Activists-1

Disarm Now Plowshares activists convicted
Faced felony charges for action at Trident Subase Bangor

TACOMA, WASHINGTON – The federal criminal trial of five veteran peace activists ended on December 13 after the jury found them guilty on all counts. The defendants, called the Disarm Now Plowshares, challenged the legality and morality of Trident missiles with thermonuclear warheads at Subase Bangor on Hood Canal, 20 miles across the water from Seattle. The naval base is home port for eight nuclear submarines, each carrying 24 Trident D-5 ballistic missiles. Each missile carries up to eight thermonuclear warheads having an explosive yield up to 475,000 tons of TNT each — more than 30 times the destructive power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

On trial were Bill Bischel SJ, 81, a Jesuit priest from Tacoma; Anne Montgomery, 83, a Sacred Heart nun from New York; Susan Crane, 67, a member of the Jonah House in Baltimore, Maryland — a faith-based community founded in 1973 by a group of peace activists that included Philip Berrigan; Lynne Greenwald, 60, a nurse from Bremerton, Washington; and Steve Kelly SJ, 60, a Jesuit priest from Oakland, California. Bill Bischel and Lynne Greenwald are active members of the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, a community near Subase Bangor that has been resisting Trident nuclear weapons since 1977.

The five were charged with trespass, felony damage to federal property, felony injury to property, and felony conspiracy to damage property. In their defense, the peace activists argued three points: the nuclear-tipped missiles at Bangor are weapons of mass destruction; the weapons are both illegal and immoral; and all citizens have the right and duty to try to stop international war crimes from being committed with those genocidal weapons.

Bangor is also home to the Strategic Weapons Facility, Pacific (SWFPAC) where nuclear warheads are stored ready for deployment. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, 2,364 nuclear warheads are based at Bangor — the largest single stockpile of nuclear warheads in the U.S. and more than the nuclear arsenals of Britain, China, France, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea combined.

The defendants admitted that they cut through the chain link fence surrounding the Navy base during the night of November 2, 2009. They then walked undetected for hours nearly four miles inside the base to the weapons storage facility. There they cut through two more barbed wire fences and went inside the top security area. They put up two large banners that said “Disarm Now Plowshares: Trident Illegal and Immoral” and prayed until they were arrested at dawn. Once arrested, the five were cuffed and hooded with sand bags because, the marine in charge testified, “When we secure prisoners anywhere in Iraq or Afghanistan we hood them..., so we did it to them.”

Federal prosecutors said the government would neither confirm nor deny the existence of nuclear weapons at the base, and argued that “whether there are nuclear weapons there or not is irrelevant.” The prosecutors successfully objected to and had excluded most of the defense evidence about the horrific effects of nuclear weapons, the illegality of nuclear weapons under U.S. treaty agreements and humanitarian law, and the right of citizens to try to stop war crimes by their government.

The jury heard testimony from peace activists who came from around the world to challenge the U.S. use of Trident nuclear weapons. Angie Zelter, an internationally known author and Trident Ploughshares activist from the U.K., testified about the resistance to Trident weapons in Europe. Stephen Leeper, chair of the Peace Culture Foundation in Hiroshima, testified that the defendants “have a tremendous amount of support in Hiroshima.” He was prohibited from testifying about the details of the death, destruction and genetic damage to civilians from the U.S. atomic bombing of the city.

Retired Capt. Thomas Rogers, who served 31 years in the U.S. Navy, including several years as commander of a nuclear submarine during the Cold War, testified about Trident: “Strategic nuclear weapons on submarines ... are kept on alert, deployed, and if ever used, they are released with a coded message ... and the commander of the ship shoots the missiles..., which, in my opinion, in my knowledge, is contrary to the law of armed conflict, which says a commander is responsible for ... following the rules and principles of humanitarian law, and for not indiscriminately hurting noncombatants and for not causing undue suffering or environmental damage. And that commanding officer is powerless [to question orders], and it’s an awful feeling.”

The peace activists represented themselves, with lawyers expert in nuclear weapons and humanitarian law as standby counsel. The jury deliberated for two days before reaching its verdict. Sentencing is scheduled for March 28. Each defendant faces a possible sentence up to ten years in prison.

