Carlyle, Gabriel

On 23 January, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported that ‘Across Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, the Obama administration has launched more than 390 drone strikes in five years – five times as many as were launched in the entire George W Bush presidency [ie 51 strikes in four years]’. According to the Bureau these strikes have killed more than 2,400 people, at least 273 of whom were reportedly civilians. On 5 February, Pakistani drone investigator Karim Khan was abducted from his home…

According to figures obtained from the ministry of defence (MoD) by Drone Wars UK in January and February 2014 under the Freedom of Information Act (FoIA), unmanned British Reaper drones launched 457 weapons over Afghanistan up to the end of 2013. A further 39 launches (during 250 missions) were made using US drones up to the end of December 2012.

In what appears to have been a deliberate attempt to mislead parliament, the MoD neglected to mention the latter strikes when asked ‘how…

During the First World War, an estimated 20,000 British men of military age refused conscription, with over 6,000 serving prison sentences under conditions which included hard labour and a ‘rule of silence’ that forbade prisoners to talk to one another.

Soon after conscription was introduced in 1916, fifty conscientious objectors (COs) were secretly taken to France by the British military. But for the intercession of Bertrand Russell — a prominent opponent of the…

Over 120 people squeezed into the Bloomsbury Suite at Friends House in London on 17 January to hear renowned US author Adam Hochschild talk about his book To End All Wars – the only recent account of the First World War to foreground the war’s opponents.

According to Hochschild: ‘The First World War changed the world for the worse in every conceivable way, but despite its folly and devastation people in Britain have one thing they should feel proud of. From 1914 to…

The British government may have had Tacitus in mind when it launched its latest PR offensive on drones by inviting a select number of journalists — not once, but twice — to view the UK’s new drone control centre at RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire.

British pilots in Waddington fly the deadly unmanned aircraft currently in operation over Afghanistan (see PN 2558). ‘This is [about] defence correspondents talking about defence and the military ... If you start touching [on foreign nations…

In his 2011 book To End All Wars – the only recent account of the first world war to foreground the anti-war movement – Adam Hochschild asks: "If we were allowed to magically roll back history to the start of the 20th century and undo one – and only one – event, is there any doubt…

In a Kafkaesque twist, even the explanation of why the release of this information would involve ‘risk to [service personnel’s] life and limb’ has been witheld.

Chris Cole, founder of the small NGO Drone Wars UK, brought a case before the tribunal in September after an earlier appeal to the information commissioner was turned down in February.

Early in 2012,…

The invasion and occupation of Iraq resulted in approximately half a million war-related deaths during the eight-year period March 2003 – June 2011, according to the results of a peer-reviewed household survey* published in the journal PLOS Medicine (PLOS stands for ‘Public Library of Science’).
The paper estimates that ‘more than 60% of excess deaths were directly attributable to violence, with the rest associated with the collapse of infrastructure and other indirect, but war…

Activism and resistance – both violent and nonviolent – take centre stage in the New Internationalist’s latest comic book (Fight the Power! A visual history of Protest Among the English-Speaking Peoples; 192pp; £9.99). Written by Séan Michael Wilson (Parecomic) and Benjamin Dickson, and illustrated by John Spelling, Adam Parson and the wonderful Hunt Emerson (How…

On 28 August 1963, Martin Luther King Jnr delivered his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC to an audience of over 200,000 marchers, calling for economic and racial justice for Black Americans and an end to segregation. Unbeknown to him, the justice department had installed a secret cut-off device in the sound system, so that they could turn off the speakers if they saw fit. Meanwhile, the Pentagon had 19,000 troops on standby.

Two…

Anti-war campaigners and academics have been quick to charge that a major study into congenital birth defects in Iraq, published on 11 September, has been manipulated to serve the interests of the US, which contaminated parts of Iraq with depleted uranium and other heavy metals. After contacting a number of those involved, PN has found no evidence of manipulation.

The summary report*, published on 11 September by the Iraqi…

Since creating the post-religious Church of Stop Shopping in 1999, the Reverend Billy has held services in churches, community centres, forests, fields, parking lots, shopping malls and – above all – inside brand-name stores across the US and Europe, preaching against consumerism, and for economic and ecological justice.

The creation of actor Bill Talen, the Reverend Billy is…

Even as the war in Afghanistan re-escalates – with the UN reporting 14% more civilian deaths in the first half of 2013 compared with 2012 – the Taliban have been holding secret talks with Afghan government officials in an effort to restart the country’s stalled peace process.

This comes in the wake of the June opening of a Taliban political office in Doha – which was supposed to lead to direct talks between the US, the Taliban and the Afghan government, but instead collapsed for…

While ‘[m]any people believe that America’s addiction to automobiles is a cultural problem’, in reality – as cartoonist Andy Singer explains in this wonderful ‘pictographic examination’ of the American transport system – the country’s ‘automobile addiction has more to do with politics, government agencies, and the [US] tax structure’.

Indeed, in the 1920s, most North Americans lived in cities, many of which had great public transit and inter-urban rail systems, leading the president…

Whether she’s recounting a wildcat strike by refuse workers in her home town of Brighton, an overland journey across the Eurasian landmass to Korea or helping to feed 10,000 protesters during the 2005 mobilisation against the G8 in Scotland, anarchist chef Isy Morgenmuffel’s autobiographical zine anthology Diary of a Miscreant, (112pp, available from…