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 by the International Third Position, was reprinted in the Sunday Telegraph on 23 November 1997 – and the interface between the left, the right and the state. But, boy, some of it is hard work. There is a 26-page article with the subtitle, ‘The Curious Case of the New Communist Party, Searchlight and the Nazi honeytrap….(run by a hermaphrodite)’, which is all but unintelligible to me because, as with his pamphlets, the information is obscured by O’Hara’s speculation and his writing style. If Larry would only let someone who knows what they’re doing edit his copy for him, convert it into plain English, and take out the speculation – or at least separate the speculation from the information……
Issue 1 is £2.50, from Larry O’Hara, BM Box 4769, London WC1N 3XX. Subs for two issues in the UK, £5.00. In Europe add 15% to prices; elsewhere add 20%. IMOs, sterling cheques or US dollars only, please.
The Secret Team
David Guyatt points out that the 1997 third edition of Fletcher Prouty’s classic 1973 book about the CIA, The Secret Team, is now available in e-format at http://www.ratical.com It comes complete with index, appendices, prefaces etc. It is downloadable in both HTML and Text format (whatever that means…..)
The Konformist
The best parapolitical/conspiratorial e-mail newsletter I have seen is Robert Sterling’s The Konformist. In this there is everything from the most preposterous nonsense from the loony fringe of America (William Cooper and dumber), via an enormous range of writing on the entire spectrum of single issue subjects (murders, scandals, conspiracies, CIA, mind control, etc.), through to major, solid pieces about the New World Order, MAI, consumer boycotts and so forth. The ratio of junk to the worthwhile used to be about 70-30; but as it expands he’s getting better material and the loopy stuff is diminishing. To get it free, e-mail to and ask to get on the list. There is also now a Konformist Web site which, I confess, I haven’t checked yet: http://www.konformist.com
Prevailing Winds
I hadn’t seen this for some time and had assumed it gone the way of all radical magazines. But I was wrong: it is still going strong, now up to issue 5 which has 90 pages of articles from the para-political A-team (Peter Dale Scott, Michael Parenti, Carl Oglesby etc), plus the usual catalogue of material (books, pamphlets, photocopies and videos) which they sell.
Subs $32 for four issues outside the USA/Canada to: PO Box 23511, Santa Barbara, CA 931221.
Web site: www.prevailingwinds.org
Spectre
This is a new (founded 1997) left-wing, European-wide, English-language magazine. It is hostile to the entire American World Order, but its focus is on the European Union. Unlike Lobster, this is professionally produced, with full-colour illustrations, lots of photographs, and all the industry-standard lay-out techniques. Issue 3 is 40 pages, with essays on aspects of Maastricht, New Labour and Blairism’s impact (or lack of it) on the EU, the MIA proposals, Brian Burkitt of Bradford University on the economics of EMU; as well as articles attacking the IMF, defending Cuba, and describing the ‘the rise of criminality to the top of the Czech Republic’s “Velvet Revolution” elite’.
Its specific political orientation – if it has one – is difficult to identify but current and former Morning Star writers, and members of other European Communist Parties contribute to this issue. Its major strength is the contributions from other EU countries reporting on anti-EU movements; and it is impressive.
Three issues to the UK for £6.00 cheque or cash equivalent to Spectre, BP5, Bx1 46, rue Wiertz, 1047, Brussels, Belgium. (A sample issue for £2.00)
Resonance
Judy Wall continues to produce Resonance, the newsletter of the Bio-electromagnetics Special Interest Group of American Mensa. Issue 33 – 33 issues! – reprints the Armen Victorian piece from the last Lobster but also includes three other substantial essays in the field. Most striking is the essay by editor Wall which includes reports on 37 US patents in the past 20 years on devices for subliminal sound projection, ultrasonic projection, brain alteration, brain washing etc etc. The existence of these patents makes it even more difficult than it was already to dismiss as nutters those who claim to be ‘hearing voices’. The kit to do it exists.
Judy Wall, 648 C.R. 535, Sumterville, Fl 33585, USA. A sample copy of the newsletter is $5.00 from her.
In the same field is a very striking essay in the US Army War College Quarterly, Parameters (Spring 1998), ‘The mind has no firewall’ by Timothy L.Thomas, warning the US military that potential mind-altering or -disabling technology is going to disrupt the US armed forces’ increasing reliance on information technology in war.
