The Third Decade The Third Decade, “a journal of research on the John F. Kennedy assassination” keeps appearing with impressive, not to say stunning, frequency. 6 in a year so far, and that’s 26 plus pages per issue. With The Third Decade the Kennedy assassination researchers have finally got, as near as makes no difference, … 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
Patriots not sneaks After a year of New Labour I feel beholden to write something on this subject, but what is there worth saying that isn’t blindingly and depressingly obvious and predictable? Jack Straw, who took over as Home Secretary, and thus formally as the boss of MI5, is determined to sedate any sleeping dogs … Read more
Diana – the saga goes on and on..… Almost ten years after the fatal crash and the Diana industry still trundles along. In addition to her birthday concert(1) we are promised a slew of books(2)and a plethora of films and documentaries.(3) The main event, though, is sure to be the long-delayed but much anticipated inquest, … 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
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
Introduction by Kenn Thomas Foreword by David Hatcher Childress Adventures Unlimited Press, Kempton, Illinois, USA, 1996, $16.00 Also known as ‘Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal’, the so-called Torbitt Memorandum (‘Document’ here for some reason) has been floating around the JFK research world since the early 1970s. Torbitt looked quite promising initially: lots of interesting … Read more
Greg Bishop London/New York: Paraview, 2005, $14 (US), p/b In Lobster 40 I presented a summary of this story. This book-length version adds much detail but nothing substantially different from that summary. Bennewitz was an electronics manufacturer in New Mexico, who lived a few yards from the boundary fence of the Kirtland Airforce Base, … Read more
Gore Vidal London: Abacus, 2002, £10.99, p/b Once upon a time collections of essays by Gore Vidal would appear every few years or so in this country in those neat little Panther paperbacks: On Our Own Now (1976), Matters of Fact and of Fiction (1978), Pink Triangle and Yellow Star (1982) for example. The … Read more
Dr Mary’s Monkey Edward T. Haslam Waterville (Oregon): Trineday, 2007 (www.Trineday.com) $19.95 (US), p/b The Kennedy assassination literature has produced some oddities over the years but this takes the biscuit. A sense of this is conveyed by what must be one of the longest subtitles in publishing history: ‘How the unsolved murder of a doctor, … Read more
