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During Christmas of 1914, British and German troops ceased fighting and adhering to the spirit of “Peace and goodwill towards men” ventured into ‘no-mans’ land to talk, exchange gifts, and even share good-natured banter. It culminated in a game of football which brought unity, fostering a sense of brotherhood and a common humanity.
For this fleeting moment of history, both sides saw through the inhumanity of war which was being propagated by the establishment, and saw each other as humans, not Huns or Tommie’s…just simply…as men! Each soldier “Put up their swords” to embrace one another during a time of year when the birth of Jesus, the ‘Prince of Peace’ ushered in everlasting peace not only between mankind and God, but between the whole human race.

As veterans striving to press towards peace and to highlighting the murder which is the pure essence of war, let us reflect at this time of year at the bravery and example of these men who downed their tools of war and showed the world what can be achieved when those who have been ordered to kill in the name of governments decide that this madness can no-longer persist. Let us draw a line in the sand.

At a time when commercial greed is blinding us in the name of a supposed religious holiday, the same greed which feeds the monster of war, let us regardless of religious or non-religious affiliation in Veterans for Peace have the courage to keep working for a time when “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore”.

Shalom

Chase Sydnor, VFP UK

On 10 December 2013 at Bulford Military Court 15 soldiers from 1st Battalion the Yorkshire Regiment were jailed for disobeying an order to stand up. Another soldier awaits sentencing.

The act of resistance took place in front of 1000 people during a parade at Archers Post, a British Army Barracks in Kenya. The 16 soldiers from the battalions Recce Platoon were ordered to stand to attention but instead a ringleader (Cpl Anthony Brown) shouted ‘sit down’ and the dissenters dropped to ground in unison. The Sergeant Major yelled at the disobedient troops but they refused to stand.

It has been reported that the soldiers were fed up with their immediate commanders following incidents in Wales and Kenya. The incident in Wales arose when the men finished a 16 mile march to find their commanders sleeping off a hangover. The soldiers had stated that they were “led by muppets”.

Soldiers are often ordered to carry out tasks that are irrational (e.g. painting Land Rovers whilst it is snowing heavily). Soldiers are also ordered to carry out tasks that are immoral (e.g. detaining civilians and handing them over to be tortured). There are also times when the Officers and Senior ranks highlight the fact that it is one rule for them and another for the Junior Ranks (e.g. Officers getting drunk in their mess when the Junior ranks are confined to two cans of beer per day). Any resistance to this system takes courage and should be supported.

Please support these courageous men.

The 16 are;

Cpl Anthony Brown, sentenced to 60 days detention and discharged from the Army.
L/Cpl Steven Tidesley, sentenced to 60 days detention and reduced in rank to Private.
L/Cpl  Miles Smith, sentenced to 60 days detention and reduced in rank to Private.
Pte Michael Hassall, sentenced to 40 days detention.
Pte Grant White, sentenced to 40 days detention.
Pte Paul Jenkin, sentenced to 40 days detention.
Pte Edward Caffrey, sentenced to 40 days detention.
Pte Martin Petti, sentenced to 40 days detention.
Pte Daniel Storey, sentenced to 40 days detention.
Pte Ross McDowel, sentenced to 40 days detention.
Pte Zak Wilson, sentenced to 40 days detention.
Pte Adam Powl, sentenced to 40 days detention.
Pte Thomas White, sentenced to 40 days detention.
Pte Killian Cassidy, sentenced to 40 days detention.
Pte Robert Ball, sentenced to 40 days detention.

L/Cpl Christopher Allport will be sentenced at a future date.

You can write to them at;

MCTC
Berechurch Hall Camp
Colchester
Essex
CO2 9NU

You can apply to visit them by filling out the following;

http://www.army.mod.uk/documents/general/proMpsMctcVisitApplication.pdf

Sign this petition calling for their release;

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/58188

Batang Kali

During the Malayan Emergency, sixty-five years ago on 11th December 1948, Tham Yong then aged 17, watched as British troops surrounded the rubber plantation where he lived, near Batang Kali. Men of the Scots Guards, were then ordered to round up the civilians and separate the men from the women and children. That evening one of the male unarmed villagers was killed and the next day 23 others were murdered. One of the victims was found headless.

Subsequently, a number of the soldiers involved have admitted their part in the killings. When news of the massacre leaked out, however, the authorities claimed that the victims were ‘bandits’ and ‘terrorists’ and had been shot trying to escape. In 1957 ‘five lorry loads of papers [about the Emergency]… were driven to the navel base at Singapore, and destroyed … discreetly.’

The first investigation into the killings, in 1970, was stopped when the Conservatives came to power. With the MoD stating: ‘If no reaction is forthcoming, the matter will probably now remain buried in the public mind … and quietly forgotten.’ In the 1990s an investigation by the Malaysian Police was also blocked, following the intervention of the British Government.

Relatives of those killed, their hopes lifted by the British Government’s admittance that torture had been used against the Mau Mau in a similar conflict in Kenya, still strive for justice and for the truth to be told. In 2010, Tham Yong, the last adult eyewitness to the massacre, died aged 78.

Veterans For Peace, an organisation of ex-forces personnel who have served their county, call upon the British Government to at last play fair, admit the wrong done and grant the relatives of the Batang Kali massacre victims the truth and justice they have struggled 65 years for.

Malaya 1948-60

Just three years after the defeat of Japan in the Second World War, British troops were engaged in a bitter ‘Emergency’ in Malaya. The people of Malaya, then a colony of the British Crown, had been promised self-government because of their fight against the occupying Japanese troops. That promise was renewed in October 1945 by the Labour Government in Westminster and the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army laid down their arms. For the next three years a Malayan independence movement strove by peaceful means to achieve their freedom.

Successive British Governments, however, wanted to retain control of the country’s rubber and tin: ‘In 1950, Malaya produced 37% of the world’s natural rubber (and 25% of total world rubber production, including synthetics). In the same year, rubber (61%) and tin (12%) accounted for 73% by value of all exports from the colony.’ i

The British colonial elite had done very well in Malaya, exploiting the country’s resources and using the native people as cheap labour. In its May 1926 edition, British Malaya expounded on the white role in the Far East: ‘The function of the white man in a tropical country is not to labour with his hands, but to direct and control a plentiful and efficient supply of native labour, to assist in the Government of the country, or to engage in opportunities offered for trade and commerce, from an office desk in a bank or mercantile firm.’

Ironically, while the Welfare State was being constructed in Britain and workers here were gradually managing to win concessions of better wages and working conditions, the exploitations of native workers abroad was ruthlessly increased. In Malaya, while great wealth was made from rubber, the native labourers lived poverty-stricken lives. In 1948, Patrick O’Donovan wrote about their living conditions in the Observer:

Several times I have been shown with pride coolie lines on plantations that a kennelman in England would not tolerate for his hounds … There is little consciousness [among the plantation owners] of the poverty and illiteracy that exists in this country. And, too often, it is a foul, degrading, urine-tainted poverty, a thing of old grey rags and scraps of rice, made tolerable only by the sun.ii

Across Malaya trade unions started to demand wage increases and better living conditions. Bitter disputes occurred in which detained Japanese troops were often released and used to take the places of striking workers. The whites in Malaya, who controlled the production of rubber and tin, demanded that the British administration stay in control and that the trade unions and independence movement be suppressed. The Labour government complied and an ‘Emergency’ was declared in mid-1948.

The ‘Emergency’

One of the first measures was to declare the Pan-Malayan Federation of Trade Unions illegal and force it to be disbanded. All forms of constitutional protest or reforms were effectively blocked off and the situation soon escalated into violence. British military and counter-insurgency experts now took control – setting in motion an all-out conflict. The Malayan Races Liberation Army (MRLA) led by Chin Peng, a communist who had been awarded an OBE while fighting for the Allies against the Japanese, launched guerrilla actions against the government.

A scenario, that was to become familiar, began to unfold as local ‘loyal’ forces were greatly increased and reinforcements of British troops were rushed to the area. General Sir Harold Briggs took charge of military operations and ‘suspect’ members of the native population were ‘resettled’ into fortified hamlets that were little more than mass prison camps, with guards, barbed wire and searchlights at night. The idea was to deprive the guerrillas of their source of food, shelter and recruits:

The war could not have been won without ruthless government control over the totality of the population. The most conservative and pro-British observers are agreed upon this. … the whole operation formed one whole, dedicated to physically separating the non-combatants from the combatants among the Malayan masses – or, in the terminology of the administration, separating “the people” from the “communist terrorists”.iii

Over 500,000 natives were ‘resettled’ in the camps, euphemistically called ‘new villages’, where they were forced to labour on plantations for barely subsistence wages. They were also often ‘punished’ by detentions and food reductions and were subjected to constant controls, including curfews and searches.

The build up of the security forces was on such a large scale that the British Survey of June 1952 stated that ‘in some areas there is an armed man to police every two of his fellows, and more than 65 for every known terrorist …’ The British High Commissioner, General Sir Gerald Templer, stated in his report for 1953 that a ‘main weapon in the past four years has been … the sevenfold expansion of the Police and the raising of 240,000 Home Guards and of four more battalions of the Malay Regiment.’

Between 1948 and 1957 some 34,000 people out of a population of 5 million were imprisoned without trial, with another 20,000 being deported. The police were a typical colonial style force, who operated mainly through fear and intimidation. Victor Purcell, a former colonial civil servant, observed:

There was no human activity from the cradle to the grave that the police did not superintend. The real rulers of Malaya were not General Templer or his troops but the Special Branch of the Malayan Police. What General Templer had ordered was virtually a levy en masse, in which there were no longer any civilians and the entire population were either soldiers or bandits. The means had become superior to the ends. Force was enthroned, embattled and triumphant. iv

Despite this overwhelming concentration of security forces, the British administration was not secure. Templer’s predecessor as High Commissioner, Sir Henry Gurney, had been killed in an ambush in 1951, and few areas were safe for colonial administrators or agents.

‘A Handful of Bandits’

Concerned voices about Malaya were raised in Britain, including The Times which stated in its editorial columns: ‘The cost in human life has been considerable; in money it is counted in millions … Several able and resourceful men have tried their hands at solving the problem, but none of the recent news has appeared to hold out better hope for the future.’v
A few weeks later, The Times reported on the trip to Malaya of Oliver Lyttelton, the Colonial Secretary just appointed by Churchill’s newly elected Conservative Government: ‘At no time were there fewer than 1,000 troops and police on guard, and when Penang was visited about 2,000 were directly involved. Outside Kuala Lumpur, Mr Lyttelton was compelled to travel in an enclosed armoured car and one observer remarked that his progress was rather like that of a Nazi leader travelling through occupied Europe.’vi Lyttelton had been educated at Eton and Cambridge and served in the Brigade of Guards. In 1937 he had been chairman of the London Tin Company, which had extensive mining interest in Malaya.

In contrast, communists in Britain, like Harry Pollitt, campaigned in support of Malayan independence. Pollitt wrote the pamphlet, Malaya – Stop the War!, in which he set out his forthright views. He outlined the size of the security forces and their repressive use against the Malayan people by the administration. Then Pollitt went on to state: ‘And all this, we are told, “against a handful of bandits”! This must surely be the biggest and most persistent handful that has ever existed in human history.’ Pollitt continued:

The British lads who are being sent thousands of miles away to Malaya are not defending Britain or safeguarding democracy. They are there to defend the corrupt colonial system under which two-thirds of the children receive no schooling, the workers’ own trade unions have been suppressed, and real wages are only a third of their pre-war starvation level. Despite all the official propaganda about Malaya being the most prosperous British colony, for the Malayan people conditions are appalling.

… This is the degraded Police State for which the Tories want to sacrifice more British lives. Already hundreds of British lads have lost their lives in Malaya. It is time for the British people to put an end to this cruel and ghastly war. … For the Tory rubber and tin profiteers there is plenty to gain, but for the British people the only dividends are death, more taxation, cuts in social services, and attacks on wages and working conditions.

Mr Churchill has already confessed that the British Government is spending £50 million a year on the Malayan war … Now fresh burdens are to be added. It was no coincidence that Lyttelton’s tour of Malaya and the announcement of his six-point plan for an intensified war came at the same time as the employers’ rejection of the claims put forward by the dockers, miners and other British workers … the Government’s announcements of £15 million cuts in education, and further cuts in rations and rises in prices.

The British Defence Secretary then issued a directive stating that those called ‘bandits’ should now be referred to as ‘communist terrorists’ (CTs). But Pollitt’s Stop the War campaign had more positive effects, with even the establishment paper, The Times, in its edition of 30th November 1951, stating that: ‘Together with the usual colonial suspicions is a growing belief, hastened by the statements of rubber producers, that Malaya is regarded first as an investment area to be made safe for British capital.’ As Pollitt had indicated, guarding that capital were young British soldiers, often doing their national service, who fought a bitter war in the jungle areas.

Massacre at Batang Kali

In 1960, Anthony Short, who had completed his national service in Malaya, was commissioned by the Malayan government to write the official history of the Emergency. They sat on his work for three years, then rejected it. Short omitted various contentious parts, but the book was continually turned down. Eventually, seven years after its completion, the book was published in London. As the writer Malcolm Caldwell stated, in his book Short had tried to come to terms with ‘the problems of waging a “counter-insurgency” war against a hostile population, deemed to be “friendly”’:

In the early stages of the campaign, and indeed wherever contact took place…, how, in the few seconds of confusion when figures are running from huts into jungle does one decide to open fire or not? … unless they are uniformed or obviously armed, there is no guarantee that the people who are running are guerrillas or wanted criminals rather than very frightened men and women who may or may not be willing or unwilling guerrilla supporters.

Almost every other situation report at the beginning of the emergency recorded the shootings of men who ran out of huts, were challenged and failed to stop. Too often, no weapons, ammunition or anything else in the least way incriminating, either materially or oral evidence, was ever found … the CPO (Chief Police Officer) Johore was particularly concerned with the situation in which suspects were shot while attempting to escape: ‘I can find no legal justification for the shootings, whether under the normal laws or the emergency regulations, unless the incident occurs in a protected place or during curfew hours.’ So far it seemed that the magistrates had brought in verdicts of justifiable homicide; but the CPO thought that would not always be the case and that some major scandal might occur. vii

Short also recorded that it was seriously suggested in the British parliament that a force of ‘Black and Tans’ be recruited to send to Malaya.

