Ben Griffin (British Army soldier)

Ben Griffin
Birth name	Benjamin Griffin
Born	1977 London, United Kingdom
Allegiance	United Kingdom
Service/branch	British Army
Years of service	1997-2005
Wars	Iraq War

Benjamin Griffin (born 1977) is a British peace activist, and former British Army infantry soldier.

Early life

Griffin was born in 1977 in London, England, to a family with military connections. He spent his childhood years in Machynlleth in Wales, receiving his formal education there and in Swansea. During his teenage years he received early military training with the Army Cadet Force.^[1]

Military career

In 1997 at the age of nineteen he enlisted with the British Army's Parachute Regiment, going on to serve with its 2nd Battalion in garrison duty in Ulster in the winding down of Operation Banner in the late 1990s-early 2000s, and in the Balkans where the battalion assisted with the disarming of the Macedonia National Liberation Army in the Western Macedonia mountains in 2001. In 2002 the battalion deployed to Afghanistan for 2 months, conducting policing operations, and training the Afghan National Army in the city of Kabul. Griffin subsequently applied to join the Special Air Service Regiment, and having passed its aptitude trials, he was attached to the S.A.S. in 2003. In 2005 he was deployed with the Regiment in counter-insurgency operations in Baghdad in the aftermath of the 2nd Persian Gulf War. During the deployment he became disillusioned with the nature of the work in which he was engaged, and whilst on leave in England sought and obtained permission to resign from the British Army in 2005.^[2]

Political activism

On leaving the British Army he was employed briefly in corporate security work, before becoming involved in anti-war activism. His initial public pronouncements involved a critique of the use of the British military to facilitate the foreign policy of the United States of America,^[3] but subsequently he broadened his criticism against what he perceives as a subliminal militaristic culture that is socially inherent in the United Kingdom.

In 2008 the British Government imposed a legal injunction upon Griffin to prevent him publicly discussing operations that he had been involved in whilst in Iraq in 2005, where he alleged that Iraqi civilian detainees were severely mistreated by the United States forces in pursuance of intelligence information, which the British military was complicit in.^[4][5][6]

Griffin is the Co-ordinator of the United Kingdom branch of Veterans for Peace.^[7]

In 2011 Griffin took part in a demonstration outside the American Embassy in London in support of Bradley Manning, a United States Army soldier who had released a mass of classified military documents to public view via an internet outlet.^[8]

In March 2015, as a representative of Veterans For Peace, Griffin went to Ulster to meet with ex-paramilitaries from the Provisional Irish Republican Army, including Seanna Breathnach. At the conclusion of the meeting Griffin and other representatives of Veterans for Peace expressed a new understanding of the IRA's perspective in the former paramilitary war in Ulster, and expressed remorse about aspects of their military service with the British Army during Operation Banner. The ex-IRA participants expressed in return a new understanding of the "programming" that the Veterans for Peace representatives had explained they had been subjected to in the British Army, but stated they shared no reciprocal regrets about their own activities in the conflict.^[9]

In December 2015 Griffin along with two other members of Veterans for Peace publicly discarded their military service medals and service berets, and renounced their military Oath of Allegiance outside the gates of Downing Street in a protest demonstration against the British Government's entry into the Syrian Civil War.^{[10][11][12][13]}

References