Skip to content or view mobile version

Home | Mobile | Editorial | Mission | Privacy | About | Contact | Help | Security | Support

A network of individuals, independent and alternative media activists and organisations, offering grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social and political issues.

International Peace Activists in Dublin to Demand that Obama Frees Brad Manning!

Free Bradley Manning! Demilitarise Shannon! End the War! | 08.04.2011 04:19 | Terror War | World

Three international peace activists are in Dublin this week for a series
of events they hope will encourage Irish people to demand of President
Obama to stop the torture of Bradley Manning and end the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan. *Info on Dublin Events (Ireland) 087 918 4552

Obama arrives in Ireland a year after Bradley Manning is taken into custody accused of exposing war crimes!

ALL EVENTS FREE ENTRY, donation appreciated!.............
*FRIDAY APRIL 8 GPO 4pm-6pm: "Yo Obama, Demilitarise Shannon! Free Bradley Manning!" End the War! Vigil

*FRIDAY 8pm Wynn's Hotel, Middle Abbey St. PUBLIC MEETING: MUSIC with Joe Black & Steve Jacobs, SPEAKERS: Harry Browne, Frank Cordaro, Ciaron O'Reilly

*SATURDAY "Le Chéile"-Donnycarney Community Centre, beside Donnycarney Church,10am-4pm Seminar with Frank Cordaro "What has the radical legacy of Dorothy Day, the Berrigan Brothers and the U.S. Catholic Worker got to offer Ireland in its present state?

*SATURDAY 7.30 p.m. Music Sessiion and Bar in the Brian Baru, 5 Prospect Road, Glasnevin D9

International Peace Activists in Dublin to Demand that Obama Frees
Bradley Manning

Three international peace activists are in Dublin this week for a series
of events they hope will encourage Irish people to demand of President
Obama to stop the torture of Bradley Manning and end the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan. Frank Cordaro, Steve Jacobs and Ciaron O'Reilly have
all been activists in the radical pacifist Catholic Worker movement for
over 30 years. The Catholic Worker was founded in New York City in 1933
during the Great Depression by anarchist suffragette and Catholic
convert Dorothy Day.

Day lived among the poor in the original New York City Catholic Worker house
of hospitality on The Bowery, working for social justice for 60 years. Since her
death in 1980, the movement has grown, now numbering over 180
autonomous communities and Day has been put forward for canonisation by
the Cardinal of New York.

Like their founder, Cordaro, Jacobs and O'Reilly have lived their lives
among the homeless and spent time in various prisons for nonviolent
anti-war resistance. Jacobs and Cordaro have travelled to Ireland from
their Catholic Worker communities in the United States. O'Reilly is now
resident at the recently opened Giuseppe Conlon House, offering
hospitality serving destitute refugees in Harringay, London.

O'Reilly stated,
"The three of us would agree that our time in prison for nonviolent
anti-war resistance has been the most intimate experience of solidarity
with the poor. Instead of us playing host at our houses of hospitality,
in prison we are the guests of the poor. Prisons are the warehouses of
the poor!

We hope non-Catholics and non-workers will also come to these
events here in Ireland that have been organised by local peace and jutice groups. The Catholic Worker has always been an inclusive movement. At Giuseppe
Conlon House, in London, we have Catholics, Quakers, Methodists, Muslims, Buddhists, Irish & Belgian nuns, artists, marxist academics, anarchist squatters, Labour and Green Party members volunteering with us to feed the hungry. We accept no funding from the state and rely on dumpster diving and the kindness of
others.

We are not here in Ireland to convert or recruit for the Catholic church
or the Catholic Worker movement. There are 1.2 billion Catholics -
that's enough of a constituency! We would like the church to return to
the radical message of the Gospels and be a beacon in these times of
economic and military chaos. But as we all well know the church in
southern Ireland has been in bed with the state in recent history. It
is a different context for the three of us having grown up
in the U.S., Britain and Australia where Catholicism is multicultural
and we have recent histories of Catholics being persecuted minorities.

