18 November 2007 In the early hours of 18 November 2007, eighteen civilians were killed when Afghan and coalition special forces, possibly American, landed by helicopter in the village of Toube in Helmand province, an area where British forces held responsibility for law enforcement. Many of the dead had had their throats cut. Abdul Manaan,…
19 May 2003 On 19th May 2003, Indonesia deployed Hawk-200 fighter jets, supplied and made by the U.K., to front its assault on the Free Aceh Movement. The Guardian’s John Aglionby observed that ‘ the Hawks were used primarily to scare and intimidate people on the ground by flying low over targets already attacked with rockets…
19 May 2009 On the morning of 19 May, a patrol of local police and Royal Gurkha Rifles in the southern Afghan province of Helmand came under small arms fire from insurgents. The ambush occurred not in remote mountain or desert terrain, but on densely populated rich agricultural land, distinguished by its many villages, farms,…
8 May 2003 On 8 May 2003, soldiers of the Black Watch regiment, searching for a suspect looter with convictions for murder and rape, raided a house in Basra. They were frustrated to find only his father, taxi driver Radhi Nama, along with his two daughters and three grandchildren. According to his daughter Afif, when…
23 December 2005 Today in 2005, Prime Minister Tony Blair, his wife Cherie and four children flew off to Egypt on, as his spin doctor Alistair Campbell politely put it, ‘another of his controversial holidays.’ Campbell also noted in a footnote to the diary entry that ‘Blair had previously been criticized for accepting hospitality from…
19 October 2001 On 19 October 2001, during the American and British air strikes on Afghanistan, Tony Blair became frustrated over legal objections to some of the targeting on the basis that innocent civilians might be killed. Alastair Campbell, his Director of Communications, recalled in his diary that the Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral…
7 October 2001 On 7 October 2001, Britain joined the United States in initiating air strikes against Afghanistan. Labour politician Tony Benn noted in his diary: ‘So we’ve launched into a war without any declaration of war, without any parliamentary authority for war, outside the United Nations, a war that is supposed to be directed…
24 September 2002 At 8 am on 24 September 2002, only thirty minutes prior to the deadline for the headline in the Evening Standard‘s first edition, Charles Reiss, the paper’s political editor, was allowed to see the government’s intelligence dossier on Iraq’s supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). After reading about Iraq’s ‘strategic missile systems’ and its…
17 September 2001 In 2001, Alastair Campbell, as Tony Blair’s director of communications, was one of the few officials in almost daily contact with the prime minister. On 17 September, six days after the attack on the World Trade Centre, he noted in his diary that the PM had lunch with the Italian prime minister,…
15 September 2003 On 15 September 2003, Baha Mousa, a hotel receptionist, was kicked, beaten and tortured to death by British troops in the Iraqi city of Basra. He was one of a group of ten innocent civilians, who were subjected to appalling brutality. Their agony was witnessed by other soldiers, a medic, officers and…
