Abstract The Tribunal established to investigate complaints about phone-tapping and the activities of the intelligence agencies has, at its first ever public hearing, quashed rules made by the Home Secretary forcing the tribunal to hold all its hearings in secret. However, the Tribunal procedure remains too secret, and its decisions cannot be appealed. Malcolm Kennedy’s … Read more
Srebrenica In Lobster 46 I noted that the publisher of Cees Wiebes’ Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995 had declined to supply a review copy. Mr Wiebes subsequently informed me that the full report on Srebrenica, commissioned by the Dutch government, including the material which made up his book, is on-line, in English, at … Read more
Sources CD-Rom JFK Assassination: a Visual Investigation Wilbur Films Multimedia, Medio Multimedia Inc Redmond, WA 98025-5515, USA, 1993. [Note 2021. See also archive.org] CD-Rom The Encyclopedia of the JFK Assassination Bob Harris and Jane Rusconi ZCI Publishing, The Infomart, 1950 Stemmons, Suite 6048 Dallas TX 75207-3109, USA. 1994 The writer of this review is of … Read more
‘Everything is going to change’ JFK and the Unspeakable: Why he died and why it matters James W. Douglass Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2008, h/b, $30.00 I am writing this immediately after Barack Obama’s victory in the US Presidential election, almost half a century after John Kennedy became the first, and thus far … Read more
The funding of Blair Sometimes chronology implies causality and sometimes not. Consider the following sequence of events: in January 1994 Tony Blair, then Shadow Home Secretary and career-long member of the Labour Friends of Israel, took a four day freebie trip to Israel, with his wife, at the expense of the Israeli government. Two months … Read more
‘The Men Who Are Dying To Win’, in Sanity February 1984. A very good article with much valuable information on the American connection which neatly dovetails with the article in Lobster 3. More on Francis Leonard Holihan. He was linked to the Heritage Foundation and, it is claimed, misappropriated funds from them intended for the … 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
A spook, moi? One of the formative experiences of my youth – and we’re talking early 1960s here, beatnik days, when wearing a narrow leather tie was pretty hip – was going to the Mound in Edinburgh on Sunday nights. The Mound is like Hyde Park Corner in London, a place where local by-laws allow … Read more
Hitler’s spy chief: the Wilhelm Canaris mystery Richard Bassett London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2005, £20 This is a full and very well researched biography of one of the great enigmatic figures of the spy world in the 30s and 40s. The author, former foreign correspondent of The Times in Berlin and Prague, provides … Read more
The story of the Ulster Citizens’ Army (UCA for the rest of this essay) is a tiny fragment in the intricate history of Protestant politics in Northern Ireland in the mid 1970s – so tiny that none of the general accounts I have looked at even mention it. But the UCA lingers on: it is … Read more
