On reaching 50
Reaching 50 issues is something. More or less than I hoped? Obviously, it never occurred to me twenty plus years ago that I would still be doing this now. But I never had any hopes beyond simply selling enough copies to keep producing it (and maybe, one day, producing an issue which doesn’t have some stupid blob I should have spotted). In this kind of publishing just surviving is succeeding.
The world – and Lobster – have changed in some ways and not at all in others since 1983 when issue 1 appeared. The piece by Jonathan Bloch in this issue shows this. It might have been published, with some changes, at any time since 1983. What it says is still true and needs to be said again. The spooks aren’t regulated. Because they resist regulation we are (rightly) suspicious of them.
But what isn’t in this Lobster is the lists of MI6 officers published on the Cryptome website. Twenty years ago such a list, had it come my way, would have been a major item. These days it doesn’t interest me greatly. Oh, I put it on a disk and maybe it will be useful one day; and I wonder who compiled it and why. But before these MI6 lists, Cryptome published a list of IRA members which included Clare Short MP. Which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, does it? (1) Even if I knew the list was genuine – though how would I know? – does it matter that we have a list of MI6 names attached to countries? In 1985 Steve Dorril’s working out which diplomats were MI6 officers under very light diplomatic cover seemed interesting and publishing the names seemed to be some kind of act against the-powers-that-be. But in 1985 there was very little information available about the intelligence services, and every scrap seemed significant. These days, if you want them, you can receive e-mail bulletins with more information about the world’s intelligence services – though, admittedly relatively little about the UK – than one person could synthesise working full-time. The issue with the security and intelligence services isn’t that we don’t know their names, it’s that we don’t know what they are doing. And neither do our politicians. While much of the public sector is being inspected to death, the police, the military, the intelligence and security services and diplomats remain beyond democratic scrutiny.
I used to think of Lobster as a radical magazine and would quote the joke definition of a radical magazine: one that doesn’t last very long. Twenty years later it just feels like a magazine; and, by definition, perhaps it isn’t very radical. But ‘being radical’ was never an objective. Twice a year I published the best material I had; and, thanks to the quality of the people who write for it, much of it stands up, I think.
The great thing about Lobster’s existence is being able to print an 11-page essay on Northern Ireland by a Protestant Marxist, which I think no-one else would publish, or the long Cummings piece on The Paris Review and the CIA, whose core was printed in Lobster 47 but which is so much better in this elaborated form. They are interesting, perhaps important pieces. But interesting would do for me.
Lobster could simply be a website on which I posted this material; but there is something about putting it on paper, about putting it into shops and envelopes, which means I have to take it more seriously than I would a digital version. Were Lobster a website then, yes, with appropriate caveats about sources and reliability, I might well post the Cryptome MI6 list. In printed form I never would. There is a difference between publishing and posting on the Net. ‘Publishing on the net’ doesn’t yet sound entirely convincing.
So this strange enterprise will continue as long as the material keeps appearing (and I sell enough copies to produce it). And, happily, the material shows no signs of drying-up and the sales remain constant.
Still unmentionable
Michael Cockrell’s entertaining look back at the 1975 referendum on membership of the then EEC, ‘How We Fell for Europe’ (BBC2, 4 June 2005) got most of it right but flunked the role of the secret state in it. Of IRD’s role in the ‘pro’ campaign there was no mention; and he was told about it.
You leak, we brief
Michael Smith, of The Times, who got the big leak over Iraq, the so-called Downing Street memo, (2) has described meeting his civil service source, ‘a friend’, to get it. Yet despite this being as big and as damaging a breach of the Official Secrets Act as I can think of, nothing has been done. Smith has not been hauled in front of the beak and told to grass up his source. No Whitehall ‘leak inquiries’ are proceeding. Nor are any proceeding over all the other leaks of material relating to the war on Iraq. In the fourth list of alleged MI6 officers posted at Cryptome this year (3) the author of the memo, Matthew Rycroft, is named as one. Which, if true, may explain why there has been no leak inquiry.
Needs must
Christopher Hitchens, once one of the sharpest knives in the drawer, seems to be losing it – he’s probably drinking too much – and may be about to become the Paul Johnson of his generation. Asked to comment on Harold Pinter being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, he jeered at Pinter and accused him of ‘hysterial anti-Americanism’. As compared to what? Calm anti-Americanism? Hitchens’ drift to the right might be the effect of living in America where the Republicans have taken ‘the centre’ – the space within which Hitchens works as a self-styled – so far to the right. There’s not much of a living to made in America by being a lefty writer, is there? Hitchens’ writing is collected at <www.hitchensweb.com/>.
Vote fraud 2004
Meanwhile, more or less unreported by the major media on either side of the Atlantic, the evidence of the Republican theft of the 2004 presidential election is massive and unanswerable. The theft is a political fact. As the Democratic Party leadership is unwilling to deal with this for fear of being attacked by the media, the 2008 election result can be confidently predicted: the Republicans will win. (Is Hilary Clinton’s election team paying attention? There’s not a lot of point in her moving to the right, becoming anti-abortion, for example, if the election’s been fixed in advance.) I can understand why the American corporate media are loathed to touch this; but why is this so tough for their British cousins? Or is stealing two elections ‘not a story’?
