The funding of Blair Sometimes chronology implies causality and sometimes not. Consider the following sequence of events: in January 1994 Tony Blair, then Shadow Home Secretary and career-long member of the Labour Friends of Israel, took a four day freebie trip to Israel, with his wife, at the expense of the Israeli government. Two months … Read more
It is impossible to make an omlette without breaking eggs. — James Anderton on anti-terrorism My anger in this case stemmed from the denial that things had gone wrong, that no eggs were broken even though the omlette was there to see. — John Stalker David Murphy, The Stalker Affair and the Press, Unwin Hyman, … Read more
Previous articles in Lobster (issues 39, 41, 43, 45) have followed Malcolm Kennedy’s case. The human rights organisation Liberty took his complaint about interference with his communications and other forms of surveillance and harassment, to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal. The IPT is the body set up under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) … Read more
‘Rug merchants’ was the epithet former White House Chief of Staff Don Regan used to describe the Iranians who negotiated secret arms deals for nearly a year with senior officials of the Reagan Administration, including Oliver North of the National Security Council. Regan’s dismissive characterization hardly did justice to the sales skills of North’s Mideast … Read more
From David Hambling On the topic of the People Zapper (Lobster 41 p. 9), the new ‘Active Denial System’ is probably not the first microwave weapon to be deployed. There have been repeated rumours of cruise missiles with HPM (high-powered microwave) warheads being used in former Yugoslavia to knock out communications centres, though apparently the … Read more
Obituaries Ace Hayes (1940-1998) by Daniel Brandt Ace R. Hayes, 58, an activist and political researcher who was well-known in the Portland, Oregon area, died on February 13, 1998 from an aneurism in the brain. Corruption and conspiracy in high places is the name of the game, but Ace was on the case. His broad … Read more
Timothy Evans Oxford and Providence (USA): Berghahn Books, 1996, £10, h/b Why review a book published in 1996? Well, I received this recently, assumed it was current and didn’t notice the publication date until I began to write this. In the early 1980s it began to dawn on people on the left of British politics … Read more
In this issue, as in No 3, we are recycling a lot of material from Irish newspapers, and one in particular, the Sunday News. One of our Irish readers describes the Sunday News as ‘almost wholly Catholic..Nationalist … moderately Social Democratic Labour Party rather than moderately Republican.’ We have no way of checking the veracity … Read more
This is a slightly abridged version of part of chapter four of Mark Curtis’s book The Ambiguities of Power: British Foreign Policy since 1945 (Zed Press, 1995) reviewed below. In August 1953 a coup overthrew Iran’s nationalist government of Mohammed Musaddiq and installed the Shah in power. The Shah subsequently used widespread repression and torture … Read more
The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners Seumas Milne London: Verso, 2004, p/back, £8 GB84 David Peace London: Faber & Faber, 2004, p/back, £12.99 On the 20th anniversary of the most significant power struggle in post war Britain, two very different books on the miners’ strike of 1984-85, read alongside each other, … Read more
