Harold Pinter defined American foreign policy thus: ‘Kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in.’ William Blum counts the heads that have been kicked. United States foreign policy In 1975, there was a committee of the US congress called the Pike Committee, named after its chairman Otis Pike. This committee investigated the covert … Read more
The Libyan connection Putting Libya in the frame has been orchestrated from Langley by Vincent Canestraro, head of the CIA counter-terrorist section. In his book On The Trail of Terror: the inside story of the Lockerbie bombing, published in October 1991, David Leppard tells us this while completing one of the most amazing somersaults in … Read more
Footy and me I did two things with Paul Foot. Over two days, he, Colin Wallace and I copy-edited the manuscript of what became Foot’s Who Framed Colin Wallace? Foot was impressively objective about his own writing, accepting editing suggestions on their merits. During a lunch break he said to me: ‘What’s a bright guy … Read more
From Tony Hollick A Response to David Guyatt’s Operation Black Dog, in Lobster 35. All aircraft and ordnance information is from Modern Warplanes, by Doug Richardson, Salamander Books, 1982. It would have been Saddam Hussein’s most heartfelt wish, to have the US attack Iraq with nerve gas during the 1991 Gulf War. He could then … Read more
Earlier articles in Lobster (issues 39, 41, 43, 45, 49) have followed Malcolm Kennedy’s case. The human rights organisation, Liberty, took his complaint about interference with his communications and other forms of surveillance and harassment, to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), the body set up under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) to … Read more
John Diamond Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2008, h/b. No price is stated but it’s around $30 on-line. In The Guardian on 4 March 2009 William Dalrymple wrote: ‘Eight years of neocon foreign policies have been a spectacular disaster for American interests in the Islamic world, leading to the advance of Hamas and Hezbollah, the … 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
Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy Vincent Bugliosi New York & London: W. W. Norton, 2007 xlvi + 1612 pps. + CD-ROM End Notes and Source Notes (958 + 170 pps.). Illustrations, bibliography, index, $49.95. ‘Reclaiming History is important not just because it’s correct, though it is. It’s significant not just … Read more
Introduction Despite their reputation for ’empiricism’, British academics have tended to treat political power by means of abstract concepts rather than empirical information about the actions of determinate individuals and groups (e.g. Giddens, 1984, 1985; Scott, 1986). After a brief efflorescence of empirical studies of the so-called ‘Establishment’ in the early 1960s, sociologists in Britain … Read more
Pieces without an author’s name are by the editor Writers in this issue Jane Affleck is a regular contributor to Lobster. Garrick Alder is a journalist. Richard Alexander is a long-time Lobster reader and contributor. His website is <http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/blackchip/> Roger Cottrell is a novelist, script writer and PhD student. Tom Easton is a freelance writer. … Read more