Information from the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action. For more info, see: http://www.gzcenter.org/index.html

– PeaceMeal, Jan/February 2011

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Activists acquitted of damage to U.S. Echelon spy center

NEW ZEALAND - Three Christian activists belonging to Ploughshares Aotearoa were acquitted in March of unlawful entry and intentional damage at the U.S. Echelon spy base in Waihopai, New Zealand. In April 2008, Adrian Leason, Father Peter Murnane and Sam Land used bolt cutters to get through an electric security fence and used sickles to puncture the plastic dome covering one of two satellite dishes at the base. They intended to shut down operation of the base because it was their country’s largest contribution to aid the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, which has resulted in horrific war crimes, including more than one million dead Iraqi civilians, torture and permanent poisoning of parts of Iraq by the use of depleted uranium munitions.

Echelon is a U.S.-led global eavesdropping network run by the National Security Agency (NSA) that includes Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany and Japan as well as New Zealand. The network taps into major national and international communications networks and monitors billions of international and domestic communications.

The jury heard evidence from a former British Echelon intelligence analyst, Katherine Gun, who blew the whistle on secret Echelon spying operations in early 2003. She was then instructed by the NSA to spy on the diplomatic communications of United Nations Security Council members leading up to the U.S. invasion. The leaked memo from Frank Koza, head of regional targets at the NSA, requested the network to mount a “surge” of surveillance on Security Council members in an effort to undermine opposition and win approval of the Iraq war resolution. Charges against Gun for leaking the memo were eventually dropped.

“Evidence presented in the court confirmed that the ongoing war in Iraq is illegal, and causing massive human suffering,” Leason said. “As an outcome of this trial, we hope that New Zealanders will insist on an inquiry into the activities of the spy base and its links to U.S.-led illegal wars.”

Father Murnane said, “We did not try to avoid the consequences of our actions because we respect the rule of law, although we do believe we are ultimately accountable to a higher authority. We damaged property at the spy base in order to save victims of war and torture. It’s all about Jesus’ command for us to treat all people as our brothers and sisters.”

– compiled from Peace Movement Aotearoa (N.Z.), Scoop Independent News (N.Z.) and Ekklesia (U.K. think-tank)
PeaceMeal, March/April 2010

Olympia Port Resistance sues Army, police over infiltration

SEATTLE — Members of Olympia Port Mobilization Resistance — an activist group opposed to the Army’s use of civilian ports to ship Stryker vehicles from Fort Lewis, Washington to Iraq — are suing an Army intelligence analyst, as well as the city of Olympia and several of its police officials, claiming their organization was illegally infiltrated and that the information gathered was used to make wrongful arrests. In a lawsuit filed January 13 in U.S. District Court in Seattle, 13 people alleged John J. Towery, a civilian intelligence analyst at Fort Lewis, attended their meetings and demonstrations using a false identity and relayed information about them to law-enforcement authorities, such as Seattle’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. The group outed Towery last summer, after learning who he was through public disclosure requests filed with Olympia. They said he had been involved with the group since early 2007 and claimed he confessed when confronted.

“This is important because it’s one of the few times the military has actually been caught spying,” said Larry Hildes, the attorney who brought the case. “It has fundamentally chilled the climate for First Amendment activity in Olympia and Tacoma. It’s caused people to distrust each other, and it’s made it very difficult to organize peaceful demonstrations.”

Fort Lewis spokesman Joseph Piek has confirmed that Towery worked for the post’s Force Protection Division, and said that because of the sensitive work Towery does, it would not be appropriate for him to speak with reporters. Piek declined to comment on the lawsuit, which also names Towery’s boss, Thomas R. Rudd, and alleged that Towery acted on Rudd’s orders.

Several Olympia Police Department officials are accused of helping coordinate Towery’s infiltration and acting on information he provided. Hildes alleged that other police departments or sheriff's offices in the region also placed undercover officers at meetings or demonstrations. “At one point there were probably more people infiltrating Olympia PMR than were actually in it,” Hildes said.

