A Channel 4 SOE mystery In January and February this year Channel 4 broadcast a history of the war-time Special Operations Executive, SOE, written and presented by the novelist Sebastian Faulks, called Churchill’s Secret Army. It was an interesting series with some excellent first-hand material and footage. But there were two mysteries. The first, and … Read more
All four of Tony Blair’s new political appointees at the Ministry of Defence are part of Labour’s Atlanticist network. Three of them, George Robertson, Lord John Gilbert and John Speller, are members of two interrelated bodies, the Atlantic Council and its labour movement wing, the Trades Union Committee for European and Transatlantic Understanding (TUCETU). The … Read more
A secret service? In the Guardian of 12 June 2000 David Leigh had an important piece on the relationship between our secret servants and the media. At the core of this was his account of the revelation, via a libel suit in London, of an MI6 operation to plant disinformation in the Sunday Telegraph about … Read more
On 8 March 1985 an attempt was made to assassinate one of the founders of Hizbullah, Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, by car bomb in Beirut. The attack failed in its objective, but there was some ‘collateral damage’. While Fadlallah was untouched, some eighty bystanders, men, women and children, were killed and over two hundred injured. … Read more
The discussion of conspiracy in the mainstream media tends towards a very specific formula. The writer first notes with shock and disappointment the growing popularity of conspiracy theories and then goes on to provide explanations for this new popularity. This explanation almost always assumes that these theories about the ‘true’ nature of social reality exist … Read more
Thanks chiefly to the efforts of the Irish MEP Patricia McKenna, we now know quite a lot about the relationship between the European Union and members of various elite management groups, notably the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group. Romano Prodi, now President of the European Commission, was a Steering Committee Member of the Bilderberg … Read more
In an interview in The Times (Times 2, 23 November 2000, p.5) Dr Rosalie Berthell spoke of her belief that the US military is researching how to modify the weather. What looks to me like the beginnings of evidence for this belief appeared in two pieces on the Net: http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/chuss/haarp.htm http://emperors-clothes.com/docs/changed.htm The second of those … Read more
In Lobster 14 we printed a piece on the USA’s alleged role in the first Fiji coup, originally published in Wellington Confidential. Since then, due to the ill-health of Wellington Confidential’s editor/publisher, it has been cut back and is now being sent to a very restricted list of people. Fortunately, Lobster is still on its … Read more
Francis Beckett and David Hencke London: Constable, 2009, h/b, £18.99 This is quite interesting and impressive; but with a strange spin. There is a lot of (to me) new detail on the impact of the event on the Labour Party and trade unions, on money given to the NUM from other unions and on attempts … Read more
In its own communications, evangelical Christianity exists in a delirious present but it has a rich and recoverable history. Evangelical religion can and should be explained in part in terms of the response of the millions of the faithful to the experience of modernity. But while secular intellectuals sometimes see it simply as a mechanism … Read more
