Re:

Unfree press

A recent release of previously undisclosed documents reveals that J. Edgar Hoover ordered the FBI to carry out the illegal surveillance of newspaper labour activists during the 1940s. Also revealed is the fact that informants included journalists who wanted Communists removing from the leadership of the Newspaper Guild.(1)

Only following orders

Psychologist Stanley Milgram, famous for his research into obedience, may in fact have been funded by the CIA.(2) ‘Since the agency regularly laundered MK-Ultra funds through other federal agencies to some 185 nongovernment researchers and has refused to release their names, we have no way of knowing the full scope of academic investigation that might have advanced the CIA’s study of torture.’(3)Such speculation has proved too much for other academics and Milgram’s reputation has been robustly defended.(4)

Conspiracy theories

Conspiracy theories, or rather the theory of conspiracy theories, seem to have given academics food for thought of late. Jeffrey M. Bale, who wrote on the subject in Lobster 29, criticises scholars and intellectuals for failing to pay sufficient attention to the historical and political importance of conspiratorial politics.(5) Ginna Husting and Martin Orr show how the conspiracy theorist label is used as a ‘mechanism of social control’ by helping to deflect questions or concerns about power, corruption and motive and ‘symbolically stripping’ the conspiracy theorist of the status of ‘reasonable inter-locutor’.(6)Meanwhile, psychologist Patrick Leman explores the possibility that conspiracy theorists are made and not born, claiming that ‘the reasoning and psychological biases that create believers or their opposites are fostered by social origins.’(7)Not exactly an academic but included for the record is David Aaronovitch who has been touring the country lecturing on what he has learned about ‘conspiracies that dominate the world….and why it is we want so much to believe this kind of story.’

Watergate and Dallas

35 years on and the FBI has made available its Watergate case files(9) while the Washington Post modestly reminds us of its part in the story ‘that brought down a president and forever altered the triangular relationship between government officials, the media and the public.’(10) Also worth a look are some sample documents from the collection of Woodward and Bernstein papers held by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.(11)

Not to be outdone, Rolling Stone caught up with E. Howard Hunt’s son who revealed that he had helped his father dispose of various paraphernalia linked to the Watergate break-in (it was put in a suitcase and dumped in a local canal). Hunt junior is also convinced that his father was one of the tramps photographed in Dallas on the day of Kennedy’s killing.(12) His father never admitted to any involvement in the assassination, but did hint at some inside knowledge. He linked Lyndon Johnson with CIA agent Cord Meyer, who in turn was linked to a CIA black-ops specialist, David Morales. The latter was connected to – in Hunt’s words – the ‘French gunman grassy knoll’ (Lucien Sarti, according to some theories). Hunt later provided his son with a fuller account. Meyer is said to have discussed the plot with David Attlee Phillips (CIA Cuban operations chief based in Miami, where the assassination was originally going to be carried out). Also allegedly involved was Frank Sturgis, a future Watergate plotter. Hunt pulled out of the plot on learning that ‘alcoholic psycho’ Bill Harvey would be one of the participants. ‘There were probably dozens of plots to kill Kennedy, because everybody hated Kennedy but the public….’, Hunt’s son says. ‘The question is which one of them worked? My dad has always said, Thank God one of them worked.’

As to how many people fired the fatal shots, a forthcoming article by Texas A&M University researchers considers evidence indicating that the assassination bullet fragments could have come from three or more bullets, implying that there would have had to have been at least two gunmen.(14)

Galloway v Barron

George Galloway went down with all guns blazing when suspended from the House of Commons on 23 July. In the course of a lengthy series of accusations and counter accusations, Galloway accused Rother Valley MP Kevin Barron of ‘the setting up and smearing of Arthur Scargill…..When Tam Dalyell and I were trying to expose Roger Windsor, the British intelligence agent in Arthur Scargill’s office during the attempt to smear him, the right hon. Member for Rother Valley was [Robert] Maxwell’s man…..’ (15) Barron denied ever being ‘some sort of emissary of Robert Maxwell. I met Robert Maxwell on two occasions, when I was Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition in the 1980s, and that was probably two occasions more than I would have wished to meet him. I have never been his mouthpiece, nor indeed anybody’s mouthpiece, in this place.’ As far as smearing Scargill was concerned ‘I spoke out [in 1990] having read an internal report of the National Union of Mineworkers about the misapplication of funds by its then president, Arthur Scargill.(16) As a consequence of my speaking out and the internal report, nearly £750,000 was returned to the NUM, although many millions of pounds remain today in foreign bank accounts. I know not what will become of that.’

