B52 Trial Concludes in Bristol"/WMD Here!" Plowshares Trial Starts in North Dakota!

international | anti-war / imperialism | news report Wednesday September 13, 2006 23:41 by Solidarity

They're on Trial For Us, We're on the Streets for Them!

A number of serious anti-war trials are underway around the globe. Margaret Jones and Paul Milling enter the last days of their trial for disabling vehicles specifically designed to reload the U.S. B52 Bombers that were based at Fairford (England) in '03 and were ging to drop napalm, cluster bombs and fuel explosives over Iraq. Meanwhile in the U.S. Fr, Carl Kabat OMI (who has already served 15 years imprisonment for nonviolent resistance),Vietnam vet/Catholic Worker Michael Walli and ex-soldier had no trouble finding WMD. they looked in North Dakota,USA, rather than wasting their time lookng for them in Iraq! Their trial started this week.

Lawyers summed up today in the case of two peace activists on trial for conspiracy to
commit criminal damage. Paul Milling and Margaret Jones are in court after attempting to hinder take-off of 14 B-52 planes to bomb Iraq at the start of the 2003 invasion. Milling and Jones damaged roughly two dozen bomb carrying and fuel vehicles for the planes, in a bid to delay their departure for Baghdad and give more people time to flee the city. In a prepared statement handed in when they were arrested at RAF Fairford after damaging two dozen vehicles, they wrote of the air base as ‘a launching pad for war crimes’, adding that if they could save ‘one life’ by their actions, they would consider them justified.

Bruce Houlder for the prosecution alleged the defendants ‘claimed a charter’ to act without reference to the law. If the defendants’ actions were taken to their logical conclusions, he told the jury at Bristol Crown Court, ‘one might as well tear up the laws of this country.’

This was ‘a unique case’ said Hugo Charlton, defending Margaret Jones. The law allowed for exceptional circumstances, and the threat to life in Iraq posed by the bombers at Fairford was one such situation. The burden of proof, he said, was ‘on the prosecution’. It was not necessary for the defendants to have been engaged in actually ‘stopping’ a crime. It was enough that they were seeking to ‘prevent’ it, and that they honestly believed that homes and property in Baghdad were in need of protection.

James Hines, representing Paul Milling, denied that the action taken was merely a symbolic ‘protest’. The defendants acted reasonably, he said, in the light of everything they had read and heard before the start of the war. Reminding the jury that the region now devastated by war is one of the cradles of civilisation, he asked them to imagine how they would react if 30 missiles, or even three, landed on their own city. He accepted that it was difficult for Westerners leading safe lives to imagine an existence where people struggle to survive without electricity or water, among unexploded cluster bombs, with sudden death an ever-present reality. These, he said, were conditions the defendants had been able to picture, and that they had done their best to address. Theirs had been a genuine attempt to save life.

During the previous week the court heard moving testimony from those who were in Baghdad during the bombing, including a young Iraq man who survived the cluster bombing of a residential area.

Judge Crowther will direct the jury tomorrow, Wednesday 13th of September. They are expected to retire to consider their verdict later that day (or Thursday at latest).