Fifth Column

Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)

[…] link not be drawn between the many dumb decisions of a dumb ally in the wake of 9/11 and social collapse in the UK inner cities. Yet drugs and other illicit trades and the massive accumulation of capital in the hands of organised crime are absolutely central to the collapse of social order – […]

Tittle-tattle

Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)

Horses for courses? Labour MP Denis MacShane used the hospitality of The Observer extended by his old Oxford pal, editor Roger Alton, to proclaim the virtues of Nicolas Sarkozy and confide, a week before the second vote, that his success in the French presidential election was greatly desired in Downing Street. The prospect of a […]

Miscellaneous Publications

Lobster Issue 21 (1991)

[…] general magazine to have merged from the American radical/left since Ramparts. The January 1991 issue contained a 13 page interview with Alfred McKoy on the politics of drugs. McKoy wrote The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (Harper Row, 1972), the ground-breaking book which showed the CIA running opium for the Meo tribes they […]

West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir

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Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002)

[…] California; and a little petty crime. This is the ‘alternative society’ of the time – or a version of it – but Blum’s obsessions are politics not drugs or rock music. Somehow Blum got a nasty – on the evidence of this book – a terminal dose of the desire to look the reality […]

The Open Side of Secrecy: Britain’s Intelligence and Security Committee

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Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7)

[…] twenty years are spurious. Their account of the CIA is wilfully inadequate, even for a three page summary. They describe the funding of the Contras without mentioning drugs, even when the CIA itself has admitted getting permission from the US Attorney General to ignore cocaine dealing in return for donations to the Contras. You […]

The Conspirators: secrets of an Iran-Contra insider

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Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002)

[…] a picture of him with Oliver North. I mean, he got very involved with us at one time. He liked the fast life. He liked to do drugs. He was big into racing cars. He liked women and he raised money for us among loyal Tories in England. That money would then get funnelled […]

The Pentagon’s Psychic Research

Lobster Issue 30 (December 1995)

[…] of his studies based on his participation in programmes carried out in 1950s.(23) He described biological and hypothetical possibilities regarding psi and also underlined the effects of drugs – consistent with the CIA’s mind control programs and findings of that era.(24) Puharich had a keen interest in parapsychology. In 1956, he brought Peter Horkus, […]

Some examples of corporate, cultural and state PR

Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7)

Clint Eastwood Movies Flags of Our Fathers, directed by Clint Eastwood and to be released in Britain in December 2006, is an example of post-9-11 PR. It tells the story of the 1945 battle for Iwo Jima and has been described as the first film in which the balance of combat and public relations has … Read more

Eternal Vigilance? 50 years of the CIA

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Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9)

edited by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones and Christopher Andrew Frank Cass, London/Portland, Oregon, 1997, £15.00 pb   There are two kinds of books about the CIA: there are those like William Blum’s, advertised in this issue, which see the CIA simply as part of the US post-war empire, the sharp end of imperial enforcement, somewhere between the … Read more

Conspiracy, Conspiracy Theories and Conspiracy Research

Lobster Issue 19 (1990)

Conspiracy, Conspiracy Theories and Conspiracy Research Robin Ramsay ‘The unexpected and dramatic death of the famous, whether statesmen like John F Kennedy, or media stars like Marilyn Monroe, invariably give rise to conspiracy theories.’ Thus Cambridge historian, Christopher Andrew, during his disgraceful hatchet job on Hugh Thomas’ books about Rudolph Hess for BBC2 ‘s Timewatch … Read more

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