following last thursdays noise demo/ roof occupaton...there back!
sketchy details: 8 arrested yesterday (thurs) 4 still on roof 24 hours later (!) the building is closed this morning. anyone able to support address is Unit 510, bristol business park, opp. UWE frenchay campus. fairplay to those involved.
just called the post to ask why the story isn't being covered...and it was just stated that the editor decided not to cover the story. one for evening post watch i think.
so 4 still on roof. eight people arrested: 5 for aggravated tresspass one for minor public disorder (throwing food on to roof) and two falsely for suspicion of breaking in to car. apparently these two hadn't even entered raytheon car park: as it turns out the police wanted a pretext: they later raided there premises.
Keep up the good work guys your action couldn't come at a better time,
Raytheon have just indicated that their profits are up showing that murder is obviously recesion proof.
They're still up there. 4 of the crew survive and they ain't comin down. Morale is high and they need our support:
FOOD and WATER is essential, with a large number of people as well would be great. They're on sunflower seeds at the moment, so fruit bread bottles of water; and a load of people!¬!!!
Any contacts with Bristol U.W.E. students would be great as their campus is just opposite. (any radical students there? we hope) Call out to get people to the building and support the RAYTHEON ROOFTOP PROTEST!
I propose a monthly morning cycle tour of the major arms manufacturers in Bristol.
1) Raytheon Systems Limited
2) Qinetiq Bristol
3) Defence Procurement Agency.
4) BAE Systems Ltd
5) BAE Systems, Land Systems
6 )BAE SYSTEMS Advanced Technology Centre
7) Rolls Royce Patchway/Filton.
8) Britania cafe (for breakfast!)
The ride will take place on the last Friday of the month, from 7:30am until 8:15am so that cyclists can still get to work on time.
Raytheon - UPDATE-16:06
category bristol | protests | news report author Friday October 24, 2008 16:14author by messenger Report this post to the editors
two people still on roof - 34 hours and counting
Hardcore- two people still on roof - the two who came down have been arrested
The 2 remaining people are reportedly in high spirits - they have been up there since 0600 yesterday morning. They have a tent and some company, both welcome and unwelcome. The whole building is covered in banners, and crime scene tape. Fire Brigade Cherry Picker has been and gone. Police brought a lighting rig, but couldn't get it up!
So go there, and make your comments before the Daily Mail readers get going... You have to register first, and then you're good to go.
And while you're at it, perhaps you should contact the BBC and tell them to start covering the story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/bristol/some...6.stm
You can ring 9747 747 anytime to tell them about the story. Or email bristol@bbc.co.uk
I love reading all the reasons people come up with to dis a protest. Having done many myself you sometimes hear these points and they always make me smile...they are
1. This protest is all well and good by why are you not protesting (insert issue here) - as seen in comment As a matter of interest will any of you be venting your moral outrage at Irans nuclear programme or the al queda suicide bombers who deliberately target civilians, why don't you go and sit on their front doorstep.
This is a great one, and misses the key point that in a democracy we have the right to go protest and nobody has a monopoly on it! So if you think there needs to be a protest about (insert issue here) rather than the current one - go and organise it! Go for it! Don't waste time complaining about other protests - put it into organising your own. Simple really.
2. This protest is a waste of time because (blah, blah) - as seen in comment Why do people do this - wasting the time of the emergency services who should be catching robbers or putting out...
Love it - so much fun - perhaps you could propose that before people can protest they have submit their plans to a special committee and get it vetted? Like they do in China? I think you miss the point of protests - it is to cause a stir - to shake things up. The price of the freedom to protest is just this.
3. If you lived in (insert axis of evil country here) you'd not be able to protest 'cos they shoot you - not had this one, but it is only a matter of time....I love the logic here: In some dictatorship you would not be able to do this so the best way to exercise your rights in the democracy that we are in is to not protest? Huh?
4. Why don't you take off to (insert axis of evil country here) - won't be long till this appears too I bet. This point's logic says that if you want to criticize this country then you should leave. Again this point suggests that because we have a right to speak we should celebrate it by shutting up.
The world backs Iran’s right to enrich uranium !: Noam Chomsky !!
gar | 27.10.2008 13:05
The world backs Iran’s right to enrich uranium: Noam Chomsky
from Tehran Times
BERLIN (IRNA) -- The world supports Iran’s right to enrich uranium, Noam Chomsky said in an exclusive telephone interview with IRNA in Berlin on Saturday.
