Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000)
I met Paul Routledge, the biographer of Gordon Brown, a couple of years ago. ‘Does Brown understand economics?’ I asked him. ‘Well, he reads lots of big books,’ said Routledge. ‘This is not the same thing.’ Of course I asked the wrong question. What I should have asked was: does Gordon Brown understand British economic … Read more
Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6)
On reaching 50 Reaching 50 issues is something. More or less than I hoped? Obviously, it never occurred to me twenty plus years ago that I would still be doing this now. But I never had any hopes beyond simply selling enough copies to keep producing it (and maybe, one day, producing an issue which […]
Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2)
[…] Hanssen was bad! (But no info about his specific badness, and no mention of the tunnel the Americans dug under the Russian embassy, or vice versa). Never mind! Bin Laden bad! The longer articles similarly crash on the rocks of recycled press reports. ‘Peru is a nation not usually associated with spy dramas’ begins […]
Lobster Issue 33 (Summer 1997)
Portland Free Press Portland Free Press, edited by Ace R. Hayes, with the legend ‘Tell the Truth and Run’ on its masthead, contains to produce important parapolitical material. The January/February issue had an extract from the 1991 deposition of Richard Brenneke, a pilot who claims to have flown missions for the Contras (which has not […]
Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003)
[…] Ward Boston, senior legal counsel for the Navy’s Court of Inquiry into the incident broke his silence and stated, inter alia: ‘There is no question in my mind that those people tried to kill every one on board. I was the counsel. I put witnesses on. I talked to kids never exposed to combat […]
Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999)
[…] a Philip Agee of the 1990s; and I for one am still unclear as to why he blew the whistle in the way he did. But never mind: thanks to Shayler’s information we have an insider account of MI5’s recent activities. The authors have compiled a quick sketch of MI5’s history up to the […]
Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000)
[…] fired some 400 Soviet experts, on the spurious ground that they were no longer needed. The relevant CIA department, known as Covert Action, ceased to operate. Never mind Crozier forgetting – and The Times subs missing – that it was Gerald Ford who succeeded Nixon, not Jimmy Carter, it was Crozier’s use of the […]
Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6)
[…] ideology and policy formulation and the techniques used to communicate ideas and mobilise mass action in support of those ideas. Above all, we need get inside the mind of the secret state, to start thinking a bit harder about why it behaves as it does domestically and internationally. What it thinks as a […]