9:11 Revealed. Challenging the facts behind the War on Terror Ian Henshall and Rowland Morgan London: Robinson, 2005; £8.99, p/b A declaration of a kind of interest: one of the authors of this book, Ian Henshall, is the Chair of INK, the Independent News Collective, to which Lobster belongs and whose leaflets Lobster has … Read more
On 8 July the Foreign Minister, Robin Cook, announced that the Libyan Government accepted ‘general responsibility’ for the death of WPC Yvonne Fletcher and normal diplomatic relations with Libya were being restored. The media reporting of this accepted the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) spin that it meant the Libyans have admitted killing Fletcher. The … Read more
W. D. Rubinstein (Second edition, revised and updated) London: Social Affairs Unit, 2006, pp., £20 Did you know that, on his death in 2001, former Beatle, George Harrison, left the second largest fortune in the UK (£98,916,000)? If you like facts like this, you will enjoy this book, and you will be in good … Read more
Lost plot After Lobster 35 I received a long letter from John Pilger, followed by a revised version of it, complaining about my review of his recent book, Hidden Agendas in 35. With the second version came a note asking me to publish his letter without comment. I replied that I was happy to publish … Read more
The Lobster is a journal/newsletter about intelligence, parapolitics, state structures and so forth. (The scope of our interests should be obvious from this first issue.) We welcome clippings, articles, letters, reviews, on these areas. Although we will exercise editorial control over any material sent to us, nothing will be cut without prior consultation with the … Read more
Nicholson Baker London: Vintage books, 2002, pb, £7.99 See note (1) In the third voyage of Gulliver’s Travels, Swift describes a visit to the Academy of Lagado, where ‘Projectors’ work at bizarre schemes like making silk from spiders’ webs. Whenever they meet problems, rather than admitting the futility of their efforts they clamour for … Read more
Introduction In 1967 the CIA sent out to ‘Chiefs, Certain Stations and bases’ a briefing document, Dispatch Document 1035- 960, titled ‘Countering Criticism of the Warren Report’. This unintentionally very revealing and faintly comic document was reproduced in issue 2 of the now defunct newsletter, The Dorff Report in March 1990. In view of the … Read more
It now looks pretty certain to me that Kennedy’s assassination was the work of a local Texas conspiracy on behalf of, and with the knowledge of, the then Vice President Lyndon Johnson. Most of the extant evidence for this can be seen on the web site ‘The Men on the Sixth Floor'(1) which advertises the … 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
Close Quarter Battle (CQB) training is undertaken by an unusual group calling itself the CTT or Combat Training Team. The CTT group has two centres near London where it trains people in the art of silent killing and similar accomplishments. It poses as a commercial organisation, but its two centres at Fort Pilgrim and at … Read more
