On April 19, six peace activists—including three military veterans—were arrested for trying to block the entrance to a U.S. Air Force base in Holloman, New Mexico, where drone pilots are trained.
One member of the so-called Holloman 6, Denise Sellers, 80, pleaded “no contest” to her charges and was given community service, another, Virginia Haufaire, 74, had her case dismissed because the sheriff never showed up to her trial, and another Ray Cagle, 77, a Vietnam veteran associated with veterans for peace, was given a 90 day deferred sentence after pleading “no contest.”
Three others (Toby Blomé, 69, John Reese, 72, and Natasha Robinson) will go to trial and risk jail time.
[Source: Photo Courtesy of Toby Blomé]
On July 10, I interviewed Toby Blomé and John Reese.
Toby Blomé [Source: Photo Courtesy of Toby Blomé]
Blomé, who worked with CodePink and is part of Ban Killer Drones, lives in the East Bay of California outside San Francisco, and Reese, who has been active in the anti-war movement since the Vietnam era, lives in Mountain Park in Otero County, New Mexico, not far from the Holloman base.
The two stressed that they are deeply disturbed that U.S. taxpayers finance violence around the world, including drone warfare, and felt compelled to try to do something about it, hoping that their actions will encourage larger acts of non-violent civil disobedience.
U.S. drones are now flying over Gaza where the Israeli army has been mercilessly slaughtering civilians, and drone killings are being continuously carried out in the Middle East and Africa, where legions of covert operations are being kept hidden from the public.
Blomé and Reese stressed that, during their trials, they are contemplating adopting a “defense of necessity” in which they admit to committing a minor offense to try to stop something far worse from happening.
This defense is comparable to a case where charges of trespassing would be waived against a defendant who entered someone’s home to save a child from a house fire.
When Reese was arrested for trying to block the main gate into the Holloman Air Force Base on April 19, he said that, without warning, the town sheriff knocked a sign out of the hands of a protester, and then proceeded to shake and drag him 50 to 100 feet even though he is 72 years old. After Reese shouted “this is police brutality,” some bystanders told the police to “chill out.”
Reese had been arrested over twenty times before in his activist career and endured harassment and beatings when he protested against the Vietnam War at his conservative high school near a military base in Alabama and befriended black students after the school was forcibly integrated.[1]
Holloman Air Force Base has become the place for anti-drone protests over the last couple of years because it is where drone pilots are trained.
[Source: Photo Courtesy of Toby Blomé]
CodePink for years has led protests outside the gates of Creech Air Force Base in a remote area of Nevada, which remains a central headquarters for the U.S. drone wars.
A regular at the Creech AFB protests, Blomé said that she has “known for a long time that the U.S. government does not value human life in foreign lands” and that “drones were developed as a tool to assassinate people thousands of miles away and to extend U.S. global domination.”
Blomé said that, some years ago, she watched the film Sir! No Sir! (Displaced Films, 2005), which showed the importance of GI resistance in ending the Vietnam War. She hopes that the anti-drone protests will attract active-duty servicemen and inspire resistance within the military.
During the Creech base protests, Blomé and members of her group would engage in conversations with military officers at a neighboring restaurant, though after the military bought the restaurant, they were asked to leave.
Blomé said that she greatly admires Daniel Hale, a U.S. Army intelligence drone operator who leaked secret military documents to The Intercept that showed that nine out of every ten victims of drone strikes were “unintended targets”—i.e., civilians.
Hale, who was convicted of leaking secret information, has recently been released after serving more than two years in prison.
Blomé says that she and her comrades are received warmly by people living in the towns around Creech and Holloman Air Force Bases, by passersby, and even by people who work on the bases.
Recently, an African-American lady who worked on the Holloman Air Force Base and recognized Blomé from a past protest, embraced her and said she was happy to be soon retiring from the military.
After Blomé’s last arrest, the judge told her and her co-defendants with a wink that he had been a political science major in college—signaling that he recognized corruption in politics and understood the motivations for their dissent.
[Source: Photo Courtesy of Toby Blomé]
The positive reception that the Holloman 6 and other activists receive reflects growing unease across broad sectors of American society for the state of endless war since 9/11.
The remoteness of the military bases and use of drone machines embody the U.S. government’s attempt to distance the public from the violence meted out in the pursuit of empire.
The costs of war cannot be shielded irrevocably, however. Blomé emphasized that among the victims are the drone pilots, who suffer from trauma and feelings of guilt for their roles in killing innocent people, even if remotely.
Founder of a homeless youth project in Seattle where he used to live, Reese grew up in Birmingham Alabama and was banned from Israel for ten years because of his involvement in activism there. At the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle, Reese helped with the first Independent Media Center; there are now hundreds of these centers around the world. ↑
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