[…] or influence: Argentina, Bolivia, Congo, Egypt, France, Greece, Haiti, Italy, Jordan…. Denying and obscuring the CIA’s role in various assassinations, coups, and interventions helps create in the mind of Americans a certain view of the history of the past fifty years, of the role of the American government and, in particular, of the role […]
[…] Talb. After lengthy sessions with CIA personnel, the Maltese shopkeeper who had previously recognised a photograph of Talb – a 35 year-old Palestinian – apparently changed his mind and fingered a Libyan airline official in his fifties. This identification, along with allegations – later disproved – that a Swiss-made timing device for the Lockerbie […]
[…] sort of stability to Anbar – but we are sure it is not quite what the mild-mannered liberal and evangelical advocates of peace and reconciliation had in mind when they surged around the government for pet project funding. The illusion of Northern Ireland is that constant dialogue and alternatively talking tough and offering concessions […]
[…] it is reasonable to assume that the “safe on Sakhalin” message was a deliberate lie. It was a lie with far-reaching effects. Firstly, it set the world’s mind at rest about 007. At the time of the broadcast 007 was several hours late at Seoul – clearly a news story in the making. Moreover, […]
Introduction Despite their reputation for ’empiricism’, British academics have tended to treat political power by means of abstract concepts rather than empirical information about the actions of determinate individuals and groups (e.g. Giddens, 1984, 1985; Scott, 1986). After a brief efflorescence of empirical studies of the so-called ‘Establishment’ in the early 1960s, sociologists in Britain … Read more
[…] were the other stories. Some were the horror stories with which we have become familiar: for example MK-Ultra and Ewen Cameron’s insane experiments with reprogramming the human mind which Hollings discusses. But also: by 1959 Cary Grant had taken LSD over 60 times as part of a Hollywood set who were using it with […]
The Westminster Whistleblowers: Shirley Porter, homes for votes and twenty years of scandal in Britain’s rottenest borough Paul Dimoldenberg London: Politicos, 2006, £12.99, p/b The author was a Labour councillor in Westminster during Porter’s ‘reign of terror’ and was instrumental in eventually bringing her down. With an insider’s view he has written an immensely … Read more
Global Intelligence: the World’s Secret Services Today Paul Todd and Jonathan Bloch, London and New York, Zed Books, 2003 h/back £32.95/ $55.00 p/back £9.99/ $17.50 ‘We lacked specific information on many key aspects of Iraq’s WMD program’ Vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Stuart Cohen, December 2003 With the spectacular failure of […]
[…] industrial trade union, led by CPGB members and ex-members, opposing government policy, was more than enough. The nonsense – the communist conspiracy theory – in Mrs Thatcher’s mind was of no relevance to MI5. But it surely is relevant to this story. Beckett and Hencke give us an expanded take on the received version […]
[…] 30 July 2000 The Punch story, in issue 117, October 2000, about Sir John Browne of BP, Prime Minister Blair and the Russian oil money comes to mind – unless the retired SIS officer that sits on BP’s board forgot to check out the latest news from Russia with his former SIS colleagues. It […]