The port protest group, one of several in the region, formed in 2006. Members sometimes engaged in civil disobedience by trying to block the shipments. They claim that because of the infiltration, police knew where they were going to protest in advance — sometimes arresting them before their civil disobedience even began. About 200 people were arrested over a two-week period in November 2007, but only about three dozen were ever charged.

The Reconstruction-era Posse Comitatus Act forbids the Army from performing law enforcement actions, such as making arrests, seizing property or searching people.

– edited from the Seattle Times, January 13, 2010
PeaceMeal. Jan/February 2010

karl_kabat.jpg (7341 bytes) Old warrior for peace pursues the same enemy

GREELEY, Colo. — It had been nearly 30 years since the Rev. Carl Kabat and a group of peace activists, including his fellow Catholic priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan, barged into a General Electric weapons plant outside Philadelphia. Known as the Plowshares Eight, they battered missile nose cones with hammers in an effort to disable some of the world’s most fearsome weapons, and sprinkled blood on classified documents to protest the Cold War, before they were arrested.

The Cold War ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago this November and the splintering of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Three of the Plowshares Eight, including Philip Berrigan, have died, and scores of other activists have turned their attention to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the terrorism suspects held at Guantánamo. Not Carl Kabat, though.

At 75, Father Kabat continues his crusade against nuclear weapons at missile silos across the United States, armed with a hammer and a pair of bolt cutters. He usually wears a clown suit, in homage, he says, to St. Paul’s words: “We are fools for Christ’s sake.” Though his actions are mostly symbolic — the authorities have always seized him before he could damage a live missile — he has spent half of the last three decades in state and federal prisons.

His most recent protest unfolded on a quiet dawn in August, when he drove down a country road a few hours north of Denver, used the bolt cutters to cut a hole in a chain-link fence, wedged his aging body through and stepped atop a Minuteman III nuclear missile silo. He had about 45 minutes to drape antiwar banners from the fence, say a prayer and try without success to open a hatch leading to the silo before he was arrested by Air Force security personnel.

“I thought, ‘What a beautiful place this is except for this damnable thing in the ground that could kill two or three million people,’” Father Kabat said later in an interview at the Weld County Jail, where he is being held on misdemeanor criminal mischief and trespassing charges. “It’s insane.” If convicted, he faces up to a year behind bars, a possibility that does not seem to faze him.

“You can’t just kill babies and children and old people indiscriminately,” he said. “It should be unreasonable for every human person to accept nuclear weapons.”

Raised on a farm in southern Illinois, Father Kabat served about a year and a half in prison for taking part in the 1980 Plowshares Eight protest, which became a touchstone of the antinuclear movement. Four years later, Father Kabat, his brother Paul and another man and a woman, armed with a jackhammer, broke into a missile silo in Missouri. Father Kabat served nearly 10 years in prison for that attack. Subsequent protests led to his spending more time in prison than out, raising questions about his effectiveness.

To Father Kabat, the nuclear weapons issue — and his protests — remain essential. The building of weapons continues to drain money that could be used to fight poverty and hunger, he says, adding, “There’s still a real threat these things could go to the U.S.S.R.”

Nearing his 76th birthday, Father Kabat muses that he now feels freer behind prison walls — where he spends time reading, reflecting and playing basketball — than he does outside them. On the outside, he says, he is overwhelmed by the sense of not doing enough. “When I die,” he said, I want my tombstone to read, ‘He really lived.’”

Recently, Father Kabat shuffled into a small county courtroom here, shackled to a line of other inmates. He has refused to post $5,000 bond or sign anything that could be interpreted as capitulation. Before his case could be presented, Father Kabat’s public defender and a prosecutor agreed to continue the hearing.

The priest smiled, nodded to a small group of supporters in the courtroom and was taken back to jail.

– edited from The New York Times, September 7, 2009
PeaceMeal, Sept/October 2009

Activist faith stays burning

by Jim Wallis

People often ask me, “Where have you found the strength to stay involved for so long?” or “How have you stuck with it and not burned out?” I’ve asked those questions of myself. But more often I’ve asked myself how I can make the most difference in the world. For me, the answer to both questions is the difference that faith makes. What do I mean by faith? I like the definition used by the biblical writer of Hebrews: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Simply put, faith makes hope possible. And hope is the single most important ingredient for changing the world.

