South of the border

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020)

[PDF file]: South of the border (occasional snippets from) Nick Must Spook joke department ‘UK spies will need artificial intelligence’ reads the headline to a Gordon Corera piece on BBC news online.1 Yes, the gags are pretty much writing themselves now. Deferred prosecution agreements – buying your way out of trouble ‘A deferred prosecution agreement, or […]

Well, how did we get here?

Lobster Issue 60 (Winter 2010)

[PDF file]: […] the British state clung to the pretensions of world power status, with all that entailed by way of overseas capital investment and expenditure on diplomatic, military and intelligence activities. The ‘bias’ in favour of the overseas lobby detected by Strange wasn’t so much hidden as so taken for granted as to be invisible. In […]

View from

Lobster Issue

[…] 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 […]

The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War by Craig Whitlock

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: […] coup to seize power for himself. He ‘did little to hide his involvement in drug trafficking’ and, according to an interview with Col. Russell Thaden, the NATO intelligence chief, on one occasion he ‘blew his stack upon learning U.S. and British forces had jointly bombed a large drug lab in northern Afghanistan’. He calmed […]

‘Nobody told us we could do this’

Lobster Issue 64 (Winter 2012)

[PDF file]: […] at Ditchley Park, in November 2009, under the auspices of The Institute of Government. A selection of academics, civil servants, politicians and the chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee were invited to attend. Following this event O’Donnell drafted ‘A Compendium of the Laws, Conventions and Constitutional Underpinning of the UK System of Government’. Apparently […]

Atomic Albion

Lobster Issue 92 (2026)

[PDF file]: […] 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. […]

Phil Shenon – a cruel and shocking twist

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017)

[PDF file]: […] much truth as possible’, it isn’t just the Castro Cuban commies who must be scrutinised, but everyone who associated with the alleged assassin, including the anti-Castro Cubans, intelligence officers and others who became entwined in the assassination story. It is pure speculation on Shenon’s part that Oswald even read the news reports of Castro’s […]

Swedish echoes

Lobster Issue 71 (Summer 2016)

[PDF file]: […] short notice as it was deemed too serious a topic for the ‘family friendly’ Wogan. Captain Hayward’s book mentioned nothing at all about his service in 14 Intelligence Company. No doubt, rightly or wrongly, he felt abandoned by the British state (which he had protected by sanitising what could have been a much juicier […]

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