The Israel Lobby John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt London: Allen Lane, 2007, £25 This account of the relationship between the ‘Israel lobby’ in the US, the US state and Israel should be required reading for anyone with an interest – personal, professional or political – in the troubled affairs of the Middle East. … Read more
Earlier articles in Lobster (issues 39, 41, 43, 45, 49) have followed Malcolm Kennedy’s case. The human rights organisation, Liberty, took his complaint about interference with his communications and other forms of surveillance and harassment, to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), the body set up under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) to … Read more
Since 1988 a goodly slice of the Great and the Good of British civil, political and media society, from the current Prime Minister downwards, have been getting letters and press releases from Mr Harold Smith. Smith’s letters have served as a kind of substitute for the non-publication of his memoir Sons of Oxford. Commissioned in … Read more
William Blum New York: Soft Skull Press, 2002, $15 www.softskull.com The working lives of writers, especially writers of non-fiction like Blum – or me – are rather dull. To produce Lobster and my other bits and pieces I have to stay in one place, read e-mails every day, books, newspapers, visit libraries, go to … Read more
On October 8 1998 the CIA’s Inspector General published a report on the recent CIA-cocaine controversy which – apparently – more or less copped the lot, acknowledging that the CIA had ignored drug smuggling by its Contra allies. (See for example The Independent 7 November 1998, ‘CIA turned a deliberate blind eye to Contras’ drug … Read more
On August 27th this year the British Channel Four TV programme ‘The Real X-Files’ gave a glimpse of the long history of US psychic research programs. As most of these programmes have been ‘black’, the true results and serious nature of the research have been concealed from the public and Congress. The triggering mechanism for … Read more
Colin Wallace On the Colin Wallace front, the big event since issue 17 has been Paul Foot’s book, Who Framed Colin Wallace? (Macmillan, 1989). With this book Paul Foot has re-researched and synthesised all the previous work and produced what is likely to remain the definitive account of Wallace’s biography, his allegations and – most … Read more
Did Churchill reveal the pending Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to Roosevelt two weeks before it happened? Below is what purports to a transcript of a telephone conversation recorded by the Germans during World War 2. If genuine, it shows, as has been alleged in the past, that Roosevelt was indeed warned of the impending … Read more
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke I.B.Tauris, London, 1992, £9.95. In his last paragraph the author concludes: ‘Books written about Nazi occultism between 1960 and 1975 were typically sensational and under-researched. A complete ignorance of the primary sources was common to most authors and inaccuracies and wild claims were repeated by each newcomer to the genre until an abundant … Read more
Giles Scott-Smith London: Routledge/PSA 2002, £55 This is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA-funded operation that ran for two decades after World War II of which Encounter magazine was the best-known British component. Giles Scott-Smith has added to the historical record well illuminated by Christopher … Read more
