Halliburton: Winning the Brown and Root Way

Lobster Issue 47 (Summer 2004)

Colin Challen MP First, buy your senator It wasn’t long after their election in 2000 that the business backgrounds of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney became mired in controversy. Cheney’s business career was not as long as Bush’s, but it personifies the role of crony capitalism endemic to U.S. politics. Cheney’s role as Halliburton’s … Read more

Conspiracy: Plots, Lies and Cover-ups

Book cover
Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003)

Richard M Bennett London: Virgin Books, 2003 £20 hardback   This is 350 pages of summaries of political and historical conspiracies. It starts in 2330 BC but the first 2007 years take up only 84 pages. The content is mostly Anglo-American, especially after WW2. It is done chronologically, so you get odd sequences of subjects: … Read more

Drugs, oil and war

Book cover
Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003)

[…] political influence, and ultimately to drug airlines and mob-controlled banks, is the story that I first explored in The War Conspiracy and again (with respect to the Contras) in Cocaine Politics….essentially the same lobbies and their milieus, with oil prominent at the overt level and mob and drug links at the deeper covert level, […]

Lockerbie, the octopus and the Maltese double cross

Lobster Issue 27 (1994)

Political debris continues to fall from the bombing of the Pan-Am flight 103 on 21 December 1988, which killed 270 people. Fallout from Lockerbie has begun to reveal one of the ugliest political corruptions of recent times. This Byzantine tale is further evidence of just how powerful and ruthless the American-led international security apparatus — … Read more

Jim Jones and the Conspiracists

Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003)

In an article in the Journal of Popular Culture, (1) one of the editors of the Jonestown Report considers the role that conspiracy theories have played in the unfolding narrative of ‘Jonestown’. It is a worthwhile endeavour to which few scholars could bring better credentials. Rebecca Moore is a professor of religious studies at the … Read more

Armed and Dangerous: the corporate origins of war with Iran

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012)

[PDF file]: […] 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 IranContra Affair. In 1983, Margaret Thatcher was returned to office […]

Misc reviews

Lobster Issue

[…] with government permission, gave cocaine dealers in Central and South America a ‘get out of jail free’ card: for a few thousand dollars of support for the contras they could fly their product in unhindered. And so the guns out and drugs back pattern began. Iran-Contra is all too frequently short-handed as weapons-for-hostages. More […]

Transnationalised Repression; Parafascism and the U.S.

Lobster Issue 12 (1986)

[PDF file]: […] last decade and a half. The thesis of “Transnationalised Repression” also seems only too relevant to U.S. politics in Nicaragua, as we learn of support for the Contras from first Argentina and Israel, and now allegedly from South Africa. The restrained optimism of the essay’s conclusions, written in the first year of the Carter […]

Miscellaneous reviews

Lobster Issue 64 (Winter 2012)

[PDF file]: […] with government permission, gave cocaine dealers in Central and South America a ‘get out of jail free’ card: for a few thousand dollars of support for the contras they could fly their product in unhindered. And so the guns out and drugs back pattern began. Iran-Contra is all too frequently short-handed as weapons-for-hostages. More […]

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