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From the ColdType archives (Scroll page for essays) Terror's Unwilling Ally Loretta Napoleoni maps out the arteries of an international economic system that feeds armed groups the world over. Chasing terror money, she takes the reader from CIA headquarters to the smuggling routes of the Far East, from the back rooms Click here or on image above to download Terror's Unwilling Ally Cheney's Nuclear Drumbeat There has been much talk about how the Bush administration “fixed” its intelligence to create a war fever in the U.S. in the many months leading up to the invasion of Iraq. What still remains to be fully grasped, however, is the wider pattern of propaganda that underlay the administration’s war effort – in particular, the Click here or on image above to download Cheney's Nuclear Drumbeat
Secret History An 50-page excerpt from Unpeople, the book that exposes the shameful reality of Britain's foreign policy under Tony Blair and his predecessors. Click here or on image above to downloadSecret History Seven Days In New York City Members of the Human Race of every size, shape, color, gender, odor, stance, agenda and world view, came together in New York demanding to be heard, despite being muzzled, repressed, marginalized, demonized, ignored, misrepresented and demeaned by the media. Hundreds of thousands of people, many there every day from 6am to 3am, doing just about everything to get the message out: marching, singing, chanting, lying down, biking, praying and crying. The Republican national Convention was covered 24/7, in sycophantic, voluminous, minute detail and largely absent any sense of journalistic inquiry. Click here or on image above to download Seven Days In New York City
Return to Kandahar To mark the first anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Click here or on image above to download Return to Kandahar
Haunted By War Veteran war columnist for The New York Times, Chris Hedges has survived ambushes in Central America, imprisonment in Sudan, and a beating by Saudi military police. He has even seen children murdered for sport in Gaza and petty thugs elevated to war heroes in the Balkans. Hedges has seen war at its worst and knows only too well that to those who have been through it, war can be exhilarating and even addictive. “It gives us purpose, meaning, a reason for living.” Drawing on his own experience and on the literature of combat from Homer to Michael Herr, Hedges shows how war seduces not just those on the front lines but entire societies, corrupting politics, destroying culture, and perverting basic human desires Click here or on image above to download Haunted By War Wapping'86 – The Strike that On January 24, 1986, 6,000 employees went on strike after months of protracted negotiations at the London national newspapers owned by media magnate Rupert Murdoch. The company’s management had ostensibly been seeking a labour agreement at their new plant in Wapping, but it had long since determined not to settle and instead sought to provoke a strike. Then, when industrial action was announced by the unions, dismissal notices were served on all those taking part. Nic Oatridge tells, in 20 pages of words and photographs, how Murdoch confronted and beat the unions, with the assistance of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's tough new labour laws and a police force that could hardly be described as impartial . . . Click here or on image above to download Wapping '86
The Road to Abu Ghraib In the wake of Vietnam, the US military was demoralised and prey to some fairly crazy ideas, including thinking that they could train ‘super soldiers’ with psychic powers … Jon Ronson went looking for the men with the dreams and discovers the monsters they created Click here or on image above to download The Road to Abu Ghraib
The Secret Rulers of the World For years, British writer Jon Ronson had heard tales of a clandestine band of powerful politicians and industrialists who were said to be the real rulers of the world, making and breaking presidents and contriving wars. Surely they could not exist. And, if they did, could he find them? Click here or on image above to download The Secret Rulers of the World
Death In Africa EXCLUSIVE - A 50-Page e-book. Fred Bridgland, then a young Reuters correspondent, won his 15 minutes of fame in 1975 when he exclusively revealed the secret South African military invasion of Angola, backed by the CIA, MI6, the French Secret Service and Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda. Bridgland subsequently wrote a highly controversial biography of Jonas Savimbi, leader of an Angolan liberation movement and a friend of Che Guevara. Savimbi’s brilliant young deputy, Tito Chingunji, helped Bridgland research the book and became his closest African friend. But, after the book was published, Savimbi executed Chingunji, his wife and children, parents and his entire extended family. He also threatened Bridgland with death. ColdType’s 50-page essay is a treatment Bridgland has completed as a proposal for new book on his friend Chingunji’s murder and telling the true story of the madness that gripped Savimbi and his guerrilla movement. Click here or on image above to download Death in Africa
