[…] in Mexico, democracy works like this: vote for the PRI or PAN and have some waterproof cardboard to roof your shack; vote for the PRD and we’ll kill you. Higher up the social scale there is more money, and a greater variety of forms of cooption. But the neo-liberal system reserves the right to […]
[…] man. “The squads consisted largely of ex-soldiers rather than experienced police or intelligence personnel”, and their overall commander used them “to exploit existing intelligence to capture or kill insurgents themselves”. (5) In contemporary Northern Ireland the SAS and E4A, the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s Mobile Support Unit have had a similar role. (6) The Palestine […]
Sean McPhilemy Roberts Rinehart, Boulder, Colorado, USA, 1998, $24.95 Sean McPhilemy was the producer of a Channel Four documentary, ‘The Committee’, shown in 1991, which made a series of startling allegations about collusion between the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and Protestant paramilitaries in Northern Ireland in the killing of Catholics. The programme — which I … Read more
[…] denies the story. IRD is dead! Long live IRD! Liam Clarke and Barry Penrose (see review of The Committee, below) co-authored the story ‘Syria paid IRA to kill Mountbatten’ in the Sunday Times 17 May 1998, in which they reported that they had been told by former IRA member Sean O’Callaghan that he had […]
Wishing and hoping I met Tony Benn only once, while researching Smear! He’s a lovely man with a big blind spot about the politics of the early 1980s in general and the Militant Tendency in particular. Here’s Benn in the course of an appreciation of Arthur Scargill on his standing down as President of […]
[PDF file]: Gonzalo Lira and the kill chain Garrick Alder I: ‘The weapons of divine justice’ On 19 September 2022, an American blogger living in Ukraine uploaded a video to YouTube. It was called ‘Notes on Being Unpersoned’. The blogger, Gonzalo Lira, had been extremely critical of the Ukrainian government, and of the western governments supporting […]
[PDF file]: […] monopoly on the use of violence. Hitherto: Warlordism had been at the heart of settler communities and colonial societies, which then sought independence for the freedom to kill everything that opposed their pursuit of profit. (p. 202) Part Four is entitled ‘The American ways of killing’ and starts with the extermination of much of […]
[PDF file]: […] sunk and the crew killed, with getting on for 200 fatalities so far. On one occasion at least, in September 2025, a second strike was made to kill survivors of the first strike and there was a ferocious debate over whether or not Hegseth had ordered a ‘no survivors’ policy. The Trump administration was […]
Gonzalo Lira and the kill chain Garrick Alder I: ‘The weapons of divine justice’ On 19 September 2022, an American blogger living in Ukraine uploaded a video to YouTube. It was called ‘Notes on Being Unpersoned’. The blogger, Gonzalo Lira, had been extremely critical of the Ukrainian government, and of the western governments supporting […]
[PDF file]: […] 75-78 Nicholson discusses documents found by one Christelle Terreblanche as part of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. These apparently discuss a plot by SAIMR to kill Dag Hammarskjöld. He writes: In 2014, Oxford scholar Dr Susan Williams updated her book, Who Killed Hammarskjöld?, and referred to the papers that Terreblanche had found, […]
