The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s London File on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy Calendared & Glossed by Anthony Frewin ‘Calendared and Glossed’ is pretty elegant, is it not? And totally accurate, of course. In his ‘Author’s Note’ Frewin tells us that this began as an idea for a Lobster piece but, like Topsy, … Read more
William Blum New York: Soft Skull Press, 2002, $15 www.softskull.com The working lives of writers, especially writers of non-fiction like Blum – or me – are rather dull. To produce Lobster and my other bits and pieces I have to stay in one place, read e-mails every day, books, newspapers, visit libraries, go to … Read more
Dr. David Kelly The death of Dr David Kelly refuses to go away. Two groups of medical experts have expressed doubts about the suicide verdict. The International Toxicology Advisory Group have queried the conclusion that Kelly swallowed at least 20 co-proxamol tablets, which contributed to his death; (1) and a group of surgeons wrote to … Read more
Reflections on the ‘cult of the offensive’: pre-emptive war, the Israel lobby and US military Doctrine In our book, Spies, Lies and the War on Terror,(1) a central theme is the ascendancy of pre-emptive war doctrine in US military strategy and its impact on public perceptions and the construction of political narrative. A parallel and … Read more
1. Getting even more ugly I confess: I have given up buying Searchlight. There just isn’t anything that can be believed in it. In any case, other people send me the good bits – if ‘good’ is the right word. In June’s Searchlight this paragraph appeared; ‘Seasoned political observers in Northern Ireland say that the … Read more
First supplement to A Who’s Who of the British Secret State See also: Part 1: Forty Years of Legal Thuggery (Lobster 9) Part 2: British Spooks “Who’s Who” (Lobster 10) Intelligence Personnel Named in ‘Inside Intelligence’ (Lobster 15) Philby naming names (Lobster 16) Spooks (Lobster 22) The official response to the ‘Who’s who’ Lobster special … Read more
Dodgy dossiers Steven Kettell, author of Dirty politics? New Labour, British democracy and the invasion of Iraq (London: Zed Books, 2006), argues that New Labour wanted regime change in Iraq before Bush and before 9/11 and that the production of the WMD Dossier was one of the key components of a broader political strategy designed … Read more
Turning up the Heat: MI5 after the Cold War Larry O’Hara Phoenix Press, London, 1994, £6 (p and p included) from BM Box 4769, London WC1N 3XX; cheques payable to Larry O’Hara. Since 1945 MI5 has had three main domestic targets: Soviet bloc espionage, the British Left and the IRA. With the Soviet target gone, … Read more
The mind control story continues There are three distinct but presumably related areas of activity. One is the use of involuntary implants as receivers and/or transmitters. The others are the broadcasting of voices – what has been called synthetic telepathy – and the use of microwaves to influence behaviour. All seem to exist; the technology … Read more
Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire Anne Norton New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004 $25/£16 What’s the Matter with America? Thomas Frank The Resistable Rise of the American Right London: Secker & Warburg, 2004, £12 Most of us in Europe find it difficult to understand what happened in America on … Read more
