Carlyle, Gabriel

Tony Blair may be sleeping a little less soundly in his bed following the launch of ArrestBlair.org. Brainchild of author and activist George Monbiot – who attempted his own citizen’s arrest of John Bolton at the 2008 Hay Literary Festival – the website has already raised over £13,000 for a “Justice for War Crimes” fund.

Anyone attempting a peaceful citizen’s arrest of the former prime minister can claim a quarter of the money in the fund, provided their actions are reported in…

A recent alleged massacre by US-led forces in Afghanistan has been greeted with near-total silence on the part of the British press.

On 31 December, The Times’ Jerome Starkey reported allegations that ten civilians – including seven children – had been killed during a night-raid on the village of Ghazi Kang. According to the local headmaster – who provided Starkey with their names and school registration numbers – the children, whose ages ranged from 11 to 17, were…

The British Government is considering plans to redeploy British troops in Afghanistan from the more dangerous, northern areas of Helmand province to its quieter central districts, in an attempt to undermine growing anti-war sentiment here in the UK. 71% of Britons support a one-year withdrawal of all British forces (see PN 2516/17).

McChrystal’s thinking

The move is apparently the brainchild of the head of US/NATO forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal.
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Readers who have attended recent national events such as Stop the War’s march against the war in Afghanistan, the Great Climate Swoop in Nottingham, or the Raise Your Banners music festival in Bradford, may have spotted something slightly unusual: namely, large numbers of Peace News being given away – to thousands of activists.

Have we lost the plot, you may be asking yourself? Why should anyone pay for PN when it’s been given away it for free? Don’t give-aways like this de-…

On 5 November, six of us – Katrina Alton and Steve Barnes of the London Catholic Worker, PN columnist Maya Evans, PN co-editor Milan Rai, Trident Ploughshares co-founder Angie Zelter, and myself – were found guilty of causing “serious disruption to the community” for our role in the “Die-in for NATO’s Victims in Afghanistan” at Britain’s military nerve centre at Northwood earlier this year.

During the trial in Watford, chief inspector Dempsey-Brench conceded that he had not…

In 2001 legendary non-fiction cartoonist Joe Sacco travelled to Gaza on an assignment for Harper’s magazine to report on the fate of Palestinians in the town of Khan Younis during the second Intifada.

That visit prompted him to follow up a reference he’d read many years earlier in Noam Chomsky’s book The Fateful Triangle: a short quote from a UN document concerning a massacre in the town during the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which scores of unarmed men were shot in their homes or lined-up…

“To fight is not the solution. We have a mouth and a brain, we should talk.” Afghan Women’s Affairs Minister, Dr H.B. Ghazanfar
“Freedom, democracy and justice cannot be enforced at gunpoint by a foreign country; they are the values that can be achieved only by our people and democracy-loving forces through a hard, decisive and long struggle.” Afghan women’s rights activist Zoya.

Recently, I overheard a significant figure in the UK anti-war movement bemoaning the collapse…

“This is last year’s protest,” he told us, smiling.

Ten minutes from the end of our eight-hour vigil opposite Downing Street – during which four of us had our details taken by the police for the crime of holding an “unauthorised” demonstration within 1km of Parliament – he had stopped to talk, apparently oblivious to the disruption he was causing to our name-reading ceremony.

95%

Smartly dressed, and apparently on his way from one Whitehall department to…

To mark the first anniversary of Israel’s bloody 22-day assault on Gaza, hundreds of international activists will march nonviolently alongside the people of Gaza on 1 January 2010, breaching the illegal Israeli blockade.

The marchers (following a code of nonviolence) will leave Cairo on 27 December, cross into Gaza from Egypt and continue to the Israeli border. Amnesty International has called the blockade a “form of collective punishment of the entire population of Gaza [and] a…

This month, lance corporal Joe Glenton of the Royal Logistic Corps faces court martial for refusing to return to combat in Afghanistan. Glenton joined the army in 2004, and in 2007 went absent without leave after serving his first tour in Afghanistan. He is thought to be the first British soldier to openly resist government policy.

In a speech on 23 July organised by the Stop The War Coalition, lance corporal Glenton described his experience on the ground in the Middle East.

“I don’t think the public are up for it any more. Everything has changed. We as a nation don’t want to send out soldiers anywhere” – former foreign office minister Kim Howells

Though the British government has run a highly successful propaganda campaign, significantly boosting support for the war amongst the British public, the recent media furore over British casualties has been causing concern in Washington.

Some anxiety

A senior US official told the Financial…

The Afghan presidential election on 20 July – the results of which may not be known until mid-September – has already received a fair amount of critical coverage in the British press.

The Times reported that a third or more of those registered to vote (including one “Britney Jamilia Spears” of Kandahar) probably didn’t exist, and that the run-up to the polls had “been characterised by horse-trading between the candidates and an array of warlords and power-brokers who promise[d] to…

Recent media coverage of the deaths of British soldiers in Afghanistan obscures an uncomfortable reality: that US/NATO forces are responsible for much – perhaps most – of the killing in Afghanistan today.

On 9-10 July, eight British soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. In their front-page headline the next day, the Guardian branded it “The bloodiest day”, while the Sunday Telegraph called it “the bloodiest 24 hours in Afghanistan.”

Only, of course, it wasn’t.

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In 2004 a group of fundamentalist Christians sitting on a school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, voted to make their students “aware of… other theories of evolution, including, but not limited to, intelligent design” – creationism’s latest Trojan horse.

Eleven committed parents – including a Girl Scout leader, a devout Catholic and a physics teacher who taught summer Bible school – decided to take a stand, and sued the board for violation of their first amendment rights (“separation of…

RAF pilots in Afghanistan are firing an increasing number of brutal “enhanced blast” thermobaric weapons, the Ministry of Defence admitted in May. Since the modified Hellfire AGM-114N weapons were bought from the US in May 2008, over 40 are known to have been fired. 20 were fired in 2008 (in seven months), while over 20 had been fired up to May this year (in five months).

Thermobaric weapons, known earlier as “fuel-air explosives”, cast a fine mist of fuel throughout a wide area,…