weapons of mass destruction

Anti-War March in London – September 28th 2003

Anti-War March in London: In the face of protests across the country and the world – “between 3 January and 12 April 2003, 36 million people across the globe took part in almost 3,000 protests against the Iraq war” the USA together with the UK, Australia and Poland began the invasion of Iraq on 20 March 2003.

In the UK we had our largest ever anti-war protest on 15th February, with estimates of between 750,000 and 2,000,000 people taking part in a march and rally. I wasn’t there as I had come out of hospital the previous day and was still too weak to walk more than a few steps, so was left at home when my wife and elder son went out to protest. It was the only major London protest against the war I didn’t photograph.

Protests in London continued, with people angered that their voices had not been heard, and particularly as we learnt more about the lies and deceit that Tony Blair had marshaled to get the decision to go to war past Parliament and in particular about the two ‘Dodgy Dossiers’ which Alistair Campbell had “sexed up”, the later one plagiarised from an article by a research associate at a US institute and the earlier making false claims about “weapons of mass destruction.” No WMDs were found in Iraq.

The earlier dossier had made the false claim that some of Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons were deployable within 45 minutes, a claim that according to BBC journalist Andres Gilligan was added at the insistence of Andrew Campbell. Gilligan claimed that his source for that was an off-the-record talk with weapons expert David Kelly. Although the Hutton Inquiry concluded Kelly had killed himself following the investigations into this exposé some still suspect our security services took a hand in his death.

You can read an account of the protest in The Guardian, Anti-war protesters vent their frustration, which notes that this was “Britain’s fifth anti-war protest in a year snaked from Hyde Park through the centre of London and filled Trafalgar Square with anti-Blair placards. It was the first national rally since Saddam Hussein’s regime fell in Iraq and the tone had changed since 1.5 million marched to prevent war in February.” It gives the police estimate of the numbers taking part at 20,000 and Stop the War’s figure of 100,000 – the actual figure was probably about halfway between the two.

I didn’t write much at the time – and didn’t post many of the pictures I took, and a few of those here are published for the first time. Here is my 2003 piece – with a link to the orginal.

The Anti-War March on 27 September was another big event, though not on the massive scale of February’s event.

It took about an hour and a half to pass me on Park Lane. The numbers reported by the police and BBC both seemed derisory. Perhaps they were closer to the numbers that ended up in Trafalgar Square, but there were far more on the march itself.

Estimating numbers is hard once the numbers get too high to really count – perhaps a few thousand. The Countryside Alliance had the right idea on this, with their arch on Whitehall although I never see one of their car stickers with 400 thousand and something on without thinking ‘and I was 3 of them.’

More pictures at http://mylondondiary.co.uk/2003/09/sep27-01.htm

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Invasion of Iraq Protest 2003

Invasion of Iraq Protest 2003 – On 22nd March 2003 several hundred thousand people marched through London against the invasion of Iraq which had begun four days earlier on on 19th March 2003.

I’d missed the huge worldwide protests the previous month, when on the weekend of 15-16th February according to the BBC, always conservative (I think a euphemism for deliberately lying) on protest numbers reported that a million people had marched in London on the Saturday among between six and ten million in 60 countries around the world.

I’d come out of hospital the previous day, February 14th, and was still very weak following a minor heart operation that had gone slightly wrong. So I could only wave to my wife and elder son as they set off to the station to join the other 1.5 or 2 million marchers.

I think it was March 6th that my doctor signed me off as fit to work, though I was still not back to normal, but I covered my first protest after the op two days later, cutting down the weight of my camera bag as much as I could to two cameras and five lenses – all primes.

I’d spent some of my time recovering getting used to the Nikon D100 I had bought just a few weeks before going into hospital. It was the first digital camera I’d owned capable of professional results, and the first with interchangeable lenses, though I only then owned one in a Nikon fitting I’d bought with the camera, a 24-85mm.

