Military police have again arrested nuclear abolitionists vigiling along a public highway outside the main gate of Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, where missiles to launch nuclear war are tested. California Highway 1 passes through the base, with the main gate actually in the interior of the sprawling installation along the coast north of Santa Barbara.
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REFLECTION FROM THE ATLANTIC LIFE COMMUNITY RETREAT
by Martha Hennessy
Earlier this fall the Atlantic Life Community held a Labor Day weekend retreat at the Romero Center of St. Joseph’s Parish in Camden, New Jersey. Camden, scorned among many other great, fallen American cities, struggles to regain it’s dignity and right means of livelihood after moving from a war economy of the shipyards in the 1960s to very little economic opportunity today. The state has taken over failed school systems and local government from the people here. Yet we were heartened by the attempts of both St. Joseph’s and Sacred Heart parishes in the rebuilding and reclaiming of their neighborhoods.
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Art Laffin, Bill Frankel-Streit, Chrissy Nesbitt and Nancy Gowan went to court on October 22 for their August 6 arrest at the Pentagon. The following report is from Art Laffin.
Dear Friends,
Thank you so much for your prayers as we once again went before the court to proclaim the Gospel of Nonviolence. Bill and I were prosecuted, while Chrissy and Nancy had there charges dropped due to no previous convictions for Pentagon protests.
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Seven nuclear abolitionists, arrested for trespass last August as they sat in front of the locked gate of a plutonium processing facility at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), will plead their case to a jury picked from residents of Los Alamos, New Mexico, where The Bomb was born.
At a pretrial hearing October 21 in Los Alamos Magistrates Court, Magistrate Pat Casados set a trial date of Tuesday, February 8, 2011 for seven of the eight people arrested last August 6, the 65th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. Defendant Elias Kohn, a student at the University of Southern California, pled no contest and was sentenced to 60 days probation and fined $500.
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Felice Cohen-Joppa. Photo by Joshua McElwee, Staff Writer for the National Catholic Reporter
Published by CommonDreams.org
by Felice Cohen-Joppa
The judge found me guilty. Even after I’d testified under oath that I had committed no crime when standing in front of a bulldozer in a muddy soybean field being cleared for the new Kansas City Plant, arm in arm with 13 others. On August 16, we had tried to stop preparation of the site for the first U.S. nuclear weapons plant to be built in 32 years. That’s what brought us to Judge LaBella’s Kansas City courtroom on October 7.
Many people I’ve talked to in the past year are not aware that while President Obama talks about the importance of nuclear disarmament, he and his administration are planning to replace and rebuild the nation’s entire industrial capacity for nuclear weapons production
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Joan Staples, Director of the Tahoma Indian Center, blesses the five Disarm Now Plowshares before their arraignment. Photo by Leonard Eiger.
Five nuclear abolitionists who entered the U.S. Navy’s nuclear weapons storage depot in Washington State in November 2009 were arraigned Friday, October 8 in federal court in Tacoma, Washington.
Sr. Anne Montgomery, 83, of Redwood City, California; Fr. Bill “Bix” Bichsel, 82, of Tacoma, Washington; Susan Crane, 65, of Baltimore, Maryland; Lynne M. Greenwald, 61, of Tacoma, Washington; and Fr. Steve Kelly, 61, of Oakland, California, were each approved to represent themselves at trial on December 7, 2010. They face up to ten years in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted on the government’s charges of “conspiracy, trespass, destruction of property on a naval installation, and depredation of government property.” The charges were handed down by a grand jury in early September 2010, ten months after their November 2009 Plowshares action. For more information, visit disarmnowplowshares.wordpress.com
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Frank Cordaro (Left) and Ed Bloomer are hustled out of a city council meeting. Photo by Allison Long/Kansas City Star
Fourteen people who blocked heavy machinery clearing the site for construction of a new nuclear weapons factory in Kansas City, Missouri, were convicted and sentenced to fines and community service.
Two of the defendants then disrupted a Kansas City council meeting, unfurling a banner and calling on the city to stop its investment in building for nuclear war. Frank Cordaro and Ed Bloomer were jailed overnight, then sentenced to time served.
The following reports are from the Kansas City Star , National Catholic Reporter and Jane Stoever of PeaceWorks, Kansas City and the Kansas City Peace Planters.
Creech 14 before court (Mariah Klusmire not in photo)
Published on Wednesday, September 15, 2010 by Las Vegas CityLife
http://blogs.lasvegascitylife.com/cityblog/2010/09/14/vegas-drone-trial-makes-history/
by Jason Whited
Fourteen anti-war activists may have made history today in a Las Vegas courtroom when they turned a misdemeanor trespassing trial into a possible referendum on America’s newfound taste for remote-controlled warfare.
The so-called Creech 14, a group of peace activists from across the country, went on trial this morning for allegedly trespassing onto Creech Air Force Base in April 2009.
From the start of today’s trial, prosecutors did their best to keep the focus on whether the activists were guilty of allegations they illegally entered the base and refused to leave as a way to protest the base’s role as the little-known headquarters for U.S. military operations involving unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, over Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.
But a funny thing happened on the way to prosecutors’ hope for a quick decision.
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Photo by Joshua McElwee, Staff Writer for the National Catholic Reporter
From Frank Cordaro:
Eight peace activists were arrested on September 8 at the “Plant Peace, Not Nukes! – Groundbreaking for Works of Mercy, Not Works of War” held at the entrance of the planned site for the new nuclear weapons parts plant in Kansas City, Missouri. It was an alternative ground breaking ceremony to the billion-dollar replacement for the Honeywell nuclear weapon parts plant that was taking place at the same time, with local and national officials touting the new plant’s local economic and national strategic importance to 500 guests. The eight peace activists broke off from the larger group of 70 “Peace Planters”* and stood or knelt in front of three large VIP buses trying to come onto the site and attend the official ground breaking ceremony.
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ARRAIGNMENT NOW SCHEDULED FOR OCTOBER 8
A federal grand jury finally handed down a litany of indictments against five nuclear resisters who entered the U.S. Navy’s West Coast nuclear weapons storage depot in a plowshares action on November 2, 2009.
On September 3, 2010 the United States Attorney announced the indictments handed down by a grand jury in Tacoma, Washington, against members of Disarm Now Plowshares, which came ten months after their plowshares action in which they entered Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor in the early morning hours of November 2, 2009, All Souls Day, with the intention of calling attention to the illegality and immorality of the existence of the Trident weapons system.
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