Iraq

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I was in two minds as to how to write up the interview with Nicolas Kent. Our usual format in PN is to just to present the transcript of the interview, and that’s what we did in the end (for an unusually long three pages), but I was very tempted to write it up in a more traditional journalistic style. These notes are a small move to bringing a bit more of the flavour of the thing over.

When I called up to arrange the interview, Nicolas Kent was very gracious, but it was clear he was…

It was in January 2003 that Mary entered Shannon airport in Ireland and took an axe to a US warplane bound for Iraq. She was arrested and held in Limerick prison before being charged with $1 million criminal damage and released on bail.

A few days later, the same warplane was disarmed by the Pit Stop Ploughshares after being repaired. They were charged with $2.5m criminal damage, but were unanimously acquitted after four trials. In Mary’s case, after two trials, one resulting in…

The first bombing raid of the Gulf War was launched on Iraq 20 years ago. On 15 January members of Wrexham Peace & Justice Forum and supporters organised a stall in the town centre with a display of information about the effects of war and sanctions on Iraqi children.

Children’s shoes were displayed alongside the information to remind us of all the lost children of Iraq. Well over a million Iraqi children have died either as a direct result of warfare or indirectly,…

I decided not to read the books by Bush and Blair because I believed they would be propaganda designed to excuse and justify their actions in Iraq. Nor did I want to give them any money. So I was delighted to read Milan Rai’s critique on the cover of the latest Peace News. It has the same great analytical style that I first came across in Gulf Crisis Weekly.
I’ve decided to not give to the PN 75 Appeal because I want to use my cash for something else, and I’m a long-time subscriber…

Reading the recently-published memoirs of George W Bush and Tony Blair is a strange experience – seeing recent history refracted through the eyes of our war leaders, and seeing more deeply into the former US president and British prime minister. The books present justifications for their crimes against humanity; and for the invasion of Iraq in particular.

Bush’s Decision Points was published at the beginning of November, two months after Blair’s A Journey. (Their shared publisher…

Evidence that the death toll in Iraq may have been grossly underestimated and documents revealing that Israel approved, in principle, “a policy of deliberate reduction” for basic goods in the Gaza Strip, have both been rated “X” in recent mainstream media coverage.

In the wake of Wikileaks’ 22 October publication of nearly 400,000 secret US military logs, the mainstream media briefly returned to the issue of the post-invasion civilian death toll in Iraq. In particular, much…

As a US student spending a semester abroad, British coverage of my own country has been an eye-opening experience. Everything from November’s tumultuous mid-term elections to the national joke that is Glenn Beck gets airplay on this side of the pond, usually with a bit more perspective than the knee-jerk coverage we get back home. Perhaps a little distance is necessary to provide proper context.

So I’d like to return the favour. So here’s an outsider’s perspective on the most…

Iraq’s third annual Week of Nonviolence began on 10 October, organised by La’Onf (“no violence” in Arabic), a network of nonviolent Iraqi civilians and civil society groups.

The theme of this year’s actions was making the upcoming provincial elections safe, free, and truly democratic.

During the intensive week of activities La’Onf stuck up masses of posters, and handed out nonviolent literature to soldiers, shoppers, schoolchildren, police, politicians, youth and women’s groups…

There is one detail in Tony Blair’s A Journey that seems to have been missed. One of the few times that Blair was forced to withdraw an untruth was in a forceful interview by Jeremy Paxman on BBC Newsnight on 6 February 2003.

Blair claimed that UN weapons inspectors had been “put out of Iraq” in December 1998. Under pressure from Paxman, Blair admitted that, in fact: “They were withdrawn”. Chief UN weapons inspector Richard Butler revealed in his memoirs that he withdrew his…

On 1 September, US vice-president Joe Biden announced the end of US combat operations in Iraq at a ceremony at Saddam Hussein’s palace in al-Fao, outside Baghdad. The official withdrawal of all US combat troops somehow leaves behind 50,000 US troops officially “assisting” the Iraqi army. These 50,000 soldiers are scheduled to withdraw entirely by the end of 2011, unless the Iraqi government (not yet formed) requests otherwise.

On 24 July, the Independent reported the results of a questionnaire survey conducted in Fallujah in January and February. These included a twelve-fold increase in the risk of cancer for under-14s (compared to rates in the Middle East Cancer Registry), and an anomalous birth sex-ratio (the ratio of girls to boys) in children under five (Patrick Cockburn, “Toxic legacy of US assault on Fallujah ‘worse than Hiroshima’”).

The Iraqi city has been the site of some of the worst…

US army whistleblower Bradley Manning has now been charged with “communicating, transmitting and delivering national defence information to an unauthorised source”. Manning, an army intelligence analyst, was arrested in May over the leaking of the so-called “Collateral Murder” video, which shows a US helicopter gunning down civilians during a July 2007 raid in Iraq.

Manning now faces a possible 52-year jail sentence if convicted. Manning, 22, who sat his GCSEs in Wales after his…

It was reported on 6 June that US federal officials had arrested 22-year-old army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning for passing classified US combat video and state department records to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks.
Manning was turned in last month by a computer hacker he had told that he was the source of videos that had appeared on Wiki-Leaks including that of a 2007 helicopter strike in Baghdad that caused civilian deaths.

Malaysian anti-war groups attempted to arrest former British prime minister Tony Blair when he appeared as the keynote speaker at a “National Achievers Conference” in Kuala Lumpur. Seven activists, including two from the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission (KLWCC) and two representatives of the Iraqi community in Malaysia, evaded intense security and registered themselves as delegates. When Blair appeared near the VIP entrance of the convention hall, Matthias Chang and Zainur Zakaria of the…