BERR In a profile of John Hutton, the new Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, Hutton said that Labour ‘is the natural party of business’,(1) another benchmark (or, in Corinne Souza country, ‘rebranding’) in the shift from old to New Labour. For it was Harold Wilson’s boast that he had made Labour … Read more
In 2002, in a class action, an American federal jury returned a verdict for the plaintiffs and against a company called Edsaco in a complex securities fraud case. (1) The case was interesting in two respects. Firstly, the plaintiffs’ plea through their lawyers that Edsaco was in fact ‘a front for organised crime’; secondly, the … Read more
When I began studying the Kennedy assassination, back in 1983, my naivety was considerable. It would be a few years before I fully hooked into the diffuse network of assassination researchers, and my hit-and-miss efforts to locate that fraternity produced some bizarre results during the 1985-87 period. Consulting periodical directories and other sources, I collected … Read more
Cock-up, conspiracy, or both? Israel and the Clash of Civilisations Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East Jonathan Cook London: Pluto Books, 2008, £14.99, p/b Was the invasion of Iraq a disastrous cock-up by the Americans and British, and by the Pentagon in particular? There certainly is a long line of people … Read more
Editorially In this issue we are running the first half of something not originally written for the Lobster. It’s not that we’re short of copy, just that there is a lot of US material which we would like to recycle in this country, and this Marshall piece seemed like as good a piece as any … Read more
David Aaronovitch London: Jonathan Cape, £17.99, h/b In his introduction Aaronovitch tells us he became interested in conspiracy theories when someone he was working with introduced him to the they-didn’t-go-to-the-moon theory; and this offended his ‘sense of plausibility’ He’s right: we all have a kind of plausibility threshold, beyond which a proposition about the world … Read more
CIA set for Pentagon buyout? Lester Coleman, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) man who co-authored Trail of the Octopus (about CIA drug-channel involvement in the Lockerbie bombing) writes in the latest Unclassified (quarterly publication of the Association of Former National Security Alumni, no. 34, Fall 1995), that the CIA feels itself threatened by a DIA … Read more
An Anglo-American Conflict? A Sunday Times article by York Membery of January 17 1999 claimed that during the 1920s and 1930s the US military had a contingency plan for war against Britain. Called ‘War Plan Red’, this included the landing of an expeditionary force in Ireland, to be executed as a response to a British … Read more
Mark Purdey Edited by Nigel Purdey East Sussex: Clairview Books, 2007 247 pps text, 8 pps of tables, £12.99 p/b Mark Purdy was an organic dairy farmer. This book results from his long battle against conventional wisdom concerning the source of ‘mad cow disease’, the variant CJD, and other neurodegenerative diseases which also affect humans. … Read more
Kissinger Commission Letter in International Herald Tribune 22nd January 1984 from one Eugene L. Stockwell who testified before the Kissinger Commission on Central America. He writes: “During my hour and a half testimony most of the commissioners repeatedly indicated that they believed today’s Nicaragua to be as bad or worse than Nicaragua under Somoza; Mr … Read more