Many people today would like to find some way to practice their faith or spirituality, despite the excesses, corruption, or narrow regulations of religion that have turned them away. I believe the making of the modern Christian, Jew, or Muslim will be through action.

When put into action, faith has the capacity to bring people together, to motivate, and to inspire, even across former dividing lines. We demonstrate our faith by putting it into practice and, conversely, if we don’t keep the power of faith in the actions we undertake, our efforts can easily lead to burnout, bitterness, and despair. The call to action can preserve the authenticity of faith, while the power of faith can save the integrity of our actions. As the biblical apostle James put it many years ago, “Faith without works is dead.” Indeed, faith shows itself in works. Faith works.

Jim Wallis, editor-in-chief of Sojourners magazine, has been an activist, preacher, and organizer for four decades. This is an excerpt from his book, “Faith Works: Lessons from the Life of an Activist Preacher,” which shows us how we can enrich our own lives by putting our beliefs to work in serving our communities.

– PeaceMeal, July/August 2008

Where have all the protesters gone?

By Andrew Rosenthal

This, perhaps, is the ultimate difference between the Vietnam generation and the Iraq generation: When you hear Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young sing of “four dead in Ohio,” their Kent State anthem, it’s hard to imagine anyone on today’s campuses willing to face armed troops. Is there anything they care about that much?

Student protesters helped drive Lyndon Johnson—in so many ways a powerful, progressive president—out of office because of his war. In 2004, George W. Bush—in so many ways a weak, regressive president—was re-elected despite his war. And the campuses were silent.

There was a brief burst of protest when America first invaded Iraq. But if there is a college movement against the war, it’s hiding pretty well. Vietnam never had the moral clarity that the 9/11 attacks provided to this generation’s war. But in Iraq that proved to be a false clarity, and a majority of Americans now say they oppose the war and no longer trust Mr. Bush’s leadership of it.

But because there is no draft, no young person has to fear being conscripted into the fight. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Americans find it much easier to stay silent when there is no shared sacrifice.

This war is also largely hidden from American eyes. Unlike Vietnam, when journalists were free to witness and record combat operations, the Pentagon controls access to American troops in Iraq and the images that come with it. The Pentagon banned press coverage of the flag-draped coffins returning home from Iraq. The president refused to attend the funerals of soldiers. Even the cost of this war was tucked from the very start into “supplemental bills” that magically don’t count toward the budget deficit.

The pressure to be silent is great. In August, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld compared critics of Mr. Bush’s Iraq policy to those who appeased Adolf Hitler. And antiwar protesters are told they’re un-American, cowardly, and lending aid and comfort to terrorists.

But in the 1960’s and 1970’s, antiwar protesters were told they were un-American, cowardly and lending aid and comfort to Communists. Then, the personal and national cost of war grew so great that public outrage drowned out this sort of propaganda.

Bloggers say there is an antiwar movement online. Perhaps, but it takes crowds to get America’s attention. Now, people find protesters vaguely embarrassing and don’t want to make too much noise. The noisy, annoying, unsubtle leaders of the anti-Vietnam protest lent courage to the rest of us to cut school and march in a few rallies.

– edited from The New York Times
PeaceMeal, May/June 2007

Cindy Sheehan resigns as war protest leader

Cindy Sheehan, the fallen soldier’s mother who galvanized an antiwar movement with her protest outside President Bush’s ranch in Texas, says she’s finished being the public face of the movement. “I’ve been wondering why I’m killing myself and wondering why the Democrats caved in to George Bush,” Sheehan said by phone May 29 while driving from her property in Crawford, Texas, to the airport. “I’m going home [to California] for awhile to try and be normal,” she said.

In what she described as a “resignation letter,” Sheehan wrote in her online diary on the “Daily Kos” blog: “Good-bye America ... you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it. It’s up to you now.”

Cindy Sheehan began a grassroots peace movement in August 2005 when she set up camp outside the Bush ranch, asking to talk with the President about the death of her son, Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, who was 24 when he was killed in an ambush in Baghdad. Sheehan started her protest small, but it quickly drew national attention. Over the following two years, she drew huge crowds as she spoke at protest events, but she also drew a great deal of criticism.

