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
David Aaronovitch London: Jonathan Cape, £17.99, h/b In his introduction Aaronovitch tells us he became interested in conspiracy theories when someone he was working with introduced him to the they-didn’t-go-to-the-moon theory; and this offended his ‘sense of plausibility’ He’s right: we all have a kind of plausibility threshold, beyond which a proposition about the world … 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
The big switch Keeping track of the developments in the JFK assassination is something like a full-time job and I don’t have the time. Plodding along years behind the buffs, I came across Walt Brown’s Treachery in Dallas (Carroll and Graf, New York, 1995), an interesting book, dotted with new (to me) bits and pieces. … Read more
See note(1) Like some Russian high official come to treat with Chechen rebels, CIA Director John Deutch arrived in force — by heavily-armed motorcade, and with helicopter cover. SWAT teams swarmed over the building that was Deutch’s destination. But on November 15, 1996, Deutch’s destination was in fact only the auditorium of Locke High School … Read more
Intelligence Personnel Named in ‘Inside Intelligence’ See also: Part 1: Forty Years of Legal Thuggery (Lobster 9) Part 2: British Spooks “Who’s Who” (Lobster 10) Philby naming names (Lobster 16) First supplement to A Who’s Who of the British Secret State (Lobster 19) Spooks (Lobster 22) for Cohen, Brooman-White, De Haan, see Lobster 9 and … Read more
Election fraud Further to ‘How to fix an Election’ in Lobster 43, more news on the gentle art of perfuming a skunk. First Pick Your Voters Some strong contenders here. But first out of the hat is the Labour Party for performance during the all-postal voting experiments that were tried across the country in the … Read more
Roundtable I get regular e-mail bulletins from an organisation called the roundtable – not the Round Table but somebody? some people? – trying to document the US ruling elite by the study of its organisations. Really they should be called Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) – because it is the CFR they mostly write about; … Read more
A spook, moi? One of the formative experiences of my youth – and we’re talking early 1960s here, beatnik days, when wearing a narrow leather tie was pretty hip – was going to the Mound in Edinburgh on Sunday nights. The Mound is like Hyde Park Corner in London, a place where local by-laws allow … Read more
