One of many reasons why the lobbying industry attracts opprobrium is because Britain’s political system offers only limited public sector facility to those who wish to influence it but lack the funding and/or patronage to do so. ‘The lobbyists’ did not cause the injustice. It is up to government to come up with the solutions. […]
[…] US State of the Union speeches. President Bush gave his this year as climate change dominated British media, a subject he ignored. The President seemed unaware that Pope Benedict, the week before – doubtless with the upcoming Presidential speech in mind – gave his first as pontiff, priming global audiences about love, which coincides […]
[…] of Soviet Analysis at the CIA said: ‘There was very good, sensitive DO evidence that suggested the Soviets were not linked to the assassination attempt on the Pope.’ The CIA, said Goodman in the early 1980s ‘had very good penetration of the Bulgarian secret services’ and that these clandestine CIA sources had found no […]
[…] of Christ is one of the finest ‘Mission Accomplished’ statements to be found. () The image is uncluttered, the victim/hero takes centre stage, and there is no pope emoting over Christ’s shoulder. (Real power is when you do not even need to be in the picture.()) Contrast this to President Bush’s busy, visually over-detailed […]
[…] has turned out to be. The item that struck me is the authors’ reproduction of an early interview on the subject of the assassination attempt on the Pope given by Claire Sterling, in which the ‘Bulgarian connection’ is described as ‘crazy’. Getting CAIB isn’t easy in the UK. It used to be stocked by […]
[…] naked Mafia shit that he is. Take the rest of the Mafia and cancer with him. A truly American service. As his Mafia brother stated (as the Pope leaped into the ‘Holy Crusade’ of Vietnam) — ‘Ask not what your country can do for you – but what you can do for your country.’ […]
This is a slightly abridged version of part of chapter four of Mark Curtis’s book The Ambiguities of Power: British Foreign Policy since 1945 (Zed Press, 1995) reviewed below. In August 1953 a coup overthrew Iran’s nationalist government of Mohammed Musaddiq and installed the Shah in power. The Shah subsequently used widespread repression and torture … Read more
[…] stability and prosperity with taxes. Both propositions are matters of faith but, while we cannot know what happens after death (making Richard Dawkins no better than the Pope in this respect), we can certainly judge whether governments have used our taxes wisely in maintaining not just prosperity but also stability. Well, they have been […]
[…] sometimes in partnership with Noam Chomsky, the scourge of its conventional wisdom. In the early Reagan years we had an expose of the ‘Bulgarian plot to kill Pope John Paul II’ — a critical event in the winding up of the Second Cold War — and more recently The Terrorism Industry: the experts and […]
[…] disinformation. The U.S. ran the ‘KGB terror network’ story, through Clare Sterling, with help from the Israelis, messers Crozier and Moss and others, and then the KGB-shot-the- Pope story. Against that the Soviet Union ran the story (with several variants) that AIDS was a U.S. biological warfare experiment gone wrong. A minor spin-off from […]
