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 […]

View from Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] 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 […]

Dark Quadrant: Organized Crime, Big Business, and the Corruption of American Democracy From Truman to Trump by Jonathan Marshall

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[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 […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 73 (Summer 2017)

[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, […]

Suddenly in September?

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[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 […]

The CIA, torture, history and American exceptionalism

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015)

[PDF file]: […] democracy, the Shah. Jimmy Carter took the blame for that, and America launched itself into twenty years of living in a fairy tale world narrated by Ronald Reagan, followed by ten years of fear happily stoked by the very people who’d sold America the fairy-tale Kool-Aid in the first place. 1 Officially the United […]

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