Such was Barron’s irritation that he wrote about the debate in his ‘View from the Valley’ column in the Dinnington & Maltby Guardian later that week, also making it available on his website.(18) It’s a fairly selective account, though, omitting any detail of Galloway’s attack on him or the part he played in the rescuing of NUM funds.

Lockerbie

Following a lengthy review by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi has been granted a second appeal against his conviction for the Lockerbie bombing. His case is expected to be heard next year. The SCCRC found no less than six potential grounds for a miscarriage of justice, one of them apparently involving key prosecution witness Tony Gauci.(19) According to The Jerusalem Post, it seems likely that, although Al Megrahi could go free, the truth about what happened will remain untold. Quoting Emeritus Professor of Scots Law at the University of Edinburgh, Robert Black, the paper says ‘the British government will “stonewall” and the American government will deride the incompetence of…..the “Mickey Mouse” Scottish courts for letting him go. “The guilty man would never have gone free in America” they’ll say.’

Black has rebutted claims that political pressure was placed upon the Scottish judges to deliver the original verdict, pointing out that prosecutions in Scotland are brought by the Lord Advocate, who is also responsible for appointing Scottish judges. ‘What influenced these judges was that they thought if both of the Libyans accused are found not guilty, this will be the most fiendish embarrassment to the Lord Advocate.’ He also criticised the Scottish criminal justice system for not having a proper system for disclosure of information. ‘In Scotland the Crown is allowed to modify or withhold evidence if it considers that withholding is in the “public interest”.’(21)

Baker on Kelly

Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker’s book The Strange Death of David Kelly (London: Politico’s Publishing) received extensive press coverage prior to its publication in November. According to Baker, not only does medical evidence support the view that Kelly did not commit suicide, there is also the fact that no fingerprints were found on the penknife that he had allegedly used to cut his wrist.(22) As to who actually killed Kelly, Baker thinks ‘the murderers may have been anti-Saddam Iraqis’ and suggests that the crime ‘was covered up by elements within the British establishment to prevent a diplomatic crisis…..British police knew about the plot but …..they failed to act in time and….the death was later made to look like a suicide to prevent political and diplomatic turmoil.’

Also mentioned by Baker is one Mai Pederson, a US Army sergeant and alleged spy, who formed a close friendship with Kelly and introduced him to the Baha’i faith.(24) She found claims that he committed suicide difficult to accept. ‘I told the police that the fact that he was found dead in the woods was not surprising. The fact that they said he committed suicide was.’

Dogs of war

A study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) published in June (26) estimates that some 30,000 employees of US and European-based Private Security Companies (PSCs) are at work in Iraq. ‘They have been involved in firefights…..scores of them…..have perished…..[and they] add by 20% the number of foreign troops in the country.’ Not that this would be apparent from news coverage of Iraq. PEJ’s survey of over 400 mainstream media outlets shows that only 7% have ‘delved into the issue of PSC forces more than once, beyond a brief mention in a story about casualties or incidents.’

A recent High Court case in which Teodoro Mbasogo, President of Equatorial Guinea, unsuccessfully sued the companies behind the failed coup to overthrow him gives some insight into the murky world of mercenaries and their financial backers.(28) One well known name that keeps cropping up is that of Mark Thatcher, although, thanks to the efforts of his mother, he ‘never spent a day in jail, despite investing in an aircraft that the plotters intended to use in the coup attempt. In January 2005 he pleaded guilty to breaking South Africa’s anti-mercenary laws, for which he received a £300,000 fine and a four-year suspended sentence, and was allowed to leave his lonely, though luxurious, house arrest in Cape Town.’

A rather more successful – if that’s the right word – mercenary was Bob Denard, whose passing was covered in detail by the broadsheets.(29)His success may have had something to do with the fact that he often had the backing of the French government. At one time he was ‘a sort of “state mercenary” ……when French ex-colonial interests in Africa were regarded as an important part of domestic politics.’