‘Defending friendly and targeting adversary data-processing capabilities of the body appears to be an area of weakness in the US approach to information warfare theory, a theory oriented heavily towards systems data-processing and designed to attain information dominance on the battlefield.’ (Emphasis added.)
In other words, what use are soldiers with mini-computers and mobile-phones and modems on the battlefield of the future going to be if micro-wave and other electronic weapons can turn their brains to jelly?
Labor and the CIA
A major new piece of work in this field is Anthony Carew’s ‘The American Labor Movement in Fizzland: the Free Trade Union Committee and the CIA’ in the American journal Labor History, vol. 39, No. 1, 1998 (pp. 25-42) Using the recently opened Irving Brown papers, as well as other new sources and interviews, Carew has plotted some of the activities of the CIA in the US and European labour movement in the early post-war years in unprecedented detail. As you might expect, with a lot of new material, the picture is now a good deal more complex than it was before. Brown and Lovestone were not simply ‘agents’, carrying out orders from some central unit – at least not in the period up to the late 1950s covered by Carew. They had their own ideas; there was conflict. And there was also Joseph McCarthy. Carew concludes:
‘Links formed within the world of intelligence are not easily broken, and there is no reason at all to suppose that the winding-up of the FTUC and the termination of CIA operations funded through it marked the end of Lovestone’s and Brown’s association with the CIA. But if they did maintain their intelligence connections thereafter the business was evidently conducted with little or nothing committed to writing. And unless some day the Central Intelligence Agency files are opened up, the chances of documenting developments in this latter period are slight.’
Unclassified
Unclassified, the rather good American magazine devoted to the US intelligence services has ceased publication. In a valedictory statement, the last editor, Verne Lyon, states:
‘….realities must be faced. For some time we have seen the hope of realizing any true or lasting change to the structure and operational capabilities of the national security agencies wither away until the prospects have all but faded from view…’
JFK sources
Two significant articles on the Kennedy assassination appeared in Probe. ‘Harvey and Lee: the case for two Oswalds’ by John Armstrong is split into two parts in Probe September-October and November-December 1997. Armstrong went back to the primary evidence and re-examined all the biographical material on Oswald. This shows that there were, unmistakably, two Oswalds: two children, of different sizes, in different schools, in different parts of the country at the same time; and then two adolescents; and then two young men. Some of the ramifications of this are discussed in part 2, but Armstrong has just scratched the surface of what is going to be an enormous area in the subject.
Probe is at PO Box 3317, Culver City, CA 90231, USA; and is on the Web at http://www.webcom.com/ctka
The second JFK journal of note is Deep Politics Quarterly at PO Box 174, Hillsdale, NJ 07642, USA; and on the Web at http://www.njmetronet.com/jfkdpq
Both journals are routinely publishing material on JFK et al of the highest quality.
Trouble at CAQ mill
Meanwhile, over at Covert Action Quarterly, the owners have summarily dismissed the three women, including the editor, who actually produced the magazine. On May 14, 1998 those three sent out an e-mail to various people. Here is most of that message.
‘Last week the publishers fired the entire staff on payroll at CAQ (Covert Action Quarterly), a prize winning magazine of investigative journalism. We’d like you to know how and why.
On Sunday morning, May 10, a courier makes the rounds to three apartments in Washington, DC. He slides a plain white envelope under the front door and scurries away…..
We are the three people who opened the envelopes last Sunday morning and read that we were summarily fired without cause.
For the last eight and a half years of the magazine’s 19-year life, we are the people who have brought you credible, solid news reporting and articles that have consistently added to the historical record and fueled social change. Terry Allen (editor) and Barbara Neuwirth (staff) have worked at the magazine for almost nine years, along with Sanho Tree (associate editor) who joined the staff last year. We are the people who did the work, who produced the magazine. They have a piece of paper that grants them legal ownership; our ownership in sweat equity was earned.
Louis Wolf, based in Washington and Ellen Ray and William Schaap, who operate out of New York, are the people who fired us. These publishers/owners consider themselves socialists, leftists, progressives, whatever. All have done some good work in the past. But all of them acted on that rainy Sunday morning like corporate thugs. They did not try to discuss problems with our collective; they did not lay us off with notice and dignity. They cowardly hired others to sneak an envelope under our doors; they seized the contents of desks and computers and sorted through personal information. “Arrangements will be made,” their letter noted, “for you to remove from the office under our representatives’ supervision, any personal property currently there.”