That was the situation, when on 11th December 1948, a unit of the 2nd Battalion of the Scots Guards entered the rubber plantation, near Batang Kali in the Selangor area of Malaya. The soldiers then rounded up and massacred 24 Chinese villagers and burnt many of the dwellings:

There matters rested until, 20 years later, The People, a London newspaper, challenged a statement by George Brown, a leading Labour Party politician, discussing revelations of the My Lai massacre [by Americans in Vietnam], that … “there are an awful lot of spectres in our cupboard too…”

… Among those who read this challenge was a Scots Guardsman who had been a member of the patrol. Eventually, he and three other members of the patrol swore statements on oath to the effect that the 24 Chinese had been massacred and that they were not trying to escape. The victims, moreover, were all civilians, and “this is just one of the many British My Lai’s in Malaya”.viii

The soldiers’ statements provoked new public interest and, under pressure, the government instructed Scotland Yard to undertake an ‘Official Inquiry’. But this was quietly shelved later after interest faded, so the details of this colonial atrocity have still to be fully revealed.

In 1952, soon after being appointed High Commissioner, General Templer had said ‘the hard core of communists in this country are fanatics and must be, and will be, exterminated.’ That same year the Daily Worker carried a photo of a smiling Royal Marine commando in Malaya, holding the severed head of a dead guerrilla. Shortly after, a second photo was shown, with another marine holding two severed heads. The authorities claimed that heads and hands were taken from the bodies of ‘terrorists’ for identification purposes. But many soldiers regarded them as trophies, which showed their unit’s effectiveness: ‘Other photos reproduced in British papers showed severed hands propped next to severed heads in mock salute and dead guerrillas stretched out like tiger skins in front of the units that had “bagged” them.’ix

The ‘Emergency’ did not officially end until 1960, but by the mid 50s guerrilla numbers had dwindled and those who were still active could only operate from the deepest jungle. The MPLA had launched their campaign from the Chinese community, who, while being the main labour force, were a 45 per cent minority of the Malayan population. This proved a fatal flaw for although the guerrillas tried to broaden their appeal, Britain used ethnic and religious divide and rule tactics against them to keep them separated from the Malay and Muslim majority.
For years the authorities had also been cultivating the native political and commercial elites, especially the United Malay National Organisation and the Malayan Chinese Association – and convincing British businessmen that it was safer to exert economic control over a neo-colony, than continue with direct rule. ‘Independence’ was declared in August 1957 and British companies had good reasons to be happy at the outcome: ‘At independence 75 per-cent of all rubber plantation acreage was in European (mostly British) hands, along with 61 per-cent of all tin production, and 75 per-cent of all services and trade.’x For them the expense and the ferocity of the ‘Emergency’ had paid off.

Written by Aly Renwick of Veterans For Peace UK, he served in the British Army for 8 years during the 1960s. 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY CHELSEA MANNING!
Free Her Now!

When – Tuesday 17 December 2013 1500 – 1630 hrs

Where – St Martin in the Fields
Trafalgar Square
London
WC2N 4JJ

Tube – Charing Cross / Leicester Sq

(St Martins request that vigils on the steps are silent)

Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning is the US soldier sentenced to 35 years in jail for leaking thousands of documents to Wikileaks exposing US and other governments’ war crimes and corruption. She is 26 years old on this day. Ever since she was detained and tortured in 2010, international protests, have demanded her release. Demonstrate your support for her courageous whistleblowing, and for all who blow the whistle on corruption, dictatorship and dirty government secrets.

Thanks to Chelsea we know about

• The “collateral murder” video of a US helicopter crew killing Iraqi civilians
• The cover-up of rape in Iraq & Afghanistan
• The extent of drone strikes
• US dirty tricks in Haiti, Venezuela & elsewhere
• The corruption of Tunisian dictator Ben Ali that spurred the 2011 revolution
• Israel consulting Egypt & the Palestinian Authority before invading Gaza

Join with Veterans For Peace UK and other groups as we vigil for Chelsea

This vigil was called by Payday Men’s Network and Queer Strike

Veterans For Peace UK invite you to attend – Demonstration to Mark the 12th Anniversary of the Opening of the Prison at Guantánamo

Demand an End to Human Rights Violations, Demand an End to the Human Suffering.

In June/July 1993 more than 4,000 meditators descended on Washington D.C. to conduct an experiment. Their aim was to prove that collective meditation would lower the levels of violent crime purely through the thoughts and intentions of the massed meditators. Against the projections of the FBI and the Washington D.C. Chief of Police, the experiment worked. Violent crime rates dropped by a staggering 23.6% (maximum increase), and when the experiment was finished, violent crimes rates rose again.

Graph showing violent crime rates against weeks of assembly by the meditators.
(Source http://www.worldpeaceproject.org/news/)

So what does this mean for us?

By using meditation as a means for increasing peace we can, literally, help lower rates of violence, across the world. If only 4,000 meditators can have such an impact over such a short space of time in Washington D.C., what could 40,000 (or more!) meditators across the world in a combined effort achieve? With a world population of over 7 billion people, if only 1 per cent of the population came together, a total of 70 million people, imagine the effect it could have on areas such as the Middle East. Peace across the world is well and truly within our grasp, we need only come together and do away with the fear driven, materialistic lies that our corrupt governments present to us.
Meditation for dealing with personal stress

Besides the benefits to humankind as a whole, meditation has huge personal benefits. Amongst many others, it is proven to significantly lower stress levels.

With so many of the men and women of our armed forces, both still serving and ex, suffering from epidemic levels of post traumatic stress from conflicts ranging from World War II to Afghanistan, and a civilian population living in a constant fear of (fabricated) terrorism, economic collapse, crime and poverty; meditation can and will help to alleviate these stresses reducing the need for psychoactive drugs that numb our minds to reality.

How can we get started?

Contrary to popular belief, mediation is practiced by all religions, and is not just something that Buddhists or New Age ‘hippies’ engage in. As such there is a wealth of ways to find out more or get started. A simple search online for ‘basic meditation techniques for stress’ will yield lots of results to help you on your way. The thing to remember is that mediation is effortless, natural and incredibly rewarding. Don’t take my word for it though, give it a try and let’s increase the peace together!

Joe Lidster is a member of Veterans For Peace UK, he served in the Royal Marines and is a daily meditator.

This article first appeared on the Cairo Review of Global Affairs website on 24/11/13

In February 2010, during a mid-tour leave, a 22-year-old United States Army private named Bradley Manning walked into a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Rockville, Maryland. The junior military intelligence analyst began uploading hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government documents to WikiLeaks, the online publisher. In collaboration with WikiLeaks, theNew York Times, Guardian and Der Spiegel later published extensive reports based on the documents.

Manning was initially arrested in May 2010 on suspicion of having disclosed what military prosecutors then believed was a classified video of a July 2007 U.S. air strike in Baghdad. The helicopter attack had injured two children and killed at least twelve civilians, including two Reuters journalists. A month before Manning’s arrest, WikiLeaks had published the video, which it entitled Collateral Murder. Despite a U.S. Central Command classification review later determining that the video was in fact unclassified, military prosecutors nevertheless charged Manning with espionage for its unauthorized disclosure.

Military prosecutors later accused Manning of disclosing four datasets containing 483,562 army field reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, 251,287 diplomatic cables, and approximately 765 detainee profiles of the men and children imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. Manning was tried by court-martial at Fort Meade, Maryland, on twenty-two charges, including aiding the enemy, espionage, exceeding authorized access, stealing U.S. government property and wanton publication.

Manning spent a year and a half in pretrial confinement, apparently longer than any accused awaiting court-martial in U.S. military law. The presiding military judge, Colonel Denise Lind, nevertheless ruled that the government had not violated the defendant’s right to a speedy trial. The legal proceedings began in December 2011 and continued for the next twenty months, ending in August 2013.

While Lind eventually acquitted Manning of aiding the enemy (the most serious charge, which carried a life sentence), she found Manning guilty of twenty other crimes and handed down a sentence of thirty-five years in prison. Though Lind had ruled that a portion of Manning’s confinement had been excessively harsh and unlawful, she granted Manning only 112 days credit on the long sentence.

The day after sentencing, Manning issued a statement through her defense counsel declaring her gender to be female, and asking that she be called Chelsea and referred to with feminine pronouns.

Significant Activity
“In Iraq death always has its way.” So begins a poem by Manning’s commanding officer, Master Sergeant Paul Adkins. A Secretary of the Army investigation into Manning’s command found that Adkins, a published poet and the highest-ranking non-commissioned officer in the intelligence shop where Manning worked, had been derelict in his duties. He was subsequently demoted to Sergeant First Class. According to the investigation, Adkins failed to inform higher command of an April 2010 email that Manning had sent to him in which she described her gender identity struggles. Manning had attached to the email a photo, which she had taken of herself during her leave in February 2010, dressed in a feminine wig and cosmetics. Adkins testified at Manning’s court-martial that he failed to inform his command of Manning’s email because he was short on intelligence analysts like Manning who specialized in the Shiite militias. Gender dysphoria can be grounds for administrative separation from the U.S. Army.

Before deploying to Iraq, Manning had worked on worldwide intelligence briefs for the commander of the Second Brigade Combat Team at Fort Drum in Upstate New York, home of the 10th Mountain Division of the U.S. Army. The 2nd Brigade formed part of the army’s global response force, on call in case troop surges were needed anywhere in the world. In the garrison’s intelligence shop, Adkins also tasked Manning with rebuilding the “incident tracker.” This required Manning to back up hundreds of thousands of military field reports called Significant Activities, or SIGACTS, from the war in Afghanistan, where the 2nd Brigade was expected to deploy.After Manning’s unit was reassigned to Forward Operating Base Hammer, a few miles east of Baghdad, she followed suit and created another backup of SIGACTS from the war in Iraq. The backups were made on read-writable CDs and stored in the intelligence shop’s shared conference room at FOB Hammer. Analysts could access the backups during periodic interruptions to network connectivity that occurred during deployment.

SIGACTS are normally housed in a U.S. Central Command database called the Combined Information Data Network Exchange (CIDNE), which was accessible on a Department of Defense classified network called SIPRNet. SIPRNet contained information classified up to the level of “secret.” Almost all the information the military presents to the White House and Congress about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan originates in the CIDNE database. Thousands of military personnel, government employees and contractors have access to CIDNE’s various types of reports, including  human intelligence reports, or HUMINT, as well as the SIGACTS.

Manning disclosed 483,562 SIGACTS from the CIDNE-Iraq and the CIDNE-Afghanistan databases. WikiLeaks later published the material as the Iraq War Logs and the Afghan War Diary. Manning did not, however, disclose the other kinds of reporting from the CIDNE database, like HUMINT, which contained intelligence sources and methods.  The SIGACTS that Manning disclosed, military prosecutors admitted at trial, only represent 24 percent of CIDNE. Manning told Lind that she believed that the classification determination of the SIGACTS (most of which were marked “secret”) was based primarily on their being housed on SIPRNet. While she knew the reports were “sensitive at the time of their creation,” she told the court that she believed that their sensitivity decreased “within forty-eight to seventy-two hours, as the information [was] either publicly released, or the unit involved [was] no longer in the area and not in danger.”

Our Foreign Policy
“Death could not just visit my house anytime it felt like filling its black palms,” reads another line of Adkins’ poem. The SIGACTS that Manning uploaded to WikiLeaks are filled with references to the ubiquity and seeming triviality of death in wartime Iraq. Manning regularly researched and reviewed the ground-level accounts of events in Iraq and Afghanistan during her long shifts at FOB Hammer and became deeply troubled by them. At her trial, Manning said she released the SIGACTS because she believed that a “detailed analysis of the data over a long period of time by different sectors of society might cause society to reevaluate the need or even the desire to engage in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations that ignore the complex dynamics of the people living in the affected environment each day.”

She further testified: 

In attempting to conduct counter-terrorism or CT and counter-insurgency COIN operations, we became obsessed with capturing and killing human targets on lists and not being suspicious of and avoiding cooperation with our host nation partners, and ignoring the second and third order effects of accomplishing short-term goals and missions.

I believe that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information contained within the CIDNE-I [Iraq] and CIDNE-A [Afghanistan] tables this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Manning removed the read-writable CD backups from the conference room. In her containerized housing unit, she transferred the files to an SD card, and transported them home on her mid-tour leave. Prior to uploading the material to WikiLeaks, she called the Washington Post. She spoke with a reporter, who expressed skepticism about Manning’s claims and said that she would check with the Post’s senior editors. Manning then called the telephone number for the public editor at the New York Times and left a voicemail message, but received no response. In all, Manning downloaded documents between February and April in 2010, and uploaded them to WikiLeaks at various times in the same period both during her mid-tour leave and while at FOB Hammer in Iraq.

“Dead Bastards”
Cynicism and a lack of critical thought defined the ethos of the intelligence shop at FOB Hammer where Manning worked. A sign hung over the desks of the targeting analysts there: “The individuals that own this office are in the business of catching shit bags. If you think for one second you can come in here and bug us with sissy shit you might want to rethink your pathetic life.” A Central Intelligence Agency Red Cell memo that Manning disclosed to WikiLeaks in March 2010 was unapologetically entitled, “Afghanistan: Sustaining West European Support for the NATO-led Mission—Why Counting on Apathy Might Not Be Enough.” Manning told Lind that after discovering the CIA memo, she “had difficulty believing what this section was doing.” Manning was also alarmed by the “seemingly delightful bloodlust” of the aerial weapons team that she viewed in the video of the 2007 U.S. airstrike in Baghdad. Manning uploaded the video to WikiLeaks in February 2010, along with information on the rules of engagement in Iraq for the years 2006 and 2007.

Manning said that the helicopter pilots in the video “dehumanized the individuals they were engaging and seemed to not value human life by referring to them as ‘dead bastards’ and congratulating each other on the ability to kill in large numbers.” She compared the pilots’ behavior “to a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass.” Manning’s co-worker, a targeting analyst named Specialist Jihrleah Showman, had originally found the video within the targeting section’s folder on the brigade’s shared drive. Showman testified that neither she nor her commanding officers ever discussed the rules of engagement while viewing the video in the intelligence shop.

Defense counsel David Coombs said in his closing arguments that Manning realized she could “no longer just ignore the fact that these are real lives being lost and real people dying.” In a letter to the Guardian published on October 9, 2013, Manning described herself as a transparency advocate. “I feel that the public cannot decide what actions and policies are or are not justified if they don’t even know the most rudimentary details about them and their effects,” she wrote.

Iraqi Partners
The 2nd Brigade’s mission in Iraq was to train the Iraqi Federal Police. The partnership included intelligence sharing. The 2nd Brigade also shared intelligence with the Iraqi presidential brigade and the National Iraqi Intelligence Agency. Classified computers in the 2nd Brigade’s intelligence shop were equipped with CD burners to distribute intelligence to their Iraqi partners.

Iraq’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies were divided along sectarian and political lines since the restructuring of the Iraqi state after the U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003. The Bush administration authorized the creation of the Iraqi National Intelligence Service (INIS) and Congress earmarked $3 billion for its operations between 2003 and 2007. Some of the money wound up supporting paramilitary units that effectively became Shiite-dominated militias and death squads carrying out personal and political vendettas in their search for Sunni insurgents who supported Saddam Hussein. The template for the U.S.-backed counter-insurgency is what journalist Peter Maass has called the “Salvadorization” of Iraq, a reference to the U.S. proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s. U.S. military counter-insurgency experts had reportedly advised the newly formed Iraqi Special Police Commandos. The Guardian reported in March 2013 that the Iraqi Special Police Commandos “conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the U.S. occupation and accelerated the country’s descent into full-scale civil war.”

When Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki of the Shiite Islamic Dawa party came to power in 2006, he mistrusted the CIA-funded INIS, which was headed by a Sunni who led a failed CIA-backed coup against Hussein in 1996. A decade later, four INIS agents were suspected of being involved in the kidnapping of an Iranian diplomat suspected of ties to Shiite insurgents. The diplomat later alleged that the CIA had tortured him. Al-Maliki subsequently established his own intelligence agency headed by a Shiite under the Ministry of State for National Security Affairs (MSNS). Fueled by the competing spheres of influence between the U.S. and Iran, Sunni and Shiite factions within both the INIS and the MSNS conducted systematic campaigns to eliminate rivals in an escalating battle for influence and control over the intelligence and security apparatus in Iraq.

“Everything Started Slipping”
Three weeks after her trip to Barnes & Noble, now back in Iraq, Manning was ordered to investigate the arrest of fifteen individuals at a printing press in the Karada district of Baghdad. The detentions had been a joint operation between subordinate commands of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team and the Iraqi Federal Police (IFP). The IFP accused the detainees of publishing “anti-Iraqi” literature; she was told to find out who the “bad guys” were.

Manning established that none of the detainees had any ties to suspected terrorists or militia groups; nor were they carrying out “anti-Iraqi” activities. Pictures from the scene of the arrest included images of the fifteen suspects, pallets of unprinted paper, and high-resolution copies of the printed material they had supposedly sought to publish. When Manning had the “anti-Iraqi” literature translated, it turned out to be a benign treatise on public corruption in Al-Maliki’s government entitled, “Where Did the Money Go?” Upon discovering the discrepancy, Manning informed her command that the detainees were dissidents, not militants. Manning said her superiors “told me to quote ‘drop it’ unquote and to just assist them and the Federal Police in finding out where more of these print shops creating quote ‘anti-Iraqi literature’ unquote were.”

In May 2010, Manning initiated contact with Adrian Lamo, a former computer hacker. Lamo decided to contact U.S. law enforcement and become a government informant when Manning initially asked him: “[I]f you had unprecedented access to classified networks fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, for eight plus months, what would you do?” Recounting events around the arrest of the fifteen Iraqis at the printing press, Manning told Lamo that her command told her to “shut up” and explain how to assist the IFP in making more arrests. “Everything started slipping after that,” she told Lamo in the online chat. “I was actively involved in something that I was completely against.”

When Manning spoke about the fifteen detainees to other analysts in the intelligence shop as well as to her non-commissioned officer in charge, “some were sympathetic,” she said in court, “but no one wanted to do anything about it.” Manning’s co-worker, Sergeant David Sadtler, said in a sworn statement for the Secretary of the Army’s investigation that Manning thought, “no one cared about the mission.”

In court, Manning told Lind, “I knew that if I continued to assist the Baghdad Federal Police in identifying the political opponents of Prime Minister Al-Maliki, those people would be arrested and in the custody of the Special Unit of the Baghdad Federal Police and very likely tortured and not seen again for a very long time—if ever.”

Manning also said in court that she decided to give the information to WikiLeaks in hopes of generating media attention preventing further IFP crackdowns on Al-Maliki’s political opponents in the run-up to the Iraqi elections. After uploading the information to WikiLeaks via its secure transfer protocol, Manning said that someone from the WikiLeaks organization requested more information in order to verify the story. WikiLeaks has never published any information about the arrest of the fifteen detainees.

Around the time that Manning was tasked to investigate the detainment of the fifteen Iraqis, brigade commanders began feeling that their soldiers were too “focused on the ground” and “they needed a bigger picture,” according to the highest-ranking intelligence officer in the brigade, Captain Steven Lim. Headquarters directed Lim to send his intelligence analysts a link to the State Department’s Net-Centric Diplomacy database, which housed diplomatic cables from across the world. Most of the cables were unclassified or confidential. Cables housed in the NCD database were intended for wide distribution among at least one million U.S. government employees and federal contractors. Lim emailed the analysts a link to the NCD, no password required, and encouraged them to incorporate the cables into their work product.

The day after the arrest of the fifteen detainees, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad sent a diplomatic cable to the CIA, National Security Council and other U.S. agencies reporting that Al-Maliki had fired 376 officers from the Iraqi security and intelligence services and replaced them “with inexperienced political officers loyal to his Shiite Dawa party.” The embassy said that Al-Maliki was positioning “his own people within the intelligence agencies to eliminate internal opposition in the run-up to the elections.” Iraqi and American observers, said the cable, found the development “troubling.”

After WikiLeaks published the Iraq War Logs, Amnesty International and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture urged President Barack Obama to order an investigation into the complicity of U.S. forces in handing detainees over to the Iraqi security forces, who then tortured them. “U.S. authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished,” the Guardian reported in October 2010.

According to another Guardian report published in January 2012, Iraqi security officers were “systematically arresting people on trumped-up charges, torturing them and extorting bribes from their families for their release.” Likewise in a McClatchy-Tribune report published in June 2012, Al-Maliki’s security services were found to have detained more than a thousand members from opposing political parties, “many of them in secret locations with no access to legal counsel, using ‘brutal torture’ to extract confessions.”

Public’s Right
The lack of transparency in the Manning court-martial raises serious questions about the justice of her conviction. The trial record totals about 45,000 pages, believed to be the longest in U.S. military law. Yet eighteen months into the proceeding, the public was still forbidden access to more than 30,000 pages of court filings and rulings. The failure to allow contemporaneous access to court documents caused irrevocable harm to the public’s right to understand and scrutinize the conduct, case law, arguments, and opinions of both trial and defense counsel and the presiding military judge. The charge of aiding the enemy is one of only two punitive articles under the Uniform Code of Military Justice that applies to “any person” and not solely military personnel. This fact is all the more reason that the public had a right to access the court record.

Obama’s Inquisition
Manning’s conviction and sentencing reflects President Obama’s unprecedented campaign against whistleblowers by employing the Espionage Act, a 1917 statute intended for spies. In January 2011, Obama’s Justice Department brought an espionage case against Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA employee accused of leaking classified information to a reporter at the New York Times. In documents related to the case, Department of Justice prosecutors argued that leaks to the press are a “greater threat to society” than when spies provide classified information to a foreign government because “every foreign adversary stands to benefit” from the leaks.

The defense argued that Manning acted with good intentions to inform the public, and that his disclosures did not lead to actual damage. Colonel Lind, however, ruled that Manning’s motive for the disclosures was not relevant at trial. Such evidence, then, could not be used to mitigate the accusation, drawn from the language in the Espionage Act and in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), charges that Manning had “reason to believe such information could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.”

Crime of Espionage
Manning was convicted on six Espionage Act offenses and one CFAA offense. For the Espionage Act and the CFAA charges, most of the evidence critical at trial remained hidden under black-ink redactions or within at least 229 sealed unreleased court exhibits. The secrecy reached an almost surreal quality, given that the charged documents are publicly available on the Internet. The fact that most of the charged documents were legally classified, despite a defense request to declassify them for trial, prevented Manning’s lawyers from citing them openly in court. It also limited the defense’s ability to call witnesses, since any potential witnesses were required to have security clearances to handle the classified but publicly available material.

Military prosecutors then selectively declassified two sets of documents for use in their case against Manning for “aiding the enemy” and “wanton publication.” One set of declassified documents was material obtained during the May 2011 U.S. raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The documents included a letter from Bin Laden to a member of Al-Qaeda requesting Department of Defense information, and a response to Bin Laden attached to which were the Afghan War Logs and Department of State “information.” Yet, a video exists of Bin Laden recommending a book by author and Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward. Journalist Glenn Greenwald has asked why Woodward and his high-level sources have not been similarly charged with “aiding the enemy.” “This question is even more compelling,” Greenwald wrote in the Guardian in January 2013, “given that Woodward has repeatedly published some of the nation’s most sensitive secrets, including information designated Top Secret—unlike WikiLeaks and Manning, which never did.”

The other documents declassified at trial by military prosecutors for use in their case against Manning for “aiding the enemy” and “wanton publication” was a 2008 U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center (USACIC) memo on WikiLeaks, which was primarily sourced from public information. Manning was eventually convicted under the Espionage Act for disclosing the USACIC memo to WikiLeaks.

Classification Questions
Manning was convicted on the Espionage Act and CFAA offenses for probable, not actual, harm. Military prosecutors were required to prove that the information charged under the Espionage Act was related to national defense and closely held, meaning it was not already lawfully in the public realm prior to Manning’s disclosure. A defense witness testified at trial, for example, that sixty-two of the 102 SIGACTS charged against Manning under the Espionage Act contained content that was also found in public reporting prior to Manning’s disclosure.

Evidence about the lack of actual damage was excluded at trial. Military prosecutors called Original Classification Authority (OCA) witnesses from each of the victimized agencies to testify. The OCA testified that charged information was properly classified at the time of its release and that its disclosure “could” cause damage. The OCA’s classification reviews weighed heavily in Lind’s determination to convict Manning on six Espionage Act offenses.

Coombs argued that the OCA failed to cite specific instances of information within the charged material that could cause damage. Instead, he said, they used generalities and buzzwords. During closing arguments, Coombs cited the classification review for the charged documents concerning the May 2009 U.S. bombing in the Farah Province of Afghanistan, which was widely reported on by the press. The OCA, said Coombs, testified that the classification review “didn’t consider open-source material or unclassified publications like various army regulations or field manuals.”

Much of the information disclosed by Manning was in fact already public, unclassified, improperly classified, or marked at the lowest levels of classification and widely circulated among government and military employees and contractors. The Washington Post reported that “nearly half a million government employees and contractors with security clearances” had access to the diplomatic cables disclosed by Manning. Some 4.2 million government and military personnel and contractors have security clearances for the highest level of charged information classified at the “secret” level.

Damage Assessment
President Obama himself has said the information revealed in the WikiLeaks publication of the Afghan War Diary was already known. Then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wrote a letter to the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee explaining that a Department of Defense review of the leaked SIGACTS had “not revealed any sensitive intelligence source and methods.” Professor Derek Shearer of Occidental College, who served as ambassador to Finland during the Clinton administration, has argued that the diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks did not contain secrets: 

These are not really secrets that are in these cables… Most of the State Department reporting is done by younger junior officials … who were assigned to go to events or to meet people. In some cases the reporting is required by acts of Congress. And, it is not quite “make-work” but it is kind of one of the lower level forms of communications.
 

At a symposium on Wikileaks held at the University of Southern California in 2011, Shearer cited the Tunisian revolution as a positive outcome from the publication of the diplomatic cables. The revelation of the U.S. government’s negative view of dictator Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali is believed to have fueled anger against the Tunisian regime: 

Some of this frank speaking, of not secrets, but just frank description of a country, had a positive outcome…. But, these cables are not the secret level in which the U.S. government operates. We have a whole separate system of much more secret reporting that comes through the intelligence officers in the embassies. And then we have a whole other channel, the defense intelligence operations—defense attaches’ reporting. So, the notion that some vital secrets of America were compromised by WikiLeaks, I think is not the case.

Foreign Advantage
The OCA and other government witnesses also testified that enemies and foreign adversaries could use the large datasets to conduct “pattern analysis.” Yet, technically, Manning was charged under the “reason to believe” language found in the Espionage Act and the CFAA in relation to only 223 of the 735,614 documents contained within the four larger datasets she disclosed to WikiLeaks: specifically 116 diplomatic cables; 102 SIGACTS from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and five Guantanamo Bay Detainee Assessment briefs. Military prosecutors failed to argue how the 223 charged documents could be used in any potential “pattern analysis” conducted by foreign adversaries or enemies. If military prosecutors wanted to use that argument in court, they should have charged Manning under the Espionage Act or the CFAA for more than 223 documents.

A similar problem arises when military prosecutors and their witnesses argued at trial and during the sentencing phase that the information Manning disclosed could potentially be used in future propaganda efforts by the enemies of the U.S. Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School has written that the absence of a “limiting principle” to the U.S. government’s expanding justifications for classification and its prosecutions of whistleblowers, who disclosed it, is alarming.“The government’s new justification for secrecy will be strongest when its conduct most clearly violates accepted international norms,” Goitein wrote in a piece published by Al Jazeera America in October 2013.“The reasons why people choose to align themselves against the United States—or any other country—are nearly as numerous and varied as the people themselves.” The Brennan Center has published a study asserting that over-classification itself is a threat to American national security. The argument is that democratic governance ceases to function when terabytes of information hide government waste, fraud, abuse and crimes. “Government secrecy has slipped its traditional moorings and is venturing forth into dangerous waters, where accountability and the rule of law cannot readily follow,” Goitein has said.

Limited Damage
At sentencing, military prosecutors could not link any of Manning’s disclosures to known deaths. Instead, they offered evidence of the government’s mitigation efforts and the expert opinions of lifelong federal employees and contractors. These witnesses testified that the leaks affected diplomatic reporting and relationships with foreign governments. The evidence and testimony concerning damage or the lack thereof was offered in closed session or hidden under redactions in classified stipulations.

Manning’s defense maintained that any impact on bilateral relations was short term and temporary. Reuters reported that government reviews of the release of diplomatic cables caused only “limited damage to U.S. interests abroad despite the Obama administration’s public statements to the contrary.” A congressional aid briefed by the State Department was quoted saying the revelations were “embarrassing but not damaging,” The “Obama administration felt compelled to say publicly that the revelations had seriously damaged American interests in order to bolster legal efforts to shut down the WikiLeaks website and bring charges against the leakers,” the aide said.

“Aiding the Enemy”
The last time a U.S. soldier was charged with giving intelligence to the enemy via a media organization was in 1863 during the American Civil War. Private Henry Vanderwater, a Union soldier, was convicted of giving a command roster to a newspaper in Alexandria, Virginia, which later published it. Vanderwater, who willfully intended to provide the information to the Confederate army, was sentenced to several months in the brig. Manning, though acquitted of aiding the enemy, was nonetheless sentenced to more than three decades in confinement.

Manning faced life in prison if convicted of aiding the enemy. Yet while Lind acquitted Manning on that charge, she had rejected two defense motions to dismiss it altogether. That sets a chilling precedent for future whistleblowers and journalists who write about national security issues. When Lind asked the prosecution if it would have acted in the same way had the organization in question been the New York Times rather than WikiLeaks, the reply was “Yes, Ma’am.”

