[…] me as a victim of inter-gang terrorist rivalry. I believed at the time (as I still do) that the incident was the result of a conspiracy to murder initiated by the Security Service (MI5) and with me as the intended victim. I thought about reporting this to the police after it had happened but […]
[…] 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 […]
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 this issue, as in No 3, we are recycling a lot of material from Irish newspapers, and one in particular, the Sunday News. One of our Irish readers describes the Sunday News as ‘almost wholly Catholic..Nationalist … moderately Social Democratic Labour Party rather than moderately Republican.’ We have no way of checking the veracity … Read more
‘Rug merchants’ was the epithet former White House Chief of Staff Don Regan used to describe the Iranians who negotiated secret arms deals for nearly a year with senior officials of the Reagan Administration, including Oliver North of the National Security Council. Regan’s dismissive characterization hardly did justice to the sales skills of North’s Mideast … Read more
[…] 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 […]
Notes From the Borderland Larry O’Hara now has his own journal, Notes from the Borderland, the first issue of which appeared in November last year. Like his previous pamphlets, this is full of fascinating information on the far right – the guts of the lead article on a charity scam being run in the UK … Read more
The Time of The Assassins: The Inside Story of the Plot to Kill the Pope Claire Sterling, Angus and Robertson, London 1984 The Plot to Kill the Pope Paul B. Henze, Croom Helm, London 1984 These two books cover the same ground, more or less, and have the same thesis: the KGB used the Bulgarians, … Read more
This is a slightly abridged version of part of chapter four of Mark Curtis’s book The Ambiguities of Power: British Foreign Policy since 1945 (Zed Press, 1995) reviewed below. In August 1953 a coup overthrew Iran’s nationalist government of Mohammed Musaddiq and installed the Shah in power. The Shah subsequently used widespread repression and torture … 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 […]
