Mid-Atlantic Port Militarization Resistance is a network of groups and individuals organizing to stop war shipments to Iraq from our region's ports. We believe that we have the full right, both as partial owners of the ports and as residents of this country, to intervene at the docks to save the lives of both U.S. soldiers and Iraqis and to spare the people of Iraq one more day of the horror that the United States war and occupation has brought about.

After identifying the ports regularly used for Iraq-shipments in our area, we decided to organize as local groups and interact with each other as a network. So there's PMR groups in New York City, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Baltimore/DC and on several campuses. We hold various political and ideological beliefs, but we join together to stop the war in Iraq and base our efforts around the issue of shipments.

The military uses publicly-owned ports to ship its equipment to Iraq. That means the Pentagon has found yet another way to use our tax-money and our facilities to do its dirty work. We believe the war to be illegal, both internationally and domestically, and a great human tragedy, downplayed by the media and military officials.

Elected officials have refused to do anything significant towards a withdrawal from Iraq. After over five years of demonstrating and playing nice with these people, we have to take the logical steps towards ending the war. One of those obvious steps is preventing war equipment from leaving our ports.

So we are starting to organize for our own withdrawal, as people in Olympia and Tacoma, Washington have been doing for a few years now, by demonstrating against and possibly delaying new shipments for offensive combat in Iraq. That means equipment attached to deployments or new machinery for killing. We do not intend to prevent life-saving equipment from reaching its destination.

Some say we are putting troops at risk by possibly delaying shipments with needed equipment. While this makes sense theoretically, we would hope to believe that no responsible military would send its soldiers into battle without the proper equipment, and that we are only intervening temporarily to make a firm stance against the war.

We believe what is putting U.S. soldiers most in danger is deployment to Iraq. We intend to save lives by working against new deployments and demanding U.S. soldiers come home now. And we intend to do this at the docks, not the offices.

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