Notes

1. Edward Alwood, ‘Watching the watchdogs: FBI spying on journalists in the 1940s’, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 84(1), Spring 2007, pp. 137-150. Alwood wrote Dark days in the newsroom: McCarthyism aimed at the press (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007) and his website is <http://www.edwardalwood.com/>.
2. Milgram’s most famous experiments took place during the early 1960s at Yale where he found that ordinary members of the public were willing to give apparently harmful electric shocks to a protesting victim because someone in authority told them to. See his Obedience to authority: an experimental view (London: Tavistock Publications, 1974)
3. Alfred W. McCoy, A question of torture: CIA interrogation, from the cold war to the war on terror (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2006) p. 47. See also David H. Price, ‘Buying a piece of anthropology. Part 1: Human ecology and unwitting anthropological research for the CIA’, Anthropology Today, 23(3), June 2007, pp. 8-13, where he reports on research programmes funded by the CIA under the MK-Ultra programme in which social scientists were encouraged to advise on interrogation techniques.
4. Thomas Blass, ‘Unsupported allegations about a link between Milgram and the CIA: tortured reasoning in a question of torture’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 43(2), Spring 2007, pp. 199-203; Richard E. Brown, ‘Alfred McCoy, Hebb, the CIA and torture’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 43(2), Spring 2007, pp. 205-213. See also Blass’s website: <http://www.stanleymilgram.com/rebuttal.php>
5. Jeffrey M. Bale, ‘Political paranoia v. political realism: on distinguishing between bogus conspiracy theories and genuine conspiratorial politics’, Patterns of Prejudice, 41(1), February 2007, pp. 45-60.
6. Ginna Husting and Martin Orr, ‘Dangerous machinery: “conspiracy theorist” as a transpersonal strategy of exclusion’, Symbolic Interaction, 30(2), Spring 2007, pp. 127-150. For examples of such exclusion see Nicholas Lemann, ‘Paranoid style: how conspiracy theories become news’, The New Yorker, 82(33), 16 October 2006, pp. 96-107; Chris Volkay, ‘Is this article on conspiracies part of a conspiracy?’, Skeptical Inquirer, 31(5), 2007, pp. 44-46. Also available at: <http://www.broowaha.com/article.php?id=2211>
7. Patrick Leman, ‘The born conspiracy…’, New Scientist, 194 (2612), 14 July 2007, pp. 35-37.
8. If you missed him, worry not. His book, Voodoo histories: the role of the conspiracy theory in shaping modern history, is due to be published by Vintage next March.
9. Part 1 <http://foia.fbi.gov/filelink.html?file=/watergat/watergat1.pdf>; Part 2 <http://foia.fbi.gov/filelink.html?file=/watergat/watergat2.pdf>
10. The Watergate Story <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/watergate/index.html> contains full Washington Post coverage, analysis, interactive features and multimedia content.
11. <http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/online/woodstein/>
12. One of the photographs is reproduced at <http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/ april2007/300407deathbedconfession.htm>. However this identification of Hunt as one of the tramps is implausible. The ‘tramps’ were identified from Dallas Police records and they were apparently just…..tramps. See <http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/3tramps.htm>.
13. Erik Hedegaard, ‘The last confession of E. Howard Hunt’, Rolling Stone, (1023), 5 April 2007, pp. 44-84. Also available at: <http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/13893143/the_last_confessions_of_e_howard_hunt>
14. Clifford Spiegelman et al, ‘Chemical and forensic analysis of JFK assassination bullet lots: is a second shooter possible?’ Due to be published in Annals of Applied Statistics. The draft article can be viewed at <http://www.imstat.org/aoas/next_issue.html>. See also John Solomon, ‘Scientists cast doubt on Kennedy bullet analysis; multiple shooters possible, study says’, The Washington Post, 17 May 2007 and Catherine Elsworth, ‘Call for rethink on Kennedy shooting’, The Daily Telegraph, 18 May 2007.
15. <http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmhansrd/cm070723/debtext/70723-0012. htm>
16. Barron is presumably referring to Gavin Lightman’s 1990 report to the NUM’s National Executive Committee. Far from being an internal report it was in fact published by Penguin as The Lightman report on the NUM , with Barron ‘offering a handsome discount on copies which he……[was]…merrily selling from his [House of] Commons room.’ (Joanna Coles, ‘Diary’, The Guardian, 1 November 1990) Scargill smearing also featured in the Maxwell-owned Daily Mirror the same year. Over a decade later its then editor, Roy Greenslade, made a public apology: ‘I am now convinced that Scargill didn’t misuse strike funds and that the union didn’t get money from Libya…. we were all taken in.’ (‘Sorry, Arthur….’, The Guardian, 27 May 2002), The authors of the original articles, however, remained adamantly unapologetic. (Terry Pattinson, Frank Thorne and Ted Oliver, ‘Roy says we were taken in. We were not…’, The Guardian, 3 June 2002).Barron himself acrimoniously severed his links with the NUM and became Kinnock’s Parliamentary Private Secretary. ‘As a junior member of Labour’s front bench energy team…. [he] was to play a leading role in fuelling the Mirror’s smear campaign against Arthur Scargill and Peter Heathfield.’ (Richard Heffernan and Mike Marquese, Defeat from the jaws of victory: inside Kinnock’s Labour Party [London: Verso, 1992, p. 125]). His Who’s Who entry makes no mention of his former NUM activities, simply listing ‘NCB, 1962-83’. The same source also reveals that he was a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee (<http://www.cabinet-office.gov.uk/intelligence>) from 1997 to 2005.