Between The Lies Since WWII, the West has moved from a society of nations proudly ordered around the notion of a ‘finest hour’ to a climate today of widespread cynicism and social disengagement. ‘Between the Lies’ explains this phenomenon by linking history to current events in an explicit manner. It exposes the hidden dynamics that exist in wartime between secrecy, governance, public opinion and the media, and the replication in ‘peacetime’ of wartime methods of information management. The author argues that unless there is a critical reassessment of what the West did actually achieve during WWII and the Cold War, democracy faces deepening moral and political decline. Compelling evidence is provided of the media’s key role in the development of the modern military-industrial complex and its influence on public conceptions of ‘the national interest’. Click here or on image above to download Between The Lies
Go Find Me A Way To Do This Sometimes it really is possible to fail to see the wood for the trees. We need to be clear that Tony Blair is claiming that the threat of Iraqi WMD justified a massive war against Iraq. We are to believe that after a major conflict in which 88,500 tons of bombs were dropped in 1991, after eight years of inspections, and after more than a decade of continuous bombing raids, and of crippling sanctions imposed under the most intensive and sophisticated surveillance operation in history, both Blair and Bush received intelligence suggesting that Iraq was a “serious and current threat”. As we now know, this alleged intelligence is said to have been related to WMD and links with al-Qaeda that did not exist. We are to believe, then, that a rush of terrifying information relating to non-existent perils – a rush so overwhelming that long-standing policy was abandoned – suddenly emerged to lead Bush and Blair to believe that nothing less than war was required to avert the danger. Click here or on image above to download GO FIND ME A WAY TO DO THIS
Bringing Hell To Haiti Have you ever noticed how stupid you sometimes feel when you watch the news? Hands up anyone who understands what's going on in Haiti? The media is good at repeatedly broadcasting footage of armed gangs roaming in trucks, and at quoting senior oofficials. But the absense of meaningful context and informed qanalysis - and above all the unwillingness to question the official version of events - means that it is often literally impossible for viewers to make sense of what is happening. For all their satellite communications and computer-equipped studios, the news media often do not give us the news at all - they give us noise. Click here or on image above to download Bringing Hell to Haiti
Target Iraq
Click here on on image above to download Target Iraq
Letters from Iraq 2004 A year after the destruction of Fallujah by the American military, let's take another look at Jo Wilding's remarkable series of essays from inside the besiged Iraq city. Click here on on image above to download Letters from Iraq 2004
In The Jungle Once upon a time, a long time ago, a small miracle took place in the brain of a man named Solomon Linda. It was 1939, and he was standing in front of a microphone in the only recording studio in black Africa when it happened . . . he just opened his mouth and out it came, a haunting skein of fifteen notes that flowed down the wires and into a trembling stylus that cut tiny grooves into a spinning block of beeswax . . . Later, the song took flight and landed in America, where it mutated into a truly immortal pop epiphany that soared to the top of the charts here and then everywhere, again and again, returning every decade or so under different names and guises . . . It is the most famous melody ever to emerge from Africa, a tune that has penetrated so deep into the human consciousness over so many generations that one can truly say, here is a song the whole world knows . . . This one’s for Solomon Linda, a Zulu who wrote a melody that earned untold millions for white men but died so poor that his widow couldn’t afford a stone for his grave … Click here on on image above to download In The Jungle
The Road Stops At Nowhere When South African author Denis Beckett took his family for a summer holiday trip from Johannesburg to the Cape, they didn't intend spending the ensuing weeks acquainting themselves with broiling desert roadsides, embattled third world hospitals or the intimate civic pathology of some of the least tourist-attractive towns on earth. A wonderful adventure story with a tale to tell about the universal human predicament. 80 pages
The New Economy of Terror – An excerpt from MODERN JIHAD In this 36-page extract from her book, Loretta Napoleoni maps out the arteries of an international economic system that feeds armed groups the world over with an endless supply of cash. Chasing terror money, she takes the reader from the CIA headquarters to the smuggling routes of the Far East, from the back rooms of Wall Street to Hawala exchanges in the Middle East. The new economy of terror is made up of illegal businesses such as arms and narcotics trading, oil and diamond smuggling, as well as charitable donations and proceeds from legal businesses. Click here or on image above to download The New Economy of Terror
The Most Dangerous Man in the World – An excerpt from Rogue State: America At War With The World Click here or on image above to download The Most Dangerous Man In The World
