Definitions? Or Whoops! A paradigm An American magazine called Mondo 2000 ran an amusing piece called ‘The Conspiracy Top Ten’. In it ‘Zarkov’ offered this definition: ‘Conspiracies may be better understood as organizations pursuing their own ends, who desire no publicity as to their true objectives and methods.’ Which sounds interesting at first then dissolves … Read more
W. H. Bowart, Self-published, Tucson, Arizona, 1994. Operation Mind Control was originally published in 1978 by Dell Paperbacks. It came out around the same time as John Marks’ The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, a rather anodyne book which, after dealing with CIA and military LSD experiments which caused at least one unwitting victim to … Read more
Reflections On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: reflections on the consequences of U. S. imperial arrogance and criminality Ward Churchill Edinburgh: AK Press, 2003, £11.90, p/back After a short and densely documented essay on the slaughter which has accompanied the formation and expansion of the United States of America, and some speculation on the possibility … Read more
The conspiracy trail is littered with unresolved leads, but few can be more important than Lee Harvey Oswald’s visit to Mexico shortly before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. What was the purpose of Oswald’s visit to Mexico City? Was it Oswald or an impostor who visited the Cuban and Soviet embassies? And what … Read more
The Enemy Within Seamus Milne Verso, London, 1994 Enemy Within: The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party Francis Beckett John Murray, London,1995 Seamus Milne has written a very good book, an essential book. Investigative journalism in this country is very hard to do, and Milne deserves great praise for this achievement.(1) The core … Read more
The Information Research Department Andrew Defty Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2004, £23.99, p/b Thinking about this book, I wondered why people like me have been so interested in IRD for the last 30 years. There are two reasons, I think. The first is that way back in the 1970s, when information about the British … Read more
Introduction In early January the American writer Martin Cannon, whose ‘Mind Control and the American Government’, was published in Lobster 23, and who has a very interesting letter in this issue, offered me a big piece of his on the so-called Gemstone File. Cannon had got access to some of the original documents on which … Read more
Matthew R. Simmons London: Wiley, 2005, h/b Ironic, perhaps, that I finished reviewing this book in Calgary, just south of the largest land-based oil project in the American hemisphere, the Athabasca shale tar sands oil recovery projects. Collectively these will realise investment between 50 and 100 billion dollars over the next ten years. Pipelines … Read more
Democracy building or democracy assistance, is a putative socio-economic policy solution, which, because of the extent of the political and economic forces impacting on it, has become a contemporary socio-economic problem. Democracy building’s institutional formation rests upon a reconfiguration of Cold War positions that retain, what Dr. Michael Pinto-Duschinsky termed ‘such interference,’(1)so as to continue … Read more
A Wapping mystery I noticed with some interest that Sunday Times editor, Andrew Neil, was described in the Guardian on May 27 as having been labour correspondent of the Economist in the 1970s. Was he, I thought, one of the correspondents recruited by MI5 in the big F branch expansion circa 1973-5? Did that explain … Read more
