MIlitary Targets

national | miscellaneous | news report Wednesday March 05, 2003 10:38 by Leith McLean - Indymedia leith_mclean at hotmail dot com

an interview with Moana Cole

On the third of February, five members of the pacifist Catholic Worker movement sabotaged British warplanes at Shannon Airport in Ireland. Among them was veteran activist Ciaron O'Reilly, who visited Christchurch last year. Last week, an Indymedia interviewer caught up with an old associate of his: Moana Cole.

When I arrive, notebook ready, Moana apologises for cancelling the previous appointment.
"I got a free ticket to Bob Dylan at the last minute, and well, I couldn't refuse." That's fine, I understand. How was Ani Difranco? "Oh, she was great. She got on stage and said 'I'm from Buffalo', and I thought 'Oh, I was in jail in Buffalo.'" She flourishes her ticket stub, laughing, and points at Dylan's name, then looks at it thoughtfully.
"I should send this to Ciaron," she says. Ciaron O'Reilly (pronounced like "Keiran") is currently in jail for acts of sabotage against a US navy aeroplane at Shannon Airport in Ireland (interviewer's note: Ciaron was released on bail on the first of March, to return to his work at a homeless shelter). Twelve years ago, just prior to the start of Operation Desert Shield, the woman whose kitchen I'm standing in was creeping with him through the American winter in Rome, New York. Their destination: Griffiss Air Force Base, their intention: direct disarmament; sabotage; what they refer to as a "ploughshares action".

Moana goes on to explain the philosophy of ploughshares. "It takes its inspiration from [the Christian prophet] Isaiah, whose vision was of a disarmed world where weapons would be converted into tools that would be constructive for humanity." It's a direct action movement that's updated the "swords" in "beat their swords into ploughshares" to include guns, bombs, and warplanes. It was begun in 1967 by brothers Dan and Phil Berrigan, who took non-violent direct action beyond passive resistance. As priests, they were not subject to the Vietnam War draft, and so could not refuse it. Instead, they broke into the office of the draft board, took the completed draft cards, and napalmed them.

Moana and Ciaron had been working throughout 1989 in Catholic Worker soup kitchens and after-school programs, in the United States. "We decided we had to confront the institutions that had created the poverty. our first target was the military." They started planning at the start of 1990, long before there was any hint that the Gulf War was going to break out; a year of meeting fortnightly for bible study, political analysis, reflection and preparation.
"Our analysis was that it is the military that underpins the economic arrangements of the world." In the States, "over 50% of taxpayers' money goes towards funding the military." [interviewer's note: military spending in the US is currently47% of the budget] The military also enforces the structure of economic power, preventing peasants from appropriating resources from their landlords.

Although the Berlin Wall had just fallen and peace was supposedly breaking out worldwide, they were unconvinced. With the knowledge of what they were going to undertake, they set out to build a small community of committed people. Part of their plan was to get caught and tried, giving them the chance to argue the illegality of the war in a court of law, and present their defence: that they acted outside the law to prevent a far greater crime. After 6 months of looking, they found two more people prepared to go to prison for the sake of disarmament. Once Bill Streit and Sue Frankel joined them, thay spent the next six months preparing, even acting through the police interrogations that would come after their arrest. This was about the time that Iraqi troops moved into Kuwait.

The leadup to the Gulf War decided them on targetting the Air Force: the plan for Operation Desert Storm was widely publicised in the news media, and consisted of a massive air bombardment targetted against the civilian infrastructure of Iraq. On the night of New Year's Day, 1991, "we crept onto the base... hold on, I'll go get my photo album." She shows me stark black-and-white photos of the Christmas angel they hung on the clipped barbed-wire fence, of a dark runway swept clear of snow, and a line of massive, grey B-52 bombers. Stunned by the lack of security, they encountered only the fence and a single security jeep, parked at the far end of the runway from the B-52s.

