John Ross Common Courage Press Monroe, Maine, 2000, $15.95 (pb) (www.commoncouragepress.com) John Ross is the foremost chronicler, in English, of modern Mexican history. He is particularly knowledgeable about the Zapatista movement and its revolutionary forerunners. In addition to the very good The Annexation of Mexico – from the Aztecs to the IMF, about said country’s … Read more
L. A. Naylor London: Roots Books, 2004, £12.99, p/b This book sets out to show how miscarriages of justice come about, and how difficult and protracted is the process of getting a wrongful conviction overturned. An estimated 3,000 wrongfully convicted people a year go to prison, according to a Home Office bulletin, and between … Read more
See note (1) Robin Ramsay The topic was suggested to me by Kevin O’Brien [of ICSA]. It wasn’t clear to me if it was simply that I was being played out a very long piece of rope with which to hang myself. At any rate, given such a wide title – and a title to … Read more
We know that torture is going on in secret and not so secret prisons. We know thanks to the excellent research done by <www.cageprisoners.com> that elements of the British government, be they MI5, MI6 or diplomats from the FCO, have been involved. Yet we seem unable to stop it. Civic society raises its voices in … Read more
[…] this genre appeared in the run-up to the Iraq war: ‘The army is training the American military to identify British troops so that they do not inadvertently kill them in “friendly fire” incidents in Iraq. Army sources said Britain believed its troops could be in danger because America’s identification methods were “sub-standard”… “They have […]
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
[…] his elbow that he was unable to use it for any task requiring a modicum of strength. ‘ would have had to have been a contortionist to kill himself the way they claim…’(20) At the toss of a COIN The publication of a new counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine manual in 2006 (21) was seen by […]
[…] well have been performing through hypnosis.’ The article’s date? May 13, 1968, two weeks before the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: the title? ‘To sleep: perchance to kill’. Notes Much of the information in this article is derived from the files compiled by John Marks, author of The Search for the Manchurian Candidate (expanded […]
[…] the 1960s, the key issues in Northern Ireland were as they remain class issues. This particularly applied to the issue of housing: the Lower Shan kill, in particular, experienced some of the worst housing in Europe. Contemporaneous editions of The People’s Press, edited by Billy Hull, (later of the Loyalist Association of […]
It has been claimed (in Sunday News 20th Feb. and The Phoenix, 19th Feb.1983) that at the heart of the disclosures over the Kincora scandal is an internal row in the intelligence services. A dissident faction is thought to have formed in the Secret Service. The scuffles over revelations concerning Kincora started with the writing … Read more
