Secrets and Lies: A history of CIA mind control and germ warfare Gordon Thomas JR Books (www.jrbooks.com) 2007, h/b, £20 Gordon Thomas has written a number of books on the intelligence services and this has a glossy cover, voluminous appendices and some admiring quotes. But it adds little to what we already know about … Read more
This piece by Daniel Brandt began as a short letter commenting on my review of Right Woos Left by Chip Berlet (Lobster 23 p. 34). I wrote back and asked if he would like to expand it. And so he did, writing almost the whole thing at one long sitting. Anyone who joined the U.S. … Read more
[…] followed, a week later, by Simon Edge, ‘Dr Kelly: The questions that just won’t go away’ in The Daily Express, 31 July. My problem with the Kelly murder theory is that it has never been clear to me why anyone would think it necessary to kill him. With a senior British civil servant like […]
[…] account, was “so British as to belong to a past backed by an Empire that ruled the waves,” a world where “theft, deception, lies, mutilation and even murder are possibilities.” (p13) Cavendish and Young were to work together from 1973 in Unison, the co-ordinating committee which was to play its part in the anti-Wilson […]
[…] raid on Colonel Gadhafi’s family, President Reagan described the Libyan despot as a ‘unique threat to free peoples’, a ‘rogue regime that advances its goals through the murder and maiming of innocent civilians’. Sanctions followed, but not for Halliburton. As Robert Bryce wrote in the Austin Chronicle: ‘Since the mid-1980s, Gadhafi’s “rogue regime” has […]
[…] men to ‘kill on sight’. The squad is known as Echo Four Alpha (or E4A), sometimes working within special support units. Constable John Robinson, acquitted of the murder of Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) member Seamus Grew was a member of an 11-strong special support unit, operating from Police Headquarters in Knock. In fact […]
Since the storming of the Iranian Embassy in London on 5 May 1980, the Special Air Service (SAS) has become a cultural phenomenon as much as a military one; has become, in the words of its former Director, Peter de la Billiere, ‘a living embodiment of the individualism of the British’. Their heroic exploits have […]
The publication of Frank Kitson’s Low Intensity Operations in 1971 created a storm on the left.(1) An influential British army officer with considerable experience of colonial warfare was advocating that the army prepare for counterinsurgency operations at home. As far as Kitson was concerned there was a serious danger of revolutionary disturbance in Britain in … Read more
In 1953 Dr Drank Olsen, a scientist working for the CIA, was found dead on the pavement outside a New York hotel. The Agency instituted a cover-up of the circumstances of his death. The cover-up survived until 1975 when it was revealed that Olsen had been one of many people who had been unwittingly given … Read more
[…] In poring over all the dissimulation over weapons of mass destruction, the death of scientist David Kelly and, most recently, who knew what over the torture and murder of Iraqi civilians, it may be useful to bear one fragment of US history in mind. Paul Lindley, the former US Congressman, wrote in his They […]