As well as taking colour pictures on the D100, I was also taking black and white film using a rangefinder camera, probably a Konica Hexar RF, the kind of camera Leica should have produced but never did. It featured automatic film advance and rewind and had accurate auto-exposure and has been described as “the most powerful M mount camera there is.” And very much cheaper than a Leica. The nine pictures from the day I sent to the library I was then using were all black and white 8×10″ prints from the pictures made with the Hexar RF, as in 2003 they were still not taking digital files.

Here you can see some of the digital images I took on 22nd March 2003 with that single zoom lens. It was the first zoom lens I had used for over 25 years, having been rather disappointed with a telephoto zoom I bought soon after I got my Olympus OM1. The image quality on the Nikon zoom – about the cheapest lens in their range and light and relatively small – was fine if not quite up to the Leica lenses on the Hexar, but it gave some distortion – barrel at 24mm and pincushion at 85mm.

But the Nikon D100 was a DX format camera, and on this the widest angle of view marked as 24mm actually was equivalent to 35mm on my film camera. Hardly wide-angle at all, and on film I was often working with 15mm or 21mm lenses.

The digital images are shown here as I put them on-line in 2003, and I think I would get the colour rather better now. And of course digital cameras have improved tremendously since then, with much better dynamic range, and the software for processing digital images is also far better. Also with download speeds generally much lower in 2003 they were put on line at a much poorer jpeg quality so they would download faster – and also spread over a number of pages with perhaps just half a dozen images on each page.

The marchers met on the Embankment and marched to a rally in Hyde Park. I think I only used the D100 before and on the march and photographed the rally entirely in black and white. Probably this was a decision I made, but it could have been because the battery ran out. But I think I had decided just to use it to photograph people on the march.

We now know that Blair lied to take us to war and made use of the fake “dodgy dossier” to swing the vote in Parliament. There were no “Weapons of Mass Destruction” in Iraq – and the UN had found none because there was nothing to find. But the US had been gearing up to attack over the past year and were not going to let the facts put them off, and Blair was their lap dog.

You can read more about the Invasion of Iraq on Wikipedia. While the US had prepared for war, they had made little or no preparation for what was to follow after President George W Bush declared the “end of major combat operations” on May 1st. Iraq was still in a mess when the US troops finally withdrew in 2011 and remains so today. It was as I wrote in 2003, the wrong war at the wrong time – and by 2023 over 60% of US citizens were prepared to state that the U.S did not make the right decision by invading Iraq.

More on the March 2003 page of My London Diary where you can also find pictures of another protest against the war on Saturday 29th March calling for more balanced coverage by the BBC.

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Stop Bush National Demonstration – 2003

Stop Bush National Demonstration – It seems so long ago; on Thursday 20th November 2003, 20 years ago today, I photographed the protest against then US President George Bush in London.

The protest came just 8 months after the US under Bush had led the invasion of Iraq, aided by Tony Blair who had lied to Parliament and presented a fake dossier to take Britain to war as well.

The US had claimed their action was necessary to “disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free Iraqi people”. It wasn’t long before it became clear that those who had always said there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were proved correct, and although Saddam was killed the invasion encouraged support for terrorists across much of the world, and rather than becoming free the people of Iraq were subjected to still continuing years of misery.

A 2023 report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute comments that the invasion “ushered in years of chaos and civil war, as a variety of armed groups vied for power and territory and targeted coalition forces and the fledgling post-Ba’athist Iraqi Army. A period of relative calm in the early 2010s was broken by the rise of the extremist Islamic State group, which occupied large parts of the country from 2014 until it was largely defeated by Iraqi forces with the support of a US-led international coalition in 2017.”

It goes on to say that the country is now in 2023 at its most stable since the invasion, but “Armed violence persists in different forms, but it is sporadic, fragmented and localized. However, the country remains fragile and divided, and its people face an array of deepening challenges that the state is struggling to address.“

Twenty years ago I was just beginning to work using a digital camera. The Nikon D100 was one of the first affordable generation of digital SLRs, released in the USA at around the same time as the Canon EOS D60, both with a price tag of just under $2000, though I forget what I paid for it here in the UK.

