Monthly Archive for January, 2023

Irish peace activists acquitted on charge of criminal damage

Posted on January 29, 2023
January 25, 2023

The trial of two peace activists, Edward Horgan and Dan Dowling, ended today at the Circuit Criminal Court in Parkgate Street, Dublin after a trial that lasted ten days.

Almost 6 years ago on 25th April 2017, the two peace activists were arrested at Shannon Airport and charged with causing criminal damage by writing graffiti on a US Navy aircraft. They were also charged with trespassing on the curtilage of Shannon Airport. The words “Danger Danger Do Not Fly” were written with a red marker on the engine of the warplane. It was one of two US Navy aircraft that had arrived at Shannon from Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia. They subsequently flew on to a US air base in the Persian Gulf having spent two overnights at Shannon.

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Two women locked-on at the entrance of the UK’s Trident nuclear submarine base in Scotland

Posted on January 22, 2023

Photo by Finlay Hobson

Margaret and Willemien, greeted by name on arrival, locked-on at the North Gate at Faslane HMNB Clyde on January 22 in celebration of the 2nd anniversary of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons coming into force, and to make peaceful protest against the UK government’s continued intention to retain and proliferate Nuclear Weapons of Mass Destruction. 

The protest lasted just under five hours in the usual cauld and damp. There were over seven police vans including the cutting crew; two cars, one 4WD; four of the vans full of police; plus 16 assorted officers around us outside the gate, and the usual MOD officers behind the closed gate.

~ from Billwerder Prison, Hamburg – Prison reflections by American nuclear resister John LaForge

Posted on January 19, 2023

January 15, 2023 This month has three important political anniversaries, anti-war and anti-nuclear holidays if you will, events I’ll celebrate privately for a change, since I’m temporarily cooling my heels in a German prison on the west end of Hamburg. It’s not that I killed or robbed very many people, but I have acted contemptuously […]

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American Activist Enters German Prison for Protesting U.S. Nuclear Weapons Based There

Posted on January 10, 2023

John speaks outside of the prison before the start of his sentence (Photo by Marion Küpker)

Amidst heightened nuclear tension between NATO and Russia in Europe, U.S. peace activist John LaForge entered a German prison on January 10, 2023 to serve jail time there for protests against U.S. nuclear weapons stockpiled at Germany’s Büchel Air Force Base, 80 miles southeast of Cologne. LaForge entered JVA Billwerder in Hamburg as the first American ever imprisoned for a nuclear weapons protest in Germany.

The 66-year-old Minnesota native and co-director of Nukewatch, the Wisconsin-based advocacy and action group, was convicted of trespass in Cochem District Court for joining in two “go-in” actions at the German airbase in 2018. One of the actions involved entering the base and climbing atop a bunker that likely housed some of the approximately twenty U.S. B61 thermonuclear gravity bombs stationed there.

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Peace activists take on the Pentagon and its corporate outposts – Decry the Merchants of Death

Posted on January 3, 2023

Decry the Merchants of Death
by Kathy Kelly

Peace activists take on the Pentagon and its corporate outposts.

Days after a U.S. warplane bombed a Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing forty-two people, twenty-four of them patients, the international president of MSF, Dr. Joanne Liu walked through the wreckage and prepared to deliver condolences to family members of those who had been killed. A brief video, taped in October, 2015, captures her nearly unutterable sadness as she speaks about a family who, the day before the bombing, had been prepared to bring their daughter home. Doctors had helped the young girl recover, but because war was raging outside the hospital, administrators recommended that the family come the next day. “She’s safer here,” they said.

The child was among those killed by the U.S. attacks, which recurred at fifteen minute intervals, for an hour and a half, even though MSF had already issued desperate pleas begging the United States and NATO forces to stop bombing the hospital.

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