Weird Web Professor Peter Dale Scott reported the following in March. ‘Four times today I have tried to go to www.counterpunch.org. And four times Netscape was unable to find it. This happens frequently on my computer to websites which share my opinions, or to which I am hotlinked. And when I searched for ‘Alex Cockburn’ … Read more
Leonard Doyle, Guardian 24th February 1984. Sued by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for illegal surveillance of private citizens, Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) settled out of court. LAPD’s Public Disorder and Intelligence Division were accused of ‘organising a massive spying operation providing right-wing organisations with a sophisticated computer and handing on extensive files … Read more
Terrorism: how the West can win editor Benjamin Netanyahu (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1986) This is a collection of papers read at the 1984 Jonathan Institute conference on terrorism held in Israel, and because these were originally papers there is no documentation: what we have is 230 pages of assertions. The contributors range from current … Read more
‘They’re blanks!’ Who Murdered Yitzhak Rabin? Barry Chamish Brookline Books, PO Box 1046, Cambridge, MA 02238, USA, $15.95 This is an interesting and important book. To its content I will return. But who is the author? Chamish is one of those names you cannot avoid if you potter around in the American conspiracy sections … Read more
The Last Investigation Gaeton Fonzi Thunder’s Mouth Press, New York, 1993 Deep Politics and the Death of JFK Peter Dale Scott University of California Press London and Berkeley, 1993 With Dick Russell’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, reviewed above by Alex Cox, these books are the best of the post Oliver Stone wave that … Read more
Bernard Donoughue London: Jonathan Cape, £25, h/b Political diaries are among my favourite reading. In that genre this is an absolute belter; but not for the minutiae of policy formation, with which Donoughue was primarily preoccupied, or the account of the government’s handling of various incidents, interesting though they are; but for the picture … Read more
Harold Weisberg Harold Weisberg died at his home in Frederick, Maryland, on 21 February from a kidney ailment at the age of 88. He was one of the first generation of Warren Report critics along with Vincent Salandria, Ray Marcus, Mark Lane, Sylvia Meagher and others. He was a tireless critic of the Report and … Read more
The Trial of Saddam Hussein Abdul Haq Al-Ani, Clarity Press, Atlanta, GA., 2008 Abdul-Haq Al-Ani’s troubling manifesto on behalf of the murdered Iraqi leader exposes bloody doings of empire from a lucid political-juridical perspective. ‘Imperialism is a universal historical phenomenon, but it remains, nevertheless, evil’, he writes (p. 23). ‘I use the term European [imperialism] … Read more
Letters From JIM HOUGAN, Washington, USA. (NB this letter was written between the reviews of Hougan’s book Secret Agenda which appeared in Lobsters 8 and 9) After reading No 8 I thought I’d share the following with you in re: Secret Agenda and, on another topic, Frank Terpil. Throat Secret Agenda is deliberately ambiguous on … Read more
Peter Dale Scott University of California Press (paperback edition, with new preface) 1996, $14.95 ‘The key to understanding Deep Politics is the distinction I propose between traditional conspiracy theory, looking at conscious secret collaborations towards shared ends, and deep political analysis, defined as “the study of all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or … Read more
