Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6)
[…] regimes which tolerate or participate in the drug traffic? The last decade has seen two more, Afghanistan and Kosovo, in which the new wrinkle is that the drugs trade co-exists with Muslim Jihadists. ‘Afghanistan is now the world’s largest exporter of heroin, and the opium used to produce it, supplying 87 percent of the […]
Lobster Issue 28 (December 1994)
[…] on the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which operated out of a base in Cyprus. Coleman alleges that the DEA is supervising, and the DIA is manipulating, the drugs and arms trafficking which is a part of the currency of power in the Syria-dominated part of Lebanon, as well as Syria itself. He tells us […]
Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6)
Before he went on the run, in the wake of Ernie Elliot’s murder in 1972, former British soldier and UDA member David Fogel gave an interview to the London Times.(1) In it he denounced sectarianism and said that he hoped that one day ‘the Official IRA and the UDA would work together, because both organisations … Read more
Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005)
[…] the following sentence of the author’s: ‘Under a top-secret CIA research project, code-named MK-Ultra, British and American scientists began carrying out experiments using psychedelic and other mind-altering drugs.’ That bit is true (though the British role was tiny, and only as subcontractors). But the next paragraph states: ‘By the mid 1960s the project resulted […]
Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005)
Henry McDonald and Jim Cusack London: Penguin, 2004, £12.99, p/b Henry McDonald’s highly readable recent book with Jim Cusack on the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) is everything that other recent offerings on the subject were not. On the one hand, it avoids the kind of borderline homo-erotic sensationalism, in which the atrocities of self-serving … Read more
Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004)
[…] clear that the mainstream media have themselves often championed doubtful and sometimes ludicrous fantasies. In the 1950s it was widely accepted in the American media that the drugs trade was driven by a conspiracy between Chinese communists and organised crime – sometimes in the form of left-wing trade unions – in the United States. […]