Compromised Reporting Taking its cue from a powerful network of far-right radio commentators, the American press insists on noting only those financial scandals which don’t sully ultra-conservative politicians. Of either party. For example: Rush Limbaugh, who has become the Republican Party’s Goebbels, loudly applauded Clinton’s appointment of Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, an appalling Texas (Democrat) […]
[…] are palpably beginning to fail. The US has a constitution that still permits lurches of adjustment to changed conditions – we think of Jackson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, even Reagan – but the British system seems to offer us a different sort of lurch, from crisis to crisis with one step forward and two steps back. […]
[…] concludes that many (including Ben-Menashe) were lying or exaggerating in part. Despite this he concludes that the core of the story, that the in-coming Republican team round Reagan did a deal of some kind with the Iranians, is true. If the gun isn’t smoking, it is still warm. Parry paints a deeply depressing picture […]
[…] the covert war against Nicaragua involved a campaign of terror waged by CIA mercenaries that was nevertheless presented to the world as a liberation struggle. President Ronald Reagan celebrated ‘the contras’ as men in the same mould as the ‘Founding Fathers’ of the United States. This did not stop him trying to subvert the […]
[…] scoured beneath the public relations veneer of U.S foreign policy and become, sometimes in partnership with Noam Chomsky, the scourge of its conventional wisdom. In the early Reagan years we had an expose of the ‘Bulgarian plot to kill Pope John Paul II’ — a critical event in the winding up of the Second […]
[…] the the basic problem we all have. X knows Y, who knows Z. Is this significant? Is there a connection between X and Z? For example: the Reagan White House supports the appointment of a former European war criminal to run one of the Republican Party’s minor committees. If this does not mean ‘Reagan […]
[…] Newsweek. The resistance to his research he met among the editors and managers of both organisations leads into his second theme: the largely successful attempt by the Reagan administration to bully and/or sweet talk the US media into not looking too closely at what it was doing in the Middle East and Central America. […]
Colin Wallace On the Colin Wallace front, the big event since issue 17 has been Paul Foot’s book, Who Framed Colin Wallace? (Macmillan, 1989). With this book Paul Foot has re-researched and synthesised all the previous work and produced what is likely to remain the definitive account of Wallace’s biography, his allegations and – most […]
[…] Circle’s January 1980 meeting: in a follow-up meeting in June the same year, the Circle’s attention was turned towards the American Presidential election that was to bring Reagan to power. Minutes of the meeting of the Pinay Circle held on 28th and 29th June 1980 in Zurich. A further meeting of the Circle was […]
[…] September 1, was riveting. His voice occasionally breaking with emotion, Shultz declared, ‘The Soviets tracked the commercial airliner for some two and a half hours.’ President Ronald Reagan soon appeared to add, ‘This was the Soviet Union against the world and the moral precepts that guide human relations among people everywhere. It was an […]