It was still a rather primitive beast, with a 6Mp sensor roughly half the size of a 35mm film frame in what Nikon dubbed DX format. It’s viewfinder was small and dim, making working with it rather more difficult than the film cameras – both SLR and rangefinder – that I had been using.

And having spent so much on a camera, I also had to buy a lens. I’d long been using Olympus SLRs along with Leica and other cameras with the Leica-M mount and had a full range of lenses for these, but nothing with a Nikon mount. So along with the camera I’d bought what was the cheapest zoom in their range, a 24-85mm with a maximum aperture of around f3.5. On the D100 that worked as a 36-127mm equivalent.

It was a useful lens, and a very decent performer, but still rather limiting, with no real wide-angle capability. So alongside the D100 I would also be working most of the time with two other cameras, one loaded with colour negative film and the other black and white.

But there was a huge advantage with digital, in that I could send off files to an agency within hours of taking them, while with the black and white it was probably a day or two before I made prints to take or send. Publishing too had largely moved to colour and colour images were now wanted rather than black and white.

Although I developed and at least contact printed the films I took then, I think I’ve made very few if any prints from this or other events at the time. And any I have made since will have been printed digitally from scans of the negatives.

Digital gave an immediacy, but there were still problems with handling the files. Software to process the RAW images that were needed to get the most out of the digital files was still rather primitive by current standards, and most of the images I processed back then have a slightly muddy look. Nikon’s colour rendering was I think more to my taste than Canon, but still not up to that from film, though now we get far more accurate colour from digital. When Adobe introduced Lightroom in 2007 it was a little of a step backwards, but since then it has improved dramatically.

Those early sensors also were not too great with high contrast subjects and for some years I worked much of the time with fill-in flash on sunny days. Fortunately this was something that digital camera and modern flash systems made a simple routine.

On My London Diary I was still experimenting in how to present digital work on the web, and the thumbnail pages I created here were not the best of ideas. But the 80 images presented there – around a third of the exposures I made – perhaps give a good idea of how I worked. Clicking on any of them gives a page with slightly larger views of several of them.

C of E Praises Weapons of Mass Destruction

Westminster Abbey has been home to some pretty bizarre events over the last thousand years or so since the site first became home to a small monastery on Thorney Island around 960 AD, and another will be taking place this weekend.

Possibly the most obscene and blasphemous service there took place on Friday 3rd May 2019, when a service was held there celebrating Britain’s weapons of mass destruction, giving thanks for 50 years of continuous nuclear threat by British submarines armed with nuclear missiles.

As protesters across the road pointed out, Britain was currently wasting £205 billion on the replacement of Trident, around a quarter of a year’s total government spending on a weapons system which can never be used as it would be totally catastrophic for the world.

The established church has of course a long record of taking the wrong side in history, supporting the rich and powerful, something Christianity inherited from older religions, which throughout history have been ways to subjugate the common people and keep them docile.

This weekend we see this again in action, with a ceremony taking place in which people around the country are to be invited to swear an oath of allegiance, though I think many will be swearing other things about this. It follows in a tradition established in 1066 when our Norman conquerors celebrated their victory with the first coronation there.

Reading the Bible and in particular the New Testament, supposedly the basis of Christianity, we find a very different religion, one in which swords shall be beaten into ploughshares and the love of power is seen as a sin. Certainly not one as the protesters pointed out one that would be thanksgiving for nuclear weapons.

CND and Christian CND protested opposite Westminster Abbey against the blasphemous and morally repugnant thanksgiving service celebrating Britain’s nuclear weapons. It was a much more Christian event than that taking place across the road, though the Christians there were joined by others including Buddhists.

Those present took part in a die-in after which there was a rally, but I left to go home, stopping briefly on my way to photograph a small group of Fridays For Future climate protesters in Parliament Square.

Fridays For Future climate protest
Die-In against Nuclear Weapons celebration