The Intelligence Files: Today's Secrets, Tomorrow's Scandals

The Intellligence Files: Today's Secrets, Tomorrow's Scandals, Olivier Schmidt (ed), Clarity Press, 2005

This is a collection of articles from a European online journal called "Intelligence". They deal with that netherworld where national and international politics, the military and the spy business intersect.

It sounds like a good thing for developing countries to put aside large tracts of land for "nature." Such a practice has now become required to receive Western aid. The poorer a country is, the more land they have to take out of production. How can a country dig itself out of poverty if large portions of their territory are no longer available for farming or livestock? To give one example of this new form of empire, 40 percent of the territory of Tanzania is now within strictly protected zones.

An extremely sophisticated radar system, called Have Stare, is being installed in Norway, its official purpose being to monitor space junk. Its actual purpose is as part of the Star Wars missile defense system. Ever since a passenger plane crashed in Lockerbie, Scotland, in the late 1980s, the whole world has blamed Libya. They recently "admitted" responsibility, even though the evidence to prove it was flimsy, at best.

If any one event can be said to have started "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland, it was the shootings of more then 40 unarmed protesters by British troops in 1972 in Londonderry (Bloody Sunday). A government inquiry, which became dismissed as a whitewash, absolved the soldiers of responsibility, declaring that they fired in self-defense. An independent inquiry came to the conclusion that the protesters really were unarmed, and that the British troops fired first.

I totally enjoyed this book, and learned a lot from it, but I am something of a foreign politics lover. More than the usual amount of knowledge of world affairs would help when reading this book, but it is very highly recommended.