“I have endured a lot of smear and hatred since Casey was killed and especially since I became the so-called “Face” of the American antiwar movement,” Sheehan wrote in the diary. On Memorial Day, she came to some “heartbreaking conclusions. ... [W]hen I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the ‘left’ started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used,” she wrote. “I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of ‘right or left’, but ‘right and wrong,’” her diary says.

Sheehan said she had endured threats and put all her energy into stopping the war. What she found, she wrote, was a movement “that often puts personal egos above peace and human life.” But she said the most devastating conclusion she had reached was that “Casey did indeed die for nothing ... killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think.”

“Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives,” she wrote. “It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years and Casey paid the price for that allegiance. I failed my boy and that hurts the most.”

She said she was returning to California on Tuesday because it was Casey’s birthday. He would have been 28.

“We’ve accomplished as much here as we’re going to,” Sheehan said. “When we come back, it definitely won’t be with the peace movement with marches, with rallies, and with protests. It will be more humanitarian efforts.”

– edited from The Associated Press, 29 May 2007
PeaceMeal, May/June 2007

Anti-nuke clowns sent to prison

Three men who protested the presence of thermonuclear weapons in the soil of North Dakota farmland were sentenced to federal prison terms and ordered to pay $17,000 in restitution by a federal judge in Bismarck. Dressed as clowns, the three went to the Echo-9 launch site of a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile in rural North Dakota in June 2006. They broke the lock off the fence and put up peace banners and posters. One said: “Swords into plowshares - Spears into pruning hooks.” Calling their action the “Weapons of Mass Destruction Here Plowshares,” they hammered on the concrete lid of the missile silo, poured some of their own blood on the site and waited to be arrested.

During their jury trial, the men openly admitted trying to disarm the nuclear weapon. They pointed out that each one of the missiles was a devastating weapon of mass destruction designed to murder hundreds of thousands. Testimony by experts about the effects of nuclear weapons and their illegality under international law were excluded by the judge and never heard by the jury.

Dressed in faded, black-striped prison uniforms, the three appeared in federal court in November for sentencing. Fr. Carl Kabat, 73, a Catholic priest from St. Louis with a long history of active resistance to nuclear weapons, was sentenced to 15 months in prison. Fr. Kabat had already spent 16 years in prison for peace protests, more than six of them for a similar 1984 action at a Minuteman II missile silo in Missouri. Greg Boertje-Obed, 52, a former Navy officer living with his family in a Catholic Worker community in Duluth, Minnesota was given a 12 month sentence. Michael Walli, 58, another military veteran also with the Catholic Worker in Duluth, received 8 months.

Boertje-Obed appealed to the judge to consider the testimony of the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki about the horrific effects of the first rudimentary nuclear weapons on their communities, testimony the judge would not allow the jury to hear. The judge challenged Boertje-Obed’s decision to take actions that risked a year in prison instead of staying home with his family. After the sentencing was over, however, Greg’s wife, Michele Naar Obed, shook her head and said, “If Greg had left us for a year and risked his life to go to war to kill people, no one would question him. They would call him a hero! But because he risked time in jail to act out his convictions for peace, people question his commitment to his family. That is tragic!”

Michele Naar-Obed has also gone to prison repeatedly for various act of civil disobedience since January 1991, including hammering on and pouring her own blood down the missile-launching tubes of a $1.5 billion Trident nuclear submarine under construction.

There are 150 Minuteman III silos in North Dakota alone, with a total of 500 in a five-state area.. Each carries a thermonuclear warhead with an explosive yield of 300-475 kilotons of TNT — more than 20 times that of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs.

– edited from CommonDreams.org, 17 November 2006
PeaceMeal, Jan/February 2007

malachi_ritscher.jpg (22869 bytes) War protester chooses suicide

CHICAGO - Malachi Ritscher, a frequent anti-war protester, envisioned his death as one full of purpose. He carefully planned the details, mailed a copy of his apartment key to a friend, created to-do lists for his family, and even penned his obituary. At 6:30 a.m. on Nov. 3 — four days before the election caused a seismic shift in Washington politics — Ritscher stood by an off-ramp in downtown Chicago, set up a video camera, doused himself with gasoline and lit himself on fire. For the crush of morning commuters, his flaming body was supposed to be a call to the nation — a symbol of his rage against the U.S. war in Iraq.

