‘I know nothing about it. I don’t want to say I didn’t at the time, but today I have no knowledge of it.’ Former US Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara on the attack on USS Liberty. ‘As with the assassination of John F. Kennedy four years earlier, the official version [of the attack on … Read more
Andrew Emmerson and Tony Beard. London: Capital Transport, 2004, £25.00, h/b Gimme Shelter(s)! The secret underground government structures that originated during the Second World War and were later adapted, enlarged and augmented for the Nuclear Age were given a once-over by Peter Laurie in Beneath the City Streets (1970) and given much more detailed … Read more
Hess: A Tale of Two Murders Hugh Thomas Hodder and Stoughton, London 1988 This is an update of Thomas’ 1979, The Murder of Rudolf Hess. Thomas argues (a) that the ‘Hess’ in Spandau prison wasn’t Hess at all but a double; and (b) that both the real and false Hess were murdered. The first proposition … Read more
Non-lethal weapons This is a scam, essentially. A smoke-screen of wacky bits and pieces – sticky stuff and gooey stuff and slippery stuff – conceals the real agenda, the development of various form of energy weapons. There was a big conference – billed ‘secret US only’ – in June this year, a ‘Detailed review of … Read more
Old spooks’ tales John Loftus is probably best known in this country for his The Belarus Secret (Penguin 1983). His latest, The Secret War against the Jews, contains the largest number of new allegations, and alleged revelations about the post-war era, of any book I have read. However, many of these new claims are sourced … Read more
Election fraud Further to ‘How to fix an Election’ in Lobster 43, more news on the gentle art of perfuming a skunk. First Pick Your Voters Some strong contenders here. But first out of the hat is the Labour Party for performance during the all-postal voting experiments that were tried across the country in the … Read more
Tom Bower, Heinemann, London This is the biography of Dick White, the only man to have been head of both MI5 and MI6 (SIS) and it is a massive breach of the new Official Secrets Act. For Bower not only had access to White’s memoir of the period, with White to vouch for him, he … Read more
Introduction On May 20th this year the San Francisco Examiner ran a story by Kathy Kadane which began, ‘The U.S. government played a significant role in one of the worst massacres of the century by supplying the names of thousands of Communist Party leaders to the Indonesian army, which hunted down the leftists and killed … Read more
The Paris Review (PR hereafter except in quotations) has a new editor. Philip Gourevitch, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner for his book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda and a writer for The New Yorker, has taken the position that was held … Read more
Introduction Despite their reputation for ’empiricism’, British academics have tended to treat political power by means of abstract concepts rather than empirical information about the actions of determinate individuals and groups (e.g. Giddens, 1984, 1985; Scott, 1986). After a brief efflorescence of empirical studies of the so-called ‘Establishment’ in the early 1960s, sociologists in Britain … Read more
