On 8 March 1985 an attempt was made to assassinate one of the founders of Hizbullah, Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, by car bomb in Beirut. The attack failed in its objective, but there was some ‘collateral damage’. While Fadlallah was untouched, some eighty bystanders, men, women and children, were killed and over two hundred injured. … Read more
Alien baloney In Nexus vol 6 no 2 is another dollop of what seems to me to be obvious disinformation about UFOs and the US government. Another batch of MJ-12 documents have surfaced in America, given to a researcher called Timothy Cooper by a (now conveniently dead) source. Nexus prints some largish chunks from them. … Read more
Kevin Coogan is the author of the study of the American fascist Francis Parker Yockey, Dreamer of the Day, reviewed in Lobster 39. He sent me an essay primarily about the American far-right group the Defenders of the American Constitution. The essay, while fascinating, is too big (about 20 pages) for these columns. However within … Read more
In 1976 Mary Ferrell discovered a curious CIA document, a telegram that had been sent from the Agency office in London to headquarters in Langley on 23 November 1963, the day after JFK was assassinated. The telegram reads as follows (blacked-out(1) matter shown by brackets, with suppositions in italic): [Paragraph deleted in its entirety] EXPRESSIONS … Read more
The story in The Guardian of 12 November, ‘Diplomat’s “slave” can stay in UK’, was the tip of an iceberg. The story concerned the allegations made that a Sudanese diplomat had kept a ‘slave’ in London. Allegations of slavery in the Sudan have been made – and denied – for years. (A summary of the … Read more
Tony Blair might be considered guilty on two of the counts for which Hitler’s Foreign Secretary, Joachim von Ribbentrop was executed at Nuremberg, ‘namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the … 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
Wishing and hoping I met Tony Benn only once, while researching Smear! He’s a lovely man with a big blind spot about the politics of the early 1980s in general and the Militant Tendency in particular. Here’s Benn in the course of an appreciation of Arthur Scargill on his standing down as President of … Read more
PART 1 See also Part 2 in Lobster 6 Most Western political scientists, following in the traditions of Marx or Weber, scorn the study of secret and occult societies as irrelevant to understanding the politics of the age. In their view, politics can best be understood as the working out, in public arenas, of bureaucratic, … Read more
Two pieces here by Tim Pendry. The major piece is followed by an addendum, which began as the text of a letter from Pendry to Dr Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance in response to an article of Gabb’s. Pendry copied me his letter and I saw that it would go nicely with the longer … Read more
