[…] 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 […]
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 […]
[…] 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 […]
The Trial of Saddam Hussein Abdul Haq Al-Ani, Clarity Press, Atlanta, GA., 2008 Abdul-Haq Al-Ani’s troubling manifesto on behalf of the murdered Iraqi leader exposes bloody doings of empire from a lucid political-juridical perspective. ‘Imperialism is a universal historical phenomenon, but it remains, nevertheless, evil’, he writes (p. 23). ‘I use the term European [imperialism] … Read more
[…] experiments were discussed in conjunction with atomic bomb testings. The CIA’s human behaviour control program was chiefly motivated by perceived Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean use of mind control techniques. The CIA originated its first program in 1950 under the name of BLUEBIRD, which in 1951, after Canada and Britain had been included, was […]
[…] that he was ‘…convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that could not be suicide,’ Baker claimed that ‘…medical evidence does not support it and David Kelly’s state of mind and personality suggests otherwise.’ He questioned the cause of death (a haemorrhage caused by cuts to the ulnar artery in the wrist), pointing out that ‘….…such […]
[…] nation-wide occurrences.’ Bessie Braddock assured the reader that this ‘bears all the distinctive marks of a genuine Communist directive’. Although it is difficult to parody the Stalinist mind, I doubt that even the Cominform would actually have written that ‘new and concentrated effort must be made by specially suitable undercover activists to penetrate into […]
In an article in the Journal of Popular Culture, (1) one of the editors of the Jonestown Report considers the role that conspiracy theories have played in the unfolding narrative of ‘Jonestown’. It is a worthwhile endeavour to which few scholars could bring better credentials. Rebecca Moore is a professor of religious studies at the […]
Maggie, Maggie, Maggie Giles Scott-Smith,(1) who wrote about the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Lobster 36 and 38, has written a very interesting study of Margaret Thatcher’s first visit to America in 1967.(2) Scott-Smith shows that Thatcher, then a junior shadow spokesperson in the Tory Party, was talent-spotted by the State Department’s man in the … Read more
Editorially First, most important, our thanks to those Lobster subscribers who responded to our appeal for money. Your response, and a bit of ‘consulting’ with Fleet St. on the content of Lobster 11, has halved our debts. We shall survive. It is tempting to say something about the developing crisis re the Wilson-MI5 story (Lobstergate?). … Read more