According to defense witness Professor Yochai Benkler of Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, Lind’s failure to dismiss the aiding the enemy charge established a broad precedent. “Leaking classified documents to… newspapers can by itself be legally sufficient to constitute the offense of ‘aiding the enemy,’ if the leaker was sophisticated enough about intelligence and how the enemy uses the Internet,” he explained. In other words, all a prosecutor will have to prove in any future legal case against a national security whistleblower is that the accused knew that an enemy or foreign adversary of the United States used the media organization’s platform to collect intelligence.

Wanton Publication
Philip J. Crowley, the assistant secretary of state for public affairs who resigned over his statements that Manning’s treatment at Quantico was “stupid” and “unproductive,” has described Manning’s leaks as “industrial scale.” In reality, the leaks are proportional to the information age that Manning was born into.

Former Ambassador Shearer said at USC:

When I went out as ambassador it was the end of the kind of old-school style of what an ambassador did. And the idea was that if you had a message for the local government, you got a cable from Washington and it told you to deliver a message, and you would print out the cable. You would make an appointment. You would go over to the foreign ministry. You would give them a message. That was already almost out of date by the Clinton administration, because CNN had already created a twenty-four hour news cycle and many things that were happening that you might want to go tell the local government were already on CNN.… The Internet basically exploded during the Clinton administration. When Clinton came in there was about 400 websites, when he went out there was like 40 million.… But, now today, if you just go on the web and look at any American embassy or other country’s embassy, you are going to see a very vibrant embassy website. The ambassador is going to have a Twitter account. He is going to keep a blog or she will keep a blog. People will write in, locals, on their opinions and things. And, most of the old-time diplomacy has become what is now called in a broader sense public diplomacy. It is not just government-to-government, but public-to-public. And, there aren’t a lot of—there are technical secrets about weapons and some about troop movements, but most everything else is in fact public.

Manning’s conviction for the unprecedented offense of “wanton publication,” which is not tied to any existing punitive article under the Uniform Code of Military Justice or any other federal criminal violation—is intended to interdict the future leak of large datasets capable of being mined or modeled for revelations by digital journalists and organizations like WikiLeaks.

When asked by the military prosecutors if “mass document leaking is somewhat inconsistent with journalism,” Benkler said that large datasets like the Iraq War Logs provide insight that cannot be found in one or two documents containing a “smoking gun.” The Iraq War Logs, added Benkler, provided an alternative, independent count of casualties “based on formal documents that allowed for an analysis that was uncorrelated with the analysis that already came with an understanding of its political consequences.” According to the online organization Iraq Body Count, the Iraq War Logs revealed 15,000 previously unknown civilian deaths; the organization’s estimate of total violent deaths increased to 150,000, 80 percent of whom were civilians.

Manning’s leaks highlight the vital role that access to information plays in the deliberative process and oversight functions of the Congress and the press. Her trial illustrates the government’s battle for control over information in the digital age. It is a battle being waged against what Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, calls the Internet’s “culture of disclosure.”

“I am the type of person who likes to know how things work,” Manning said in court. “As an analyst, this means I always want to figure out the truth. Unlike other analysts in my section or other sections within the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, I was not satisfied with just scratching the surface and producing canned or cookie-cutter assessments. I wanted to know why something was the way it was and what we could to correct or mitigate a situation.”

Fort Leavenworth
Manning is confined at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. Her case must be reviewed and approved by the Convening Authority, Major General Jeffrey Buchanan. This process is referred to as “taking action” on a case. Buchanan has the power to disapprove any conviction and/or reduce Manning’s sentence. Once Buchanan takes action, the case will automatically be reviewed on appeal by the Army Court of Criminal Appeals (ACCA). Such a review by ACCA could take years. Manning’s defense attorney has filed an application seeking a presidential pardon from President Obama. Coombs says it is unlikely that the request will be granted. Obama has only granted nine pardon requests during his presidency, and he has never granted a pardon for someone that he has previously said “broke the law.” For her part, Manning appears to have appreciated the risks when she decided to release classified information. In her chats with Lamo, she expressed hope that the information would make a difference. She stated that she was willing to pay a heavy price for her decision, telling Lamo: “I wouldn’t mind going to prison for the rest of my life…”

This article first appeared on the Cairo Review of Global Affairs website on 24/11/13

Alexa O’Brien is an independent journalist who writes for the Guardian, Daily Beast, and other publications. She received a 2013 Freedom of the Press Foundation grant for her coverage of the Chelsea Manning trial. For her “outstanding work for justice for Manning” she was shortlisted for the 2013 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. On Twitter: @carwinb.

War Poem

For those with the power to send us to war,
Who Have their feet firmly on the floor,
Under their desks they cross their feet,
They can taste victory that’s oh so sweet,

They fight using other peoples kids,
While syphoning money from the highest bids,
And all the while we fight their wars,
They sit there licking their blood stained claws,

For the endless conflict in their eyes,
Promoting democracy the best money always buys,
For every hero that’s always worshipped,
All Their minds are broken, torn and ripped,

With memories of horror, battles and fights,
Some are lucky to even get read their last rites,
For all the blood, grit and pain,
They never know they died in vein,

Who knows what the next conflict offers,
All for corporations to enrich their coffers,
Politicians lay their phoney wreaths,
While round the corner another war prepares to thieve,

Near billion dollar weapons fire hell bent,
To Blow up a family in a Bedouin tent,
They are merely just collateral damage,
In the eyes of a deranged and brutal savage.

David Buck

David served in the British Army from 1997 to 2003. He deployed to Kosovo and Iraq.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Hollywood
When you showed me John Rambo
Stitching up his arm with no anaesthetic
And giving them “a war they won’t believe”
I knew then my calling, the job for me

Thanks also to the recruitment adverts
For showing me soldiers whizzing around on skis
And for sending sergeants to our school
To tell us of the laughs, the great food, the pay
The camaraderie

I am, dear taxpayer, forever in your debt
You paid for my all-inclusive pilgrimage
One year basking in the Garden of Eden
(I haven’t quite left yet)

Thanks to Mum and thanks to Dad
Fuck it,
Thanks to every parent
Flushing with pride for their brave young lads
Buying young siblings toy guns and toy tanks
Waiting at the airport
Waving their flags

Danny Martin

Danny served in the British Army from 1999 to 2006. He deployed to Iraq.

This picture was taken a few years after my departure from the UK Armed Forces. I took to the streets marching with past and present serving members, to a clapping and cheering general public. Why were they clapping us?

This picture was published of me. I am marching behind a serving Royal Marine. The Journalist labelled me a hero, yet; never knew my name.

The journalist was not in Afghanistan with me. He or she did not know what happened there or what I did there. Who are they to call me a hero? Did they label me a hero because I was wearing a Royal Marines beret? Or is it because I have a medal for service in Afghanistan pinned to my chest?

This admiration for our ‘heroism’ only distracts from the true reason why we attend remembrance parades. To remember those who have fought and died.

We must open our eyes and see that the hero caricature is imposed on our armed forces of today to fool us into supporting wars that do not need to be fought.

I did not die, thus my duty as a survivor is to bring awareness to the cruel reality of conflict, if not, I am doing a great injustice to those who did die.

My obedience and service was abused. I was lied to and lead to believe our reasons were just. I did not serve queen or country. I participated in a conflict that has inevitability brought more harm to people of this country. The country I swore to protect.

I am not a hero.

Ben Wright served with the Royal Marines in Afghanistan and is now a member of Veterans For Peace UK

The reception from bystanders was mostly positive. As we neared The Cenotaph we were stopped by the police. A negotiation between the police and Ben Griffin ended with the police agreeing to allow the veterans and their bugler approach The Cenotaph. The tension started to build as we waited for The Salvation Arm to finish their ceremony.

As we stood facing The Cenotaph D-Day veteran Jim Radford sang ‘1916’. Afghanistan veteran John Boulton then read ‘Suicide in the Trenches’ by Siegfried Sassoon. A wreath of white & red poppies was then laid by Northern Ireland veteran John Bourton. The Last Post was played, after which there was a minute of silence during which we tried to remember all victims of war.

It was a sombre and moving event which took courage to participate in.

“1916”

16 years old when I went to the war,
To fight for a land fit for heroes,
God on my side, and a gun in my hand,
Chasing my days down to zero,
And I marched and I fought and I bled and I died,
And I never did get any older,
But I knew at the time that a year in the line,
Is a long enough life for a soldier,

We all volunteered, and we wrote down our names,
And we added two years to our ages,
Eager for life and ahead of the game,
Ready for history’s pages,
And we brawled and we fought and we whored ’til we stood,
Ten thousand shoulder to shoulder,
A thirst for the Hun, we were food for the gun,
And that’s what you are when you’re soldiers,

I heard my friend cry, and he sank to his knees,
Coughing blood as he screamed for his mother,
And I fell by his side, and that’s how we died,
Clinging like kids to each other,
And I lay in the mud and the guts and the blood,
And I wept as his body grew colder,
And I called for my mother and she never came,
Though it wasn’t my fault and I wasn’t to blame,
The day not half over and ten thousand slain,
And now there’s nobody remembers our names,
And that’s how it is for a soldier.

Written in 1990 by Lemmy Kilmister

Suicide in the Trenches

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

Written in 1918 by Siegfried Sassoon

The audio file above is a debate on The Morality of Remembrance held on BBC Radio 4 (The Moral Maze). First up is Ben Griffin representing Veterans For Peace UK, he is followed by Helen Hill representing The Royal British Legion.

The pictures displayed are a sample of the ways in which Remembrance Sunday is promoted. The true nature of war is hidden behind this nonsense .

The full program including Michael Morpurgo the author of Warhorse and Sir Hew Strachan a professor of the History of War can be found here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b03gg7nh/

When I was about seven, my dad took me to the local Remembrance Day memorial. Neatly turned-out elderly men were stood in equally neat rows while The Last Post was played. I wondered why everyone looked so sad. Dad said it was because their friends had been killed in the war; this day was to remember them. I wore a poppy then and I am glad that I did.

This week, other elderly men are standing in railway stations holding out boxes of poppies for passers-by. The poppy still means something to them and because of that, it matters to me as well, but its deeper significance of lament, remembrance, and the commitment called ‘never again’, is being lost. I think it is being killed off.

The nation’s official custodian of remembrance is the British Legion, which is now a very large, corporate-style charity. The poppy appeal is its main source of income. This year, girl band The Saturdays launched the appeal at a glitzy concert with their song Notorious: ‘I’ve been a bad girl / I’m a bad girl / I’m notorious’. A cloud of poppies fell from the ceiling while the crowd cheered. The Legion has extended the range of poppy jewellery this year. You can even play the Poppy Lottery and win £2,000 every week. The Head of Fundraising says he hopes to raise £37 million.

Displaying the poppy is no longer a matter of choice for some public figures and institutions. I have met TV presenters who are made to wear the poppy and producers who are made to make presenters wear it. I too have been asked by a TV crew to wear a poppy before an interview. I declined, not because the poppy is meaningless to me, but because I do not want to join the beaming ‘wear it with pride’ jamboree that has stolen its significance.

The poppy is a good example of an empty signifier: a symbol that only gains meaning from the story we give to it. To this end, we are offered the foggy rhetoric of noble warriors ‘who gave their life for their country’ and made ‘sacrifices for our freedom’. I have worked with veterans for a while and never heard them talk about war in this way. As one veteran put it to me: ‘Why do we call them “the fallen”? It’s not as if they just fell over.’ While I want to honour the courage of veterans who, amid the inhumane catastrophe of war, could still act out of humanity for others, these genteel euphemisms have more to do with forgetting than remembering.

When I was in my teens, Dad made me watch The World At War, possibly the best documentary series ever made. For one hour each week, he said I was not allowed to consume whatever ‘American crap’ was piped through on the other channel. I remember watching the footage of Coventry, Dresden, Hamburg and London on fire; soldiers dead in the mud of Burma; German and Russian soldiers frozen and starved to death in the snow; piles of bodies at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

Although violence on such a scale is difficult for most of us to imagine, first in our remembrance has to be the abject tragedy of war – the overwhelming waste of human life. Harry Patch, the last veteran of the First World War, called it ‘organised murder’. The more fully we recognise war for the mass violence it is, the more it may provoke our deeper humanity to work for a just and practical peace, in which every person has and deserves the dignity of life.

This Sunday I will join a walk organised by Veterans for Peace, who do more than anyone else I know (and with a budget of nothing at all) to ensure we remember war properly. We will walk to the Cenotaph under a banner reading ‘Never Again’ and observe a time of silence.

David Gee of ForcesWatch

SUNDAY 10 NOVEMBER 2013

1330 HRS

TRAFALGAR SQUARE

Follow Veterans For Peace UK as we walk to The Cenotaph with a message of peace.

This year in opposition to the pro-war tone of the state parade. Veterans For Peace UK will walk to the Cenotaph under a banner which reflects the original sentiment of the Armistice
“NEVER AGAIN”.

Once there D-Day veteran Jim Radford will sing ‘1916’ and Afghanistan veteran John Boulton will read ‘Suicide in the Trenches’ by Siegfried Sassoon. A wreath of white & red poppies will then be laid by Northern Ireland veteran John Bourton. After The Last Post has been played
there will be a period of silence in which to remember all victims of war.

Veterans For Peace UK have been active since 2011. We have a wide range of members from all three services ranging in experience from D-Day to Afghanistan. We work toward increasing public awareness of the true costs of war for the larger purpose of world peace.

 ALL ARE WELCOME TO FOLLOW US TO THE CENOTAPH

Dress – Smart

No banners or placards except for “NEVER AGAIN” to be carried by Veterans For Peace.

Info – veteransforpeaceuk@gmail.com

          07866 559 312

“1916”

16 years old when I went to the war,
To fight for a land fit for heroes,
God on my side, and a gun in my hand,
Chasing my days down to zero,
And I marched and I fought and I bled and I died,
And I never did get any older,
But I knew at the time that a year in the line,
Is a long enough life for a soldier,

We all volunteered, and we wrote down our names,
And we added two years to our ages,
Eager for life and ahead of the game,
Ready for history’s pages,
And we brawled and we fought and we whored ’til we stood,
Ten thousand shoulder to shoulder,
A thirst for the Hun, we were food for the gun,
And that’s what you are when you’re soldiers,

I heard my friend cry, and he sank to his knees,
Coughing blood as he screamed for his mother,
And I fell by his side, and that’s how we died,
Clinging like kids to each other,
And I lay in the mud and the guts and the blood,
And I wept as his body grew colder,
And I called for my mother and she never came,
Though it wasn’t my fault and I wasn’t to blame,
The day not half over and ten thousand slain,
And now there’s nobody remembers our names,
And that’s how it is for a soldier.

Written in 1990 by Lemmy Kilmister

Suicide in the Trenches

I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

Written in 1918 by Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)

Keith Hebden

It’s that time of year when we do the important work of remembering victims of war and many wear a red poppy to express their solidarity with those sent to fight. But 11th November is a day that has been stolen from the many to serve the propaganda of an elite who risk nothing for anyone. Can we ever get it back? Those of us who choose to wear no poppy, or a white one, risk yearly being misunderstood or verbally assaulted; so why do we do it?

