[…] narratives are found wanting and counter-narratives (of varying plausibility) abound: from the suspicious deaths of government weapons experts, cryptographers and shadowy financiers to the covered-up connections between intelligence agencies and terror groups (see Curtis 2010). Criminologists should shrug off the stigma attached to theorizing that diverges from official accounts and carefully excavate the deep […]
[…] should never have gone down. In the last few years, a considerable lobby has urged a 5 reboot of civilian nuclear, citing the extravagant requirements of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data centres as a justification for this. Such arguments should be resisted, as indeed should the unregulated private sector-led AI that is being offered. […]
[PDF file]: […] or impacts upon democracy. It might, for example, examine all the state conspiracies which now exist within this society; and since the armed forces, police, security and intelligence services (and the big corporations) are almost entirely unaccountable, such research would be entirely apt. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that the […]
[PDF file]: […] was red meat for her base. As we know, the death penalty was not re-introduced. In fact, Thatcher had been briefed for some time by UK military intelligence that she could not realistically fight the IRA head–on (as Neave would have wished) and the likelihood was that high levels of violence would continue unless […]
[PDF file]: […] a third party buried in a book mixing fact with faction. But many of the witnesses in other versions of the story can be portrayed as unreliable: intelligence officers of one stripe or another, for example, or the anti-Castro Cubans, and assorted military and right-wing activists, all of whom have axes to grind. If […]
[PDF file]: […] disdain, as Hitler made clear in Mein Kampf: ‘We must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public. The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and […]
[PDF file]: […] Britain and Saudi Arabia which led to allegations of massive corruption. The investigation was closed down by the Blair government when the Saudis threatened to end their intelligence relationship with Britain if it was pursued.4 He gave hundreds of thousands of pounds to the Conservative Party and made a donation of £20 million to […]
[PDF file]: […] ‘the iron curtain’, e.g. how many missiles the Soviets had, etc., was unknown and the ‘danger’ belief was just viable. By 1960 it was clear to US intelligence and military that the Soviet Union was a nuclear minnow, compared to the US. That ‘danger’ was the rationalisation for the CIA’s activities. There was no […]
[…] as though there has been some big shift; and in a sense there has been. I am no longer collecting every scrap of information about the British intelligence and security services in the way that I did once. Why not? A number of things have come together. Firstly, it no longer seems as important. […]
