Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed Clairview, East Sussex: 2003, p/back, £11.95 It is, perhaps, unfair to review a current affairs book, a year or so after its initial publication. In this age of the Internet and the speed at which information is passed between people and continents, what chance does any book stand of still being … Read more
David Aaronovitch London: Jonathan Cape, £17.99, h/b In his introduction Aaronovitch tells us he became interested in conspiracy theories when someone he was working with introduced him to the they-didn’t-go-to-the-moon theory; and this offended his ‘sense of plausibility’ He’s right: we all have a kind of plausibility threshold, beyond which a proposition about the world … Read more
Steamshovel 11 The arrival of a new Steamshovel is an event. No matter that I am going to want to be picky about something in it, every issue contains items both substantial and intriguing – and much that would find a home nowhere else, that I can think of. (Except maybe Lobster. I wish I … Read more
Cloak and Dollar: A History of American Secret Intelligence Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones London: Yale University Press, 2002, £22.50 Know Your Enemy: How the Joint Intelligence Committee Saw the World Percy Craddock London: John Murray, 2002, £25 Jeffreys-Jones is Professor of American History at Edinburgh University and writes on the American intelligence services. His book’s subtitle … Read more
On 1 January 2005 several new laws and regulations governing access to information come into force: the Freedom of Information Act 2000, covering England, Wales and N. Ireland; the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002; new Environmental Information Regulations 2004/5; Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004; and an extension of the Data Protection Act 1998 to … Read more
Paul Routledge London: Fourth Estate, 2002, £16.99 In Lobster 39 (p. 23) I reported the snippet of information from a recent biography of James Callaghan that Mrs Thatcher, while leader of the Opposition, in 1977 had twice gone to to see Robert Armstrong, then Home Office liaison with MI5, to put the beliefs of her … Read more
Peter Dale Scott Talk in Palo Alto, October 27, 2006 If I had an hour, I would talk to you about how the 9/11 Report failed to reconcile Dick Cheney’s conflicting accounts, which cannot all be true, of what he did on the morning of 9/11 in the bunker beneath the White House. But that … Read more
Al Martin Pray, Montana: National Liberty Press, 2001, $14.95, ISBN 0-97-10042-0-X Alexander ‘Al’ Martin is a retired Lt. Commander in the US Navy, a former member of the Office of Naval Intelligence and a middle-ranking player in the thicket of scandals known as Iran-Contra. This might be the most startling book written about post-war American … Read more
Police use of computers Unreported in the daily papers in this country, Merseyside County Council recently decided to refuse the funding for Merseyside Police’s criminal intelligence computer. (Detailed account in Computing 13th September 1984) This is the most significant step to date in the struggle to get some kind of control established over policing methods. … Read more
Operation Julie, a nation-wide police investigation of LSD production, was launched in 1976. Two years later, although some 60 members of the British ‘microdot conspiracy’ had been convicted, Detective Inspector Dick ‘Leapy’ Lee was dissatisfied. The operational commander of ‘Julie’, Lee was interested in the international connections of the network, but was blocked from probing … Read more