"When we arrived there, the B-52s were better housed and fed than the people we'd been [working] with for the last 2 years." On 5-minute alert status, the planes were equipped with air-launch nuclear-tipped missiles, the pilots asleep in the hangars next to them, ready to take off at a moment's notice. The quartet tipped baby bottles of their own blood over the B-52s (Moana refers to this as "unmasking the weapon," revealing it as a tool for shedding blood), then Moana and Ciaron spraypainted "Love your enemies. Swords into Ploughshares. No more bombing children: Hiroshima, Vietnam, the Middle East, or anywhere else," and painted a crucifix on the runway in blood. Bill and Sue started pounding on the fuel tank of one bomber. There are both symbolic and practical elements to such an action: in addition to the graphic metaphor of human blood and children's bottles, they disabled the bomber for the duration of the Gulf War.

I'm struck by the daring it would take to swing a sledgehammer at the fuel tank of a fully-fuelled and -armed nuclear launch platform. But Moana is adamant: "we're not part of some elite group. Part of the vision is that these are just preliminary actions; there's a real consciousness of inviting other people to get involved." In fact, the first guard to arrive on the scene was asked to join in.

Judge McCurn ruled out all testimony regarding the illegality of the war, and overruled the defendants' necessity defense (that they had to break a minor law to preserve a greater one), saying that the United States government and the war were not on trial but the defendants were. He also refused to allow the baby bottles as evidence, claiming they were "irrelevant," even thought they were used to commit the crimes the defendants were charged with. He admitted the hammers and wire-cutters though, instructing the jury to consider only property law when reaching their verdict. All four defendants were found guilty on federal charges of conspiracy and destruction of government property, and Moana was sentenced to a year in prison.
"I was hoping to get into a federal prison. I was planning to get fit, learn some carpentry, hang out with political prisoners." But in the county jail she was sent to, she spent 23 hours a day locked up with her cellmates, with only an hour each day for exercise. "You get to see who goes to jail," she says. "It's the poor." She decided to treat the deprived conditions as a monastic experience, and settled into a daily routine of morning yoga, followed by meditation, study of scripture, then political analysis and some fiction. She served the first half of her sentence with co-defendant Sue, and they spent a lot of time reading and replying to the forty letters they received each day. They also helped the other prisoners a lot, by writing letters for them or helping them read letters they had received. However, Moana and Sue were seperated when Moana spoke out against practices within the prison.

"This guy committed suicide. The guy was unstable, you know, in prison on a petty charge. He obviously needed psychiatric care." The prison, however, had overextended its budget doing up the administration block. Although many of the inmates were serving drug- and alcohol-related sentences, there weren't even any Alcoholics or Narcotics Anonymous services available to help them. Nor, of course, were there psychiatric services for suicidal prisoners. Moana wrote a letter to the local paper, laying responsibility for his death at the feet of the prison administration. It had to be smuggled out of the prison, but the paper published it in full.

Sue was transferred to another prison: she and Moana were seen as troublemakers and the prison officials wanted to isolate them. They turned the rest of the prison population against Moana by revoking privileges, saying it was because of what Moana had done. She was placed in solitary confinement for a week, for wearing a headband while exercising. Headbands, you see, are not part of an inmate's uniform.
"I didn't really foresee the consequences, which is good 'cos otherwise I might not've done it." I'm not sure if I believe her, because her response was to write another letter, detailing the use of arbitrary punishment to keep prisoners suppressed, claiming that prisons were a law unto themselves, without effective oversight.

"As things got really tense, with the other inmates, there was a letter to the editor, the typical 'prisoners are the scum of the Earth, they've got this cruisy life and all they do is complain about it.' There were 250 men in the prison, and 15 women, and almost all of them wrote to then paper complaining after they saw it. The heat was off me completely after that."

Moana is about to complete a Law degree at Canterbury University. She has been co-ordinating weekly vigils outside the Harewood Airforce Base at Christchurch Airport, every Friday from 5 to 6pm.