(c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 43)  | |||
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Issue 43 | |
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The view from the bridge
Bilderberg and the EU
The Diaries of former Liberal-Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown, (volume one 1988-1997, London: Allen Lane, Penguin, 2000) is a pretty uninteresting read with a couple of striking sections. Pages 42-46 contain his account of attending a Bilderberg meeting - by far the longest and most detailed account by a major political figure. He makes it sound about as dull as any other weekend spent listening to speeches. And on p. 78 he writes in February 1990:
'At 3 o'clock David Williamson, Secretary General of the [European] Commission and [Jacques] Delors' right-hand man. He is bouncing with energy and full of ideas. I was impressed. He told us that Delors' policy on Europe was what called "progressive structural dynamic destabilization" (I can just hear it in French). What this amounts to is deliberately introducing items on to the European agenda as "problems". Each problem, once solved, opens up another problem. Thus he makes progress from monetary to pol-itical union. He never admits his ultimate destination, but merely sets the process in train.'On January 15 2002 an Irish MEP called Pat Cox was elected President of the European Parliament. Grattan Healey e-mailed to report that Cox had attended the 2001 Bilderberg meeting.
Off target
Back in the 1970s the Army's psy-ops unit in Northern Ireland once put out a story claiming that the IRA had hired American Vietnam vets to do its killing for them. ('Paddy' couldn't really shoot straight was the subtext.) A new variation on this appeared - where else? - but in The Sunday Telegraph on 10 March 2002. After a sniper killed ten Israeli civilians and soldiers on the West Bank in one session, the Telegraph reported 'British security officials are looking into suspicions that a crack sniper....might be an IRA gunman.' ('Ragheads' can't shoot straight but 'Paddy' apparently now can.)
The truth isn't out there after all
Alex Cox e-mailed me in January that the links to the national archive documents on the www.majesticdocuments.com site, cited in Lobster 42 p. 15, didn't work. Indeed not: all those links seem to have been removed from the site. (This is the worst thing about the Net: here today, gone tomorrow.) The removal of those documents may have comething to do with this extract from Timothy Cooper, whose site this was.
'....In summary, the Majestic documents are, in all probability, an attempt by an informed person(s) to reconstruct for researchers a historical narrative based on non-existent and authentic documents supported by published facts with classic disinformation techniques in what is termed in counter-intelligence parlance as "gray" intelligence. The question of whether they are genuine, authentic or real is not the issue here. The important point to keep in mind, as I believe, is the information contained in the documents themselves. For in these documents and the FOIA material already released, and the published facts contain the answers we all seek. The truth may be found in our individual perceptions (emphases added). (1)In other words, the documents are a fake but that no longer matters. The truth isn't out there but in here, apparently.
Plus ca change
Buried in the Guardian's business pages on 27 March 2002 was a little story which should have been placed on the top of the pile of documents in every minister's in-tray. A group of British researchers traced the fortunes of two groups of children, one born in 1958 and the other in 1970 and 'found that the links between parents' and children's incomes has strengthened during the last 30 years.' One of the researchers commented:
'The common view that anyone can make it to the top is wrong. Many observers think that we now live in a more mobile, meritocratic society than in the past, but where you come from matters more today than it did in the past.'
'Mind control' bill in the US Congress
Late last year Rep. Dennis Kucinich (Democrat-Ohio) introduced a bill in the House of Representatives that would ban weapons in space. So reported the e-mail newsletter Secrecy News on 10 Jan 2002. (2) The interesting section is the bill's reference to
'......the use of land-based, sea-based, or space-based systems using radiation, electromagnetic, psychotronic, sonic, laser, or other energies directed at individual persons or targeted populations for the purpose of ...... mood management, or mind control.'The Bill won't be passed, of course, but it is striking that the concerns of the 'wavies', as the mind control victims are disparagingly known, has finally filtered through to a Congressman.
McKinney again
In Lobster 42 at p. 41 I commented on Democratic Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney's sponsorship of a radical forum on contemporary US imperialism in Africa. In March McKinney turned her attention to the effect of September 11 in a speech which not only pointed out US support for 'terrorists' over the years but included these remarks:
'Moreover, persons close to this Administration are poised to make huge profits off America's new war. Former President Bush sits on the board of the Carlyle Group. The Los Angeles Times reports that on a single day last month, Carlyle earned $237 million selling shares in United Defense Industries, the Army's fifth-largest contractor. The stock offering was well timed: Carlyle officials say they decided to take the company public only after the Sept. 11 attacks. The stock sale cashed in on increased con-gressional support for hefty defense spending, including one of United Defense's cornerstone weapon programs. Now is the time for our elected officials to be held accountable. Now is the time for the media to be held accountable. Why aren't the hard questions being asked? We know there were numerous warnings of the events to come on September 11. Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, delivered one such warning. Those engaged in unusual stock trades immediately before September 11 knew enough to make millions of dollars from United and American airlines, certain insurance and brokerage firms' stocks. What did this Administration know, and when did it know it about the events of September 11? Who else knew and why did they not warn the innocent people of New York who were needlessly murdered?'Talking like that in the rabid climate in the US at the time took some courage - and a safe seat!
