Covert Action: The Roots of Terrorism Edited by Ellen Ray and William H. Schaap Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press, 2003, £14.95 The Politics of Anti-Semitism Edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair Oakland (US) and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2003, £9.00/$12.95 The Betrayal of Dissent: Beyond Orwell, Hitchens and the New American Century Scott … Read more
[…] Need to Know. The authors are Aleksandr Fursenko, a Russian historian, and Timothy Naftali, a ‘fellow in International Security Studies’ at Yale. It’s mainly about the Cuban Missile Crisis, drawing on what are described as declassified KGB and other Soviet intelligence materials. The Nation review was generally favourable, with the exception of references to […]
[…] Iraq, I was informed. Heavy casualties resulted. The operation, directed by the Central Intelligence Agency, was a counter-strike, following an Iraqi Scud that fell on Israel. The missile had contained Sarin. Fuming, the Israelis had prepared to detonate a nuclear warhead high above Baghdad. Only the swift intervention of President George Bush forestalled a […]
Back to the future: the USA, the UK and Iraq The US threatens to attack Iraq and is backed by the UK. There are objections in the UN Security Council from Russia and France. A large task force is assembled. Guess what happens next? Not a lot. There is a diplomatic crisis temporarily resolved after … Read more
‘Isn’t it true that when those poor devils stop suffering it is through a loss of what you call psyche?'(1) The psychotronics era The former Soviet Union had a long history of programmes in energetics and psycho-energetics technology, known to the West as psychotronics. Until recently, the bulk of the initial work on the science … Read more
[…] and thoroughly documented book is a history of the most important of those recent contests, from the debate in the 1970s over the scale of the Soviet missile ‘threat’ through to the invasion of Iraq.(2) Essentially, the CIA has been in an impossible position. Tasked with surveilling the entire planet, which can’t done, even […]
[…] Defence against which missiles? There is one section of the John Diamond book on the CIA, reviewed below, which deserves picking out. Diamond points out that the missile defence system which the US is deploying, apparently against ‘rogue states’, is not to defend the US against nuclear attack by ‘rogue states’ but to enable […]
[…] a consultant for the CIA and employed J.C. Licklider, who later worked on the Pentagon’s early internet system; one of Clapp’s bulk-reducing projects was built by the missile technology firm AVCO; the current Librarian of Congress worked for Allen Dulles in the 1950s, and so on, with many other instances given. Baker also hints […]
Ivor Crewe and Anthony King Oxford University Press, 1995, £25 Few who lived through the launch of the Social Democratic Party are likely to forget the impact of the creation of the Gang of Four in 1981. The avowed intention of the four former Cabinet ministers was to offer Britain a fresh alternative – a … Read more
[…] because Obama won the election). We need that America and the contest over America’s history is part of the wider struggle. The fact that after the Cuban missile crisis Kruschev and Kennedy were trying to reduce the influence of their military-industrial complexes and both failed (Kruschev’s fall caused by JFK’s death and the change […]
