Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America James Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Yale University Press, London and Yale, 1999, £19.95 The Haunted Wood: Soviet espionage in America – the Stalin era Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev Random House, New York, 1999, $30.00 So now we know: most of what the Republican right in the US, … Read more
NFTB There is a new issue, no 6, of Larry O’Hara’s Notes from the Borderland. It is 68 pages, glossy paper, with essays on ‘journo-cops’, Paul Foot, Shayler and Machon and the Copeland bombing. In the UK this is £3.50 from BM 4769, London WC1N 3XX; a two issue sub is £7.50. Outside the UK: … Read more
The discussion of conspiracy in the mainstream media tends towards a very specific formula. The writer first notes with shock and disappointment the growing popularity of conspiracy theories and then goes on to provide explanations for this new popularity. This explanation almost always assumes that these theories about the ‘true’ nature of social reality exist … Read more
Rodney Stich Diablo Western Press, PO Box 5, Alamo, CA 94507, USA $28 plus $4 shipping in the US. Outside the US inquire first at 1-800-247-7389 (phone) 925- 295-1203 (fax) This is the successor to Stich’s Defrauding America, reviewed in Lobster 34. As with the earlier work, it is impossible to verify and difficult … Read more
This is the text of a letter The Guardian declined to print It was sent from Fred Holroyd on May 13th 1987 Dear sir, It comes as no surprise that Mrs Thatcher over reacted to the media attempting to discover the real facts of the Gibraltar shootings. Her attitude is vulnerable to close scrutiny, especially … Read more
Peter Oborne London: The Free Press (Simon and Schuster), 2005, £7.99, p/b Before his minutely detailed account of some of New Labour’s lies Oborne gives us a potted history of lying in the past 25 years to show us how relatively truthful New Labour’s predecessors were. This old nag won’t run. For example, he … Read more
The Trial of Saddam Hussein Abdul Haq Al-Ani, Clarity Press, Atlanta, GA., 2008 Abdul-Haq Al-Ani’s troubling manifesto on behalf of the murdered Iraqi leader exposes bloody doings of empire from a lucid political-juridical perspective. ‘Imperialism is a universal historical phenomenon, but it remains, nevertheless, evil’, he writes (p. 23). ‘I use the term European [imperialism] … Read more
George McT. Kahin London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003, £17.95, p/b The late George Kahin was a pioneering US scholar of Southeast Asia in the post WW2 era. This memoir describes some of his travels in the 1945-70 period, when he behaved rather like a CIA officer (for which he was occasionally mistaken), talking to the rising … Read more
Volume 1: Reflections of the Participants, Mark Baimbridge (ed.) Volume 2: Current Analysis and Lessons for the Future, Mark Baimbridge, Philip Wyman and Andrew Mullen (eds.) Exeter (UK) and Charlottesville (USA): Imprint Academic, 2006, single volumes £17.95 (uk ) and $34.90 (US) Andrew Mullen, who has written about the EU in these columns, brought … Read more
The origins of Civil Assistance? In the UK in 1974-75 a number of ‘private armies’ appeared, linked to retired senior military and intelligence figures. There were General Sir Walter Walker’s Civil Assistance, Colonel David Stirling’s GB75, and George Young’s Unison. (1) These groups formed in order to frustrate the impact of strike action in the … Read more
