The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War by Craig Whitlock

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: […] that many senior U.S. officials privately viewed the war as an unmitigated disaster, contradicting a chorus of rosy public statements from officials at the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department, who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan.’ The various war plans ‘had fatal flaws’ and the […]

View from Bridge copy

Lobster Issue

The view from the bridge Robin Ramsay As always, thanks to Nick Must and Garrick Alder for editorial help with Lobster. *new* Broken-down Blighty We’ve had at least a century of essays and books bemoaning British decline. This a nicely surveyed in Andrew Gamble’s ‘Britain’s eternal decline’ in the New Statesman in September last year.1 […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] Alliance and Daszak declined to comment for this story.’51 This article did not refer to the report that EcoHealth Alliance had received nearly $40 million from the Pentagon which it had tried to ‘bury’ in its accounts.52 So: the man whose organisation is funded by the US military and who has been working with […]

View from Bridge copy

Lobster Issue

The view from the bridge Robin Ramsay As always, thanks to Nick Must and Garrick Alder for editorial help with Lobster. *new* Broken-down Blighty We’ve had at least a century of essays and books bemoaning British decline. This a nicely surveyed in Andrew Gamble’s ‘Britain’s eternal decline’ in the New Statesman in September last year.1 […]

The Lincoln-Kennedy Psyop

Lobster Issue 81 (Summer 2021)

[PDF file]: […] during the Second World War, and (US Army General) Eisenhower’s special advisor on psychological warfare. Between 1953 and 1954, Jackson was President Eisenhower’s special liaison between the Pentagon and the recently-created CIA. On one fundamental principle, Jackson and Eisenhower were likeminded: psychological warfare was preferable to physical warfare, and decisively so in the age […]

View from

Lobster Issue

[…] let alone all the still secret stuff – this is sort of surprising. But perhaps it hasn’t been trying. Perhaps the large increase in funding for the Pentagon bought off the ‘deep state’. * Related to the above, I asked Google AI for use of the term ‘deep state’ and inter alia it offered […]

Everybody Knows: Corruption in America by Sarah Chayes

Lobster Issue 81 (Summer 2021)

[PDF file]: […] themselves in the swamp like no other President before them. Jared Kushner, for example, has both ‘personal and financial entanglements’ across the Middle East. According to one Pentagon aide, every policy in the region was ‘examined for what it can do for him’. And as for Trump himself, he is ‘at once a symptom […]

Historical notes on the war in Ukraine

Lobster Issue 83 (Summer 2022)

[PDF file]: […] which mainstream media outlets in the West did not discuss in much detail. This was the country’s place in US global strategy. As early as 1992 a Pentagon defence planning document explicitly stated that the main objective of US security policy should be ‘to obstruct the emergence of any potential rival – “either on […]

The Mandelson legacy

Lobster Issue 91 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] network that was the UK Government-supported BAP when his opposite number in the US was NeoCon Paul Wolfowitz, a key Republican ‘war on terror’ figure. Wolfowitz became Pentagon deputy to Donald Rumsfeld with a major role in planning and promoting the invasion of Iraq in the George W Bush administration. Mandelson was by then […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] the Dog, a ‘threat’ from Albania is created. In the satire-proof America of 2013 the threat is North Korea. The Washington Post reported on 15 March: ‘The Pentagon announced Friday that it would strengthen the country’s defenses against a possible attack by nuclear-equipped North Korea, fielding additional missile systems to protect the West Coast […]

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