Chomsky lashed out at Western media reports saying Tehran was “defying the world” with its nuclear program. “That’s a funny definition of the ‘world’. The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), for example, which is the majority of countries, endorses Iran’s right to enrich uranium,” Chomsky observed. “Now nobody thinks they have the right to develop nuclear weapons. However, that’s a different issue. But the majority of the (American) population agrees (on Iran’s right to enrich uranium),” he added. Iran has repeatedly announced that the production or acquisition of nuclear weapons would be a violation of the Islamic teachings and laws it adheres to. The distinguished 80-year-old professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) said, “Public opinion here overwhelmingly holds that Iran should have the right to develop nuclear energy.” Chomsky reaffirmed also that Iran was “of course entitled to uranium enrichment as a member of the NPT.” The U.S. scholar made clear that most Americans reject the Iran policy of President George W. Bush. “With regard to Iran, a substantial segment of pretty mainstream opinion has been harshly critical of the confrontational approach and has called for negotiations and diplomacy,” Chomsky noted. He added that there could have been a U.S.-Iran “rapprochement for the last 10 years.” “It did not happen because the extremism of the Bush administration was simply directed at making relations harsher, more bitter, militarizing them, and that’s why the Bush administration even antagonized allies,” Chomsky explained. ...
----------------------------
A negotiated solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis is within reach
By Noam Chomsky http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/3695
The urgency of halting the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and moving toward their elimination, could hardly be greater. Failure to do so is almost certain to lead to grim consequences, even the end of biology's only experiment with higher intelligence. As threatening as the crisis is, the means exist to defuse it.
A near-meltdown seems to be imminent over Iran and its nuclear programmes. Before 1979, when the Shah was in power, Washington strongly supported these programmes. Today the standard claim is that Iran has no need for nuclear power, and therefore must be pursuing a secret weapons programme. "For a major oil producer such as Iran, nuclear energy is a wasteful use of resources," Henry Kissinger wrote in the Washington Post last year.
Thirty years ago, however, when Kissinger was secretary of state for President Gerald Ford, he held that "introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran's economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals".
Last year Dafna Linzer of the Washington Post asked Kissinger about his reversal of opinion. Kissinger responded with his usual engaging frankness: "They were an allied country."
In 1976 the Ford administration "endorsed Iranian plans to build a massive nuclear energy industry, but also worked hard to complete a multibillion-dollar deal that would have given Tehran control of large quantities of plutonium and enriched uranium - the two pathways to a nuclear bomb", Linzer wrote. The top planners of the Bush administration, who are now denouncing these programmes, were then in key national security posts: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Iranians are surely not as willing as the west to discard history to the rubbish heap. They know that the United States, along with its allies, has been tormenting Iranians for more than 50 years, ever since a US-UK military coup overthrew the parliamentary government and installed the Shah, who ruled with an iron hand until a popular uprising expelled him in 1979.
The Reagan administration then supported Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran, providing him with military and other aid that helped him slaughter hundreds of thousands of Iranians (along with Iraqi Kurds). Then came President Clinton's harsh sanctions, followed by Bush's threats to attack Iran - themselves a serious breach of the UN charter.
Last month the Bush administration conditionally agreed to join its European allies in direct talks with Iran, but refused to withdraw the threat of attack, rendering virtually meaningless any negotiations offer that comes, in effect, at gunpoint. Recent history provides further reason for scepticism about Washington's intentions.
In May 2003, according to Flynt Leverett, then a senior official in Bush's National Security Council, the reformist government of Mohammad Khatami proposed "an agenda for a diplomatic process that was intended to resolve on a comprehensive basis all of the bilateral differences between the United States and Iran". Included were "weapons of mass destruction, a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the future of Lebanon's Hizbullah organisation and cooperation with the UN nuclear safeguards agency", the Financial Times reported last month. The Bush administration refused, and reprimanded the Swiss diplomat who conveyed the offer.
