[…] be required. Mission-critical systems: defense attempting to address major software challenges (27 pp.) GAO/IMTEC-93-13, December 1992. Billions of dollars in defense weapons and command, control, communications and intelligence systems depend on high-performance, correctly functioning real-time computer systems capable of withstanding severe stresses without failing. This report identifies the many software problems affecting weapons and […]
[…] more dense, more difficult in places and more depressing than it did in isolated essays. The underlying message is clear and alarming: if governments give military- or intelligence agency-sponsored scientists large amounts of money and no political control they will eventually come up with technologies with which to control the behaviour and thinking of […]
Greg Philo and David Miller Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education, 2001, £16.99 I asked the publisher for this on the basis of the title and the authors: Greg Philo has written many books for the Glasgow University Media Group (Bad News, More Bad News etc.) and David Miller is the author of Don’t Mention the … Read more
David W. Wrone University Press of Kansas; 2003, h/b, $29.99 (UK prices vary) In the conclusion to his Pocket Essentials Who Shot JFK?, the editor of this journal asked: ‘Where are the historians?’ David Wrone is a former Professor of History at Kansas University, and so his book provides at least part of an … Read more
[…] decline. Most of all, the UK is no longer a world military power but merely a cash-strapped proxy for the US, dependent upon US weapons systems and intelligence from the US-dominated global surveillance system. (I don’t take seriously recent newspapers stories about the UK creating a defensive missile screen and building – or acquiring […]
[…] the U.S.’s many covert and overt anti-Soviet operations of the 1980s. As you might expect with the author’s track record of accepting what the U.S. and U.K. intelligence services tell him, there is no consideration – none; not a line – of the massive critiques of the KGB-done-it thesis by Edward Herman and others […]
[…] the ‘dirty tricks’ attributed to the ‘political soldiers’. He denies all the charges and his explanation for the hostility is that as head of the ‘Security and Intelligence Department’ (of which Barrett was briefly a member), he played a prominent part in the disciplinary tribunals of those suspended or expelled, with concomitant legal action […]
[…] a camera with a long lens can seem like a gun as it is pointed over a wall. The chances are that he was working for British Intelligence.’ Geraghty forthrightly condemns the Heath Government’s hard line policy, providing the fascinating detail that senior ministers had urged ‘an unlawful “shoot-to-kill” policy’ on the Army, but […]
[…] and Kissinger’s sabotaging of the 1968 Paris peace talks (an early ‘October Surprise’), no discussion of Nixon’s links with Howard Hughes, and the links to that vast intelligence underworld. Nixon’s defining moments, the Watergate scandal, his impeachment, and resignation, exist in a similarly conspiracy-free light. Greenberg repeatedly quotes with approval those reporters who admit […]
[…] eye-opening but unsuccessful spell in the real economy, into retirement as a country gentleman – that kind of rebel! Notes 14 There is nothing which throws light on the report in The Times of 2 April 2002 that Lord Carrington the Foreign Secretary had ignored reports of invasion fears coming from the Joint Intelligence Committee.
