The Nuclear Resister

Photo by Ellen Grady

On the morning of Monday, September 21, members of the grassroots human rights coalition, Upstate Drone Action to Ground the Drones and End the Wars, were arrested for closing the main gate of Hancock Airfield to call a halt to the U.S. weaponized drone program operated out of Hancock by the 174th Attack Wing of the New York Air National Guard. Hancock, in Dewitt, New York, is home to the “hunter/killer” (the Pentagon’s phrase) MQ9 Reaper drone. The theme of today’s event was: Drones Kill Children.

Those arrested include Dan Bergavin and James Ricks of Ithaca and Ed Kinane, Bonny Mahoney and Julienne Oldfield of Syracuse, who held signs reading “Drones Kill Children” behind wooden figures of drone victims, including dead and dying children.

Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu was arrested on September 10 because Israeli police, at the direction of the Shin Bet, claim his recent Channel 2 interview violates the terms of his release from prison (he was released in 2004 with strict conditions after serving his entire 18 year sentence). But government censors had approved the Channel 2 interview before it aired! After several hours of interrogation by police, he was released to 7 days of house arrest.

from the Jerusalem Post

Vanunu tells Channel 2: Israel’s nuclear program a danger to the world

Mordechai Vanunu, the former technician at the Dimona nuclear plant who was imprisoned for 18 years for divulging secrets related to Israel’s purported nuclear weapons program, gave his first interview to the Hebrew-language Israeli press on Friday.

Vanunu told Channel 2 that his decision to photograph sensitive nuclear facilities at Dimona, revealing information that Israel had kept secret until that point, was motivated by his desire to “inform the citizens of the Middle East, the world, and the state of Israel.”

Thanks to Leonard Eiger for sending these articles.

The following articles articulate the rich history of nonviolent resistance that took root in the Pacific Northwest beginning in the 1970s. The first two articles are by Matt Dundas, and were originally published in the Antiwar and Radical History Project-Pacific Northwest, based at the University of Washington, Seattle (http://depts.washington.edu/antiwar/nukes_dundas1.shtml). The other articles are by Terry Messman, and were published in Street Spirit, a publication of the American Friends Service Committee, San Francisco Bay Area (thestreetspirit.org). All articles were recently published together at the Satyagraha Foundation for Nonviolence Studies (satyagrahafoundation.org/). Here is a link to an additional article by Brian Casserly, “Confronting the U.S. Navy at Bangor, 1973-1982,” also published in the Antiwar and Radical History Project (http://depts.washington.edu/antiwar/nukes_casserly.shtml).

The following text is excerpted and expanded from a workshop led by Frank Cordaro for 30 U.S. federal judges as part of the Eighth Circuit Judicial Conference in Omaha, Nebraska in August of 2014.

I’d like to start of with two words that connect you with me: Scribes and Pharisees.

I was a Catholic priest for nineteen years. I consider the scriptures my point of reference for understanding what’s real and what’s not in the world we live in.

There are a lot of things we can say about Jesus but one of the things people don’t often say is there were some people Jesus really didn’t have a lot of good things to say about – the Scribes and the Pharisees of his day.