Peter Levenda Waterville (Oregon); TrineDay; 2005, h/b, $29.95 This has a foreword by Jim Hougan who describes it as ‘one of the darkest and most provocative books that you are likely to read’. I’m a big fan of Hougan’s but I didn’t get this book. Not that it isn’t an interesting read: it is. … Read more
Sallie Pisani, University of Edinburgh Press, 1992 (UK) University Press of Kansas, 1991 (USA) No price stated Pisani lays out her thesis on pp. 7/8. ‘My claim is that the emphasis on paramilitary operations in the literature has led to a distorted picture of covert operations in this seminal period. In fact, a recreation of … Read more
Weapons of Mass Deception: The uses of propaganda in Bush’s war on Iraq Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber London: Robinson, 2003, p/b, £6.99 Regime Unchanged: Why the war on Iraq changed nothing Milan Rai London: Pluto, 2003, p/b, £10.99 The Rampton/Stauber book appeared about 6 weeks after the attack on Iraq ended and concentrates … Read more
What was Henry Brandon? One of the most interesting secondary sources covering the struggles of the British Labour government under Harold Wilson to prevent the devaluation of sterling between 1964-66 is Henry Brandon’s In the Red, published by Andre Deutsch in 1966. It is a remarkably well-informed text and its reliability is underlined by the … Read more
Alien baloney In Nexus vol 6 no 2 is another dollop of what seems to me to be obvious disinformation about UFOs and the US government. Another batch of MJ-12 documents have surfaced in America, given to a researcher called Timothy Cooper by a (now conveniently dead) source. Nexus prints some largish chunks from them. … Read more
A number of the obvious questions about an enterprise like this can now be answered. Can we do an issue every 2 months or so? Yes: the problem is the reverse. We actually have more material than we really know what to do with at the moment. Will other people begin writing for it? Yes. … Read more
Let’s start with the easiest question: what do George Robertson, Chris Smith and Marjorie ‘Mo’ Mowlam have in common? They are, of course, all strong Tony Blair supporters in the new Labour Cabinet. And what about Peter Mandelson and Elizabeth Symons? Not yet quite Cabinet members, but both are key figures in the ‘modernising project’ … Read more
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
I met Paul Routledge, the biographer of Gordon Brown, a couple of years ago. ‘Does Brown understand economics?’ I asked him. ‘Well, he reads lots of big books,’ said Routledge. ‘This is not the same thing.’ Of course I asked the wrong question. What I should have asked was: does Gordon Brown understand British economic … Read more
The Persecution of Armen Victorian The persecution of Armen Victorian (and his wife), described in Lobster 28, seems to have come to a halt. All the charges against them have been dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service. As I expected, the prosecutions were sustained, via a number of postponements, until the last possible minute, then … Read more
