The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs Douglas Valentine London/New York: Verso, 2004, h/back, £20 This comes garlanded with praise from Jim Hougan and Anthony Summers. The praise is justified: this is, as Hougan says, ‘a ground-breaking work of investigative reporting’; and it is, as Summers says, ‘a … Read more
Stephen Dorril London: Viking, 2006, £30 In his 1975 biography of Oswald Mosley, Robert (now Lord) Skidelsky very much celebrated the old fascist on his own terms, contributing, wittingly or not, to his attempted rehabilitation. Mosley, we were told in all seriousness, was always driven by his concern for ordinary people and a desire … Read more
James Adams Hutchinson, London, 1994. I first noticed James Adams when he began running some of the MOD’s disinformation lines about Colin Wallace and Fred Holroyd in 19867. For a while I collected articles by him which seemed to show the traces of Whitehall briefings. Then I stopped: what was I going to do with … Read more
The articles on Blairism and contamination in Lobster 33 are tremendously useful in understanding the recent political changes in the UK, and also in understanding ‘fusion paranoia’ as a cross-contamination argument. Maybe it’s not a conspiracy, but it’s surely not a coincidence that the fusion idea was first put forth by New Yorker, a champion … Read more
The Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein, (Penguin 2007) X Films: true confessions of a radical filmmaker Alex Cox, London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2008 Managing Britannia: Culture and Management in Modern Britain Robert Protherough and John Pick, imprint-academic.com, ISBN 978-097645539 Guns for Hire Tony Geraghty, Piatkus, 2008 A Peoples History of American Empire: a … Read more
The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners Seumas Milne London: Verso, 2004, p/back, £8 GB84 David Peace London: Faber & Faber, 2004, p/back, £12.99 On the 20th anniversary of the most significant power struggle in post war Britain, two very different books on the miners’ strike of 1984-85, read alongside each other, … Read more
Publications The Kennedys: An American Drama Peter Collier and David Horowitz (Pan Books, London 1985) JFK:The Presidency of John F. Kennedy Herbert S. Parmet (Penguin Books, London 1984) Kennedy assassination buffs – and I confess to being one in a very small way – can’t resist books about the Kennedys even when they suspect there … Read more
Clint Eastwood Movies Flags of Our Fathers, directed by Clint Eastwood and to be released in Britain in December 2006, is an example of post-9-11 PR. It tells the story of the 1945 battle for Iwo Jima and has been described as the first film in which the balance of combat and public relations has … Read more
In mid-November 1993, after six years of research, 42-year old Eileen Welsome produced a gripping series of articles examining the life and death of five people — a railroad porter, a house painter, a carpenter, a politician and a homemaker — used as human guinea pigs by the US Department of Energy. Appearing in the … Read more
Fijian politics, which has been made increasingly chaotic by various coups and counter-coups over the last 14 years, is dominated by racial identity interests. On the one side are the native Fijians, the original Polynesian inhabitants of the island, and on the other, the Indian Fijians. The native Fijians, though still comprising 51% of the … Read more