“Here is the statement I want to make: If I am required to pay for your barbaric war, I choose not to live in your world. I refuse to finance the mass murder of innocent civilians, who did nothing to threaten our country,” he wrote in his suicide note. “... If one death can atone for anything, in any small way, to say to the world: I apologize for what we have done to you, I am ashamed for the mayhem and turmoil caused by my country.”

But no one was listening. It took five days for the Cook County medical examiner to identify the charred-beyond-recognition corpse. Meanwhile, Ritscher’s suicide went largely unnoticed. It wasn’t until a reporter for an alternative weekly, the Chicago Reader, pieced the facts together that word began to spread. Soon, tributes — and questions — poured into the paper’s blogs.

Was this a man consumed by mental illness? Or was Ritscher a martyr driven by rage over what he saw as an unjust war? Mental health experts say virtually no suicides occur without some kind of a diagnosable mental illness. But Ritscher’s family disagrees about whether he had severe mental problems.

In a statement, Ritscher’s parents and siblings called him an intellectually gifted man who suffered from bouts of depression. “He believed in his actions, however extreme they were,” his younger brother, Paul Ritscher, wrote online. “He believed they could help to open eyes, ears and hearts and to show everyone that a single man’s actions, by taking such extreme personal responsibility, can perhaps affect change in the world.”

Malachi Ritscher titled his obituary “Out of Time.” Friends, who seemed surprised about his death, found themselves searching for answers. Ritscher’s death became even more enigmatic than his life.

“This man killed himself in such a painful way, specifically to get our attention on these things,” said Jennifer Diaz, a 28-year-old graduate student who never met him but has been researching his life. Now, she is organizing protests and vigils in his name. “... I can’t sit by and let this go unheard.”

In the end, only Ritscher knew the motivations for his suicide. There is little doubt, though, that he was satisfied with his choice. “Without fear I go now to God,” Ritscher wrote in the last sentence of his suicide note. “Your future is what you will choose today.”

– edited from The Associated Press, 26 Nov. 2006
PeaceMeal, Nov/December 2006

al_mangan.jpg (6807 bytes) Al Mangan honored as peacemaker

Longtime Spokane peace activist, Al Mangan, was presented the 2006 Peacemaker award by Pax Christi of Spokane at a special meeting in March. Jody Dunn, secretary of the organization, described Al as “a man of integrity, peacefulness and outrage, trying to make the world peaceful. He has had a history of public service and defending democracy.”

Before coming to Spokane, Al reared eight children while he worked 30 years for the U.S. Postal Service in California. He got started as an activist there in the aftermath of the 1979 partial core meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. In 1981, Al spent a week in protest at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in San Luis Obispo. It was there that he was first arrested for civil disobedience.

Al retired from the post office in 1982 and moved to Spokane. In an interview with PeaceMeal, Al related that his first subsequent contact with an activist organization was with World Citizens for Peace, which was founded in 1982. He has been a friend and associate of WCPeace ever since.

Al has been arrested eight times for protests against the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons and waste, and the U.S. invasion of Iraq. His most memorable arrest at Hanford, along with ten other people, was the 1987 crossing of the Hanford security fence adjacent to the Vernita rest area on the Hanford highway. Details and photos of that action are included in the online history of WCPeace. (See: wcpeace.org, History, section on “The Hanford Family”)

Al’s experiences led him to study and become an educator on the U.S. Constitution and law. He has used that knowledge to defend himself in court when he has been tried for nonviolent civil disobedience. In prison, he said he has met and been nurtured by other protesters, including Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who precipitated a national uproar in 1971 when he publicly released the Pentagon Papers, the U.S. military’s account of activities during the Vietnam War.

Prior to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Al did a 40-day fast in front of the Federal Building in Spokane, holding a poster that said: “War is not healthy for children, animals or other living things.” In the summer of 2004, Al was again outside the Federal Building for a month, trying to educate people about the need to impeach President Bush.

