Prison

The hunger strike among California’s prisoners against protracted solitary confinement, a strike which initially involved over 30,000 prisoners (see PN 2561), was called off after 60 days on 5 September, in order to avert deaths.

The decision was ‘especially difficult considering that most of our demands have not been met’, said the prisoners. More info:
www.tinyurl.com/peacenews498

On 21 August, a military judge sentenced the 25-year-old US army private formerly known as Bradley Manning to 35 years in prison, with time served (almost three years) in pre-trial custody counted towards this.

The next day, Bradley Manning publicly asked to be referred to as Chelsea Manning from that point on, and asked people to use the feminine pronoun to refer to her (except in official post to the prison), saying: ‘I am a female’.

The judge in Manning’s trial counted…

It was reported on 6 August, that 60 people being held in the United States military’s Guantánamo Bay detention centre were continuing a hunger strike against their continued imprisonment without trial.

The hunger strike has lasted six months and at one point involved over 100 of the 160 detainees. Many hunger strikers have suffered force-feeding, a practice  widely condemned as torture.

The remaining British resident, Shaker Aamer, who has been detained for 11 years, is among…

Puerto Rican nationalist Oscar Lopez Rivera has the dubious distinction of being one of the longest-serving political prisoners in the world.

Having served in the US army in Vietnam, Rivera returned to Chicago and started working to improve living conditions for Puerto Ricans in the city.

Radicalised during this period, he became a forceful advocate for Puerto Rican independence from the United States. Facing police repression, Rivera went underground for several years. In 1981…

As PN headed to the printers, Brian Terrell was heading to prison for a drone protest at Whiteman air force base on 15 April with Ron Faust and Mark Kenney. The three were arrested at the base while trying to deliver an indictment to the base commander, brigadier general Scott A Vander Hamm, charging everyone involved in drone operations with extrajudicial killings, wars of aggression and other crimes.

Mark Kenney served a four-month sentence ending on 11 November, and Ron Faust was…

Hannah Brock, the new WRI worker writes: 1 December marks ‘Prisoners for Peace’ day.

For more than 50 years, War Resisters’ International has used this opportunity to make known the names and stories of those imprisoned for their actions for peace.

Some are conscientious objectors, detained for their refusal to join the military. Others have taken nonviolent direct actions to disrupt preparations for war.

This day is a chance for you to demonstrate your support.

…

On 28 August, Dr Shakir Hamoodi, 59, an Iraq-born US citizen, began a three-year sentence for sending money between 1991 and 2003 to his relatives in Iraq, and the families of friends living in Iraq, to help relieve suffering caused by the UN sanctions.

A five-year FBI investigation found the father of five had not sent any money to the Iraqi government.

On 25 July, exactly two years after the WikiLeaks release of the Afghan war diaries, the following banners were unfurled at the summit of Snowdon in Wales: ‘Free Bradley Manning’, ‘Don’t shoot the messengers! Free Manning. Free Assange. End the wars.’

WISE Up Action, a solidarity network for Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, held the demo to support US army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning (who has Welsh roots) who has been held for two years in pre-trial detention on charges of…

Former British police spy Mark Kennedy, who infiltrated anti-climate change and other activist groups between 2003 and 2010 (see PN 2530), is now working as a security consultant for the Densus Group in the US, providing ‘investigative services, risk and threat assessments’, according to an entry on his online LinkedIn profile.

The new job, like Kennedy’s initial exposure, was first reported on the activist media website Indymedia before being picked up as ‘exclusive’ breaking news by…

The 169 men held in the US Guantánamo Bay detention centre in Cuba, including 87 cleared for release, can no longer challenge their indefinite detention without trial.

That is the effect of a US supreme court ruling handed down on 21 June, refusing to uphold a previous ruling in 2008, while giving no reasons.

In 2008, the supreme court gave Guantánamo prisoners the right to challenge the lawfulness of their detention under habeas corpus. Subsequently, lower courts whittled away…

On 21 May, a US judge in Pennsylvania asked peace activist Norman Lowry, prosecuted for blockading a local recruiting office, to ‘forswear’ blockading military recruiting offices in future. Otherwise the court would be ‘obliged’ to impose the maximum sentence of seven years. 

Lowry refused to give such an undertaking and was sentenced to one-to-seven years, the implication being that if he later agreed to give such an undertaking, he could be paroled after serving a year.

Lowry…

WISE Up for Bradley Manning is a grassroots network in Wales, Ireland, Scotland and England (WISE) taking action for the young US military intelligence analyst who has been held by the US government for two years without trial.

Accused of blowing the whistle on US war crimes and revealing other truths the US would have preferred to keep buried, Bradley Manning has been tortured and denied his constitutional rights.

When US president Barack Obama, commander-in-chief of the…

I was really frightened of going to prison. I’d had a really bad experience of being in a boys-only boarding school, and I thought prison would be like that except worse.

To be honest, I think quite a lot of it was classism. Being a middle-class person from a privileged background, the thing that I thought would be ‘worse’ was that it would be a working-class men-only environment.

I don’t know whether that meant I was frightened of it being violent (my upper-middle-class…

Both Maya Evans, imprisoned in HMP Bronzefield on 29 February, and Gabriel Carlyle (PN promotions worker), sent to Lewes prison on 21 March, were sentenced to £355 in fines and court costs; both were imprisoned by Hastings magistrates court for two weeks for refusal to pay, after two years of fending off bailiffs.

The May 2009 action was a die-in for NATO’s victims in Afghanistan, held outside the gates of a base in north London.

Up betimes at 5.30am, to catch the 6.08am tube to Vauxhall and thence the 6.32am overland train, arriving at Ashford (Surrey) station at 7.03am. From there, a short walk brought me to Her Majesty’s Prison Bronzefield.

I’d been there once before - to see Susan Clarkson out of jail - and the reception assured me that Maya would be released shortly. They…