A year later the European Union and Iran struck a bargain: Iran would temporarily suspend uranium enrichment, and in return Europe would provide assurances that the United States and Israel would not attack Iran. Under US pressure, Europe backed off, and Iran renewed its enrichment processes. Iran's nuclear programmes, as far as is known, fall within its rights under article four of the non-proliferation treaty (NPT), which grants non-nuclear states the right to produce fuel for nuclear energy. The Bush administration argues that article four should be strengthened, and I think that makes sense. When the NPT came into force in 1970 there was a considerable gap between producing fuel for energy and for nuclear weapons. But advances in technology have narrowed the gap. However, any such revision of article four would have to ensure unimpeded access for non-military use, in accord with the initial NPT bargain between declared nuclear powers and the non-nuclear states.
In 2003 a reasonable proposal to this end was put forward by Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency: that all production and processing of weapon-usable material be under international control, with "assurance that legitimate would-be users could get their supplies". That should be the first step, he proposed, toward fully implementing the 1993 UN resolution for a fissile material cutoff treaty (or Fissban). ElBaradei's proposal has to date been accepted by only one state, to my knowledge: Iran, in February, in an interview with Ali Larijani, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator. The Bush administration rejects a verifiable Fissban - and stands nearly alone. In November 2004 the UN committee on disarmament voted in favour of a verifiable Fissban. The vote was 147 to one (United States), with two abstentions: Israel and Britain. Last year a vote in the full general assembly was 179 to two, Israel and Britain again abstaining. The United States was joined by Palau. There are ways to mitigate and probably end these crises. The first is to call off the very credible US and Israeli threats that virtually urge Iran to develop nuclear weapons as a deterrent. A second step would be to join the rest of the world in accepting a verifiable Fissban treaty, as well as ElBaradei's proposal, or something similar. A third step would be to live up to article six of the NPT, which obligates the nuclear states to take "good-faith" efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons, a binding legal obligation, as the world court determined. None of the nuclear states has lived up to that obligation, but the United States is far in the lead in violating it.
gar
Homepage: http://garizo.blogspot.com/2008/10/world-backs-irans-ri....html
make this your indymedia front page
Friday October 24, 2008 09:32
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Jump To Comment: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13just called the post to ask why the story isn't being covered...and it was just stated that the editor decided not to cover the story. one for evening post watch i think.
ask why they are not covering the story/ or report the story as oif you were a eyewitness..(0117) 9343333 or e-mail: epnews@bepp.co.uk
more power to you guys. great stuff.
so 4 still on roof. eight people arrested: 5 for aggravated tresspass one for minor public disorder (throwing food on to roof) and two falsely for suspicion of breaking in to car. apparently these two hadn't even entered raytheon car park: as it turns out the police wanted a pretext: they later raided there premises.
Keep up the good work guys your action couldn't come at a better time,
Raytheon have just indicated that their profits are up showing that murder is obviously recesion proof.
http://news.google.co.uk/news?hl=en&client=firefox-a&ch...54404
What they wern't counting on was the feeling of bristolians.!!!
lets kick the killers out of bristol
They're still up there. 4 of the crew survive and they ain't comin down. Morale is high and they need our support:
FOOD and WATER is essential, with a large number of people as well would be great. They're on sunflower seeds at the moment, so fruit bread bottles of water; and a load of people!¬!!!
Any contacts with Bristol U.W.E. students would be great as their campus is just opposite. (any radical students there? we hope) Call out to get people to the building and support the RAYTHEON ROOFTOP PROTEST!
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=150%20bristol%20busines...ab=wl
Evening Post have been contacted again, unsure if they will cover it, but keep ringing the newsdesk!
just rang the Evening Post news desk: they're writing something on this protest as i write. should be up in 10 minutes.
i'm now off to filton, via a food shop, to support you guys. keep it up!
Anyone fancy a critical mass style thing?
I propose a monthly morning cycle tour of the major arms manufacturers in Bristol.
1) Raytheon Systems Limited
2) Qinetiq Bristol
3) Defence Procurement Agency.
4) BAE Systems Ltd
5) BAE Systems, Land Systems
6 )BAE SYSTEMS Advanced Technology Centre
7) Rolls Royce Patchway/Filton.
8) Britania cafe (for breakfast!)
The ride will take place on the last Friday of the month, from 7:30am until 8:15am so that cyclists can still get to work on time.
More details, route map and sign up here:
http://www.pledgebank.com/ArmsTradeCycle/
What a beauty!
Good luck to you!
