[…] International Workers Association. Who they? you ask. That I don’t know. Details at http://www.directa.force9.co.uk Heavy weather An impressive reworking of the evidence that the Libyans did not kill WPC Yvonne Fletcher was published in Squall and is – or was – on their Website at www.squall.co.uk/yes/ind2.html Drug wars and Another view of the Afghani […]
John Newsinger London: Bookmarks, 2006, £11.99, p/b Fifty years after Suez is a good time for Britons to reflect on empire. Our military is again deployed in regions of the world more associated in the national mind with the 19th century than the 21st, while the children of the poorer regions of Britain are … Read more
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
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
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
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: 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
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 […]
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
