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83-year-old nun convicted of sabotage for breach of US atomic complex

RT | May 09, 2013

Three activists, including an 83-year-old nun, who broke into a US nuclear weapons facility in Tennessee were convicted on Wednesday of interfering with national security.

In what The New York Times labeled the biggest security breach in the history of the atomic complex, the trio broke into the Y-12 National Security Complex on July 28, 2012 and defaced a uranium processing plant.

The Y-12 facility has been in operation since 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project, and today is responsible for both the production and maintenance of all uranium parts for the entire US nuclear weapons arsenal. Over the years, the facility has also been the target of nonviolent anti-nuclear protests.

Now, a jury in Tennessee has charged the three protesters with sabotaging the plant, with a second charge of damaging federal property.

Defense attorneys for the three activists – Sister Megan Rice, 57-year-old Greg Boertje-Obed and Michael Walli, 64 – maintained that the prosecution had overreached.

“The shortcomings in security at one of the most dangerous places on the planet have embarrassed a lot of people,” defense lawyer Francis Lloyd said.

“You’re looking at three scapegoats behind me,” he added

Defense attorneys also noted that, once the three refused to plead guilty to trespassing, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years’ imprisonment, the prosecution introduced the charge of sabotage, which carries a maximum prison term of twenty years. They believed the higher charge should have been dismissed.

According to the Associated Press, which provided details of the court proceedings, the three activists have no remorse for their actions, and were pleased to have reached one of the most secure areas of the facility.

Prosecutor Jeff Theodore noted that the trio’s fate could have been far worse, as that area of the facility allowed guards to use deadly force.

“They’re lucky, and thank goodness they’re alive, because they went into the lethal zone,” said Theodore.

The three defendants spent two hours inside Y-12, during which time they hung banners, cut through security fences, strung crime-scene tape and sprayed “baby bottles full of human blood” on the exterior portion of the facility.

Boertje-Obed, who is a house painter from Duluth, Minnesota, explained why they sprayed the blood.

“The reason for the baby bottles was to represent that the blood of children is spilled by these weapons,” he said.

While inside the most secure portion of the facility, the three activists managed to hammer off what is described as a “small chunk” of the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility.

During cross examination, Sister Rice stated that she wished she had not waited so long to stage a protest within the plant.

“My regret was I waited 70 years,” she said.”It is manufacturing which can only cause death.”

Prosecutors argued that the breach of security was serious, and caused the plant to shut down for two weeks as security staff were re-trained and defense contractors replaced.

Meanwhile, federal officials maintain that there was never any danger of the three activists reaching materials that could be detonated or used to construct an improvised bomb.

May 9, 2013 Posted by | Militarism, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Why Won’t the Media Criticize Harsh Treatment of Pacifists?

Disarmament Protests and Massacres

By JOHN LaFORGE | CounterPunch | August 6, 2012

“How brave it is to believe that in today’s world, reasoned, nonviolent protest will register, will matter. But will it?… The threshold of horror has been ratcheted up so high that nothing short of genocide or the prospect of nuclear war merits mention. Peaceful resistance is treated with contempt. Terrorism’s the real thing.” …

— Arundhati Roy

Initial court appearances, known and unknown

James Holmes was in court Mon., July 30, in Aurora, Colorado, charged with 142 counts of murder, etc. The whole world knows of this initial hearing for the alleged murderer/terrorist because every detail of Holmes’ life is now regularly put at the top of TV and radio news shows and above the fold in every newspaper. Someone kills a lot of people and the media swarms.

Not so if your action was a peaceful attempt to prevent massacres.

On exactly the same day, the first court appearance took place in Knoxville, Tenn. for disarmament activists Michael Walli, 63, of Washington, DC, Megan Rice, 82, of New York City, and Greg Boertje-Obed, 57, of Duluth, Minn. (Greg is a married father of one and a former ROTC medical clerk trainee.)

You won’t have heard or read a word of these pacifists because their action was free of violence and mayhem. On the contrary, their protest was against nuclear madness and the continuing waste of hundreds of billions of dollars on nuclear warhead production, and it involved hoisting a banner and issuing an indictment against illegal U.S. weapons.

Early on July 28, the three walked into one of the country’s “most militarily secure” sites — the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn. — and conducted a bold protest against the government’s plans to spent $80 billion on upgrading the nuclear weapons production complex.

Unarmed activists walk around nuclear “security”: Facing 1 year in prison and $100,000 fine for protest

According to statements released by the three and phone calls from Blount County jail in Tenn. where they are being held, they entered Y-12 before dawn, passed through four fences and entered the maximum security “Use of deadly force authorized” area, where they hoisted banners, spray painted messages and poured their blood (drawn by a nurse) on the Highly Enriched (weapon-grade) Uranium Materials Facility.

Appearing before federal magistrate Bruce Guyton, the three face one charge of federal trespass which carries a max of one year in prison and/or a $100,000 fine. Felony charges may be pending.

The indictment of nuclear weapons production delivered by Rice, Walli and Boertje-Obed cites U.S. Constitutional and Humanitarian Treaty Law, as well as the Nuremberg Principles. It says in part, “The ongoing building and maintenance at Y-12 constitutes war crimes that can and should be investigated and prosecuted by judicial authorities. We are required by International Law to denounce and resist known crimes.”

The action, which they called “Transform Now Plowshares,” is one of a long tradition of Plowshares actions in the U.S. and around the world which challenge or interfere with war plans and weapons of mass destruction, and which often take inspiration from the Old Testament prophesy to “turn swords into plowshares and study war no more.

At Y-12, construction is under way to replace facilities for producing “enriched uranium” for H-bombs. It is budgeted to cost over $6.5 billion. Stealing these funds from hungry and impoverished people forces them to starve, hence the protesters’ use of blood to “name” Y12.

Anniversary of U.S. Massacres at Hiroshima & Nagasaki

You may have thought that the nuclear war budget was shrinking and that the President honestly meant something when he spoke of “a world without nuclear weapons,” but you’d be mistaken.

The President and Congress have funded new construction of a pair of projects at Y-12 — one of which was reached by the protesters — for producing uranium for new U.S. H-bombs.

One of the laws mentioned by the activists, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968, obliges the U.S. to undertake complete nuclear disarmament. Y12 openly contravenes this law. 

While the world notes the anniversary of the U.S. atomic bomb massacres at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Greg, Megan and Michael wait in jail to endure the wrath of an embarrassed nuclear weapons establishment.

Prosecutors who will advance the federal case against them may not want to call their government work “protection of the Bomb” — especially in the face of international law requiring its abolition — but that’s what it is.

Still, the media won’t criticize harsh treatment of the pacifists. While the press over-kills the multiple murder story in Colorado, our TV nation seems to agree with George Carlin: The United States isn’t warlike, it just likes war.

John LaForge is on the staff of Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog and environmental justice group in Wisconsin.

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August 6, 2012 Posted by | Militarism, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment