Reflections on the ‘cult of the offensive’: pre-emptive war, the Israel lobby and US military Doctrine In our book, Spies, Lies and the War on Terror,(1) a central theme is the ascendancy of pre-emptive war doctrine in US military strategy and its impact on public perceptions and the construction of political narrative. A parallel and […]
Flying Saucers over Los Angeles The UFO Craze of the 1950s Dwayne B. Johnson and Kenn Thomas Adventures Unlimited Press, Kempton, Illinois, USA, 1998, $16.00 Flying Saucers over America Steamshovel Supplement to Flying Saucers Over Los Angeles Steamshovel Press, 1998, $20 Two more productions from the prolific Kenn Thomas. Flying Saucers Over Los Angeles is … Read more
See note(1) Very few notions generate as much intellectual resistance, hostility, and derision within academic circles as a belief in the historical importance or efficacy of political conspiracies. Even when this belief is expressed in a very cautious manner, limited to specific and restricted contexts, supported by reliable evidence, and hedged about with all sort … Read more
[…] bleak winter of 1944-45, when Philby was busily forming his new Soviet counter-espionage section, that Muggeridge met him again… Two small incidents imprinted themselves indelibly on Muggeridge’s mind. Each concerned Philby. The first was a heated discussion at table about the rights and wrongs of withholding important Bletchley intercepts from the Soviet Union. It […]
[…] 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 […]
Researching the European State: a critical guide Edited by Tony Bunyan Statewatch PO Box 1516, London N16 0EW £7.00 With sixty A4 pages plus a six page index, this is, as the title suggests, an annotated bibliography. The flyer which came with it accurately described it thus: ‘This is the first bibliography on the European […]
‘Everything is going to change’ JFK and the Unspeakable: Why he died and why it matters James W. Douglass Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2008, h/b, $30.00 I am writing this immediately after Barack Obama’s victory in the US Presidential election, almost half a century after John Kennedy became the first, and thus far … Read more
[…] believe he ingeniously plays fast and loose with facts but because my memory of such exchanges that we had suggested to me that you had a closed mind on this issue. Baa Baa White Sheep! Simon Matthews Local government — and local politicians — generally get a bad press, some of it deserved, some […]
[…] Belfast worsened and, as an interim measure, Gibbons ordered 500 rifles to be transported to Dundalk on the border. The rifles had been stockpiled with this in mind – against the advice of Kelly, as they were traceable to the Irish Army – after a potential purchaser in August 1969 turned out to have […]
[…] that the root cause of all the trouble in the UK was Watergate, the CIA and a few spook-spotters and critics of the police in London. Never mind the British labour movement, the Heath government’s attack on the independence of trade unions and the roaring inflation caused by Heath’s ‘dash for growth’, it was […]
