[…] were trying to raise lots of relatively small sums of money at great effort from traditional Labour networks which had no money. You have to cast your mind back to a time when Thatcherism was culturally triumphant. The wealthy middle classes, let alone the rich, were little interested in the ‘men in brown suits’ […]
[…] Orange Two. Through General Sir Peter Leng, Ware confirms the existence of a “Clockwork Orange One” (“hare-brained”, according to Leng), but tells us that “today, in Wallace’s mind, ‘Clockwork Orange’ has become a more sinister Mark Two which … went beyond destabilising the IRA; it was aimed at mainland Labour politicians – which just […]
Dodgy dossiers Steven Kettell, author of Dirty politics? New Labour, British democracy and the invasion of Iraq (London: Zed Books, 2006), argues that New Labour wanted regime change in Iraq before Bush and before 9/11 and that the production of the WMD Dossier was one of the key components of a broader political strategy designed … Read more
The killing of WPC Yvonne Fletcher in public view and for no apparent reason remains one of the most notorious murders of recent decades. For sixteen years there have been few signs of any serious attempts to locate and bring to justice the perpetrator of this outrage. Finally, this April, in an outstanding piece of … Read more
The Robert Henderson/Tony Blair story. Having failed to persuade any section of the British political class then in power to do anything about a wrong he had suffered at the hands of the media, Robert Henderson wrote letters to the then Leader of the Opposition, Tony Blair – 13 letters in all. This is Henderson’s […]
[…] 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 […]
edited by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones and Christopher Andrew Frank Cass, London/Portland, Oregon, 1997, £15.00 pb There are two kinds of books about the CIA: there are those like William Blum’s, advertised in this issue, which see the CIA simply as part of the US post-war empire, the sharp end of imperial enforcement, somewhere between the […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] new member of a very small category, the geopolitical conspiracy theory satire. (Only Report from Iron Mountain and the various books by Robert Anton Wilson spring to mind in this area.) For this reason alone it is worth getting. (How effective a piece of satire, and how good a piece of writing, is a […]
