Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995
Cees Wiebes
Munster, Germany: Lit Verlag, Studies in Intelligence History, 2003
ISBN 3-8258-6347-6
p/b, 34.9 euros, $39.95 from Amazon.
The publisher declined to send me a review copy but I read one chapter sent by e-mail from the author. This isn’t my field but it seems to me to be a dazzling demonstration of parapolitical research, in an area in which research looks difficult to do. The intelligence historian Richard Aldrich summarised its contents and gave it a big thumbs up in the Guardian at <www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4398721103677,00.html>
The greatest sedition is silence
William Rivers Pit
London: Pluto Press, 2003, h/b, £18.99
A left-liberal polemic against the Bush regime, this hits the right targets: corporate dominance of politics, stealing the election, 9/11, the hyping of terrorism, the Patriot Act, neo-cons, the religious right the new American Reich which Bush Jnr. has fronted since the Republicans ran their little coup in Florida. All entirely acceptable but rather familiar and mostly unsourced. It might get him run out of town in Middle America but for readers of this journal it won’t be of much interest. Sort of Greg Palast lite; Gore Vidal without the style.
The Vatican Exposed: Money, Murder and the Vatican
Paul L. Williams
Prometheus Books, New York, 2003
h/b, $27.00
www.prometheusbooks.com
A short (200 pages, large print) and sharp history of the Catholic church’s greatest scandals. Wearing his philosophy PhD and MA in divinity lightly, Williams conducts the reader through the church’s enrichment by the Hitler and Mussolini regimes in exchange for its support; the church’s wartime role supporting the genocidal Croat regime; its post-war role in helping Nazis flee Europe; the long succession of financial and political scandals Sindona, Calvi, Gelli et al over the last 30 years; and the sex abuse scandal which is ripping the church to bits across the world. This isn’t documented very thoroughly but it isn’t that kind of book: it’s a polemic, a sketch; and I enjoyed it a lot. But quite where the author is coming from, I don’t know. On page 98 he writes: ‘As an advocate of Communism, Paul VI….’ Huh?
War is a Racket
Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler
Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003
p/b, $9.95
About Smedley Butler I knew only two things: there was the famous quote of his, which began, ‘I was a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall St and the bankers’, which has been floating around the Net for many years; and it is said that he prevented a coup against President Franklin Roosevelt. So when I read that Feral House was publishing War is a Racket by Butler, I asked for a copy.
The ten pages here by publisher Adam Parfrey on the ‘coup’ show that there was not so much a coup plot, so much as discussions among bankers about getting Butler to head an organisation of former soldiers in 1934, the year after the beginning of ‘the New Deal’. The aim, according to Parfrey, was to ‘attempt to intimidate President Roosevelt into functional inactivity’. Hardly a coup! Butler had supported the campaign of WW1 veterans for a ‘bonus’ and was popular with them. But he was also a vociferous populist and rejected the idea. For that role Butler was precisely the wrong man.
The rest of the text is reprints of four short, isolationist essays written by Butler in the mid 1930s, saying nothing other isolationists of the period hadn’t said, and of interest only because of Butler’s former rank in the Marine Corps.
Notes from the Borderland
… is Dr. Larry O’Hara’s journal. Issue 5 has appeared with 64 pages devoted to ‘Spooks: in the media, among the fascists, inside UFOlogy, on television’, to quote the front cover. This edition is a big step forward technically it looks much better than the earlier issues but the content remains recognisably O’Hara country: lots of fascinating information but all too often linked by guesswork and speculation. Pace my comments on Peter Dale Scott’s book above, in this field some speculation and guesswork is acceptable, even necessary, but here there is too much of it in many of the articles (and a knowing tone of voice which I find irritating). On the front cover is advertised ‘Eliza Manningham-Buller: uncovering the link between the MI5 director-general and recent royal scandals’. But there is no link that I can see. After four thousand or so densely documented words, the question is posed: ‘Was buxom Buller appointed to expunge aristocratic ordure?’ And answered: ‘Quite possibly.’
And so, quite possibly not.
This is not my cup of tea but it might be yours Notes from the Borderland sells more copies than Lobster, incidentally and this latest issue is available in the UK for £3.50 (EU add 15% ; US/Canada add 20%). Cheques should be made payable to Larry O’Hara at BM Box 4769, London WC1N 3XX.