Hammered by the Irish

On a damp night in February 2003, as the U.S. prepared to invade Iraq, five Catholic Worker activists scrambled across runways and broke into a hangar at Shannon Airport. Swinging hammers and a pickaxe, they did more than $2.5 million damage to a U.S. Navy transport plane. The five were hit with the full weight of the law, and were quickly condemned by the media and much of the anti-war movement. But three-and-a-half years later a Dublin jury decided they were innocent of any crime. This is the story of how a civilian airport in the west of Ireland became a “Pitstop of Death,” and how an act of conscience touched the hearts and minds of twelve jurors, making political and legal history, in an epic of popular resistance.