[PDF file]: The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong about Islam Peter Oborne London: Simon & Schuster, 2022, £25 (h/b) John Booth If you need a revival of spirit and energy this summer, Peter Oborne’s ambitious new book could help top up your political Vitamin D. For in its telling of some of the history […]
[PDF file]: […] South Africa. The restrained optimism of the essay’s conclusions, written in the first year of the Carter presidency, may sound a little odd after six years of Reagan. Support for drug-running criminals has moved from being the dark underside of U.S. foreign policy to (in the case of the Nicaraguan Contras) being at that […]
[PDF file]: The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s secret relationship with apartheid South Africa Sasha Polakow-Suransky London: Vintage Books, 2011, £16.00 O ne of the striking features of the apartheid years was the courageous determination of many South African Jews to bring down a regime significantly sustained through close alliance with Israel. In part this was a relationship of […]
[PDF file]: […] held tax free, offshore, greatly advantaging those corporations. The author describes how attempts to control US money supply in 1979-81 were thwarted; and six months after Ronald Reagan took office the International Banking Facility was introduced in America, allowing US banks to pretend to be overseas banks. Thus the US moved to the UK […]
[…] the 1980s via the Mena airstrip, when Bill Clinton was governor and controlled the state police. But the story goes further. Mena was the hub for the Reagan administration’s secret operation to supply Contra rebels in Nicaragua, which interested me because I had spent four years covering the Sandinista Revolution and the guerrilla insurgencies […]
[PDF file]: Weather weapons: the dark world of environmental warfare T. J. Coles Didn’t it rain Declassified records show that from 1949 to 1955, the Royal Air Force (RAF) released various substances, including dry ice, silver iodide, and salt into the atmosphere at high altitudes in order to induce rain. ‘The clouds would then precipitate, pulled down […]
[PDF file]: Dark Quadrant Organized Crime, Big Business, and the Corruption of American Democracy From Truman to Trump Jonathan Marshall New York and London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021, $29.95/£22.95, h/b Robin Ramsay In 1958, the US attorney for the southern district of New York told an audience of his peers: ‘In this country today, we have a […]
[…] significant on first reading but amounts to little. Pieczenik is willing to swear that X said that Y said . . . . Honegger is a former Reagan era Washington insider, best known for revealing the existence of the so-called ‘October Surprise’, the deal between the Reagan election campaign and the Iranians to prevent […]
[…] down mentioned it at every opportunity as proof of the Sandinistas’ immorality. “High level officials” of both Nicaragua and Cuba “have been personally implicated” in drug smuggling, Reagan said during the 1985 debates over contra aid (Reagan 1987:673–76). The State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy, which managed the administration’s public-relations campaign against the Sandinistas, […]
[PDF file]: The nature of the state and future challenges Bigger Government: The Future of Government Expenditure in Advanced Economies Marc Robinson Arolla Press, 2020 https://biggergovernment.com The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy David Graeber London: Melville House, 2015 The Entrepreneurial State – Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths Mariana Mazzucato, […]