Try the following:
- <www.harpers.org/ExcerptNoneDare.html>
- <www.commondreams.org/views05/0310-32.htm>
- <www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1462>
- <www.bradblog.com/archives/00001838.htm>
My enemy’s enemy
The broadsheets reported on 11 October on the Home Secretary’s list of groups that are being banned in Britain. Number one on the list was the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group which, we are told, is trying to overthrow Colonel Gaddafy’s regime. That name might ring a bell because this is the group, an al-Qaeda affiliate we are told, which, according to David Shayler, was paid by MI6 to try to assassinate Colonel Gaddafy. But this was back in the days when Gaddafy was ‘the mad dictator’, some time funder of the IRA and head of the regime which organised the Lockerbie bombing.
But the great engine of state trundles on and things change. Libya ‘accepted responsibility’ for the Lockerbie bombing (while continuing to deny that they had done it), offered compensation to the victims’ families, gave up their nuclear ambitions (whatever that amounted to), to emerge, born again, free of sanctions, as a responsible, respectable member of the international community, bla bla bla. And so the Islamic Fighting Group, our former enemy’s enemy, is our enemy.
Libya’s new status as ‘friend’ is visible elsewhere. Con Coughlin, often a guide to the thinking within SIS, commented in The Sunday Telegraph, ‘Ratcheting up to the next war’ on 9 October, on the British policy of ‘kow-towing to the Iranians’. Wrote Coughlin:
‘As part of this policy, the British government took the shameful decision to drop its claim that the Iranians had masterminded the Lockerbie bombing…….even though British intelligence uncovered significant evidence of Iranian involvement.'(emphasis added)
Is Coughlin saying that SIS opposed the government’s policy of kow-towing to the Americans and blaming the Libyans?
Libya is clearly a tricky problem for British foreign policy people. The ‘deal’ done with Libya was only possible because everyone – except David Shayler, apparently – knows that Libya didn’t do Lockerbie. But HMG doesn’t want to embarrass America by pressing it. Now that Iran is again top of the list of America’s designated enemies, it is OK to blame them for Lockerbie; and just hope that we forget Libya.
On 29 August The Scotsman newspaper in Edinburgh reported that a:
‘retired [Scottish police] officer – of assistant chief constable rank or higher – has testified that the CIA planted the tiny fragment of circuit board crucial in convicting a Libyan for the 1989 mass murder of 270 people.’ (4)
Does this seem like a story to you? It did to me but not to the London media. Not a word of it was published in the newspapers south of the border.
All of which might sound like good news for Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, currently preparing to appeal for the second time the life sentence he received for the Lockerbie bombing – an offence which even the British government apparently knows he did not do. But there was a hint in The Sunday Times on 23 October that an appeal is not what the British and American states desire.
‘Earlier this month it was reported that officials from Britain, America and Libya had met to discuss moving Megrahi back to Libya on the condition that the appeal is dropped.’ (5) (emphasis added)
You can see the problem: what if the appeal succeeds? Then the issue of who really did Lockerbie, who faked the Lockerbie evidence and how the Scottish legal system allowed this wrongful conviction to take place, is back on the agenda. (6 ) Much better to let Megrahi go back to Libya, pretending that he is ‘serving his sentence’ there.
Hey Joe
In September the US State Department put out a briefing, ‘How to Identify Misinformation’. Before 1990 such a document would have been about Soviet disinformation campaigns; and this one begins with some well known examples of Soviet disinformation before proceeding to attack conspiracy theories. It names only three current sources of conspiracy theories: the two websites, Rense.com and Conspiracy Planet, and ‘Australian private investigator Joe Vialls, who died in 2005’.
Thus I learned that Joe Vialls had died.
Vialls first hove into view in a curious epilogue to the Tony Collins book on the apparently mysterious deaths of scientists working for Marconi, Open Secret (London: Sphere, 1990). Vialls talked about being the subject of some kind of mind-influencing programme. I had heard about such things from Harlan Girard and the late Anthony Verney and when Vialls contacted me I knew enough to be an intelligent listener for him. He told me that he thought that he, while mind-controlled, and not the Libyans, had shot WPC Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan Embassy. I published this in Lobster. Joe was very unhappy about this and denied telling me what he had said. Since I don’t record conversations, I had to make a qualified withdrawal. But that’s what he said.
Subsequently I lost touch with him on his return to Australia where he became, as the State Department’s bulletin suggested, quite a figure in the conspiracy theory world, with opinions and theories about almost everything (so it seemed). Alas, almost invariably what Joe wrote was utter shite. (7)
Notes
[1] Cryptome’s apparent policy of printing anything it gets, without checking, could hardly be better designed to provide ammunition for the lobby against freedom of information.
[2] See <www.downingstreetmemo.com/> for a sense of how significant it seems in America.
[3] <http://cryptome.org/mi6-list4.htm>
[4] <http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1855852005>
[5] Mark Macaskill, ‘Fraser: my Lockerbie trial doubts’, The Sunday Times 23 October, 2005. The original report on this was in The Glasgow Herald on 12 October but when I looked, while the headline was there, the text was not on the paper’s website.
[6] For a good short summary of the case against the conviction go to <www.williambowles.info/spysrus/lockerbie.html>
[7] Vialls’ biography and fantasies have been researched in great detail at <http://judicial-inc.biz/Vilas_Beattie.htm>