I want to say from the start that I’m not a pacifist, in the moral sense. No one has the right to tell an opressed people how to resist evil. My contention is a practical one: war does not make for peace or as Harry Patch, the last remaining “Great War” veteran put it, war “isn’t worth one life”.

The jingoist “Help for heroes” approach to remembering, favoured by the British Legion and much of our media, is getting harder to maintain in the face of repeated allegations of war crimes committed by both UK and US troops, news that class is the biggest indicator of chance of death in combat, the effect of armed drones on civilian populations, and the increased risk of psychological trauma or even suicideamong returning veterans.

Add to this list the fact that most of those killed in modern conflicts are not military “heroes” but rather civilians caught up in combat. And is any of this working? Well, “No”, is the short answer. Afghanistan has experienced nearly four decades of foreign occupation and remains deeply troubled. The Middle East has seen more than its share of conflict and yet remains unstable. War isn’t working for peace.

And if war isn’t working for peace then who is war working for? Part of the answer can be gleaned by looking at the main funder of the British Legion a charity for war veterans that has monopolised the symbolic meaning of the red poppy in this country and turned it away from remembrance and towards support for war.

The British Legion is funded by BAE Systems, one of the worlds leading Arms Manufacturers. Their slogan for this year, “Shoulder to Shoulder with all who serve” rings hollow when they are hand in glove with those who profit from war.

What this means, in practical terms, is that those who frame our Remembrance Day require wars to go on and on. Companies like BAE systems are, in turn, funded by Big Banks and Insurance Companies.

In other words, this whole “filthy rotten system” to quote humanitarian Catholic Dorothy Day, is predicated toward justifying and perpetuating war. War is more important to the system than either domestic security or world peace.

In fact, the safer we are the less money is made by the British Legion’s backers.

This is why I cannot wear a red poppy this year. Many people choose to do so in good faith. I believe that, knowing what I know, to do so is to add insult to the many injuries we inflict both on our nation and on those our government sends to war.

Until the British Legion gives us back our poppy I’ll be wearing a white poppy: the peace poppy, and on the 11th of November I will remember them. And every day after I will not let others forget.

Keith Hebden is a Pioneer Minister and Supporter of Veterans For Peace UK.

David Buck of Veterans For Peace features in this short film about Army Recruitment.

David Buck of Veterans For Peace features in this short film about Army Recruitment.

ForcesWatch published ‘The Last Ambush? Aspects of mental health in the armed forces’ on 28 October 2013 – the first report since the Iraq and Afghanistan wars began on the roles that youth and poverty play in mental health problems among veterans. The report is based on 150 sources, including 40 British academic studies of military personnel. This is the report’s conclusion.

[Download the fully referenced report at http://www.forceswatch.net/content/last-ambush]

Given the myriad subtleties of well-being and ill-being, all claims about mental health in any group, perhaps especially a military one, must be provisional. If meaningful conclusions are possible at all, academic research ought to shape them, but a fuller understanding depends on more than what studies can tell us about prevalence and risk factors for narrowly defined mental health effects. If an Infantryman with a troubled family background develops a stress reaction in Afghanistan, or if alcohol misuse has contributed to a veteran’s homelessness, then the questions of why and how this has happened are not only – or even mainly – psychological; they have their roots in society at large. What, then, do mental health problems in the armed forces tell us about our society and the place of the armed forces within it? Is there a wider narrative in which the mental health research becomes socially and politically meaningful?

The research reviewed for this report points strongly to: a) socio-economic disadvantage as a major factor in pre-traumatic vulnerability; b) the preponderance of the most vulnerable individuals in the most dangerous military roles; and c) prolonged exposure to the traumatic stressors of warfare as the primary triggers for stress reactions in combatants. In general terms, war is a marriage of poverty and violence, in which people from poor backgrounds are recruited into violence on behalf of the state. Whether or not war is a necessary evil, the research shows that it attacks the minds of those who enact it. For the poorest recruits, this is likely to be the latest assault in a long line, beginning with the material poverty of their childhood. Whilst the psychological impact of military training and war is manageable for some or even negligible, for others, particularly the youngest from the poorest backgrounds, this last ambush may be a tenacious one.

Against this, the prevailing, official narrative characterises armed forces careers as formative opportunities for young people who would struggle in civilian life. The Ministry of Defence states: ‘We take pride in the fact that our armed forces provide challenging and constructive education and training opportunities for young people, equipping them with valuable and transferable skills. The services are amongst the largest training providers in the UK, with excellent completion and achievement rates, and the quality of our training and education is highly respected.

Whether Infantry recruits do gain meaningful training that will transfer to the civilian jobs market later on is far from clear. Even so, whilst some veterans, having seen war for what it is, say that they would never encourage a young person to join up, others look back on their time in the forces with appreciation. For example, in a Radio Tees phone-in about the minimum age for recruitment, a veteran who joined the Army at 16 said that if he had not done so he would have ended up in prison. There are as many veterans’ views about their time in the forces as there are veterans.

How we interpret the mental health research depends on which narrative we choose to situate it in: one of exploitation or one of opportunity. Does the state put young people’s minds in harm’s way by recruiting them into what two veterans have called a ‘killing machine’? Or are young people well served by the armed forces despite a minority unfortunate enough to suffer problems as a result, as others have suggested? Both these narratives rest on claims about the best interests of young people and, less obviously, moral views about warfare. The findings of mental health research appear to both support and challenge each of these positions. On the one hand, the armed forces can be formative for young people; far from all personnel have mental health problems as a result of their work. At the same time, the armed forces are not a glorified version of the social services; they achieve their purposes by violence and it is for the performance of this violence that some of society’s poorest young people are recruited. If military recruitment supports and exploits young people, it demands a narrative incorporating shades of both realities. It is this third perspective, perhaps, that can best situate the findings of mental health research in their social and political context.

Whatever perspective we may choose to take, there are certain views that the research shows clearly to be false. One such assumption, historically stubborn but perhaps now losing traction, is that mental health problems are due to the constitutional weakness of certain individuals. The research shows that this is wrong. Whilst factors connected with an individual and their background shape responses to trauma, these are not responsible for traumatisation itself. There is no virtue of character that can bestow immunity to trauma; veterans are traumatised not because they are defective, but because they have been immersed in the dehumanising abnormality of extreme violence, which eventually takes a toll on even the most hardened of veterans. The research collected in The Last Ambush shows that immersion in traumatic events makes personnel more likely to commit violence, suffer from PTSD, and/or misuse alcohol whether or not these problems were already part of their history (but particularly if they were). The evidence points to the grim, unavoidable conclusion that, in the wake of war, a substantial proportion of its participants become more violent and suffer from debilitating mental health problems, although neither outcome will affect most individuals fortunate enough to avoid the worst that war can be.

The research also shows that it makes little sense to describe prevalence of mental health problems in the armed forces as ‘high’ or ‘low’. We can confidently say: that the mental health risks are significant and appreciably higher in general than those found in civilian life, especially for those who have left the forces; that identifiable mental health-related problems are common and that these only describe part of the mental health effect of military life; and that war trauma affects certain groups of personnel, particularly younger individuals from poor backgrounds, appreciably more than others. If potential recruits, who may be as young as 15 when they apply to enlist, are not told of these risks or are not able to consider seriously their real-life implications, then recruiting them is an exploitative practice.

It would also be wrong to assume that all veterans are significantly harmed by military life, or to be fatalistic about the prospect of recovery when many veterans are resourceful in their own healing. One veteran, eight years after leaving the Army, said that he scrutinises his behaviours daily in order to facilitate his gradual recovery. Professional help is important, he said, but he and other veterans still have to work at recovery themselves using their own resources. The research on post-traumatic loss of social support, as well as veterans’ own stories, show that those who are able to describe their situation and draw informal and professional support from those around them may be better able to manage than those who cannot. This depends in turn on others, perhaps especially civilians, being willing to listen non-judgementally to veterans’ stories when they choose to tell them and to respect their silence when they do not.

In recent years, the Ministry of Defence has increased funding for mental health research, supported informal sources of support such as helplines, and improved access to specialist psychiatric help. Genuine progress is being made, although this still fulfils only a small part of the rigorous duty of care that the state owes to the people it sends to war. Mental health in the armed forces must be understood in the context of the complete career process: what happens before joining, during the career itself, and afterwards, are all important factors in the mental health or illness of personnel. An assumption that mental health problems are primarily a post-deployment challenge would be ignoring the effect of pre-military factors on vulnerability; in particular, the evidence shows that who gets recruited for which roles matters. This report has shown that recruits from the most socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds, who are most vulnerable to the effects of traumatic stress, are being channelled disproportionately into the most trauma-exposed, front-line combat roles.

In this regard, the age at which personnel are recruited is critical: the youngest recruits are typically the most socio-economically disadvantaged and are over-represented in direct combat roles, as discussed earlier. This finding strengthens calls for a review of the policy which allows the armed forces to recruit school-leavers from age 16. The Ministry of Defence has resisted this on grounds that these individuals are not suited to mainstream education and would struggle to find civilian jobs, and that recruitment targets would be unachievable without them. No verifiable evidence has been presented to support either claim.

The UK’s practice of recruiting from age 16 is unique in the European Union and rare worldwide; most states now recruit only adults into their armed forces. The exceptional British position has been challenged by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, Parliamentary Committees, and a number of human rights organisations. The policy also remains starkly at odds with the bar on young people joining the civil emergency services, buying alcohol or tobacco, watching a violent adult film, signing legally binding contracts and even playing certain computer games that simulate military roles, until they attain the age of adult responsibility at 18. There is a growing global consensus that only after a person reaches this age should society deem them ready to make an informed and responsible choice about whether to enlist. Since those who enlist as minors into the British armed forces bear a disproportionate share of the risks, as shown in The Last Ambush and elsewhere, the justice of the policy is in question and it deserves to be reviewed. The government’s obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which include ensuring that the best interests of young people are ‘a primary consideration’ in how policies are crafted,add further justification to the accumulating calls for change.

All that said, the research collected for this report points to one conclusion that is beyond reach of policies on either recruitment or welfare. In the final analysis, veterans’ trauma proceeds from the crucible of war, in which extreme violence leads to substantial numbers of psychologically wounded people. Many will live with this insidious legacy of warfare for the rest of their lives. The scourge is war itself. We as a society must realise that we cannot support wars without also condoning the traumatisation of combatants and civilians alike. We can choose health or war, but not both.

David Gee

On the 12th anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan, Veterans For Peace UK and Ryan Harvey held an evening at Housmans Books, North London. Veterans spoke of their experiences during the “War on Terror” and Ryan sang his anti war songs.

Ryan Harvey singing “Christmas Truce”.

Ben Griffin of Veterans For Peace UK followed by Ryan Harvey singing “To be a Killer”.

John Boulton of Veterans For Peace UK

Ryan Harvey singing “The Good War!”.

Dan Taylor of Veterans For Peace UK

Ryan Harvey singing “Search and Avoid”.

Mike Lyons of Veterans For Peace UK

RAAST singing Ryan’s “Flowers“

RAAST singing “No Women, No Revolution“

If anyone is free tomorrow…

This Tuesday, 11 foreign ministers and representatives of some Syrian opposition groups will meet in London to discuss the ongoing conflict in Syria and the upcoming Geneva peace talks:

http://www.gov.uk/government/news/foreign-secretary-announces-syria-ministerial-meeting-in-london

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/17/syrian-opposition-pressure-geneva-peace-conference

You are warmly invited to join an all day peace vigil (non-partisan) outside the Foreign Office, to put forward the following demands:

To all Foreign Ministers:

    – Stop fuelling the conflict with supplies of arms and other military equipment;

    – We believe that the peace negotiations should be led by the Syrian people themselves rather than foreign elites, who should only play a facilitating role.

To the Syrian government and all armed groups:

    – Call an indefinite ceasefire immediately;

    – Cease all attacks against civilians – including peaceful protesters – and civilian infrastructure, like medical facilities;

    – Immediately allow safe humanitarian access to all areas in need;

    – Recognise the detrimental effects of continued violence, especially on children and other civilians, and therefore urgently commit to political negotiations to end the conflict and prevent further destruction and loss of life, injury, psychological damage and displacement of people.
 
The vigil will start at 10am and may continue until around 6pm (advisable to phone ahead if you plan to arrive later, in case vigil ends early, e.g. due to bad weather – see contact number below).

Location: Foreign and Commonwealth Office, King Charles Street (off Whitehall), London SW1A 2AH
Map: http://tinyurl.com/ocdcnuz
Nearest tube: Westminster
Mobile contact (Dan): 07506 234 091

All adverts are lies, almost by definition. Each and every advertisement is a distortion of reality which attempts to convince the viewer to act against their own interests. For most of us, the worst results of being duped by an advertising campaign are that we buy a more expensive brand over an identical generic rival, or we’re on some level convinced, incorrectly, that a new car will make us more popular or a phone will make us happy. But, if we’re unlucky enough to be duped by an advertisement for the armed forces, the worst that can happen is that we are permanently disfigured, psychologically scarred, maimed or even killed in a foreign land.

Of course, adverts for the armed forces aren’t going to dwell on the horrors of war, they need to distort the truth in order to sell military servitude. But no advert for any other product has such a disparity between the shiny lie and the grim reality as one does for the armed forces. To this day I find it staggering that they are able to take war, which is broadly described throughout history as being a living hell of pain, despair and suffering, and rebrand it as an exciting and character-building adventure.

I have been working on a satirical comic book which attempts to draw out the absurdity of advertising something so morally questionable and dangerous. ‘Join The Army’ takes the concept of a shiny army brochure and corrupts it until it starts spewing out something more resembling the truth. Some of it will no doubt be seen as offensive or in bad taste, (it was rejected by three printing companies for those reasons before I was actually able to get it printed), but I think there is a line between attacking the armed forces for manipulating young people into sacrificing their lives for dubious reasons, and attacking soldiers themselves who, as I see it, are also victims of war.

As part of a pull-out section of the comic I made some ‘Action Man Battlefield Casualties’, which take three of the worst potential outcomes for any soldier and cast them in toy form. Our society is so militarised that it’s sometimes difficult to see that propaganda for state violence soaks through almost every pore of consumer culture, which includes promoting war to children. In the UK the military even has it’s own official line of toys, H.M Armed Forces. The focus of all such toys is on technology, uniforms and heroics, rather than the physical and mental toll of warfare. The real Action Man, after all, had eagle-eyes action, not blinded-by-shrapnel action. These toys are just another recruiting tool; like the advertising, it would be counter-productive for them to draw any attention to the negative consequences of military service.