Why this sordid little covert action? Why the firing of three employees whose job performance was consistently excellent? Well, here are the reasons they gave in the letter: “Your employment is terminated…..effective immediately” because of “interpersonal relations and work styles … creating a hostile and unproductive environment for all of us.”
…..As for interpersonal relations: they were fine among the three people who actually produced the 64-page magazine four times a year. We did it on time, on budget, and on target with annual costs under $200,000. Interpersonal relations were admittedly less good between management and workers, but no worse than at many workplaces. In any case, they were not the real problems.
As to how we were fired, there can be no explanation. The method speaks for itself. As to why, there are two basic reasons. The first and most important was our refusal to be bullied by Wolf, Ray, and Schaap into publishing whacko-conspiracy theories and articles that served their agenda but failed to distinguish between facts and political fairy tales. ……Among those championed by one or another of the publishers was a proposal to expose Hitler’s current hideout in Antarctica, an undocumented piece on alleged US release of screw worms as a weapon of war, a story presenting Serbia as the blameless victim of Bosnian aggression, and a reference by Schaap and Ray to President Aliev of Azerbaijan as a model of progressive governance. Some of these we were able to stop immediately and others took endless discussions before they were dropped. We also received a letter from Schaap and Ray berating us for a humorous piece because they said embarrassed them in front of their friends. The story quoted a long-time solidarity worker affectionately calling Fidel Castro “a nice old fart”.
In all cases where we disagreed with the publishers, we documented our logic and discussed our reasons at length, often circulating the articles and soliciting the opinions of experts. We looked for common ground always, but always we refused to compromise on basic principles and journalistic standards. This commitment to maintaining the firewall between owners and editors did not sit well with management. We allowed no special treatment, no cronyism, no party lines. We insisted on publishing solid, well-written, rigorously documented progressive journalism. And we did.
Our second unpardonable sin was that we also refused to condone unethical behavior and challenged the publishers whenever they stepped over legal and moral lines.
Throughout these difficult times, the CAQ staff has refrained from airing the individual crimes and misdemeanors of the publishers. We are already hearing reports that Wolf, Schaap, and Ray are starting a smear campaign against us.
We prefer to confine ourselves to the real issues: the exercise of raw power by employers against workers and the violation of the principles of independent journalism. There are, however, some work related issues we should put on the record. As is often the case in corporations, the owners were almost wholly irrelevant, not only to production, but to administration as well. Aside from interference into editorial matters, in the last eight years, Schaap and Ray shirked almost all the responsibilities of publishers. They did not raise one cent — either in donations or grants. They did little to promote the magazine and they met with staff on average less than once a year. Wolf did a little fact checking and proof-reading and some occasional research. But except for contributing a small portion of his inherited wealth to CAQ, he played a minor role. And worse, his admitted unethical behavior and dishonesty repeatedly endangered the credibility and viability of the magazine.
The way they fired us speaks eloquently to what these people stand for. Wolf, Schaap, and Ray “terminated” us in a manner that smacks of monstrous arrogance. They did it with a smarmy exploitation of the legal niceties of capitalism that would make the Dulles brothers blush.
And it is not the first time. Nine years ago, they changed the locks on a previous editor while she was at lunch. They then launched a rumor campaign to smear her character. Her major crime was trying to publish an article critical of Stasi, the East German intelligence agency. She, like many people they treated like expendable serfs, kept quiet — for the good of the left.
But we believe that injustice is injustice no matter what ideology is cynically used to justify it. And like all workers — whether their bosses are gloating capitalists or self-righteous leftists — we live under a system that uses labor and then dismisses the laborer at will. We also now understand in our guts that it is the people who own the presses who have freedom of the press.
The irony is painful and the experience has left us angry and profoundly disappointed. But at the end of the day, it will only strengthen our commitment to good independent journalism and social justice. We go public with great reluctance, but out of a belief that the damage to CAQ the publishers have wrought will not be mitigated if we go quietly………
To all of you who have shared this decade and helped make CAQ the fine, credible magazine it has become, we cannot express how grateful we are for your help and support. We are so deeply sorry at this turn of events, and we hope profoundly that, together or separately, we can continue to fight the good fight.
Please keep in touch and we will try to do the same as events unfold. Feel free to pass on this message.
In solidarity,
Terry Allen (802-434-3767) email:
Barbara Neuwirth: (202-232-6863) email:
Sanho Tree (202-234-6854) email: