BAP There was a nice little twist to be observed by followers of the British American Project when Home Office minister Baroness Scotland dashed to Washington this summer seeking to prevent the extradition of the NatWest Three, caught in the long shadow of Enron. The old friend of Tony and Cherie Blair was a young … Read more
Sean McPhilemy Roberts Rinehart, Boulder, Colorado, USA, 1998, $24.95 Sean McPhilemy was the producer of a Channel Four documentary, ‘The Committee’, shown in 1991, which made a series of startling allegations about collusion between the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and Protestant paramilitaries in Northern Ireland in the killing of Catholics. The programme — which I … Read more
Most of a talk given at Housman’s bookshop in March. The talks in this book (1) kind of parallel some of the things that I have been writing about elsewhere. I began publishing Lobster in 1983; and I also joined the Labour Party that year, partly, I confess, because it seemed a likely source of … Read more
Body of Secrets: How America’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ Eavesdrop on the World James Bamford, London: Century, 2001, £20 Report on the existence of a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications (ECHELON interception system) Rapporteur: Gerhard Schmid European Parliament, 11 July 2001 [Online in Adobe Acrobat PDF Format ~1Mb] In … Read more
From David Guyatt: David Hambling’s comments in Lobster 39 (Feedback) underscore the extreme difficulties involved in firstly accessing, then corroborating and, finally, reporting stories that are as obviously sensitive as Operation Black Cat and Operation Black Dog. It is easy to raise what appear to be realistic technical objections, but the Black Dog story consumed … Read more
Tony Blair will be remembered not just for the slaughter in Iraq, and the subsequent collapse of Labour in Scotland in face of a resurgent SNP, but as the Labour leader who could have forged common links across Europe but chose to side with one of the continent’s most despised figures. Charles Clarke, one of … Read more
Compromised Reporting Taking its cue from a powerful network of far-right radio commentators, the American press insists on noting only those financial scandals which don’t sully ultra-conservative politicians. Of either party. For example: Rush Limbaugh, who has become the Republican Party’s Goebbels, loudly applauded Clinton’s appointment of Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, an appalling Texas (Democrat) … Read more
This piece by Daniel Brandt began as a short letter commenting on my review of Right Woos Left by Chip Berlet (Lobster 23 p. 34). I wrote back and asked if he would like to expand it. And so he did, writing almost the whole thing at one long sitting. Anyone who joined the U.S. … Read more
