Tony Benn to BBC "If you won't broadcast the Gaza appeal then I will myself"

Unlike the BBC I don't have to be impartial, so here's the appeal address:

Disaster Emergency Commitee (DEC)
Gaza Crisis
PO BOX 999
LONDON
EC3A 3AA

New Poll: Troop withdrawal timetable

Margaret Becket, the UK foreign secretary announced this week that British troops could be withdrawn from Iraq as early as next spring. What do you think? Is it too soon? Not soon enough? Should it include Afghanistan?

Vote in the poll which you will find in the sidebar, and air your opinion by leaving a comment here.


ps: you can find the result of the last poll (Labour leadership) in the post below.

Self awareness

According to the BBC

A senior US state department official has said that the US has shown "arrogance and stupidity" in Iraq.

Oh really? Do you think? This at least shows the beginnings of hope flickering. Acknowledging one's mistakes is the first step on the road to putting them right.

Darfur - it must not become another Rwanda

In 1994 the world watched in horror as approximately 800,000 Rwandans were massacred in less than three months. Tragically, watch is all the world did, and little attempt was made to actually bring about an end to possibly the worst case of genocide in recent memory. You would think we would have learnt something from those days, but sadly it seems we haven't, and a similar scenario is playing itself out in Darfur, with little intervention from the outside world.

We can not stand idly by and let a man made tragedy of this magnitude happen again. Up until now, troops from the African Union have managed to keep some kind of grip on the situation but due to a lack of resources and manpower they will be pulling out of the region at the end of the month, leaving many, many vulnerable people at risk of rape, robbery and murder. The UN have agreed to send in a peace-keeping force, but only with the permission of the Sudanese government - the very people who are responsible for the atrocities! This is a ludicrous idea, to use an analogy, it's comparable to asking Hitler's permission to liberate the concentration camps!

Tomorrow is the Global Day for Darfur, if you visit the site you can find out details of events in your area, even if you can't attend such an event, visit anyway and add your name to the petition which will be sent to your elected representatives and also the UN. You could also pop over to Pip Wilson's blog and read about an interesting idea he has for using technorati to raise awareness of the situation.

Technorati Tags: rwanda, darfur, un, african+union, global+day+for+darfur

A point for discussion

The War in Iraq is illegal. Millions of people marched against it.

But by definition the Nato action in the former Yugoslavia was illegal. It had no UN mandate.

So why were there so few complaints?

Point for discussion?

Oh and Spadgers Chirps is now open for business.

The al-Jazeera report.

I must have been napping because this one slipped right past me and didn't even get a mention at the fix the law wiki.

PRESIDENT Bush planned to bomb Arab TV station al-Jazeera in friendly Qatar, a "Top Secret" No 10 memo reveals.

But he was talked out of it at a White House summit by Tony Blair, who said it would provoke a worldwide backlash.
-mirror.co.uk

This raises fresh doubts that the suspicious US claims that previous attacks against al-Jazeera staff were "military errors" are anything more than lies.according to blairwatch

After Blair's threat to jail any editor who reports the Bomb Al-Jazeera memo, we thought there would be an outcry. Who would stand up for press freedom, or at least the freedom not to be bombed to buggery?

Not really surprising then that I learn that requests for the publication of the memo have been turned down.

And so if Mr Blair is threatening jail time for publication of this document just get me a copy. I'll sign my full name to the bottom and publish it to every free hosting server on ever continent in the world. I'll use every free portal so that Blair has to suppeona Google, Yahoo, AOL, Slashdot, BoingBoing and Godaddy. I'll (ab)use my opensource development access to upload copies to servers of every university in the world and future participation be damned.

I'll post it in every forum I can get to so that the UK must address companies big and small to get a takedown from definitive-hosting to Microsoft themselves.

While I'm at it I'll post it to everyone in my address book and ask that they hide a copy too. While that's sending I'll add it to bittorrent and as many peer-2-peer systems as possible.

If I have time I will then foobar the PC so that they can't even track where it might be.

When they come to drag me away it will be too late. Far too late.

Blair has broken too many laws and breached too many human rights in his quest to a police state and I, for one am now one really pissed off blogger.

They can torture me for all I care and I will never say who leaked the document to me.

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A peaceful world ?

I wish that I could be more erudite and intellectual in this post. However, at the moment I find myself so disillusioned with current events that it is impossible not to be angry tonight. Our leaders say that they want a free and peaceful world. How can this be when Israel are defying the terms of the truce in Lebanon? How can this occur when the UN is increasinly viewed with suspicion and it's authority undermined? How can this be when security measures that have been introduced in an emergency have led to chaos that has led to repeated security scares? How can it be when this has led to blatant instances of racism. It may seem that I am looking at this from a very western centric point of view. However, if we are to believe that terrorism is a global threat then all these are of extroadinary importance to all of us.