After more than a decade of unnecessary war against two separate nations, the government and military establishment have had to obfuscate the reasons for our aggression, and we have been left with the idea we should support these wars simply because they are being fought by British soldiers. They have deliberately confused the apparent virtue of the troops with the integrity of the invasions. Because of the reverence with which soldiers are now held, questioning militarism and it’s foreign endeavours has almost become a form of blasphemy. It is impossible to say anything in the media critical of the army without first giving a disclaimer about the great work of servicemen and women. My hope is that this book might help puncture the piety that surrounds our military and lead to a more frank and honest discussion about how destructive these institutions are, both to foreign societies and our own.

The comic is available from Etsy or on the website www.bethemeat.co.uk

The launch exhibition is from the 25th -27th October (11am-7pm) and the opening night is on the 24th (7pm till late)

S2 Gallery

1B Darnley Road

London E9 6QH

My other work can be found on my blog www.spellingmistakescostlives.com

Ryan Harvey to Sing, Ben Griffin to Speak

Tonight Friday 11 October

1930hrs

The Wool House,
Town Quay, 
Southampton,
SO14 2AG

All the way from America Ryan is going to sing his inspirational songs of resistance.

Also on the bill

Ben Griffin, Veterans For Peace UK
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Griffin_%28British_Army_soldier%29

Skipped. The Junk band. All there instruments are made from junk. Eco friendly and original sounding, amazing…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRdN7vDUs5Q

Ash Victim. Stripped-down folk-punk. His honest acoustic anarchic sounds will have you hanging on every word…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24NTImTUtD4
http://ashvictim.bandcamp.com/

Greenpeace,

CAAT

Food Not Bombs.

No charge on the door however donations would be welcome.

On the 12th anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan come along for an evening of Riot Folk and personal recollections of “The War on Terror” at Housmans Bookshop.

Ryan Harvey, folk singer and activist will share his songs of resistance.

Ryan has taken his powerful, insightful, and humorous songs and stories of activism, social movements, and political analysis around the world for the last ten years. He has performed in 19 countries, visiting some of the most infamous epicenters of recent uprisings including New York, Cairo, Athens, Madrid, and Lisbon. Ryan is a long term supporter of  Iraq Veterans Against The War.

Veterans For Peace UK,  will tell short personal stories about their own experience of  “The War on Terror”.

• John Boulton ((Afghanistan)
• Daniel Taylor (Iraq)
• Mike Lyons (Afghanistan War Resister)
• Ben Griffin (Afghanistan, Iraq)

Monday 7 October 2013

1830 hrs (6.30pm)

Housmans Bookshop,

5 Caledonian Road,

London, N1.

Tube = Kings Cross

The attack on the World Trade Centre in New York City on the 11th of September 2001 resulted in the deaths of 2996 people.

In response to that attack, we in the west have unleashed our military might on Muslims around the world.

We have killed hundreds of thousands of people.

We have destroyed countless homes.

We have locked up 1000s of men in numerous prisons and subjected them to torture.

As of Friday 13 September in solidarity with the 166 men still held in Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and thousands more held in other prisons, members and supporters of Veterans For Peace UK will be fasting every Friday from 0600 to 1800 (no food).

Those taking part will wear an orange wristband and attempt to engage people they meet during the day about Guantanamo Bay and the wider injustices of the so called “War on Terror”.

If you would like to take part;

1. Add your name, home town and when you will be fasting to the comments section below.
2. Buy or make yourself an orange wristband.
3. On Fridays fast from 0600 to 1800 (no food) wearing your orange wristband.
4. Be ready to engage in conversation about Guantanamo Bay and the wider injustices of the so-called “War on Terror”.
5. Email a picture of yourself wearing the wristband during your fast at an interesting place in your town to veteransforpeaceuk@gmail.com.

On Sunday 8 September 2013, four members of Veterans For Peace UK joined Occupy Vs The Arms Fair at London Excel. This was part of a week of protests and actions against the DSEI Arms Fair.

DSEi 2013 features over 1,300 arms companies from around the world, displaying arms ranging from rifles to tanks to fighter jets to battleships. They will be joined by arms dealers, “trade visitors” and military delegations, including countries involved in conflict and from human rights abusing regimes, as well as those with desperately underfunded development needs.

Around one in three of the world’s military’s are likely to be at the arms fair. Adversaries will browse alongside each other for weapons to use against each other.

It will all take place in secret, behind heavily protected security fences and police lines – designed to allow arms dealers to trade their wares unhindered by transparency or public protest – and subsidised by the UK taxpayer.

A week of Protests and Actions against the Arms Fair can be found on Stop The Arms Fair website

Young age at Army enlistment is associated with greater war zone risks:

An analysis of British Army fatalities in Afghanistan

David Gee and Anna Goodman have written this excellent report that Veterans For Peace (UK) endorses.

Published by ForcesWatch and Child Soldiers International, August 2013

The risk of fatality in Afghanistan for recruits who enlisted into the British Army aged 16 and completed training has been twice as high as it has for those enlisting at 18 or above.

The authors believe the increased risk reflects the disproportionately high number of 16 year olds who join front-line Infantry roles. This is the result of recruitment policies which drive young people with limited academic qualifications into the Army’s most dangerous roles. Those who enlist at 16 are effectively barred from entering many of the less risky support or technical roles due to lack of qualifications. Another probable contributing factor is the longer average career length of 16 year old recruits who successfully complete training, leading to more tours of duty in Afghanistan when compared with adult recruits.

The study analyses data on British Army fatalities in the Afghanistan war and compares this with published recruitment data over a ten-year period. It concludes that:

• Although fatalities have been uncommon among British forces in Afghanistan, soldiers who enlisted at age 16 and subsequently completed training have been approximately twice as likely to die there as those enlisting at age 18 or above. (Odds ratio 1.92, 95% CI 1.39-2.66, p<0.001, n=209)
• Since higher fatality rates are correlated with higher rates of non-fatal physical injuries and psychiatric casualties, these other war-zone hazards are also likely to form part of the increased risk for soldiers who enlisted at 16.
• The relatively higher risk to those who enlist as minors applies despite the prohibition on deployment to war zones until they are 18 years of age.

Read the report: Young age at Army enlistment is associated with greater war zone risks: An analysis of British Army fatalities in Afghanistan

By Charles Bird,

Over last weekend I spent four days at the Greenbelt Festival in Cheltenham, camping in the same tent I used during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Mr Cameron and other hawks would have benefited from being there and hearing former combatants, including from the SAS, with experience in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Palestinians and Jews, including Israeli ex-military, all talking about the futility of war and military intervention and of the need for peaceful means of settling disputes and conflict.

Lying in my tent I listened to the news and heard the politicians justifying a military response to the use of chemical weapons. Interestingly, those sounding a more cautious note were former military personnel, including General Lord Dannet and Admiral Lord West, who know the realities of war and the dangers of mission creep.

So, here we go again. Limited military intervention in Syria in response to the Assad Government’s use of chemical weapons against its own citizens.

“It defies any code of morality”, says the US Secretary of State, John Kerry. I agree, but so does Mugabe’s misrule in Zimbabwe, what went on in Darfur (anybody remember that?), the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, Western trade policies that keep the developing world in poverty, and the world banking system that brought on the global economic crisis.

David Cameron says that we cannot stand idly by otherwise others may try and get away with using chemical weapons. I’m confused here. It seems to be the use of chemical weapons the Government objects to, not Assad’s brutal repression of his people. The message we are sending is: “crack on with killing your compatriots, just don’t use chemicals.”

Over 120,000 Syrians have already been killed and thousands more displaced, and we haven’t considered military action up until now. So, on the sliding scale of international morality, what makes the use of chemical weapons worse than, say, executing women and children in cold blood, bombing and shelling civilian areas including schools and hospitals, or using rape as a means of punishment and intimidation?

While we’re at it, what was our response to the Israeli use of white phosphorous shells in Gaza? Phone up the MoD press office and ask them to explain our use of depleted uranium ordinance in Iraq and how it has led to birth defects in newborn babies.

The moral outrage being applied over Syria is selective. There are human rights abuses, including massacres of the innocents, going on around the world all the time, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, but we turn a blind eye. We are responding to the method of killing and not the inherent brutality of the regime.

And what is the objective? It won’t stop the war in Syria nor will it earn us the gratitude of the extremists. Our interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo and Libya on behalf of the Muslim communities there haven’t given the terrorists pause for thought. Al Qaeda came out of the mujahideen resistance to the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan — armed by the US and UK, just as we are now doing with the fractured and divided opposition in Syria. But who will control those weapons when the war is over?

The analysts got it wrong over Iraq and Afghanistan, and there is no reason to suppose that the lessons identified from those failures have been learned. Tony Blair, who does not seem to suffer sleepless nights over the steadily increasing violence and killings in Iraq, advocates intervention in Syria — that in itself should make David Cameron stop and think twice.

Once we intervene in Syria, however surgically and briefly, we are taking sides and lining up against Assad’s backers including Russia and Iran. The law of unintended consequences will kick in and we will not be able to control what happens next.

Don’t forget that the killers of Drummer Lee Rigby used our military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as a rationale for their actions. And however surgically we act, civilians will die, “collateral damage”.

No doubt the Government will regret our killing of innocent Syrians. The irony being that they will have died in our response to Assad’s killing of his own people. But that’s okay, we will only have blown them up, not gassed them.

Charles Bird OBE worked for HM Diplomatic Service.  He served within GoC’s Command Staff in Iraq 2003. Charles is a member of Veterans For Peace (UK).

Mike Lyons and Ben Griffin of Veterans For Peace (UK) give a full and frank interview to John Schumacher on PATV Iowa during their tour of the Mid West.

By John Boulton

If the history books are to be believed, the practice of ‘pressing’ the King’s/Queen’s shilling upon unsuspecting recruits by the Royal Navy and British Army (the most common point of delivery being at the bottom of an ale jug) seems to have been an effective one. I don’t doubt for a minute that today, there are those of you out there who believe that this archaic practice of recruitment, in respect to its level of deceit, is something that has never really gone away and serves as a sound analogy for the modern practice of enticing fresh crops of military recruits, with the lure and promise of education and the acquirement of ‘new skills.’

Well, it’s at least the subject of a documentary in the making that seeks to explore if the military are keeping to their side of the bargain but in particular, the focus being on ex-servicemen/veterans who ‘joined up’ below the age of eighteen and what affects if any, this junior engagement of service has had on them. A recent request for people to take part has prompted me to throw in my own two shillings worth having filled out my paperwork at fifteen years old and subsequently, joining as a  ‘Junior Leader’ in the British Army at sixteen years and four months.

One thing’s for sure; unless things have changed since my day, the Queens shilling is still very much in play and after my attestation in August of 1990, I received the modern equivalent, amounting to something like eleven pounds. With the ceremony complete, I took my father to the nearest pub and spent it buying him his first beers ‘on me.’ As I recall the barman looking me over, wondering probably if I should really have been at school instead of nervously rattling my change in front of his woodwork. That recollection seems ever more pertinent now and indeed, if somewhat, a little telling because if that’s what the barman had been thinking, well, he’d have been right and with hindsight, I’m certain that I should have been at school.

When I signed up I was still a child and to allow one to make such a serious and binding commitment at such a vulnerable and ill-informed age is simply wrong. I served in what was essentially a peace time army and it was not an entirely negative experience. I can’t say I was lied to in any way and in terms of my individual role as an armoured crewman, the army delivered and I was suitably trained and employed. What got me in the end was the boredom factor (such was my mindset back then). Unlike most of today’s young soldiers, I was lucky in that I was not subjected to actual combat and allowed to forgo what at such a tender age, can surely be nothing but a traumatic experience.

I deployed to Afghanistan as a reservist at the age of thirty three. Just five years later, my views on that conflict have turned 180 degrees. So imagine me at fifteen years old, I didn’t know my own mind at all and that for me is clearly the point. Why the MOD does recruit from this age group is obvious and entirely for that reason. The acquisition of young, malleable, and to a large degree, unquestioning minds.

As a supposedly ‘civilised’ society, we really should be encouraging our precious youth to seek the supposed benefits of military service elsewhere and steer them well clear of the morally corrupt ‘Military-Industrial Complex’ which to my mind is nothing more than a tool used to wage war on behalf of the ‘money-men’, Those major financiers and corporations that really have the say in how this world is run. Brigadier-General Smedley Butler (U.S. Marine Corps) once said, “War is a racket!” so lets stop doing it!

In closing, and without hesitation, I would raise the age of recruitment to at least twenty one. When I think about my own two sons signing their lives over to those who couldn’t care less about them (during the expenses scandal the Armed Forces Minister reportedly claimed £7.20 to attend a service of remembrance!) it sends me cold. There’s no chance I’ll be countersigning any such papers and I wouldn’t expect anybody else to do something I wasn’t prepared to do myself. Now that’s something positive that the Army did teach me!

John Boulton served in Afghanistan (Household Cavalry) and is a member of  Veterans For Peace (UK)

By Chase Sydnor

50 years ago today, Martin Luther King Jr (MLK) manifested his era defining, momentous and prophetic ‘dream’ at the Lincoln memorial in America’s capitol. He spoke of a time when people of all colours and creeds would be united in a common bond of humanity, where justice, in the words of the biblical prophet Amos, would, “roll down like waters”. Today, 50 years on, the ‘dream’ needs to be given earnest attention, it is as relevant today as it was at the height of racial segregation and the epoch of the Vietnam war. It seems highly ironic that the first Black President of the United States is making a speech in the same location that MLK made his, and yet time after time contradicts everything the great man stood for by pressing his finger on the button of ‘justifiable violence’….sadly this illustrates the contradictions and duplicity of the world we live in. One can only imagine the feelings and words of lamentation which would spring from the mouth of MLK were he alive today.

Something of MLK’s life work and message has been usurped by the Governments and mainstream media. Watching the BBC today, I could not fail to notice that whilst all the coverage of the 50 year speech focused upon civil rights, hardly anything (possibly nothing) was spoken of MLK’s outspoken views against war and violence. We do the legacy of King a great disservice by simply focusing on his struggle for black freedoms. MLK fought for justice and peace for all. Militarism, Materialism and Racism were MLK’s greatest concerns and they should be ours today.

Martin Luther King Day is celebrated in America around January the 20th of each year. It is a Federal Holiday, so for the bulk of the military, it is an extended weekend ‘liberty’. Once again, the paradox is there for all to see. One of the main highways outside of Camp Lejuene where I was stationed in North Carolina, was named after MLK. What this illustrates is the co-option of MLK by the establishment, which in my view, has led to a watering down of the overall meaning and aims of King’s life struggle. This cannot be allowed to persist! Now is the time to recapture and with real courage, engage properly with Martin Luther King’s dream of a world that does not resort to violence to achieve justice and peace. King fell out of favour and grace with the government after his famous speech when he began to denounce the war in Vietnam. Too often this facet has been ignored by modern history. It is my personal view, that King was assassinated as much for his stance against Vietnam, as for his crusade for black equality.

