103 results found.
... Iran was not top of Israel and America's 'axis of evil' hit list, but rather the means of lubricating the foreign policy interests of both. Mossad 91 Summer 2010 founding father Kimche was a key figure in setting up the 1985 US arms-for-Iran deal when President Ronald Reagan was needing to find a way to finance the Contra rebels in Nicaragua after the US Senate ruled such funding illegal. Israel supplied the weapons and Reagan's Central American friends got the dosh. Kimche, working with his old friend and key Reagan security adviser Michael Ledeen, was the brains behind the scheme, leaving former US marine Colonel Oliver North as the fall guy when the whole covert operation ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 13 - 15 Dec 2012 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster59/lob59-086.pdf
... ghastly series of atrocities that was US foreign policy in the 1980s in Central America in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala – remember Blowtorch Bob, the Americans' proxy psychopath in El Salvador? – is missing. Around half a million dead Central Americans do not merit comment, apparently. The domestic political spin-off, the Iran-Contra scandal, is there en passant. As are many other things. His introduction tell us that the Kennedy assassination was a landmark: but of all the hundreds of books on that event published in the period covered by these essays, he reviews only two of the least significant, both of which recycle the absurd Oswald-did- ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 21 - 27 Aug 2012 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster64/lob64-misc-reviews.pdf
... In keeping with the entrepreneurial spirit of David Stirling (that dates from the Long Range Desert Patrols during World War II) it was the 23rd Airborne Territorial SAS in Hereford that provided the main recruitment conduit for these state sanctioned covert operations. Again, the memoir of 'Tom Carew' would seem to confirm this. Outsourced state terrorism and the contras The link between British Special Forces and military privatisation partly entered the public domain in the Iran- Contra Affair. In 1983, Margaret Thatcher was returned to office with an increased majority only because of the Falklands' War. But victory in that war carried a price. Britain won the Falklands War because of signals intelligence provided by the ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 56 - 07 Apr 2012 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster63/lob63-armed-dangerous.pdf
... wake of 9/11 but tracing it back to its roots in the Carter administration's support for Afghan resistance to the Soviet invas-ion. The simple point, that the US and Britain now find themselves just as mired in that country as the Russians did three decades ago, barely needs to be stated. That the architects of Iran Contra, an earlier alliance of 'creative destruction', in the brilliant terms of neo-con apparatchick Michael Ledeen, should be setting the agenda for the second President Bush came as no surprise; that there was such a continuum through the Clinton years per-haps should. Depending now on a Sunni 'arc of moderation' has simply inflamed ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 14 - 01 Jun 2009 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue57/lob57-37.htm
... at the US embassy and in an active retirement from the diplomatic service continued to influence British politicians through his work at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. One son Roy, a close friend of CIA chief William Casey, continued in a similar line of work with British trade unionists, while also having a hand in the Iran-Contra affair. Other son Dean, whose journalistic career at The Daily Telegraph prospered mightily under Conrad Black after serving as a defence assistant in the Reagan Administration, wrote a biography of David Trimble, and is now research director of the Policy Exchange. In that capacity Godson fronted its 2007 publication of The Hijacking of British Islam. Policy Exchange ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 13 - 01 Jun 2009 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue57/lob57-47.htm
26. Briefly [Lobster #56 (Winter 2008/9)]
... the making of his films, the fact that his politics are radical gives this a quite different feel from other film memoirs which mostly eschew politics. Cox is a political animal and his (left) radical political views run through this. He made his film 'Walker' (which I haven't seen) in Nicaragua while the US-supported contras were attacking the country. But the politics are mostly part of the background and the occasional aside. This is centrally about his becoming a filmmaker and the processes involved in making films, from the ground up: fundraising, casting, location-scouting, script-writing, directing, dealing with actors, editing – the whole intricate ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 14 - 01 Dec 2008 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue56/lob56-51.htm
... charges. But before he could be tried, he fled to Venezuela, where he has lived comfortably ever since, untouched by the U.S . authorities. A clue as to why that might be lies in the strong possibility that the extra money being defrauded from Medicare was being used by Recarey to fund medical aid for the Nicaraguan Contras. Whilst a Congressional Intelligence Committee found no evidence to support this theory, former CIA operative Jose Basulto told the Wall Street Journal in 1987 that he had been at meetings at IMC headquarters in Miami with Contra leaders Adolfo Calero and Felix Rodriguez.(37) Let's take the Bush family denials at face value; let's pretend that a ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 11 - 01 Dec 2008 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue56/lob56-17.htm
28. Sources [Lobster #55 (Summer 2008)]
... billion spent by Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon on a daily propaganda organ, The Washington Times, according to a 21-year veteran of the newspaper. '( 10) While visiting Parry's site, take a look at 'Gary Webb's death: American tragedy',(11) Parry's admirably succinct summary of the CIA-cocaine-contras story which led to the suicide of the American journalist, Gary Webb, who was the first to break it in the major media. An even dodgier dossier The 'dodgy dossier' produced by the government of Colombia and the USA against Venezuela in March – terrorists and drugs and nukes – reported straight by most of the major media, ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 14 - 01 Jun 2008 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue55/lob55-43.htm
... roughly speaking those of the liberal-individualist ideology of Western culture with its emotivist ethics and hidden dependence on existing power structures. After Dark broke all these rules from the beginning, built as it was by the Viennese to reflect the polygon of views that is real life, rather than the binary fallacy of yes/no, pro/contra stylised debates. Somehow we still managed to make the news, broke many stories of importance, and flourished like a dock leaf next to the nettle of Thatcherite triumphalism. The special freedoms guaranteed by the programme were grabbed by the participants, who often said the apparently unsayable. Intelligent production kept us out of the law courts, if ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 12 - 01 Jun 2008 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue55/lob55-03.htm
... their torturers were the CIA's own paid informants. Moreover, the Agency did its best to ensure that 'the torturers were shielded from any legal or political consequences. ' Similarly, the covert war against Nicaragua involved a campaign of terror waged by CIA mercenaries that was nevertheless presented to the world as a liberation struggle. President Ronald Reagan celebrated 'the contras' as men in the same mould as the 'Founding Fathers' of the United States. This did not stop him trying to subvert the Constitution the Founding Fathers had drawn up in order to conduct his illegal war, something conveniently forgotten in the eulogies that accompanied his death. Moreover, as Greg Grandin writes of the contras: 'They ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 32 - 01 Dec 2007 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue54/lob54-09.htm