Good news! Or bad....
If you thought the secret state only used its techniques against the radical left, take heart! The Evening Standard Diary 13 June 2001 reported that the diaries of Private Lee Clegg, convicted for the murder of two joy riders in Northern Ireland, and a minor cause célèbre for the right and the British Army, disappeared in the mail despite being sent by registered special delivery.
One the other hand, please note that not even registered special delivery is spook-proof.
Does disinformation work?
It does with some journalists. Take Andrew Rawnsley and his lavishly praised Servants of the People: the Inside Story of New Labour (London: Penguin, 2001). On pp. 256 and 7 he gives us a thumbnail sketch of the events leading to the NATO attack on Serbia over Kosovo. The sequence of events, Rawnsley tell us, was this:
'Slobodan Milosevic had rejected the last of a series of ultimatums to cease his murderous campaign in Kosovo. Intelligence had warned for months that Operation Horseshoe, Milosevic's spring offensive, would be an expanded and more brutal version of his operations against the Kosovo Liberation Army and the ethnic Albanians of th region. Spring came early. In January, fifty-four Kosovars were massacred in the village of Racak. The terror intensified following the Serbs' refusal to sign an agreement at Rambouillet and the withdrawal of the international observers.'Operation Horseshoe was a crude piece of NATO disinformation which I discussed in Lobster 39 p. 23; the 'massacre at Racak.' was fabricated and can be read about in many stories on the Net; (3) and the Rambouillet deal offered to the Serbs amounted to allowing NATO occupation and was designed to be refused.
Rawnsley swallowed the lot.
I-oops
It has been a bad few months for the British media's relationship with the psy-ops boys in SIS. First the BBC's David Shukman fronted a piece apparently planted on the BBC by them which claimed that an African company Oryx was a source of funds for al-Qaeda. Oops! Name confusion. Cue large legal action by Oryx. (4) Or so it seemed. But a piece in the Observer Media section on 25 November 2001 contained two important little snippets. The first was that the story was originally offered to the Sunday Times who turned it down. The second was that the company concerned, Oryx, had been the subject of stories linking it to Robert Mugabe, and:
'The original genesis of the Mugabe story came from a splash in a small east-London based newspaper called Africa Confidential. Copies of the paper containing the story were sent to various newspapers including The Observer. Africa Confidential's article was based - at least in part - on a dossier of information handed over by an unidentified source.' (5)So: a Mugabe-linked minerals firm and two smear stories. The first one, run via Africa Confidential, failed to be picked up by the major media; the second, using the sexier al-Qaeda hook, is fronted by a person with an intelligence gloss, and this one sticks. Think this will make the BBC more cautious about stories with FCO or SIS on them?
Then the Sunday Telegraph had to apologise to the son of Colonel Gadafi whom it had accused in 1995 of being involved in a conspiracy to flood Iran with counterfeit money. This was a whiz-bang from those ingenious people at SIS, given to Con Coughlin then the Sunday Telegraph's man in Whitehall, at that time the paper's chief foreign correspondent. (6) The Telegraph made pathetic attempts to pretend it didn't know the provenance of the story.
Do SIS pay the Telegraph's legal fees in cases like this?
Told you so
Lobster's award for prescience goes to former Tory Cabinet member John Nott. In his recent memoir, reviewed below, he wrote on p. 350:
'Money is a corrupting influence on advice. One-stop financial shopping is the current fashion, but it will not last. The internet bubble has already revealed the lack of quality control being excercised by the big investment banks, and it is only a matter of time before a mighty scandal demonstrates the inherent flimsiness of their so-called "Chinese walls". .....that way lies disaster, mark my words.'And then came the Merrill Lynch scandal.....
A history man
In Peter Hennessy's recent trawl through Whitehall's preparation for nuclear war, The Secret State, there is this snippet on p. 22
'As late as the start of the twenty-first century, a decade after the 1991 Congress voted to dissolve the CPGB after seventy-one years of political life and to reconstitute itself as the Democratic Left, more than one MI5 officer could be heard to claim (a) that the British Security Service "had been virtually running the CPGB at the end....",Assuming this claim about MI5 running the CPGB is true, did this include Marxism Today? Thinking about MT's strange final incarnation as a journal of the new right, it would explain a great deal if it did.
Notes
1 Research Synopsis On The Majestic Documents By Timothy S. Cooper http://home.sprintmail.com/~rigoletto/reports/tim_cooper_research_synopsis.htm
2 The text of 'The Space Preservation Act of 2001' (H.R. 2977), introduced on 2 October 2 001 is at http://www.fas.org/sgp/congress/2001/hr2977.html
3 I read www.FreeRepublic.com/forum/a38ebcce74c9d.htm and http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/ europe/newsid258000/258529.stm
4 See the Guardian Media 11 March 2002 for details.
5 Africa Confidential is actually a newsletter not a newspaper and is widely suspected of having intelligence connections - a suspicion which this latest story will do nothing to diminish.
6 See Richard Norton-Taylor, 'Humiliation for Sunday Telegraph, and apology for son of Libyan leader', the Guardian 19 April 2002. Details of the operation were first given by Mark Hollingsworth in the Guardian 30 March 2000.
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