KAL 007 and Overhead Surveillance

Lobster Issue 16 (1988)

There has been much discussion about whether KAL 007 was an overhead intelligence platform or not. This article does not attempt to directly answer this question. Instead it reviews the reasons why the US should attempt technical intelligence gathering around September 1983 – when KAL 007 was downed – and the means available to do … Read more

British Counter-Insurgency

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Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3)

John Newsinger Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave; 2002 hb £47.50   To my knowledge this is the first account of Britain’s post-1945 colonial wars written from a radical left stand-point. By which I don’t mean that it is a load of left rhetoric – that is entirely absent; but the assumptions about legitimacy and right are on … Read more

Tittle-tattle

Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9)

Wick the forgotten One of the most prestigious, yet least challenging, posts in British journalism is that of Washington correspondent. Prestigious because of the importance of the United States; but least challenging because the natives speak English, more or less; and there are so many ready-made stories ripe for recycling to Britain, as the Internet … Read more

Kennedy assassination miscellany: Book Reviews

Lobster Issue 7 (1985)

The Shadow Warriors Bradley F. Smith (Andre Deutsch, London 1983) The network of close personal connections established in O.S.S. (the fore-runner of the CIA) “helped bridge some of the widest gaps in American society and could be called upon in cases of need long after the war ended. For example, when in 1964 former British … Read more

Rogue State and Globalize This!

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Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1)

Rogue State: A guide to the world’s only superpower William Blum Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine, 2000, $16.95 Globalize This! The battle against the World Trade Organization and corporate rule eds. Kevin Danaher and Roger Burbach Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine, 2000, $15.95   I have lumped these together partly because they are both published … Read more

Persian Drugs: Oliver North, the DEA and Covert Operations in the Mideast

Lobster Issue 30 (December 1995)

[…] State Department and NSC consultant who initiated the arms-for-hostages talks, fleshed out the alleged connection. “Drugs go to the bourgeois countries where they corrupt and where they kill, while the arms go to pro-Communist terror groups in the Third World.’ The DEA’s own deputy administrator, David Westrate, framed the ideological rationale for expanding his […]

Some examples of corporate, cultural and state PR

Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7)

[…] ten competing cereal brands on the shelf. Welcoming converts but not necessarily engaged in organised conversion (the equivalent, in retail terms, of no longer cutting prices to kill the competition in a winner take all tactic), the major faiths in Britain are playing the numbers game. Together they form a huge political lobby with […]

The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations

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Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3)

Larry Tye New York: Owl Books, 2002, pb $16.00 ISBN 0 8050 6789 2   If Edward Bernays hadn’t existed, Edward Bernays would have invented him. And in fact this is more or less what happened. This is the long-awaited paperback edition of the first full-length biography of Bernays, who, like President Harry Truman, added … Read more

Briefly

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Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008)

[…] (if you’re black or a Native American) through to media character assassination, but it is a grim read. By world standards, The Great Satan hasn’t had to kill many at home since 1900; and why it hasn’t needed to is explained here. The author argues that the American state has gone ‘beyond bullets’, that […]

Vindication is a dish still edible when cold

Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004)

[…] with me and BOSS, had told Mandela that he was willing to help him escape. 3 At that time, I was unaware of BOSS’s counter plot to kill Mandela. I only discovered about that counter plot later when the Escape Plot was cancelled by BOSS because British intelligence (MI6) had found out about it […]

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