Dean Andrews’ testimony to the Warren Commission The strangest thing about Jim Garrison’s recent book on his investigation of the assassination is the fact that he never mentions Clay Shaw’s homosexuality. This is about par for the course, for the number of gay men in and around the assassination — Shaw, David Ferrie, J. Edgar … Read more
ed. Roedad Khan Pakistan: Oxford University Press, 1999 Faisal A. Qureshi This book caused quite a stir when published in Pakistan due to the government’s reluctance to declassify its own documentation for this period. The editor deserves credit for going to the US and utilising the FOIA to put together and index various documents, such … Read more
The Paris Review (PR hereafter except in quotations) has a new editor. Philip Gourevitch, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner for his book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda and a writer for The New Yorker, has taken the position that was held … 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
Seymour M. Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (Boston: Little Brown, 1997) Seymour Hersh is one of those figures with no real equivalent in British journalism. For one thing, the budgets, the armies of fact-checkers and, indeed, the market for this sort of extended politico-analytical foray just does not exist over here. Writing from a … Read more
Political activist Daniel Ellsberg and Professor Alfred McCoy have something special in common. Based on their actions and accomplishments of nearly thirty years ago, they have achieved the status of icons within the subculture of what passes for the New Left. Icon Ellsberg became a celebrity in 1971 after he leaked The Pentagon Papers, an … Read more
Are raw prawns pink? Fun and games Down Under where a great brouhaha developed over allegations that Australia’s most famous – and left-wing historian, the late Manning Clark, was a Soviet agent. It started when the Australian poet Sid Murray reported that 26 years before he had seen Clark at a dinner wearing the Order … Read more
One of many reasons why the lobbying industry attracts opprobrium is because Britain’s political system offers only limited public sector facility to those who wish to influence it but lack the funding and/or patronage to do so. ‘The lobbyists’ did not cause the injustice. It is up to government to come up with the solutions. … Read more
Henry Brandon died (Obituary, Independent, 23 April, 1993). Brandon was one of the post-war school of journalists who were happy to act as mouthpieces for the secret services and foreign policy establishments of the NATO bloc. Had he been on the Soviet side of the Cold War, he would have been long dismissed as an … Read more
An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King William Pepper London: Verso, 2003, £17, h/b William Pepper has solved the King assassination. He hasn’t quite got enough to name the shooter but he has laid bare the conspiracy. It has taken him 20 years. Is there a comparable piece of research by … Read more
