A new royalty? A few weeks before former BBC political editor Andrew Marr received two Broadcasting Press Guild awards – one as ‘best TV performer in a non-acting role’ – his journalistic colleagues were quietly made aware of a little drama in his own life. Typical of the message from editorial lawyers circulated among Britain’s … Read more
Kevin Danaher (ed.) Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine, U.S., 2001, $15.95 www.commoncouragepress.com This volume contains 27 short essays by everyone from Fidel Castro (rather impressive, if he wrote it himself) through Chomsky, and Naomi Klein to Margot Smith, whose essay is titled ‘Granny Goes to Washington and Goes to Jail’. So: this runs from … Read more
This began as a review of Deacon’s Truth Twisters by David Teacher, and grew as we both saw bits and pieces we could add to it. Richard Deacon’s The Truth Twisters (McDonald, London 1987: Futura, London 1988) is a classic of Western disinformation purporting to describe Soviet disinformation. Deacon lines up all our favourite state … Read more
One of the benefits of living in the West is the freedom to criticize our politicians. The fact that the electoral system rarely reflects considered criticism is not the point. We have always known that it is centred on political parties that are run by small groups more intent on newspaper opinion, and on that … Read more
The final testimony of George Kennedy Young Introduction When this was published we believed that it had been written by a close friend of his. Subsequently we learned that it had been written by Young himself. As far as we were able to judge, it is accurate. But this is by no means the whole … Read more
US bioweapons in Korea? In Lobster 44, p. 27, I noted the ongoing controversy about the alleged use of biological weapons by the United States during the Korean War: material from Soviet archives appeared to show that the ‘evidence’ of said biological weapons had been faked to embarrass the Americans; but this ‘evidence’ has since … Read more
9/11: The new evidence Ian Henshall London: Robinson, 2007, p/b, £9.99 This is a sequel to, an updating of, Henshall’s book (co-written with Rowland Morgan) 9:11 Revealed, reviewed in Lobster 50 (p. 29). Some new bits and pieces are chewed over, some new evidence is presented, some familiar material is reworked. It is done … Read more
Anne Hessing Cahn Penn State University Press, 1998, $19.95, p/b The ‘Team B’ episode of 1976/7, the subject of this book, which saw a group of the CIA’s critics on the right being given access to the Agency’s raw intelligence data, was one of the key moments in the counter-attack against detente with the … Read more
In Lobster 40 I wrote about a long-term operation by elements within the US military and intelligence services to disinform those interested in UFOs. More information on this has subsequently come to light. The MAJESTIC mystery solved? The real author of this section is Martin Cannon: I have just rewritten his e-mail to me. The … Read more
The channels for US covert military aid to the Afghan mojahedin have been thrown into disarray by the death on August 17 [1988] of President Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan in an aircrash unexplained as we went to press. His death came at a particularly sensitive moment as the Soviet occupation forces prepared to withdraw and … Read more
