One of many reasons why the lobbying industry attracts opprobrium is because Britain’s political system offers only limited public sector facility to those who wish to influence it but lack the funding and/or patronage to do so. ‘The lobbyists’ did not cause the injustice. It is up to government to come up with the solutions. … Read more
A Covert Life. Jay Lovestone: Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster Ted Morgan New York: Random House, 1999, $29.95 Freedom’s War: The US Crusade Against the Soviet Union Scott Lucas Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999, £45 Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of its Operations in Guatemala 1952-54 Nick Cullather Stanford (California): Stanford University Press 1999, £8.95 … Read more
[…] they are doing anything wrong or unusual. G2, 27 March, 2007. Did anyone in that press office know that the theme of the book is the meaningless murder of an Arab? Four of them were reviewed in The New York Review of Books 1 March 2007. The National Institute of Standards and Technology issued […]
Transnationalised Repression; Parafascism and the U.S. Both inside and outside the U.S. narcotics enforcement is particularly susceptible to corruption. It is also inescapably a political matter, especially in those areas of covert intelligence and operations which, up to now, have been concerns of the CIA. It is undeniable that DEA has picked up at least … Read more
[…] of the Second World War, Smith and Kay (Putnam 1972) includes virtually all the information in Last Talons of the Eagle. See Tom Bower, Blind Eye to Murder – Britain, America and the Purging of Nazi Germany, a Pledge Betrayed (1981) and The Paperclip Conspiracy (1984) and Christopher Simpson, Blowback – America’s Recruitment of […]
Mind control update Writing about something you don’t really understand, it’s easy to make bad early decisions. It’s like being self-taught on an instrument and acquiring bad habits. In this case I began by naming this subject ‘ELF’, extremely low frequency, which was about all I picked up from my initial reading of the torrent … Read more
Robert Caro New York and London: Alfred Knopf, 2002, hb $35 (US) £35 (UK) (But in the UK only £22 from Amazon.com) This is the third volume in Caro’s biography of LBJ. The first two volumes are wonderful pieces of work, the best biographies I have read; and in many ways this is their … Read more
[…] lecture by Peter Dale Scott on the global drug traffic and US intelligence; a long piece by Ralph Schoenman (there’s a blast from the past!) on the murder of Robert Kennedy, inter alia taking issue with Dan Moldea’s recent exculpation of Thane Cesar, everybody else’s candidate for the role of the actual assassin (see […]
With the decline of the revolutionary socialist Left the Right has turned to the anarchists for a law-and-order bogeyman – and a stick to beat the Left with. One journalist involved is Jamie Dettmer. Having worked for Tribune for a while, Dettmer migrated to the Sunday Telegraph (for whom his first article was an ‘expose’ … Read more
The Enemy Within: Thatcher’s Secret War Against the Miners Seumas Milne London: Verso, 2004, p/back, £8 GB84 David Peace London: Faber & Faber, 2004 p/back, £12.99 On the 20th anniversary of the most significant power struggle in post war Britain, two very different books on the miners’ strike of 1984-85, read alongside each other, … Read more