We are here on the eve of the Obama visit to Ireland to demand that he
immediately ends the torture of Bradley Manning. Obama has often
referenced Dorothy Day along with Martin Luther King in a litany of
inspiring American figures. We three believe that, Dorothy and Martin
would not be pleased with Obama's present wars on Iraq and Afghanistan
and the torture of Bradley. President Obama arrives in Ireland a year after
Bradley Manning was taken into custody in Iraq. Bradley was then transferred
to Kuwait and is now being tortured in Quantico U.S. Marine Base, Virginia, U.S.A. Bradley is presently in a military brig accused of speaking truth to power. We see this visit to Ireland by Obama, on the aniversary of Bradley's loss of freedom, as an opportunity for the Irish people to speak some truth to power!

Bradley Manning's maternal grandfather comes from here in Dublin. Bradley's
last point of departure before entering the Iraq war zone
and subsequently U.S. military prisons was Shannon Airport, Ireland. We ask
the Irish government to return to its constitutional commitments of neutrality
and close the de facto U.S. military base at Shannon. Like most of the U.S.
troops that participated in the illegal, immoral and self defeating invasion and
ongoing occupation of Iraq, Bradley's point of departure to a destroyed
life was the small departure lounge at Shannon."

O'Reilly, along with four other Catholic Workers known as the "Pit Stop
Ploughshares", was arrested at Shannon Airport in 2003 after disarming a
U.S. war plane en route to the invasion of Iraq. The five were charged
with $U.S.2 1/2 million criminal damage and put through three trials at
Dublin's Four Courts. They were acquitted unanimously by a jury in 2006. The
acquittal was the subject of secret cables from the U.S. embassy in
Dublin exposed by WikiLeaks in December 2010.

Support for the Catholic Workers on trial in Dublin came from people of
a wide range of backgrounds, various faith and non-faith traditions. At
the first trial, many members of the Catholic Worker movement travelled
from the U.S. and Europe to support the defendants. Bishop
Gumbleton of Detroit, actor Martin Sheen, former U.N. assistant
secretary general Denis Halliday, Japanese Budhist monks, Irish artists
and activists, American and British combat veterans joined in the events
around the trials, some offering testimony to the court.

O'Reilly states, "Frank, Steve and I know what it is like to be an
anti-war prisoner. We know from experience the significance of the
smallest act of human solidarity to the prisoner. These are the reasons
why we are here in Ireland. We are here for Bradley Manning, as an act
of solidarity. As they say in the U.S., "what comes around goes around!"
We are here for the 1 million Iraqis who have lost their lives in the
invasion of their country. We are here for the 4,000 young Americans
who passed through Shannon Airport to their deaths in Iraq, for the
20,000 who will never walk or talk again. The U.S. and Irish
governments had the cunning not to ship the American dead and wounded
back through Shannon. Those lifeless and destroyed bodies were returned
home through Saudi Arabia and Germany.

Bradley has spent over 300 days in isolation and sensory deprivation;
if you read his conditions of confinement you can only
conclude that he is being tortured. Ireland has recently been complicit
in torture with its refuelling of C.I.A. rendition flights at Shannon
Airport. If we call ourselves a peace movement, we owe proactive
solidarity to Bradley Manning, Michael Lyons and other nonviolent
resisters in the British and U.S. military standing up against this war.

Bradley Manning is 5' 2" and weighs just 105 lbs. He is a giant of a
man. He is a hero for our desperate times. Bradley Manning is in prison;
he may never get out alive, for allegedley exposing the truth about the
nature of these wars. He is being punished reporting a crime, namely the
slaying of Reuters journalist Nimir Nor-Eldeen, his driver Saeed Chmagh
and eight other unarmed Iraqis from a helicopter gunship
attack from a from a distance of a mile. Also the murder of
Matasher Tomal and the wounding of his two children, as he paused from
the daily school run to see if he could help the wounded from the first
attack. View this footage, decide what crime has been committed and
how you are going to respond
.
Please join us in Dublin to send a message to Obama when he visits
Ireland.

Collateral murder footage that Bradley Manning is accused of releasing:
 http://www.collateralmurder.com/


Free Bradley Manning! Demilitarise Shannon! End the War!
- e-mail: wiseupforbm AT yahoo.com
- Homepage: http://www.wiseupforbradleymanning.wordpress.com

Upcoming Coverage
View and post events
Upcoming Events UK
24th October, London: 2015 London Anarchist Bookfair
2nd - 8th November: Wrexham, Wales, UK & Everywhere: Week of Action Against the North Wales Prison & the Prison Industrial Complex. Cymraeg: Wythnos o Weithredu yn Erbyn Carchar Gogledd Cymru

Ongoing UK
Every Tuesday 6pm-8pm, Yorkshire: Demo/vigil at NSA/NRO Menwith Hill US Spy Base More info: CAAB.

