Parapolitical bits and pieces

Lobster Issue 7 (1985)

[…] sacking large numbers of its security personnel. (Daily Telegraph 8 October 1984). With this and Papandreou continuing to make anti-Nato noises, somewhere in the Pentagon the Greek- coup computer model will be getting a spin. A flare-up in Cyprus might be the first stage. (On Cyprus, Christopher Hitchens’ Cyprus (1984) is of interest, especially […]

How to Fix an Election

Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002)

[…] 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 […]

Reflections on the ‘cult of the offensive’

Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

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 […]

Kennedy assassination miscellany: Book Reviews

Lobster Issue 7 (1985)

[…] 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. […]

Blair and Israel

Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002)

[…] 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 […]

SNAFU in Dallas

Lobster Issue 23 (1992)

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

Briefly

Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9)

The Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein, (Penguin 2007) X Films: true confessions of a radical filmmaker Alex Cox, London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2008 Managing Britannia: Culture and Management in Modern Britain Robert Protherough and John Pick, imprint-academic.com, ISBN 978-097645539 Guns for Hire Tony Geraghty, Piatkus, 2008 A People’s History of American Empire: a … Read more

Body of Secrets and Echelon

Book cover
Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2)

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

Puppet Masters: the political use of terrorism in Italy

Lobster Issue 22 (1991)

[…] 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 […]

Our Friends in the North West: The Owen Oyston Affair

Lobster Issue 34 (Winter 1997)

[…] importance, likewise you should go for a substantial sum.’ Hounam said if Murrin acted to set up Oyston, he must be decisive: ‘It’s got to be the coup de grâce’ for Oyston. Murrin discussed his next meeting with Oyston in the taped conversation with Peter Hounam of the Sunday Times in which Hounam suggested […]

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