Luke Harding, David Leigh and David Pallister Penguin, 1997, £6.99 George Orwell said that Robinson Crusoe was a good example of a bad book, clumsily written but of natural interest due to its subject. The same is true here. Heroic and triumphant in tone, the troika of authors concentrate mainly on the paraphernalia, research and … Read more
Earlier articles in Lobster (issues 39, 41, 43, 45, 49) have followed Malcolm Kennedy’s case. The human rights organisation, Liberty, took his complaint about interference with his communications and other forms of surveillance and harassment, to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), the body set up under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) to … Read more
Labour Party PLC David Osler Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, £15.99, 2002 Colin Challen MP Having written a history of Conservative Party funding, (1) I had been wondering when somebody would get round to doing a similar job on Labour. However, Labour Party plc is more than a simple history of party financing, it seeks to show … Read more
‘Isn’t it true that when those poor devils stop suffering it is through a loss of what you call psyche?'(1) The psychotronics era The former Soviet Union had a long history of programmes in energetics and psycho-energetics technology, known to the West as psychotronics. Until recently, the bulk of the initial work on the science … Read more
Weapons of Mass Deception: The uses of propaganda in Bush’s war on Iraq Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber London: Robinson, 2003, p/b, £6.99 Regime Unchanged: Why the war on Iraq changed nothing Milan Rai London: Pluto, 2003, p/b, £10.99 The Rampton/Stauber book appeared about 6 weeks after the attack on Iraq ended and concentrates … Read more
Nicola Calipari’s death If the tragic death of ‘Nicola Calipari’, the international oper-ations chief of Italy’s military intelligence service, in March 2005, was, as has been alleged, a deliberate act rather than misadventure, it is one of the most recent examples of extreme PR ‘message management’ I can think of. ([1]) ‘Public relations’ is about … Read more
James Rusbridger I. B. Tauris, London 1991, £8.95 James Rusbridger is Peter Wright’s cousin oddly enough, and occasionally assisted MI6 in the 1950s and 60s, an experience which has left him a cheerful cynic. He canters briskly and amusingly over the field of spook foul-ups in the post-war period to ‘show the pointlessness of so … Read more
Harold Weisberg Harold Weisberg died at his home in Frederick, Maryland, on 21 February from a kidney ailment at the age of 88. He was one of the first generation of Warren Report critics along with Vincent Salandria, Ray Marcus, Mark Lane, Sylvia Meagher and others. He was a tireless critic of the Report and … Read more
Portland Free Press Portland Free Press, edited by Ace R. Hayes, with the legend ‘Tell the Truth and Run’ on its masthead, contains to produce important parapolitical material. The January/February issue had an extract from the 1991 deposition of Richard Brenneke, a pilot who claims to have flown missions for the Contras (which has not … Read more
Mark Hollingsworth and Nick Fielding London: Andre Deutsch, 2003, p/b £8.99 An updated and expanded version of Defending the Realm: MI5 and the Shayler Affair which was reviewed in Lobster 38, this account of MI5’s adjustment to the post Cold War world is one of the best books on the UK’s intelligence services, up … Read more