“As a veteran of World War II and the Korean War, he has seen the ravages and horrors of war,” Jody Dunn commented.

On receiving the Peacemaker award, Al said: “I wish that the peace community in Spokane were thousands of people instead of hundreds.”

– edited from The Fig Tree, April 2006
PeaceMeal, July/August 2006

Iraq War veteran arrested at parade

Geoffrey Millard, 25, an Iraq War veteran who served on active combat duty for 13 months, was arrested in Washington DC on the Fourth of July when he tried to enter the Independence Day parade with a message of peace.

Millard walked into a break in the parade with a sign that read: “Support the Troops, Bring Them Home Now.” He was dressed in his military jacket with “Iraq Veterans Against the War” on the back and his many medals pinned to the front.

Veteran Millard was stopped by the police and was subsequently arrested when he tried again to enter the parade with his antiwar message. While trying to explain to the police that he simply wanted to march in the parade with his message, the crowd behind him chanted “He earned the right!” and “Let the vets in!”

“When I was in Iraq, I used to dream of going home, getting on with my life,” Millard said. “But I can’t be silent now,” he added, “knowing the horror of what is going on over there. It is my duty now to speak out against this immoral, illegal war. That’s why I felt it was my right and my duty to march in the Fourth of July parade.”

– Code Pink.org, 4 July 2006
PeaceMeal, July/August 2006

NSA mounted massive spy op on peace group

The National Security Agency has been spying on a Baltimore anti-war group and intended to deploy units trained to detect weapons of mass destruction, according to documents released during litigation. The Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore, a Quaker-linked peace group, has been monitored by the NSA, working with the Intelligence Unit of the Baltimore Police Dept. The Baltimore Pledge of Resistance is part of the national Iraq Pledge of Resistance, a group committed to nonviolent civil resistance to stop the war in Iraq. Members of the group are periodically arrested for peaceful protests.

The revelation that the peace group was spied upon comes in the wake of reports that the agency has also been eavesdropping on Americans’ international telephone calls and raises new questions about the legality of NSA activities.

The largest and most secret of U.S. intelligence agencies, the NSA has two principal functions: to protect U.S. government communications and to intercept foreign transmissions. However, the NSA’s Directive 18 strictly prohibits the interception or collection of information about “U.S. persons, entities, corporations or organizations” without explicit written permission from the Attorney General.

Documents turned over by the NSA indicate that the group was closely monitored. In one instance, the agency filed reports approximately every 15 minutes for six hours on the day of a demonstration in 2004. According to an NSA email, the agency collected license numbers, descriptions, and the number of people in each car and filed a report about them gathering in a church parking lot for the demonstration. A canine dog unit was used to search a minivan when it was stopped on the way to the demonstration; nothing was found. NSA officials even reported on the balloons being inflated for the demonstration and the content of their signs. On the day of the demonstration three protesters were cited for “disturbances on government property” and released. A federal judge eventually dismissed the case before trial.

A second document on the letterhead of the NSA Police and authored by NSA Police Major Michael E. Talbert is dated Oct. 3, 2004. It is an action plan for the “threat of a demonstration hosted by a group known as Pledge of Resistance - Baltimore.” They note the demonstration is part of the “Keep Space for Peace Week.” The NSA action plan includes plans for four days, but six activities planned by the NSA before the day of the demonstration were redacted.

Extensive plans are described for the day of the demonstration. The letter shows that the NSA planned to have their Weapons of Mass Destruction Rapid Response Team on site, an officer with a shotgun, an increase in the number of officers, mobile units monitoring the highway and parking lot, roving patrols on bicycles in various areas, four K9 handlers, agents to provide counter-surveillance, aerial observations by the local police, and photography/video surveillance of the activities.

“Shocking, appalling and unnecessary,” is how the Chair of the DC Chapter of the National Lawyer’s Guild Demonstration Support Committee, Mark Goldstone, described the NSA actions. “This surveillance is completely unrelated to even an expansive definition of “national security.’”

