Afghan president Hamid Karzai, has recently been criticised for taking 'ghost money' from the CIA and MI6. The sums are inevitably unknown, for the usual reasons of 'national security', but are estimated to have been tens of millions of dollars. While this is nowhere near the eye-bleeding $12billion

A couple of days ago I was invited onto RT Arabic TV to do an interview about the ongoing clusterfuck that is Syria, with a particular focus on the issue of Western jihadis allegedly flooding into the country.

The premise, pushed across much of the Western media, is that...

Where to start with this tangled skein of media spin, misrepresentation and outright hypocrisy?

Last week the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence presented this year's award to Dr Tom Fingar at a ceremony jointly hosted by the prestigious Oxford Union Society.

Dr Fingar, currently a...

Just a quickie, as this is some sort of holiday season apparently. However, this did annoy me. In the same way that President Obama signed the invidious NDAA on 31 December last year, despite his previous protestations about using his veto, it appears the US government has sneaked/snuck...

I blame my partner. There I was having a perfectly nice day off, pootling my way through the Sunday newspapers and finding such intriguing articles as the fact that Britain has invaded all but 22 countries around the world over the centuries (France is the second most prolific invader...

Only in the mad world of modern British politics could it be possible to connect MPs, drones and royal breasts. Is this sounding a little too bizarre? Let me explain.

Way back in 2008 Conservative MP Damien Green, who was at the time the Shadow Minister for Immigration, was...

A lot of sound and fury has been expended in the British media over the last few months about the Coalition government's proposal to enact secret courts via the proposed Justice and Security Bill - purely for terrorist cases, you understand. Which, of course, is OK as...

I have written over the years about the encroaching surveillance state, the spread of CCTV and the increasing use of drones in our skies. When the North East of England introduced talking CCTV cameras that could bark orders at passing pedestrians in 2008, I thought that we were...

A storm of diplomatic sound and fury has broken over Ecuador's decision to grant political asylum to Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange. The UK government has threatened to breach all diplomatic protocol and international law and go into the embassy to arrest Assange.

The UK justifies this by citing the 1987...

OK, I was really so not planning on ever writing anything, whatsoever, at any point while I continue to breathe, about the London Olympics. First of all I have absolutely zero interest in the circus that is modern competitive sport (panem et circenses), and secondly what more could I possibly...

Recent remarks by the head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, leave us wondering if the Secret Intelligence Service is preparing to 'fix' intelligence on Iran, as his immediate predecessor, Sir John Scarlett, did on Iraq.

Scarlett's pre-Iraq war role in creating 'dodgy dossiers' hyping the threat of non-existent "weapons of...