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Menwith Hill campaigners to hold Independence from America event on July 4
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A group of campaigners meeting in Kettlesing this Friday will mark America's Independence Day by holding an Independence from America event.
The event, which is organised by the Menwith Hill Accountability Campaign (MHAC), has been held annually for more than 25 years.
This year’s incarnation will feature David Webb from the Yorkshire Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and speakers from Pembrokeshire, where a large American radar station is being built, as well as from other countries which host US military bases, including Australia and New Zealand.
There will also be singing from the East Lancashire Clarion Choir and entertainment from Lynda Williams, a Hawaii-based physicist-turned-singer, whose Atomic Cabaret “exposes the reckless stupidity of the bomb [...] with science, satire and song that is smart, sexy, sassy and radical”.
Campaigner, Quaker and MHAC member Martin Schweiger told the Stray Ferret:
There are military activities, some of them lethal, that are directed from Menwith Hill, but it’s not accountable to anyone in Yorkshire or the UK.
And each time someone is targeted, there is quite a lot of what they call ‘collateral damage’. Who says these targets are legitimate anyway? These people don’t receive any trial.
There has to be some kind of accountability, but for over 50 years there hasn’t been any.
Ideally, we’d like the US to consider what Donald Trump has suggested, and pull its military out of the UK.
RAF Menwith Hill is nominally a British base, but since the 1950s has been used by the United States as a listening station, originally gathering intelligence on the Soviet Union and its allies during the Cold War, and latterly directing much of its focus towards the Middle East, where it has been implicated in drone strikes.
The Independence from America event will be held on July 4, from 3 to 7pm at Kettlesing Millennium Village Hall.
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