Goldstone says the impact of NSA surveillance is worrisome. “People should not be afraid to speak out,” he said, “and unfortunately evidence of domestic spying tends to chill people’s interest in speaking out — thus chilling and limiting our precious First Amendment rights. Nothing that the Pledge does, either by their public advocacy against the war or their non-violent civil disobedience/resistance to war can be plausibly seen as a threat to United States national security, as the group is pledged to non-violence and non-property destruction guidelines.”

David Rocah, a staff attorney with the Maryland ACLU, adds, “There is obviously a well-founded concern of law enforcement monitoring of First Amendment activities. The ACLU and others have exposed such activities all over the country resulting in law suits.”

For further info, see: www.iraqpledge.org and www.baltnvctr.org

– edited from a Jan. 10, 2006, article on rawstory.com by Kevin Zeese, director of Democracy Rising
and a candidate for the U.S. Senate in Maryland
PeaceMeal, Jan/February 2006

Japanese activists visit Hanford

Fifty-three peace activists from Japan — a delegation of the Japan Council Against A&H Bombs (Gensuikyo) — visited Richland and Hanford on April 27 & 28. They were one contingent of more than 800 Japanese who joined an international demonstration for the abolition of nuclear weapons in New York on May 1 — the day before the opening of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference at the United Nations. The demonstration in New York was led by the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Richland delegation, which included a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bombing and a second-generation hibakusha, visited the Hanford 300 Area on Wednesday, April 27, with WCPeace chairman Jim Stoffels as their guide. A private evening dinner meeting at the Richland Red Lion Hotel featured a program of speakers from the Japanese delegation and representatives of the Hanford “downwinders.” Jim gave a slide presentation on WCP’s peace and nuclear disarmament activism in the Hanford community.

On Thursday, April 28, the visitors took a jet-boat tour up the Columbia River to see the defunct Hanford plutonium production reactors, and then continued on their journey.

The Gensuikyo website is at: http://ww10.plala.or.jp/antiatom/html/e/e-index.htm

- PeaceMeal, May/June 2005

Inspiration Award

dick&nyla_award.jpg (11037 bytes) A special Inspiration Award has been presented to Dick and Nyla Brouns of Richland for "commitment and dedication to public witness for peace." It is the first such award ever made by World Citizens for Peace.

Dick and Nyla — an Army nurse during World War II — were honored for their faithful presence on the sidewalk next to Richland City Hall since our public opposition to the war in Iraq began in the fall of 2002. Through the cold of three winters and the heat of two summers, our octogenarian peacewalkers have been an inspiration to the rest of us who have shared the sidewalk, political discussions, and the toots and taunts of passing motorists with them.

The presentation was made at their residence by chairman Jim Stoffels and vice chairman Gene Weisskopf.

Congratulations, Dick And Nyla!

- PeaceMeal, March/April 2005

norb_drouhard_1988.jpg (38019 bytes)

In Memoriam: Norb Drouhard

Photo caption: Norb Drouhard in front of the Federal Building, Richland, Wash., August 9, 1988. (Tri-City Herald photo)

Norb Drouhard, aka "No More Nukes," 80, died peacefully in his sleep during the night of April 5, 2005, at the Catholic Worker House in Las Vegas, Nevada. Norb is survived by five children and nine grandchildren.

Following service in the U.S. Army during World War II, Norb farmed for most of his adult life in Kansas and the Columbia Basin of Washington State. After his retirement from farming, Norb became an activist protesting plutonium production at the Hanford Nuclear Site during the Nuclear Freeze campaign of the early 1980s. He later began a nomadic life of peace and social justice activism that took him to various parts of the United States and the world.

Norb took part in protests at the Nevada Test Site, the School of Americas (Fort Benning, Georgia), and other important sites in the military-industrial complex. He participated in major transcontinental peace walks in the United States and transnational walks in Europe — including several in the former Soviet Union, where he lived during the mid-1990s.

No matter where he went, Norb's friendly outspoken manner, button-bedecked attire, and folksy hand-lettered protest signs often caught the attention of the news media. He was a colorful, caring, and committed crusader for peace, with a strong sense of morality and social justice. His death is a loss to the peace movement that will be felt most acutely by those of us who respected and loved him.

~ Jim Stoffels, chairman
PeaceMeal, March/April 2005