MLK expressed righteous anger against the fact that while millions of Americans were living in poverty, Billions of dollars were being wasted on imperialistic  ventures overseas. With Britain and the U.S making no secret of their contempt for the U.N whilst planning a bombing campaign against Syria, we have to ask what would MLK be doing and saying now. Now more than ever, the dream of MLK needs to be extricated from government hypocrisy and championed by those who wish to truly follow the man in downing the tools of Militarism.

Chase Sydnor is a former US Marine and a member of Veterans For Peace (UK).

by Andrew Bacevich

Let us posit that the Syrian government did, in fact, order last week’s chemical attack that killed hundreds of Syrian citizens, including women, children and others who had not taken up arms against the Assad regime.

In Washington, the eagerness to initiate military action in order to punish Assad is now palpable. Before ordering any such action, President Obama should answer several questions. He should share those answers with the American people, before not after pulling the trigger.

First, why does this particular heinous act rise to the level of justifying a military response? More specifically, why did a similarly heinous act by the Egyptian army elicit from Washington only the mildest response? Just weeks ago, Egyptian security forces slaughtered hundreds of Egyptians whose “crime” was to protest a military coup that overthrew a legitimately elected president. Why the double standard?

Second, once U.S. military action against Syria begins, when will it end? What is the political objective? Wrapping the Assad regime on the knuckles is unlikely to persuade it to change its ways. That regime is engaged in a fight for survival. So what exactly does the United States intend to achieve and how much is President Obama willing to spend in lives and treasure to get there? War is a risky business. Is the president willing to commit U.S. forces to what could well become another protracted and costly struggle?

Third, what is the legal basis for military action? Neither Russia nor China is likely to agree to an attack on Syria, so authorization by the U.N. Security Council won’t be forthcoming. Will Obama ask Congress for the authority to act? Or will he, as so many of his recent predecessors have done, employ some dodge to circumvent the Constitution? With what justification?

Andrew Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University.

This article first appeared on Moyers and Company

Sign the White House Petition Now!

What a week it has been for Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning. After the young Army whistle-blower was sentenced to an outrageous 35 years in prison, she chose to reveal her true identity, the one she has felt ever since childhood. She is a female in a male body.

“Why now?” some may ask. Bradley/Chelsea’s struggle has always been for truth and transparency. Apparently, she did not think it was a good idea to make this a full-blown issue in the midst of a military court martial. But now that the court martial is over, Chelsea wants us all to know who she is, and she is asking us to give her the respect of calling her by her chosen name.

Members of Veterans For Peace should be more than happy to comply. We will continue to fight for freedom for this courageous young whistle-blower. We will learn more about her rights as a transgender woman in prison and work to ensure her safety.

Amnesty International and the Bradley Manning Support Network, which will soon be changing its name, have launched a White House petition calling on President Obama to “Restore the United States’ human rights record and grant clemency to Pvt. Bradley Manning!”

This petition was launched immediately after sentencing and before Bradley asked to be called Chelsea. It is too late to change the wording of this petition now, as it already has been signed by over 14,000 people, of the 100,000 now required for a White House response. This also remains her legal name, for the time being.

SIGN THE WHITE HOUSE PETITION This White House petition is the most important and timely initiative, among many. We have only 26 more days to gain 86,,000 additional signatures. Please go there now and sign this petition. Ask all your friends and allies to do the same. If you are going to the White House petition site for the first time, you will be asked to register with your name, residential address and email address. Please do not be put off by this extra step or be overly concerned about your privacy (they already know where you live).

Soon Veterans For Peace will begin a letter-writing campaign to General Buchanan, to be part of a packet for sentence reduction that lawyer David Coombs will present him in November. General Buchanan’s will announce his decision in December. So you may wish to begin working on those letters. But for now, please help us get to 100,000 signatures on the White House petition.

Learn more about the petition, and share it with friends. http://pardon.bradleymanning.org/

Go straight to the White House petition. http://wh.gov/lgG58

Wage Peace! Gerry Condon

By Ben Griffin

Monday 5 Aug, Mike Lyons and I began our trip to the Mid West with a flight from London to Chicago via Dublin. Whilst transiting through Dublin we had to pass through USA customs, it is a physical manifestation of the empire. The imperial crest sits on the wall with a picture of emperor Obama. TSA officers man the desks and walk people to a private area if further questioning is required. The only upside is that you don’t have to fly all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to be turned back.

On arriving in Chicago we were picked up by folks from Voices For Creative Non-Violence and headed back to Kathy Kelly’s place. We travelled with Kathy to the annual Hiroshima Day Rally at the Henry Moore atomic energy monument. The location commemorates the exact location where the Manhattan Project team devised the first nuclear reactor to produce the first self-sustaining controlled nuclear reaction under the former stands of Stagg Field. About 30 folk gathered there to sing songs and read accounts from survivors.On returning to Kathy’s we were treated to an excellent meal prepared by Joshua. By 2200 we had been awake for over 36 hours and had to crash. The following day we met up with fellow VFP UK member Les Gibbons and headed to De Paul University for our first talk.

Wednesday 7 Aug, we boarded a bus to Madison. On arrival we booked into our hostel along with several other VFP. Les was put up by a local VFP member and given a bicycle to get around. That evening we attended the opening reception and it was great to meet up with Barry, Rhonda, Gene, Victoria, Gerry and Helen all of whom have been very supportive of VFP in the UK. We spent the rest of the night with local activists from Madison and some IVAW members.

Thursday 8 Aug, The convention opened with songs from the Bad River Tribe. I got to speak to the convention about the development of international chapters over the past year. In the afternoon Les and I attended a workshop given by Brian Willson called An Outline for Non-Violent Bio-Regional Revolution Strategies. Just in case your thinking what Brian Wilson of the Beach Boy’s? No this is the Vietnam veteran who had both legs cut off whilst attempting to block a military train carrying ammunition to Central America. His presentation was thought provoking and I encourage you to read about his life and ideas on his website. 

Les and I then attended the workshop Addressing Veteran Suicide  given by Alice Franks-Gray, a former Paramedic now working for a charity trying to lower veteran suicide. I found this workshop disturbing not because of the subject but because of the ideas and language promoted by Alice. She pushed the idea that PTSD is a disease that can be treated whereas I and other veterans suffering ‘PTSD’ see it as a human reaction to the traumatic situations we experienced within the military. She also referred constantly to Warriors which implies that the actions we carried out whilst serving in the military were somehow noble! These attitudes help to push the myth that war is normal and that all who serve are heroes.

In the evening we attended a presentation by Nick Terse who has written a book called Kill Anything that Moves about the numerous unheard of atrocities that were comtted in Vietnam. The presentation was gruesome and sad. Thanks to some inspired planning Nick was followed by folk singer Ryan Harvey who’s songs about rebellion, protest and war were uplifting. After the evenings entertainment we got to show our new VFP UK promotional video which went down well. Doug Rawlings told me that when he helped write the VFP Statement of Purpose in 1985 he never expected to be watching British veterans saying it on film 28 years later.

Friday 9 Aug, Mike and I presented alongside Gerry Condon (Vietnam War resister), Michael (Courage To Resist), and Nicole Guiniling (Fronlines International) at a workshop entitled ‘Supporting Bradley Manning and All G.I. Resisters’. We heard from Michael about the work carried out by  Courage To Resist in supporting Bradley Manning. Nicole spoke about the plight of veterans refusing to continue serving in Iraq and Afghanistan who are seeking asylum in Canada. I spoke about the practicalities of supporting resisters and Mike told his own story highlighting how support had made his time in prison easier to cope with.

At lunchtime Mike, Les and I joined with other VFP and local activists to take part in the daily Wisconsin Solidarity Singalong. The SSA began at the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison on Friday, March 11, 2011, and there has been an SSA every weekday during the noon hour since then.

In the afternoon we listened to Kathy Kelly who has spent years going back and forth to the Middle East trying to build peaceful relationships with the people she meets. We heard from Brian Willson about his upcoming documentary about his new film Paying The Price For Peace. We also heard from Diane Wilson (no relation different spelling) who is a truly inspirational fisher-woman from Texas. Her direct approach to activism and straight talking advice was refreshing to hear.

Whilst browsing through the merchandise area Mike and I met with Vietnam Veteran Lem Genovese who kindly donated a copy of his book Tunesmith Chronicles: A Musical History Tour and his CD to our VFP Chapter. It will be available to members at our next meeting.

On Friday evening we attended the VFP Convention Banquet. it was great to see Barry Ladendorf pick up the Leadership in Peace Award, given to the person or organization that displays initiative, inclusiveness, tirelessness and persistence in moving the mission of Veterans For Peace forward either locally, nationally or internationally. Barry has been instrumental in helping VFP become an international organisation and continues to work in this area. After the meal we headed out to watch Ryan Harvey perform at a bookshop.

Saturday 10 Aug, the morning was taken up with the business meeting. The By-Law changes and Resolutions can be found here. Voting will take place in October. In the afternoon we all headed out for a rally on State Street. Will Williams was for me the stand out speaker. We then processed down state street led by the Wisconcin Solidarity Singalong band.

Our time in Madison exceeded both of our expectations. A really good crowd at the VFP Convention with some great speakers and lots of friendly faces from last year. A sizeable contingent of IVAW in and around the convention. Lots of engaged local activists involved in current street activism. Cheese with every meal and lots of good local beer.

Sunday 11 August, Mike and I said our goodbye’s to Les who headed east. Bill Bassinger and Ed Bloomer of VFP Des Moines drove us south into iowa (after 3 laps of Capitol Square!). We arrived in Des Moines and were housed at Rachel Corrie House. We were both pretty tired so had to crash for the afternoon. We spent the evening relaxing in and around the Des Moines Catholic Worker.

Monday 12 August, after breakfast VFP Des Moines began to gather outside of Berrigan House. We jumped into 3 cars and headed to the Iowa State Fair. I have been to the Royal Welsh Show on a number of occasions but nothing quite like this. On show were the biggest bull, biggest pig and a life-size cow made entirely of butter on display in a huge fridge. However we were not there to view the agriculture.

VFP Chapters 161 (Iowa) 163 (Des Moines) and 169 (Linn County) were joined by Mike and I to march in the State Fair Veterans Parade. I have never seen anything like this.  The local National Air Guard turned up with a model F16 (tractor). There was a mobile hill representing Iwo Jima with men renacting the famous flag raising picture. To top it off there was a guy dressed as Colonel Custer on a live horse. You could not make this shit up! It reminded me of a Minutemen song;

The Punchline
I believe when they found the body of General George A. Custer,
Quilled like a porcupine with Indian arrows in his back,
He didn’t die with any honor, dignity or valor,
I believe when they found the body of George A. Custer,
American General, patriot and Indian fighter,
He died with shit in his pants.

There were about 15 of us marching with VFP banners. The reception was good from quite a few people. As we approached the review platform we revealed our concealed Free Bradley Manning! placards to a stern reaction from the soldiers seated there. No applause for us from them!

That afternoon we headed off to Iowa City with Ed Flaherty and John Jadryev. It was great to hang out with these guys. We were dropped off at the home Of Louis De Grazia and then on to an interview with John Schumacher on Public Access TV in Iowa City. John brought the best out of us with his insightful questions and gentle style. That night we had an excellent meal with Ed and John prepared by Louis.

Tuesday 13 August, started with breakfast at John Jadryev’s place and then a trip down town with Ed. In the afternoon we attended a meeting of Peace Iowa and spoke of our experiences and about VFP in the UK. It was good to meet up with local activists. In the evening we attended a chapter meeting of VFP 161 (IOWA). There were some familiar faces there and it was interesting to see how another chapter organises. This was followed by a public meeting in the Coralville Public Library. We both spoke of our experiences in the military and showed our new promotional video. There was a good crowd of about 50 in attendance.

Wednesday 14 August, after breakfast with Louis we started out on our way to Cedar Rapids. We stopped for lunch with Everlee Mickey and then continued on the road. We got into Cedar Falls thanks to Clark Reike and spoke at the Mennonite Church there. Another good turnout with several veterans and a serving sailor who was seriously questioning why he was still in the military. I put him in touch with some local people who will be able to help him out.

Frank Cordaro and Tommy Schmidt had travelled up to Cedar Falls from Des Moines to hear us speak. We then jumped in their car and drove through the night to Columbia Missouri. We got to Steve Jacobs place (St Francis House) in the middle of the night and woke early to do speak on a local radio station, probably not our best performance! This was followed by breakfast in a classic American diner.

Whilst in Columbia Graeme Dunstan an Australian veteran and long term peace activist was in court for disabling a helicopter gunship along with the now deceased Brian Law during a joint USA / AUS exercise in 2011. We joined an international campaign to support Graeme during his trial. The slogan say’s FREE GRAEME DUNSTAN “Helicopter gunships are Indiscriminate killing Machines”. You can see a video of their action and other supporters Here

That night we spoke at the Missouri United Methodist Church in downtown Columbia. The event was co-sponsored by the St. Francis Catholic Worker Community, Mid-Missouri Fellowship of Reconciliation, Veterans for Peace and Occupy CoMo. It was a great venue and we had a good interaction with the 30+ people who turned up. We went out for a few beers afterwards and met a handful of veterans that night. Some of them on reserve duty. I was encouraged by the positive attitude of these veterans to our campaigning.

Friday 16 August, we travelled back to Des Moines with Frank and Steve and spent the afternoon relaxing. In the evening we spoke at Chet Guinn’s fire station a truly unique venue. Abandoned by the Des Moines Fire Department in the sixties Chet bought the place in the early eighties and set about a restoration. The pictures do not do it justice. A good crowd turned up and it was nice to see familiar faces from the convention.

I final talk in the USA went down well with those gathered and some good questions were directed to us. After the formalities Chet gave us the guided tour of the Fire Station including the pole. Peace Iowa commissioned a Peace Statue carved by Ron Dinsdale. some years ago which has found a good home at the rear of the station overlooking the freeway.

Saturday 17 August, Mike and I gave an interview to Aran for the Via Pacis news letter and then to Michael Gillespie for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. I had the chance to converse with Michael severeal times over the week and found him to be insightful and engaging, I encourage you to check out some of his writing. Aran then took us to Funk War an afternoon concert organised by Students Beyond War. It was great to see so many young people turning out to an anti-war gig. We both enjoyed the music and conversations. Thanks for inviting us to speak.

Sunday 18 August, thanks to Julie for driving us all the way back to Chicago. Thanks to Joshua for putting us up for the night and making sure we got to the airport on time.

Our VFP UK trip to the Mid West exceeded all of our expectations. The people we met had a genuine friendly attitude towards us. Our trip was only made possible by the generous attitude of all who put us up, drove us around, fed us and organised our talks. Thank You All. Michael and I both returned to the UK with renewed energy and optimism.

Short notice call out.

