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
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
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
[…] 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 […]
Jane Affleck Here are a few more websites, focusing chiefly on the issue of electronic privacy which is currently being debated both in the U.S. and Europe. Thanks to those who have sent comments, and thanks for contributions to: Terry Hanstock, Ian Tresman and Tony Hollick. Comments and contributions are welcome: I can be contacted … Read more
[…] 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 […]
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
In 1976 Mary Ferrell discovered a curious CIA document, a telegram that had been sent from the Agency office in London to headquarters in Langley on 23 November 1963, the day after JFK was assassinated. The telegram reads as follows (blacked-out(1) matter shown by brackets, with suppositions in italic): [Paragraph deleted in its entirety] EXPRESSIONS … 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 […]
