A quarter of a century has passed since Ciaron O’Reilly, with a sledgehammer and a bottle of his own blood, took his first tilt at the US war machine.
The Brisbane-born man served what is believed to be the longest jail stint for a civilian protester on US soil during the first Gulf war, over a New Year’s Day sortie by a band of Catholic peace activists into Griffiss air force base in New York in 1991.
He poured blood on a runway from a bottle bearing pictures of Iraqi children and smashed up the tarmac till his hands were blistered, while his cohorts did the same to the engine of a B-52 bomber on standby for raids in the Gulf.
O’Reilly served 13 months in jail, which nearly broke him at first.
But he is quick to point out that his punishment paled besides that meted out to the surprising new vanguard of anti-war resistance – hundreds of members of the military, who received jail sentences of up to six years.
Giving practical support to conscientious objectors – as well as to Julian Assange and Edward Snowden – has led to an unexpected recent phase in the life of an activist who cheerfully volunteers that he still looks like “the hippie from central casting”.“You never know where resistance will come from – techie geeks are probably the last people I would have expected and now they’re obviously the people who are most trouble,” O’Reilly says.
“If you’re anti-war and you’re part of the movement, it doesn’t mean you have to go to prison, but you have to be sensitive to where resistance is coming from, because solidarity is needed there.
“Most resistance in both the Gulf war and the recent invasion [of Iraq in 2003] came out of the US and also the British military.”
O’Reilly regards an absence of solidarity with the imprisoned US army whistleblower Chelsea Manning – as well as Assange, Snowden and hundreds of conscientious objectors – as the signal failure of a long-hobbled peace movement.
He says a protest leadership that is “increasingly NGO-ish and [based on] leftwing kind of cults” has failed to translate mass demonstrations into support for individuals whose acts have proven much more troublesome to the establishment.
In recent years, O’Reilly’s unlikely allies have included Ben Griffin, a former British commando in Iraq turned anti-war campaigner, who has become his godson. Together they teamed up to act as Assange’s “security detail” in London court appearances.
O’Reilly has also been instrumental in fundraising campaigns for “simple things” he says the mainstream anti-war movement has neglected.
These included raising funds to help Manning’s family visit her in Fort Leavenworth prison, where she is serving 35 years for disclosing classified US information, including the “collateral murder” video of Reuters journalists being gunned down by US troops in Iraq.
O’Reilly also helped raise the rent for the partner of the British navy medicMichael Lyons. She had faced eviction from her apartment after Lyons was sent to Colchester military prison for refusing to go to Afghanistan.
“It wasn’t rocket science, it wasn’t difficult,” he says. “And that’s what the anti-war movement should be doing. If you’re not in jail, you should be supporting people who are for non-violent anti-war resistance.”
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