Hammered By The Irish: How The Pitstop Ploughshares Disabled A U.s. War-plane -with Ireland's Blessing

On a damp night in February 2003, as the United States 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 US 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 antiwar 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.