[…] them to vote for Tony Blair. In the run-up to the 1997 general election, Blair’s win in this popular media event would have been a valuable propaganda coup, making this something of a ‘double whammy’ in the world of influencing the democratic process. (The coked-up monkeys, similarly, were a rigged sample evidently intended to […]
Introduction This, as some of Lobster‘s older readers will recognise, is a re-write of the essay I wrote on the JFK thing in Lobster 2, published on the 20th anniversary of the assassination in November 1983. This rewrite was written for the first issue of Casablanca, but it failed to appear. In JFK the Costner/Garrison … Read more
[…] Pine Gap project at Alice Springs, the public disclosure of which so infuriated Ted Shackley, the CIA’s East Asian chief, that he set in motion a virtual coup d’etat. Relevant to the Kennedy assassination is the fact that the prime contractor for the Pine Gap base in 1966 was Collins Radio, of Dallas, Texas. […]
[…] the Sunday Telegraph 25 July 1999 that Blair tried to make Levy a Minister in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). This would have been a stunning coup by the Israelis but it was resisted by the Foreign Secretary, at the behest, presumably, of the traditionally pro-Arab FCO. Instead Levy became Blair’s personal envoy […]
[…] produced a book which is practically falling over itself to tell ever more astounding (and dreadful) tales of plots, “red’ and “black’ terror run by spooks, bombings, coup plans, assassinations and all the other goodies the Americans bought with the 100 million dollars or so they have spent there since the war. On second […]
I was a student here (1) from 1971-74 doing a social science degree; but more importantly, between 1976 and 1982 I was on the dole much of the time and spent most of my days in the library here, educating myself in post-war history, American history, what was available then about the intelligence services – … Read more
Body of Secrets: How America’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ Eavesdrop on the World James Bamford, London: Century, 2001, £20 Report on the existence of a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications (ECHELON interception system) Rapporteur: Gerhard Schmid European Parliament, 11 July 2001 [Online in Adobe Acrobat PDF Format ~1Mb] In … Read more
[…] to shame. He should also be given credit for quoting KGB files, in so doing discarding cold war paranoia (still prevalent if the official reaction to Costello’s coup is any guide) in the cause of sound scholarship. Despite all this it is difficult to avoid finishing the book without feeling disappointed. There are some […]
[…] establishment media praised Hitler and Mussolini in the most fulsome terms. This admiration was widely shared by business leaders. A small group of industrialists even plotted a coup against Roosevelt that would have established a Major General from the Marines, Smedley Butler, as a pro-business dictator. One of the most important and long-lasting legacies […]
Reflections on the ‘cult of the offensive’: pre-emptive war, the Israel lobby and US military Doctrine In our book, Spies, Lies and the War on Terror,(1) a central theme is the ascendancy of pre-emptive war doctrine in US military strategy and its impact on public perceptions and the construction of political narrative. A parallel and […]