Tuesday 6th August 2013 Noon-1pm

At the Hiroshima Cherry Tree in Tavistock Square, London WC1

Speakers;

Bruce Kent – CND Vice-President

Natalie Bennett – Leader of the Green Party

Nobu Ono – JAN UK

Linda Perks – UNISON London Regional Secretary

Peter Tatchell – Peter Tatchell Foundation

Val Brown – London Guantanamo Campaign

Songs;

Raised Voices,

Red & Green Choir,

JAN UK

Jim Radford.

Poems;

Celia Mitchell

The cherry tree was planted in Tavistock Square in 1967, by the then Mayor of Camden, Cllr. Millie Miller, in remembrance of the victims, past and present, of the atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6th and 9th August 1945. Participants are invited to bring flowers to lay beneath the tree during the ceremony.

People are also invited to picnic in the Square after the Ceremony.

Organised by London Region CND

Tuesday 6th August 2013 6pm

Charlton House, Greenwich.

Hiroshima ceremony, including a Peace picnic and more singing.

Organised by local CND/STW groups.

Bring some food and drink to share all welcome

This is usually a more social event and since it is my manor I am on the bill again.

Jim Radford

ZERO
The Case for Nuclear Weapons Abolition

In his remarkably readable and informative book on why abolishing nuclear weapons is an imperative for a safe and secure world, David Krieger points out there is a growing consensus among the peoples of the world that ZERO nuclear weapons is the only option. David Krieger, a founder of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in Santa Barbara, California and President of the Foundation since 1982, has devoted his life to educating, inspiring and urging world leaders and ordinary citizens to act with a sense of urgency in a quest to abolish nuclear weapons.

The United States’ nuclear strategy was built on the notion of mutually assured destruction: if any nation attacked the United States, we would respond by totally and complete destruction of the attacking nation. To pursue such a strategy the United States built an enormous nuclear arsenal with various response capabilities. To be able to withstand a first strike and retaliate, the US plan was to deploy our nuclear arsenal in the air, at sea and from land based missiles scattered across the country. With such an overwhelming ability to destroy any adversary, we were coaxed into believing no one would dare attack us. Such a false sense of security left other nations deciding they too must arm themselves with nuclear weapons, thus further perpetuating the false notion of security. In spite of the fact that the US and Russia have actually reduced their nuclear weapons, other nations continue to seek, or are believed to be seeking, a nuclear capability.

In his book ZERO, The Case for Nuclear Weapons Abolition, David Krieger’s piece by piece analysis of the arguments in support of our continued reliance on nuclear deterrence convincingly demonstrates that it is a doomed and failed long range strategy for world peace and security. He grapples with such questions as: Do we really want to have the fate of the world and future generations entrusted to an ever changing cadre of world leaders who often govern under intense pressure (politically and emotionally) and stress?; Under such circumstances can these leaders be trusted to act prudently for the well being of all humankind?; If nuclear deterrence is so effective, why has the United States spent billions of dollars on missile defense systems?; Have those systems and nuclear arsenal stopped the attacks of 9/11? On the USS Cole? On our embassies in Africa and elsewhere?

With the fall of the Soviet Union, perhaps we have become complacent about the danger posed by nuclear weapons. ZERO awakens us to the dangers, costs, and absurdity of our reliance on these weapons for our security. . .because in reality with them, we are less secure. Krieger astutely observes that as long as the nine nations of the world’s “nuclear club” rely on the false notion of nuclear deterrence, we can expect nuclear war to loom over the future of the world.

Remembering the Hibakusha (the name given a person who survived the atomic bombs dropped on Japan), ZERO draws on the all too real, personal and intimate horrors nuclear war inflicts on all, individually and collectively, by relating the story of Miyoko Matsubara, a Hibakusha. Miyoko, 13 years old when the US dropped its atomic bombs on her country, describes how after the explosions her friend, Takiko, “simply disappeared from my sight.” Miyoko learned English so she could tell her story not to heap on us a sense of guilt and shame, but simply and quietly to give us a deeper understanding of the impact of weapons of mass destruction. She challenges us to become more aware of the world and a future we must avoid. Krieger’s book accepts that challenge by attempting to raise our consciousness and calling us to act in reducing nuclear weapons so there will not be a future of Hibakusha and others simply disappearing from our sight.

In the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu::

“This book makes a clear and persuasive case for why we must move
urgently and globally to zero nuclear weapons. It should be required
reading for all citizens of Earth.”

No matter your level of understanding on this all-important issue, ZERO is a concise and thoughtful book which will better your understanding of the development, history and proliferation of nuclear weapons and why nuclear disarmament is necessary for a secure world. It is an essential addition to your list of must reads.

Barry Ladendorf
Veterans For Peace (San Diego)
Hugh Thompson Chapter 091

Report From The Courtroom By Gerry Condon

There were tears outside the courtroom today. Of course, Bradley Manning is not really guilty of anything but being a good global citizen, and it is painful to see him so persecuted.

But we scored an important victory today on both the legal and political fronts. The Army had made a ridiculous case that Bradley Manning was “aiding the enemy,” “with evil intent,” and that he was “not a whistle-blower, but a traitor. They even tried to tie Bradley to Osama bin Laden.

There was only one problem with the Army’s case. They had no evidence whatsoever, only baseless insinuations and “child’s logic” (the words of defense attorney David Coombs). Even a military judge who clearly favored the Army prosecutors could not buy their lame arguments.

If Bradley had been convicted of “Aiding the Enemy,” he would be facing life in prison without parole. A big blow would have been struck against freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Any soldier, civilian or reporter involved in shining the light on to the government’s dirty secrets could be arrested and charged with “Aiding the Enemy,” or Being the Enemy.

Bradley Manning and his supporters have won a critical battle in the court of law and the court of public opinion. But, as defense attorney David Coombs said today after the verdict, “now we have to win the war.”

Bradley was found guilty 19 other charges, including 5 counts of espionage, serious enough to add up to 137 years in prison.

Wednesday morning, the prosecution will begin presenting its case for sentencing, expected to go through August 12, when the defense will begin its case. Each side plans to call over 20 witnesses and the sentence will not be announced before late August.

Now is the time for all of us to keep up the pressure. Bradley Manning remains in the hands of the guardians of empire. They want to know everything about us, but don’t think we have the right to know what they are doing in our name and with our dollars.

Go to bradleymanning.org for more information.

Down with the Surveillance State!
Support Whistleblowers!
Free Bradley Manning

“Blessed are the Peacemakers” – Jesus of Nazareth

Throughout History, the Christian Church has failed to adhere to the teachings of Jesus Christ, to love our enemies, and to resist non-violently against all forms of aggression. It would seem that too often, collectively and individually, Christians have conveniently forgotten or twisted the Gospel message, in its pursuit of ‘Worldly’ power and status. Christianity has been more apt to worship Mars, the Roman god of War, than the Prince of Peace. I write this as one who would call himself a Christian, who was complicit in this misrepresentation of Jesus Christ and the Gospel of Peace, having served in the United States Marine Corps.

During my time as a Marine, that I saw much of the dark side of this false strand of Christianity.
Muslims are constantly exhorted to ‘keep their house in order’ when it comes to fundamentalist action within the Islamic faith. However, Christians must be held to the same standard, which they are certainly not! Are Irish Catholic Republicans or Protestant Loyalist’s branded such when they commit acts of violence in the name of religion? Christianity is just as culpable as Islam in its religious violence. Have we forgotten the Crusades or the Inquisition?

Too often Christians are the most warmongering of people. We had a running joke in the Marines, that the Chaplains were the most ‘Gung-ho’ of the military establishment. I recall walking into an Army chaplain’s office and standing bemused at the huge portraits of Confederate Generals of the American Civil War which hung on his wall. Could I find much in his space which related to Jesus…not much? It looked like some kind of Confederate War shrine. Now I am not saying that all true believers in the military are warmongering fanatics, however, too often we do not realise how complicit we are in the imperialist war waging machine and how it has cleverly co-opted true Christianity with the military state. In his narrative, ‘Jarhead’ played by Jake Gylenhall in the movie adaptation, Anthony Swoffard, a former Marine Scout Sniper and self- proclaimed atheist, clearly saw the dichotomy between Christians in the military. Most of the British Servicemen I am friends with, also acknowledged the ‘Gung-ho’ militant mind-set of their Padres. This is an issue which is nearly as prominent in Britain, just in a more subtle form. Anyone who saw the funeral of Maggie Thatcher could not fail to visualise the extent to which Christian religion and military ceremony were cleverly fused together.

During The First World War the established church exhorted young British men to fight a righteous war against the evil ‘Hun’. Military padres preached sermons and crazily blessed artillery guns along the front lines to convince their ‘flock’ that  to kill Germans (fellow Christians) was OK in the eye’s of God. On the home front, Anglican Priests and churches acted as recruiting agents for the military in its attempt to fight the “unholy Boche” and the forces of evil. God was an Englishman, and Britain was fighting to uphold Christian sanctity in the world. The Church was actually promoting “the false religion of patriotism” coined by ex SAS Soldier Ben Griffin at an Oxford Union Address I watched on Youtube.

That Jesus told his followers to put down the sword because, “Those who live by the sword die by the sword”, seemed lost in translation. The horrendous loss of life had far reaching spiritual and emotional consequences upon Britain as a nation. Harry Patch, who was the last surviving Tommy, comments in his book about how the trench experience affected his view of Christianity and the Church of England, negatively when he returned home from the war. His view was just a microcosm of the sentiments of many survivors of that war, and also of many of the Padres who served them. This rancour and bitterness exists in British society to this day.

As a recruit in Marine Corps Recruit Depot, I was stunned to enter the base chapel and see it adorned with stain glass windows depicting images of conflicts U.S Marines had fought throughout its history. I questioned who we were actually worshipping, God or the Marine Corps. The Marine’s Hymn {yes….the Marine Corps has its own hymn}, propagates a false myth of Marines being the guardians of the gates of heaven. As ludicrous as it seems, it does feed into a callous myth of relating military service as some divine pursuit. As Marines, we recited a ‘Rifleman’s Creed’ which invoked the blessing of God in our desire to shoot accurately and kill our enemy. Throughout my time in the Marines, I came across many slogans which equated U.S soldiers as God’s Warriors, and shirts emblazoned with statements which read, “Only God can forgive terrorists, it’s just the Marine Corps job to arrange the meeting”. I even saw a British soldier with a t-shirt bearing a regimental badge with the tagline – “And on the 8th day God created the Coldstream Gaurds”.

“Greater love has no greater honour than this…that a man lay down his life for his friends”. These words from Jesus which he spoke in relation to his foreseen execution have been manipulated and splashed across war memorials all across the British Isles. This feeds into the myth of the ‘Glorious’ death in combat purported by mainstream religion. It reflects the complicity that goes on even in contemporary Britain by the church which fuels the war state. True followers of Christ and those against imperialism cannot allow the Gospel and Jesus to be usurped by the powers that be which employ Christianity to drive their foreign conquests for oil, greed, influence and filthy lucre. We must be weary of not recognising that Christian fundamentalism is still alive and well. The Old Testament even prophesies that the church would fall prey to worship Babylon, which is referred to as “the glory of Kingdoms”. Christians living in a modern Babylon must renounce the idol of militarism.

Article by, Chase Sydnor: Former Marine, Veterans for Peace London (UK).

July 25, 2013

Not Confined To The UK & USA

Stand With Bradley Manning At This Crucial Time

The trial of Army whistleblower Bradley Manning will open again on Thursday 25 July  for the defence and prosecution to make closing arguments. The judge will rule on two defense motions to dismiss charges in the morning, after which the defense will spar with the prosecution, making its case for acquitting Bradley of ‘Aiding the Enemy’ and other major charges.

The judge will likely make her ruling by next Wednesday 31 July, which is when the 2-3 week sentencing phase of the trial is scheduled to begin.

The Bradley Manning Support Network has called for an International Day of Action on Saturday 27 July

To get involved in the UK get yourself along to one of these events.

London (1)

1400 – 1600

St Martin in the Fields, London, WC2N 4JJ (Trafalgar Square)

Vigil called by Payday Men’s Network. All welcome. Contact Giorgio via payday@paydaynet.org

London (2)

1600-1800

Amnesty International office – 1 Easton St, London, WC1X 0DW (Clerkenwell)

Peaceful vigil. Supporters of Bradley gathering to continue pressure on AI to give greater public support to Bradley, including prisoner of conscience status.

London (3)

1900-2100

Calder Bookshop and Theatre – 51 The Cut, London, SE1 8LF (Waterloo). 19:00 -21:00.

Readings,  poetry and open mic. This will include a reading of the Bradley Manning: ‘In His Own Words’ script  adapted by Lindi from the chat log extracts, and other poetry associated with Brad. Contact Sergio at Calder Bookshop and Theatre.

Peterborough

1200 -1400

Cathedral Square, Peterborough PE1 1XH

Standout in solidarity with Bradley Manning. Contact Gill via peterboroughpeace@hotmail.co.uk

Haverfordwest

1200-1400

Castle Square, Haverfordwest SA61 2AE (map). 12:00 – 14:00

We will be showing our support for Bradley Manning in the town where he lived as a teenager and where he still has many family members. Bring placards and banners or just yourselves.

Nottingham

1100

Nottinghamshire Pride – Old Market Square, Nottingham.

Join Bradley supporters from the Nottinghamshire area, Queer+ Friends of Bradley Manning and others in a day of celebration and solidarity.

Edinburgh

1230

Meeting at the mound to head to the US Consulate in Edinburgh, 3 Regent Terrace EH7 5BW

https://www.facebook.com/events/298775023593322/

To tell us about other Bradley Manning events being held on 27 July email veteransforpeaceuk@gmail.com

“I was in the military, not in the “service”. Service is doing something good. Service is what the person does who fixes your car. When the word “service” is applied to the military, it helps to justify violence as a method of conflict resolution. Like “defending our freedom” or “bringing democracy,” the word “service” is used to lower the barriers of aggression. The military solution to conflict is death and destruction. That’s not service. Call it what it is – the military. If you have to hurt someone to solve a problem, you are the problem.”

Arny Stieber – Vietnam Veteran

Summer 2013 Issue of War Crimes Times.

Ben Griffin is a former SAS soldier who served in Afghanistan and Iraq before refusing to continue serving in Iraq. He instigated the launch of Veterans For Peace in the UK.

Mike Lyons is a former Royal Navy medic who refused to deploy to Afghanistan after reading Wikileaks’ Afghan War Diaries. After having his application for Conscientious Objector status turned down he spent 6 months in military prison.

Both have been active in solidarity action in support of Julian Assange and PFC Bradley Manning.

August 6, 2013 7:00 p.m.
DePaul University College of Law
25 East Jackson Boulevard Room 242
Chicago

For more information contact;

Voices for Creative Nonviolence
info@vcnv.org
001-773-878-3815