When falsehoods are bared, we have to be alert to those that will take their place as well as the ones that remain concealed.(1) At the time of writing (October 2004), the deluge of media coverage on the false justifications for the Iraq war – now understandably giving way to greater anxieties about the well-being … Read more
Political activist Daniel Ellsberg and Professor Alfred McCoy have something special in common. Based on their actions and accomplishments of nearly thirty years ago, they have achieved the status of icons within the subculture of what passes for the New Left. Icon Ellsberg became a celebrity in 1971 after he leaked The Pentagon Papers, an … Read more
The story in The Guardian of 12 November, ‘Diplomat’s “slave” can stay in UK’, was the tip of an iceberg. The story concerned the allegations made that a Sudanese diplomat had kept a ‘slave’ in London. Allegations of slavery in the Sudan have been made – and denied – for years. (A summary of the … Read more
Israel, the Jews, and the West: The Fall and Rise of Antisemitism William D Rubinstein London: The Social Affairs Unit, 2008, £10.00 The Holocaust is Over; We Must Rise from its Ashes Avraham Burg New York: Palgrave Macmillan, £15.99 A Time To Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity Edited by … 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
There has been much discussion about whether KAL 007 was an overhead intelligence platform or not. This article does not attempt to directly answer this question. Instead it reviews the reasons why the US should attempt technical intelligence gathering around September 1983 – when KAL 007 was downed – and the means available to do … Read more
Wishing and hoping I met Tony Benn only once, while researching Smear! He’s a lovely man with a big blind spot about the politics of the early 1980s in general and the Militant Tendency in particular. Here’s Benn in the course of an appreciation of Arthur Scargill on his standing down as President of … Read more
Peter Dale Scott University of California Press (paperback edition, with new preface) 1996, $14.95 ‘The key to understanding Deep Politics is the distinction I propose between traditional conspiracy theory, looking at conscious secret collaborations towards shared ends, and deep political analysis, defined as “the study of all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or … Read more
Global Intelligence: the World’s Secret Services Today Paul Todd and Jonathan Bloch, London and New York, Zed Books, 2003 h/back £32.95/ $55.00 p/back £9.99/ $17.50 ‘We lacked specific information on many key aspects of Iraq’s WMD program’ Vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Stuart Cohen, December 2003 With the spectacular failure of … Read more
GEHEIM (“SECRET”) is West Germany’s representative in the international stable of state research publications. Geheim has appeared three or four times a year since 1983, and its editors are experienced state research journalists in the Federal Republic – Rudolf Gossner, author (with Geheim contributor Uwe Herzog) of an exhaustive work on the undercover activities of … Read more