Raytheon - UPDATE-16:06
category bristol | protests | news report author Friday October 24, 2008 16:14author by messenger Report this post to the editors
two people still on roof - 34 hours and counting
Hardcore- two people still on roof - the two who came down have been arrested
The 2 remaining people are reportedly in high spirits - they have been up there since 0600 yesterday morning. They have a tent and some company, both welcome and unwelcome. The whole building is covered in banners, and crime scene tape. Fire Brigade Cherry Picker has been and gone. Police brought a lighting rig, but couldn't get it up!
Request for more support
Folks, the Evening Post is now covering this story:
http://www.thisisbristol.co.uk/news/Protest-Bristol-mis...unity
So go there, and make your comments before the Daily Mail readers get going... You have to register first, and then you're good to go.
And while you're at it, perhaps you should contact the BBC and tell them to start covering the story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/bristol/some...6.stm
You can ring 9747 747 anytime to tell them about the story. Or email bristol@bbc.co.uk
I love reading all the reasons people come up with to dis a protest. Having done many myself you sometimes hear these points and they always make me smile...they are
1. This protest is all well and good by why are you not protesting (insert issue here) - as seen in comment As a matter of interest will any of you be venting your moral outrage at Irans nuclear programme or the al queda suicide bombers who deliberately target civilians, why don't you go and sit on their front doorstep.
This is a great one, and misses the key point that in a democracy we have the right to go protest and nobody has a monopoly on it! So if you think there needs to be a protest about (insert issue here) rather than the current one - go and organise it! Go for it! Don't waste time complaining about other protests - put it into organising your own. Simple really.
2. This protest is a waste of time because (blah, blah) - as seen in comment Why do people do this - wasting the time of the emergency services who should be catching robbers or putting out...
Love it - so much fun - perhaps you could propose that before people can protest they have submit their plans to a special committee and get it vetted? Like they do in China? I think you miss the point of protests - it is to cause a stir - to shake things up. The price of the freedom to protest is just this.
3. If you lived in (insert axis of evil country here) you'd not be able to protest 'cos they shoot you - not had this one, but it is only a matter of time....I love the logic here: In some dictatorship you would not be able to do this so the best way to exercise your rights in the democracy that we are in is to not protest? Huh?
4. Why don't you take off to (insert axis of evil country here) - won't be long till this appears too I bet. This point's logic says that if you want to criticize this country then you should leave. Again this point suggests that because we have a right to speak we should celebrate it by shutting up.
Ps. - well done the protestors!
The world backs Iran’s right to enrich uranium !: Noam Chomsky !!
gar | 27.10.2008 13:05
The world backs Iran’s right to enrich uranium: Noam Chomsky
from Tehran Times
BERLIN (IRNA) -- The world supports Iran’s right to enrich uranium, Noam Chomsky said in an exclusive telephone interview with IRNA in Berlin on Saturday.
Chomsky lashed out at Western media reports saying Tehran was “defying the world” with its nuclear program. “That’s a funny definition of the ‘world’. The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), for example, which is the majority of countries, endorses Iran’s right to enrich uranium,” Chomsky observed. “Now nobody thinks they have the right to develop nuclear weapons. However, that’s a different issue. But the majority of the (American) population agrees (on Iran’s right to enrich uranium),” he added. Iran has repeatedly announced that the production or acquisition of nuclear weapons would be a violation of the Islamic teachings and laws it adheres to. The distinguished 80-year-old professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) said, “Public opinion here overwhelmingly holds that Iran should have the right to develop nuclear energy.” Chomsky reaffirmed also that Iran was “of course entitled to uranium enrichment as a member of the NPT.” The U.S. scholar made clear that most Americans reject the Iran policy of President George W. Bush. “With regard to Iran, a substantial segment of pretty mainstream opinion has been harshly critical of the confrontational approach and has called for negotiations and diplomacy,” Chomsky noted. He added that there could have been a U.S.-Iran “rapprochement for the last 10 years.” “It did not happen because the extremism of the Bush administration was simply directed at making relations harsher, more bitter, militarizing them, and that’s why the Bush administration even antagonized allies,” Chomsky explained. ...
----------------------------
A negotiated solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis is within reach
By Noam Chomsky
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/3695
The urgency of halting the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and moving toward their elimination, could hardly be greater. Failure to do so is almost certain to lead to grim consequences, even the end of biology's only experiment with higher intelligence. As threatening as the crisis is, the means exist to defuse it.
