[…] interesting – if unsurprising – that the final edits are done by Blair’s two closest advisors. But by the time Hutton heard this, the memo from Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) chair John Scarlett had been released which referred to the JIC’s ‘customers’.(5) Once that concept has been taken on board the game is up […]
[…] various neo-con and/or Israeli-supporting think tanks and action groups, notably the PNAC, had been pushing for more military action against Iraq; and the bits of the military- intelligence network in Washington under their control, such as the Defence Policy Board, within a week of 9/11 began planning how to use 9/11 as the pretext […]
[…] Mayne, and an investigation of Loyalist sectarian killers, The Shankhill Butchers (1989). His book opens with the attempts in 1970 by Captain James Kelly of Irish Military Intelligence to import weapons for the North (Kelly’s books were reviewed in Lobsters 13 and 15) and continues through the history of the Northern Irish conflict up […]
[…] Sterling’s, and it is hers I will concentrate on. As with her last book, The Terror Network, much of her ‘evidence’ is attributed to unidentified police and intelligence officers. This bothered me less than it did with The Terror Network. This book is more modest in its ambitions, more tightly focused, the unattributable assertions […]
A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the abuse of America’s intelligence agencies James Bamford, New York: Doubleday, 2004, h/back, $26.95 Ghost Wars: The Secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet invasion to September 10, 2001 Steve Coll New York: Penguin, 2004, h/back, $29.95 These books cover some […]
[…] of the judiciary from the state executive being almost entirely eroded. The criminalisation of foreigners and of dissent increased, beginning with the Asylum Act of 1993 and Intelligence and Security Act of 1994, after which rival law enforcement agencies began competing with the police.(12) Although MI5 made much of its anti-fascist credentials in the […]
[…] B’ episode of 1976/7, the subject of this book, which saw a group of the CIA’s critics on the right being given access to the Agency’s raw intelligence data, was one of the key moments in the counter-attack against detente with the Soviet Union in the 1970s. With the collapse of the Soviet empire, […]
[…] knows what it is doing about civil disorder. It is fishing. As the facts come out, they often seem to fit into the standard pattern of poor intelligence and some mistreatment of those arrested. We remain convinced that miscarriages of justice are likely in this mismanaged chaos. We have noted the signs of a […]
[…] but is incapable of turning the analysis round: what has US foreign policy persistently done in the past? Who says the CIA and the assortment of other intelligence organisations stopped what they were doing just because the NED was put in front of them as a fig leaf? Might these criticisms also apply to […]
[…] Henry (Scoop) Jackson, Paul Nitze (Coalition for a Democratic Majority) (CDM); ideologues like Rostow and Podhoretz (the latter editor of the ‘neo-conservative’ Commentary); hardline dissenters in the intelligence community such as Daniel Graham (ex head DIA) who is ECUD Chairman; and the grass roots New Right symbolised by Weyrich. The CSFC and CDM worked […]