Every Tuesday, UK & worldwide: Counter Terror Tuesdays. Call the US Embassy nearest to you to protest Obama's Terror Tuesdays. More info here

Every day, London: Vigil for Julian Assange outside Ecuadorian Embassy

Parliament Sq Protest: see topic page
Ongoing Global
Rossport, Ireland: see topic page
Israel-Palestine: Israel Indymedia | Palestine Indymedia
Oaxaca: Chiapas Indymedia
Regions
All Regions
Birmingham
Cambridge
Liverpool
London
Oxford
Sheffield
South Coast
Wales
World
Other Local IMCs
Bristol/South West
Nottingham
Scotland
Social Media
You can follow @ukindymedia on indy.im and Twitter. We are working on a Twitter policy. We do not use Facebook, and advise you not to either.
Support Us
We need help paying the bills for hosting this site, please consider supporting us financially.
Other Media Projects
Schnews
Dissident Island Radio
Corporate Watch
Media Lens
VisionOnTV
Earth First! Action Update
Earth First! Action Reports
Topics
All Topics
Afghanistan
Analysis
Animal Liberation
Anti-Nuclear
Anti-militarism
Anti-racism
Bio-technology
Climate Chaos
Culture
Ecology
Education
Energy Crisis
Fracking
Free Spaces
Gender
Globalisation
Health
History
Indymedia
Iraq
Migration
Ocean Defence
Other Press
Palestine
Policing
Public sector cuts
Repression
Social Struggles
Technology
Terror War
Workers' Movements
Zapatista
Major Reports
NATO 2014
G8 2013
Workfare
2011 Census Resistance
Occupy Everywhere
August Riots
Dale Farm
J30 Strike
Flotilla to Gaza
Mayday 2010
Tar Sands
G20 London Summit
University Occupations for Gaza
Guantanamo
Indymedia Server Seizure
COP15 Climate Summit 2009
Carmel Agrexco
G8 Japan 2008
SHAC
Stop Sequani
Stop RWB
Climate Camp 2008
Oaxaca Uprising
Rossport Solidarity
Smash EDO
SOCPA
Past Major Reports
Encrypted Page
You are viewing this page using an encrypted connection. If you bookmark this page or send its address in an email you might want to use the un-encrypted address of this page.
If you recieved a warning about an untrusted root certificate please install the CAcert root certificate, for more information see the security page.

Global IMC Network


www.indymedia.org

Projects
print
radio
satellite tv
video

Africa

Europe
antwerpen
armenia
athens
austria
barcelona
belarus
belgium
belgrade
brussels
bulgaria
calabria
croatia
cyprus
emilia-romagna
estrecho / madiaq
galiza
germany
grenoble
hungary
ireland
istanbul
italy
la plana
liege
liguria
lille
linksunten
lombardia
madrid
malta
marseille
nantes
napoli
netherlands
northern england
nottingham imc
paris/île-de-france
patras
piemonte
poland
portugal
roma
romania
russia
sardegna
scotland
sverige
switzerland
torun
toscana
ukraine
united kingdom
valencia

Latin America
argentina
bolivia
chiapas
chile
chile sur
cmi brasil
cmi sucre
colombia
ecuador
mexico
peru
puerto rico
qollasuyu
rosario
santiago
tijuana
uruguay
valparaiso
venezuela

Oceania
aotearoa
brisbane
burma
darwin
jakarta
manila
melbourne
perth
qc
sydney

South Asia
india


United States
arizona
arkansas
asheville
atlanta
Austin
binghamton
boston
buffalo
chicago
cleveland
colorado
columbus
dc
hawaii
houston
hudson mohawk
kansas city
la
madison
maine
miami
michigan
milwaukee
minneapolis/st. paul
new hampshire
new jersey
new mexico
new orleans
north carolina
north texas
nyc
oklahoma
philadelphia
pittsburgh
portland
richmond
rochester
rogue valley
saint louis
san diego
san francisco
san francisco bay area
santa barbara
santa cruz, ca
sarasota
seattle
tampa bay
united states
urbana-champaign
vermont
western mass
worcester

West Asia
Armenia
Beirut
Israel
Palestine

Topics
biotech

Process
fbi/legal updates
mailing lists
process & imc docs
tech