Archive for the 'Inside Line' Category

Kim Young-Jae was arrested on April 12 while standing in front of a truck, on the road leading into the site of a naval base under construction on Jeju Island, South Korea.  Two days later, he was issued a warrant and taken to jail.  Here are translated excerpts from a letter he wrote on April 25.  

I guess that many people were embarrassed by my arrest and imprisonment. However I am fine, different from your concern about me.

It is because I have been preparing for this, expecting my imprisonment long time ago.

A tree seen on the way to the meeting room of the Jeju Prison

 from Save Jeju Now

UPDATE ON YANG YOON-MO ON HIS 68TH DAY IN PRISON

Yang Yoon-Mo hit his 68^th prison day on Monday, April 8. On April 10, he will hit his 70^th prison day.

On a sunny Monday, the way to the meeting room of the Jeju prison was filled with green trees and magnolia.

Yang Yoon-Mo was still in patient cloth. Though still thin, he looked bright. His hairs were cut in tidy fashion.  The international team member could not tell him that a clash began in front of the construction sites from the early morning of the day because she worried about his heath that is still in recovering process.

Dear Friends,

Greetings from the Federal Prison Camp in Yankton, South Dakota! As of this writing, I am two months into a six month sentence imposed due to my protest of war crimes committed by remote control from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri against the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Greg Boertje-Obed at a November 2011 protest at the construction site of the new Kansas City nuclear weapons parts plant

(published in issue #167 of the Nuclear Resister newsletter)

~from Blount County

The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.
By the Lord has this been done; it is wonderful in our eyes.  
– Psalm 118.22-23

When Megan, Michael and I were preparing for the witness that became the Transform Now Plowshares, we discussed this passage and were struck by how it might apply to the action we were considering. We learned of government and corporate plans to build a new factory for making “modernized” nuclear weapons, called the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF). Peace activists called for a campaign to halt the plans for this $7.5 billion death factory whose projected costs kept increasing. We knew that many of our international treaties committed us to stop building nuclear weapons and to reduce to zero our weapons of mass destruction.

We Must Raise The Level Of Our Resistance

Excerpted from Lynne Stewart’s letter to the United National Anti-war Coalition (UNAC) conference that took place March 23-25, 2012 in Stamford, Connecticut.

Too many wars, too much death and destruction on both sides…

And our ever-present legacy of these wars? Go down to your local “shelter for the homeless” or state prison and count the veterans… Watch any sport on TV and the ads that sell the glamorous, patriotic life of the military are the best that big money can produce. It attracts, as it is meant to do, the kids this government means to “throw away” in the projects of the big cities, on the farms that can no longer compete, in mines of Appalachia, in the immigrant communities. And these sons and daughters of “someone else” die; they are maimed; they are driven mad, in faraway places where people hate them and the flag they operate under. And then they come home to haunt us.