Lobster Issue 30 (December 1995) £££
[…] run from the White House. In the face of a congressional ban on American aid he relied on a corrupt Iranian arms merchant (Albert Hakim), a scandal-tainted Pentagon officer (Richard Secord), a shady CIA veteran connected to the drug-linked Nugan Hand Bank (Thomas Clines), a convicted Syrian arms-and-drugs dealer (Manzer al-Kassar), a fugitive wanted […]
Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3) £££
Nicholson Baker London: Vintage books, 2002, pb, £7.99 See note (1) In the third voyage of Gulliver’s Travels, Swift describes a visit to the Academy of Lagado, where ‘Projectors’ work at bizarre schemes like making silk from spiders’ webs. Whenever they meet problems, rather than admitting the futility of their efforts they clamour for […]
Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002) £££
[…] and, of course, many of God’s children find ways to fake them. An absolute classic of the genre was reported by AP on 6 June 2001: ‘The Pentagon agency charged with rooting out fraud destroyed documents and substituted fakes to win a passing grade in an audit of its own operations, according to an […]
Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002) £££
See Note (1) Introduction In The Wealth of Nations, a book supposed to underpin modern free-market philosophies, Adam Smith thought that the separation of management from ownership would inevitably gave rise to negligence and corruption. The owners of Enron were the shareholders, represented by pension funds, banks and trust funds. The chief managers of Enron […]
Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7) £££
Mr Tony was a spook? Issue 7 of Larry O’Hara’s Note from the Borderland () includes a section from the Anne Machon and David Shayler book, Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers (reviewed in Lobster 49), which was apparently dropped by the publisher. The key section is this, from an unnamed MI5 officer: ‘Blair was recruited early […]
Lobster Issue 23 (1992) £££
[…] Gaulle in this period. But it is difficult to believe that any of the powerful elements in the U.S. state apparatus — the intelligence agencies or the Pentagon, for example — would have felt it necessary to ambush Kennedy if they just wanted to get rid of him or change some of his policies. […]
Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006) £££
Bernard Porter London: Yale University Press, 2006, £18.99. h/b Porter is one of our leading historians of the British empire. He is also a friend of mine. Generally I wouldn’t try and review a friend’s book but this arrived too close to my deadline to find someone else and someone more competent […]
Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009) £££
[…] Military-Industrial Complex: It’s Much Later Than You Think’.(8) So far Barack Obama has said nothing about reducing the proportion of US federal tax income given to the Pentagon, though some cuts in future military spending were announced in April by Defense Secretary Gates.(9) It remains to be seen if these cuts and closures can […]
Lobster Issue 7 (1985) £££
The Shadow Warriors Bradley F. Smith (Andre Deutsch, London 1983) The network of close personal connections established in O.S.S. (the fore-runner of the CIA) “helped bridge some of the widest gaps in American society and could be called upon in cases of need long after the war ended. For example, when in 1964 former British […]
Lobster Issue 47 (Summer 2004) £££
Covert Action: The Roots of Terrorism Edited by Ellen Ray and William H. Schaap Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press, 2003, £14.95 The Politics of Anti-Semitism Edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair Oakland (US) and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2003, £9.00/$12.95 The Betrayal of Dissent: Beyond Orwell, Hitchens and the New American Century Scott […]