A near-meltdown seems to be imminent over Iran and its nuclear programmes. Before 1979, when the Shah was in power, Washington strongly supported these programmes. Today the standard claim is that Iran has no need for nuclear power, and therefore must be pursuing a secret weapons programme. "For a major oil producer such as Iran, nuclear energy is a wasteful use of resources," Henry Kissinger wrote in the Washington Post last year.
Thirty years ago, however, when Kissinger was secretary of state for President Gerald Ford, he held that "introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran's economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals".
Last year Dafna Linzer of the Washington Post asked Kissinger about his reversal of opinion. Kissinger responded with his usual engaging frankness: "They were an allied country."
In 1976 the Ford administration "endorsed Iranian plans to build a massive nuclear energy industry, but also worked hard to complete a multibillion-dollar deal that would have given Tehran control of large quantities of plutonium and enriched uranium - the two pathways to a nuclear bomb", Linzer wrote. The top planners of the Bush administration, who are now denouncing these programmes, were then in key national security posts: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Iranians are surely not as willing as the west to discard history to the rubbish heap. They know that the United States, along with its allies, has been tormenting Iranians for more than 50 years, ever since a US-UK military coup overthrew the parliamentary government and installed the Shah, who ruled with an iron hand until a popular uprising expelled him in 1979.
The Reagan administration then supported Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran, providing him with military and other aid that helped him slaughter hundreds of thousands of Iranians (along with Iraqi Kurds). Then came President Clinton's harsh sanctions, followed by Bush's threats to attack Iran - themselves a serious breach of the UN charter.
Last month the Bush administration conditionally agreed to join its European allies in direct talks with Iran, but refused to withdraw the threat of attack, rendering virtually meaningless any negotiations offer that comes, in effect, at gunpoint. Recent history provides further reason for scepticism about Washington's intentions.
In May 2003, according to Flynt Leverett, then a senior official in Bush's National Security Council, the reformist government of Mohammad Khatami proposed "an agenda for a diplomatic process that was intended to resolve on a comprehensive basis all of the bilateral differences between the United States and Iran". Included were "weapons of mass destruction, a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the future of Lebanon's Hizbullah organisation and cooperation with the UN nuclear safeguards agency", the Financial Times reported last month. The Bush administration refused, and reprimanded the Swiss diplomat who conveyed the offer.
A year later the European Union and Iran struck a bargain: Iran would temporarily suspend uranium enrichment, and in return Europe would provide assurances that the United States and Israel would not attack Iran. Under US pressure, Europe backed off, and Iran renewed its enrichment processes. Iran's nuclear programmes, as far as is known, fall within its rights under article four of the non-proliferation treaty (NPT), which grants non-nuclear states the right to produce fuel for nuclear energy. The Bush administration argues that article four should be strengthened, and I think that makes sense. When the NPT came into force in 1970 there was a considerable gap between producing fuel for energy and for nuclear weapons. But advances in technology have narrowed the gap. However, any such revision of article four would have to ensure unimpeded access for non-military use, in accord with the initial NPT bargain between declared nuclear powers and the non-nuclear states.
In 2003 a reasonable proposal to this end was put forward by Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency: that all production and processing of weapon-usable material be under international control, with "assurance that legitimate would-be users could get their supplies". That should be the first step, he proposed, toward fully implementing the 1993 UN resolution for a fissile material cutoff treaty (or Fissban). ElBaradei's proposal has to date been accepted by only one state, to my knowledge: Iran, in February, in an interview with Ali Larijani, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator. The Bush administration rejects a verifiable Fissban - and stands nearly alone. In November 2004 the UN committee on disarmament voted in favour of a verifiable Fissban. The vote was 147 to one (United States), with two abstentions: Israel and Britain. Last year a vote in the full general assembly was 179 to two, Israel and Britain again abstaining. The United States was joined by Palau. There are ways to mitigate and probably end these crises. The first is to call off the very credible US and Israeli threats that virtually urge Iran to develop nuclear weapons as a deterrent. A second step would be to join the rest of the world in accepting a verifiable Fissban treaty, as well as ElBaradei's proposal, or something similar. A third step would be to live up to article six of the NPT, which obligates the nuclear states to take "good-faith" efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons, a binding legal obligation, as the world court determined. None of the nuclear states has lived up to that obligation, but the United States is far in the lead in violating it.
gar
Homepage: http://garizo.blogspot.com/2008/10/world-backs-irans-ri....html