Category: World
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One week: two worlds – Brexit and the US election
It’s been a surprisingly quiet week in Brexit negotiations, given that the end of the withdrawal period is now less than two months away. That this is probably a good sign was confirmed by Irish foreign minister Simon Coveney on Tuesday, when he suggested that some form of long term agreement is now likely. The…
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British Intelligence in Ireland: The Colonial Connection
Subscribers will have noticed a few new profiles of intelligence officers on my Patreon recently, most notably Alastair Crooke of MI6, and John Deverell of MI5, both of whom contributed to a tradition of covert diplomacy that formed one strand of the roots of the Irish peace process. It's a format that I hope shows some…
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The problem with the Quilliam Foundation
This post originally appeared on openDemocracyUK on 7 November 2016. The Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) has a long history of fighting racism, extending back to roots in the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, so its Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists published last month, attracted widespread interest from those involved in combatting Islamophobia. Unfortunately, this latest…
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Bilderberg 2013
My piece for Spinwatch earlier this week on the Bilderberg meeting in Watford: A remarkable collection of politicians, diplomats, industrialists, bankers, royalty and other notables assemble in Watford today for the 61st Bilderberg meeting, a discreet high-level transatlantic policy forum that has met almost annually since 1954. In recent years Bilderberg has taken to publishing…
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The Al Yamamah oil fund
Very interesting thread on Sic Semper Tyrannis about the US investigation into BAE: the biggest aspect of the BAE/"Al Yamamah" story is the offshore fund. To summarize: BAE delivered about $40 billion in arms and services to Saudi Arabia. BAE padded the bills substantially, up to nearly $80 billion. The pad was used, in part,…
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“Cheap propaganda tricks” – The neocons on Obama
Tony Karon points us to a remarkable attack on Barack Obama by Edward Luttwak in the New York Times: As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced…
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The Litvinenko Affair revisited
David Habbakuk will be familiar to readers of Col Pat Lang’s blog Sic Semper Tyrannis. He has some very interesting thoughts on the November 2006 death of Alexander Litvinenko over at Yuri Mamchur’s Russia Blog: Uncritical acceptance of claims by [Oleg] Gordievsky about how Litvinenko died is particular bizarre — given that he has made…
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Sic Semper Tyrannis: A Nuclear Proliferation Network in Washington?
Interesting series of posts over at Sic Semper Tyrannis, about the case of Sybil Edmonds, a former FBI translator Sybil Edmonds who claims that the Bureau is sitting on evidence that corrupt US officials are part of an international network trading nuclear secrets. Col. Pat Lang picks up The Times‘ reports on the case: There…
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Clinton, Obama, and America’s Mercenary Army in Iraq
Jeremy Scahill has been doing some good work trying to pin down the US Democratic contenders on the issue of mercenaries in Iraq (hat tip:The Spy Who Billed Me): A senior foreign policy adviser to leading Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has told The Nation that if elected Obama will not "rule out" using private…
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Afghanistan, Ireland and MI6
Moon of Alabama offers a compelling reconstruction of the blown MI6 back-channel operation in Afghanistan, about which new details have emerged in the past few days. He also draws attention to Syed Saleem Shahzad’s allegations in the Asia Times, about Irish official Michael Semple. It’s worth noting that the British official expelled from Afghanistan along…