“You do not become a ‘dissident’ just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.”
Václav Havel
From last Saturday’s Guardian newspaper:
“If they were to do it over again, Phil Pritchard says, they would bring less stuff. He and Toby Olditch were carrying “silly amounts” when they broke into RAF Fairford on the eve of the Iraq war: bolts and screws to be placed inside the B-52s’ engines, pictures of smiling Iraqi children to be stuck on to the payload doors, toothbrushes and stamps to be used in prison, and flashing headbands in the hope that they would look too ridiculous to be shot.
“Somewhat inevitably, they were arrested before they got anywhere near one of the bombers. “At that stage,” says Mr Pritchard, “I think the word that went through our heads was: arse.” Instead of preventing the jets from taking off for Iraq, the two men were charged with conspiracy to commit criminal damage, remanded in custody for three months, and told to expect a jail sentence of up to 10 years.
“But while their mission may have been, in Mr Olditch’s words, “a bit Keystone Cops”, it was not criminal. That was the remarkable verdict of a jury at Bristol crown court this week, which unanimously acquitted the two men, having accepted their defence that they were acting to prevent the US air force planes from committing war crimes.”