Paying the Price A 28-page excerpt from The New Rulers of the World by top British political author John Pilger If you wonder why the Iraqi people didn’t welcome the American forces as liberators at the end of the second Gulf war, it may be enlightening to read this excerpt from John Pilger’s book, The New Rulers Of The World, written and published before war began. Pilger describes the terrible suffering of the people of Iraq under the West’s – specifically the United States and Britain – decade-long embargo of that country, vicious sanctions that saw hundreds of thousands of children die because of lack of medical treatment as the richest country in the Middle East was brought to its knees because of supposed – but still undiscovered – weapons of mass destruction. In the first part of this excerpt, Pilger reports from Iraq on the murderous effects of these sanctions on the most vulnerable section of Iraq society; in the second, he travels to the United States, where he has an enlightening interview with Madelaine Albright’s Assistant Secretary of State James Rubin. Pilger concludes, “A prosecutor [at the International Criminal Court] might ask who has killed the most innocent people in Iraq: Saddam Hussein, or British and American policy-makers? The answer may well put the murderous tyrant in second place.” Click here or on image above to download Paying the Price
Global Mutation A 20-page excerpt from The Age Of Dissent: A Manifesto For A New World Order Acclaimed columnist for The London Guardian, George Monbiott wonders why the world’s rich keep getting richer while the poor are overtaken by debt and disaster. “The world,” he says, “is run not by its people but by a handful of unelected or underelected executives who make the decisions on which everyone else depends: concerning war, peace, debt, development and the balance of trade. Without democracy at the global level, the rest of us are left with no means of influencing these men but to shout abuse and hurl ourselves at the lines of police defending their gatherings and decisions. Does it have to be this way?” he asks as he presents a series of proposals that will create a revolution in the way the world is run – true democracy, where people are more important than nations and corporations. Our excerpt consists of the prologue and first chapter of this bold and important new work. Click here to download Global Mutation Always Happy. Never Sad A 28-page excerpt from Hard Work, Life in Low-Pay Britain by acclaimed Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee Could you live on the minimum wage? The Guardian's Polly Toynbee took up the challenge; living on one of the worst council housing estates in Britain and taking whatever was on offer at the job centre. What she discovered shocked her. In telesales and cake factories, as a hospital porter and as a school dinner lady, she worked at a breakneck pace for cut-rate wages, alongside working mothers and struggling retirees. The service sector in Britain is now administered by seedy agencies, offering no prospects, no screening and no commitment. And, perhaps most damning of all, Toynbee found that, despite the optimism of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s New Deal, the poorly-paid effectively earn less than they did 30 years ago. In ColdType’s excerpt from Hard Work, the author takes a job working as a dinner lady, preparing and serving lunches to children in a school canteen . . . Click here or on image above to download Always Happy. Never Sad
The Lying Game What did the media tell us in the run up to war on Iraq? Was it all true? Where are the weapons of mass destruction? This book is for everyone who is appalled by the duplicity and misinformation churned out by the media in the lead up to war with Iraq, and is a scathing indictment of the media's role in creating public support for a war which threatens to create further instability and resentment of the US throughout the Middle East. Click here or on image above to download The Lying Game
Arrest & Interrogation Forty years ago, South African journalist Hugh Lewin was arrested by security police for being a member of the African Resistance Movement (ARM) responsible for acts of sabotage against the nation’s apartheid government. After serving seven years as a political prisoner, Lewin went into exile in Britain where he wrote his acclaimed book, Bandiet: Seven Years in a South African Prison. Our 48-page excerpt from the recent republished version of the book – BANDIET Out of Jail – contains the first chapter of the original book, plus a new chapter and two of his prison poems, including the evocative TOUCH. Click here or on image above to download Arrest & Interrogation
Small Towns, Small Minds Before taking up the pen for Britain’s Observer and Guardian newspapers, Los Angeles-born Greg Palast traveled the globe as expert investigator of corporate fraud and racketeering. Palast won Britain’s highest journalism honors for his 1998 undercover investigation of influence peddling within Tony Blair’s cabinet – by Enron and other US corporations. He then turned his sleuthing skills on to the Bush money trail: uncovering for BBC and The Observer the uncomfortable truths of how the Bush Administration quashed investigations of Saudi financing of terror – and Poppy Bush’s extraordinary methods for stuffing his bank account and his son’s campaign coffers. In this excerpt from “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” Palast turns his spotlight on the culture of McDonald’s and the “frightening Americanization of America.” Click here to download Small Towns, Small Minds |
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