Iraq

When I was a child, I read the Guinness Book of Records, and marvelled at the stories of the people who, in ancient times, removed themselves from everyday reality, like Saint Simeon Stylites, a Christian ascetic who lived on a tiny platform on top of a pillar in Aleppo, Syria for 37 years in the [...]

To mark the first anniversary of the arrest of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the alleged whistleblower responsible for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, the Guardian has produced a 19-minute film, “The madness of Bradley Manning?” telling his story, and including elements that have not been reported before. [...]

My friend Richard Haley, of Scotland Against Criminalising Communities (SACC), recently put me up for two nights in Edinburgh, during a visit as part of my ongoing tour of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” which I co-directed with filmmaker Polly Nash. Richard and I have known each other for many years [...]

1. Since its founding in December 2006, WikiLeaks, which was established as, essentially, a secure information clearing house for whistleblowers around the world to provide sensitive information, some of which would then be released to the public, and which was reportedly set up by “Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and start-up company technologists, from the US, [...]

Forgive me, dear readers, for bombarding you with articles about the financial settlement recently reached between the British government, 15 former Guantánamo prisoners and Shaker Aamer, the remaining British resident in Guantánamo, and for repeating, over the last week, since this story first broke, that sustained pressure must be exerted on both the British and American goverments to [...]

On Saturday, I was privileged to be a speaker at the Amnesty International Student Conference 2010, at the Human Rights Action Centre in London, where I spoke about Guantánamo — and, specifically, about the plight of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, who is still held, despite being cleared for release in [...]

Announcing the release of the largest collection of classified US military documents leaked by an insider — 391,832 field documents relating to the war in Iraq from 2004 to 2009 — Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said at a press conference in London today, “This disclosure is about the truth. We hope to correct some of [...]

Last Wednesday, on Day Four of “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week — the largest gathering of anti-torture experts and activists since the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” began over nine years ago — one of the obstacles to attracting support for a mass movement against the crimes and human rights abuses of the Bush [...]

Time will tell if Labour’s new leader, Ed Miliband, is a genuine force for change, but I was impressed during his campaign that he so clearly recognized that the Labour Party had failed and that criticizing the electorate was both insulting and counter-productive. In an interview with the Guardian in August, for example, he stated, [...]

OK, I admit that the heading is more accurate in relation to Tony Blair’s sniping at Gordon Brown in his recently released memoir than it is to the issues that really concern us here — Iraq, Guantánamo, and the “War on Terror” — but I couldn’t resist using it. So what are Blair’s revelations about [...]