Ivor Crewe and Anthony King Oxford University Press, 1995, £25 Few who lived through the launch of the Social Democratic Party are likely to forget the impact of the creation of the Gang of Four in 1981. The avowed intention of the four former Cabinet ministers was to offer Britain a fresh alternative – a … Read more
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 … Read more
Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall University of California Press, Berkeley, 1998, $15.95 pb ISBN 0-520-21449-8 This is a revised and updated version of this book which was first published in 1991 (and was reviewed in Lobster 24). Since that first edition we have had the great furore over the 1996 stories published in … Read more
[…] 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 […]
You might remember the red sofas, leather Chesterfields recovered in quieter fabric. You might remember that the talking didn’t end at any specific time, unique in an era when all television channels closed down at night. You might remember Oliver Reed getting drunk, although he was hardly the only disruptive guest. Reading Norman Baker’s book … Read more
[…] was the limit respected, but that was because the Saigon regime fell before the limit was reached.) Congressional bans on aid to the death squads of the contras in the mid-1980s were secretly and illegally subverted by Oliver North in the Reagan White House with Pentagon and CIA support, provoking the Iran-Contra confrontation. Indonesia’s […]
[…] in the last twenty years are spurious. Their account of the CIA is wilfully inadequate, even for a three page summary. They describe the funding of the Contras without mentioning drugs, even when the CIA itself has admitted getting permission from the US Attorney General to ignore cocaine dealing in return for donations to […]
[…] terror and “terror” George Schultz actually says (p19): “it is not hard to tell … who are the terrorists and who are the freedom fighter …. the Contras in Nicaragua do not blow up school buses or hold mass executions of civilians.” This is preposterous, of course. I can’t be bothered doing it, but […]
Let’s start with the easiest question: what do George Robertson, Chris Smith and Marjorie ‘Mo’ Mowlam have in common? They are, of course, all strong Tony Blair supporters in the new Labour Cabinet. And what about Peter Mandelson and Elizabeth Symons? Not yet quite Cabinet members, but both are key figures in the ‘modernising project’ … Read more
9:11 Revealed. Challenging the facts behind the War on Terror Ian Henshall and Rowland Morgan London: Robinson, 2005; £8.99, p/b A declaration of a kind of interest: one of the authors of this book, Ian Henshall, is the Chair of INK, the Independent News Collective, to which Lobster belongs and whose leaflets Lobster has … Read more
