Police use of computers Unreported in the daily papers in this country, Merseyside County Council recently decided to refuse the funding for Merseyside Police’s criminal intelligence computer. (Detailed account in Computing 13th September 1984) This is the most significant step to date in the struggle to get some kind of control established over policing methods. … Read more
Brian Crozier Foreword by Sir James Goldsmith The Claridge Press, London, 1995, £12.95 One of the odd things about the James Goldsmith Referendum Party gambit in the recent election is the way the mass media collectively chose not to refer back to the last great Goldsmith campaign – his hunt for the Red Menace … Read more
The idea that the Security Service, MI5, colluded with British fascism in the inter-war years is not to be found in the existing literature on the subject. On the contrary the fascists are depicted as the victims, rather than the beneficiaries of MI5’s attentions. MI5, it is generally argued, viewed fascism as a potential danger … Read more
Al Martin Pray, Montana: National Liberty Press, 2001, $14.95, ISBN 0-97-10042-0-X Alexander ‘Al’ Martin is a retired Lt. Commander in the US Navy, a former member of the Office of Naval Intelligence and a middle-ranking player in the thicket of scandals known as Iran-Contra. This might be the most startling book written about post-war American … Read more
Richard Keeble University of Luton Press, Luton, 1997, £14.95 Richard Keeble – a former journalist and now Course Director of the BA in Journalism degree at City University, London – makes his stance clear in the first chapter of this well researched study: There was no Gulf war of 1991…It was nothing less than a … Read more
David Miller, Pluto Press, London, 1994, £14.95 (paper) 40.00 (cloth) In his introduction Miller thanks his ‘colleagues at the Glasgow University Media Group’, from whence came the pioneering studies of the way the British media handle politically sensitive events, such as Bad News, More Bad News and Really Bad News. That, with the book’s title, … Read more
As a number of people have pointed out, in the first 5 Lobsters – something like 100,000 words – there has been hardly a mention of the Soviet and Soviet satellite intelligence activities. There are reasons. No-one has offered us anything on this subject, and neither of us (ie Ramsay/Dorril) know much about it. What … Read more
A man with Friends The Third Secret: the CIA, Solidarity and the KGB’s plot to kill the Pope Nigel West HarperCollins, London, 2000, £19.99 Let’s dispose of the ‘Third Secret’ nonsense. West claims that Pope John – the Polish Pope – was told the ‘third secret’ of the Fatima revelations; and that this ‘third secret’ … Read more
Searchlight At the beginning of the essay on the Blairites above, I discuss the concept of political contamination, the denigration of people on the left by association – real or fictitious – with ideas or people on the right. The most enthusiastic users of the contamination device in Britain today are found in Searchlight magazine. … Read more
When falsehoods are bared, we have to be alert to those that will take their place as well as the ones that remain concealed.(1) At the time of writing (October 2004), the deluge of media coverage on the false justifications for the Iraq war – now understandably giving way to greater anxieties about the well-being … Read more
