Anti-War Actions

  21st July 2003: Fairford: Mention of Iraq War "Not necessary"
  14th Mar 2003: Thirty B52 Support Vehicles Disabled at RAF Fairford

For the latest information visit the Fairford Peace Watch website: www.fairfordpeacewatch.com/iraqwarontrial.html

Margaret Jones

ACTION AT FAIRFORD

"Do you consider yourself a terrorist?" "Do you hate Americans?" were two of the questions the M.o.D police asked Paul Milling and me, after our arrest for damaging a low loader truck for bombs, some bomb trolleys, and three fuel tankers, at Fairford US Air Force base, a week before the attack on Iraq began.

It wasn’t hard to explain that that we had no wish to harm to individual Americans - but rather to do what we could for innocent Iraqis threatened with death and maiming by some of the most terrifying weapons a military power has ever owned. (As it turned out, only half the 3,000 bombs on Baghdad we had been led to expect actually fell - mainly because the British generals persuaded the Americans that unrestrained carpet bombing would be a political disaster. But the ongoing miseries of the war have been terrible enough, all the same.)

Our plan was to disable the fuel trucks and bomb trolleys because they formed the support system the B-52 bombers kept at Fairford would depend on to carry out their murderous raids. Fairford air force base has an enormous underground fuel store, but if fuel tankers couldn’t carry the fuel from it to the planes, then the store wouldn’t be of much use. And, we reasoned, a delay in the bombing caused by damage to the support system might enable someone to get out of Baghdad before the bombs came down. We might be able to save a couple of lives.

Just after seven o’clock on the evening of March the 13th, we cut some fencing and slipped into the bomb truck compound. We cut a lot of brake pipes, on maybe twenty-odd bomb trolleys without engines. Some grinding paste went into a petrol tank. We put notices on some of the trucks, that read, "Out of Order - Do Not Use" and "Prevent War Crime." Then we left for our other target.

This was also amazingly easy to reach. There were three big fuel tankers in the refuelling compound, their cabs wide open. Two had their ignition keys in the dashboards.

We’d just finished work on the three fuel tankers - smashing the windscreens and the dials on the dashboards - when round a corner came a young American soldier. When he saw us, he was clearly more scared than we were. After all, we had been expecting someone to turn up - he hadn’t. He gabbled orders at us, while we dropped our tools and stood against a shed, assuring him, over and over, that we were quite harmless, and that there were only two of us. After he and his friends had thoroughly investigated the damage to the vehicles, he called the RAF police to arrest us.

Now we’re out on bail, awaiting a trial in the autumn.

We hope that a jury will recognise the spirit in which we undertook our action - that they will understand our arguments about "lawful excuse." An action normally considered a crime can be justified when you are trying to prevent a worse crime taking place.

We hope, moreover, our fellow-citizens will understand that Whitehall and the White House are where the real criminals are.

See Thirty B52 Support Vehicles Disabled at RAF Fairford TP press release 14th March 2003

also Yorkshire CND

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