17. <http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmhansrd/cm070723/debtext/70723-0014.htm#07072328000116>
18. <http://www.rothervalley.info/index14.asp?page=4>
19. ‘Tony Gauci was an absolutely crucial witness at the original trial, giving “reliable” evidence that Megrahi bought clothes in his shop that were later used to wrap the bomb. Gauci’s evidence has long been considered controversial and there have already been claims that he received rewards and treats from investigators.’ Marcello Mega, ‘Lockerbie witness “given £2m reward”’, Scotland on Sunday, 14 October 2007. Details of the SCCRC decision, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi Referral, 28 June 2007, can be found at <http://www.sccrc.org.uk/ViewFile.aspx?id=293> The full review takes up 800 pages and 13 volumes of appendices.
20. David Horovitz, ‘Lockerbie bomber will go free on appeal experts tell “Post”’, The Jerusalem Post, 10 October 2007; David Horovitz, ‘Lockerbie – a sinister miscarriage of justice?’, The Jerusalem Post, 12 October 2007. In an attempt to find out what really happened, Robert Fisk has asked those in the know to contact him – ‘…an appeal for honest whistle-blowers to tell the truth.’ ‘Do you know the truth about Lockerbie?’, The Independent, 13 October 2007.
21. Hugh Miles, ‘Inconvenient truths’, London Review of Books, 29 (12) 21 June 2007, pp. 8-10. Available at: <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n12/mile01_.html> See also Professor Black’s own blog, The Lockerbie case at <http://lockerbiecase.blogspot.com/>
22. Not that this concerned Thames Valley Police who ‘confirmed that there were no fingerprints on the knife whatsoever’ but went on to say that this ‘does not change the official explanation of his death.’ Andy Dolan, ‘Doctor Kelly’s “suicide” knife and mystery of the missing fingerprints’, Daily Mail, 15 October 2007; Keith Dovkants, ‘Kelly: the evidence that says he was murdered….’, The Evening Standard, 17 October 2007; Simon Edge, ‘Is this proof David Kelly was murdered?’, The Express, 20 October 2007.
23. Fiona Barton, ‘Dr Kelly “was murdered”’, Daily Mail, 20 October 2007; Jenny Percival, ‘Iraqi assassins killed weapons scientist…’, Scotland on Sunday, 21 October 2007; Norman Baker, ‘Did two hired assassins snatch weapons inspector David Kelly?’, Daily Mail, 21 October 2007; Norman Baker, ‘Did Britain give a nod and a wink to the killers of Dr David Kelly?’, Daily Mail, 22 October 2007.
24. Norman Baker, ‘…The belly-dancing spy whose secrets they just ignored’, Daily Mail, 23 October 2007.
25. Sharon Churcher, ‘I’m not surprised David was found dead in the woods. I am surprised police say it was suicide’, Mail on Sunday, 25 January 2004; Tom Mangold, ‘David was told: “Keep away from Mai, she’s a spy and won’t help your marriage”’, Mail on Sunday, 1 February 2004.
26. A media mystery: private security companies in Iraq. Available at: <http://journalism.org/node/6153> See also the Congressional Research Service Report Private security contractors in Iraq: background, legal status, and other issues <http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32419.pdf>.
27. The judgment is available at <http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Files/1/SystemsDesignLtdandLogoLtdvPresofstateofEquGuinet.pdf>. Mbasogo was claiming special damages for financial loss and general damages for trauma. See also Kate O’Hanlon, ‘Claims arising out of failed African coup not justiciable in English court’, The Independent, 26 October 2006; Anon., ‘Foreign state claim non-justiciable’, The Times, 27 October 2006; Adrian Briggs, ‘The cost of suppressing insurrection’, Law Quarterly Review ,123, April 2007, pp. 182-185. Related cases were also heard in the Isle of Man and Guernsey. See law firm BakerPlatt’s informative commentary at <http://www.bakerplatt.com/upload/public/Civ/2006/1370.html>
28. Kim Sengupta and Karyn Maughan, ‘The Thatcher dossier’, Belfast Telegraph, 14 January 2005; Vicky Ward, ‘Black sheep, big trouble…’, Vanity Fair, (533), January 2005. Available at <http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2005/01/thatcher200501>; Raymond Whitaker, ‘So, where is Mark Thatcher?’, The Independent on Sunday, 13 May 2007.
29. He was reputed to have been the role model for the hero of Frederick Forsyth’s The Dogs of War. Sophie Nicholson, ‘Bob Denard…’, The Guardian, 16 October 2007.
30. John Lichfield, ‘Bob Denard…’, The Independent, 16 October 2007.