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January 2, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Kings Bay Plowshares Sentences: 10 to 33 Months

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2020-2021

The Kings Bay Plowshares 7 got inside the world’s largest nuclear submarine base—Naval Station Kings Bay, in Georgia—and poured blood, painted messages, hung banners, and damaged several objects there including nuclear weapons sculptures that the seven condemned as “false idols.” The reference is to the Old Testament declaration that “those who worship inanimate idols will be like them, unseeing, unfeeling, unable to hear the truth.” The seven chose April 4, 2018, for their radical action, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In October 2019, the seven were convicted in federal court of felony sabotage and damage to property.

In June, defendant Elizabeth McAlister, 81, of New London, Connecticut, and a founder of both Jonah House in Baltimore and the Plowshares Movement, was sentenced by US District Judge Lisa Godbey Wood to time served after spending more than 17 months in jail awaiting trial. Liz was also sentenced to three years of probation, and ordered to pay $33,501 restitution to be shared jointly with the six other defendants.

On November 12, via video conference, Carmen Trotta, 58, of the New York City Catholic Worker was sentenced to 14 months in prison, and Clare Grady, 62, was sentenced to one year and one day in prison. The additional day means Clare will be eligible for time off for good behavior while in prison. Carmen and Clare were also ordered to serve three years of probation, and to “jointly and singly” pay restitution of $33,501.

On November 13, Martha Hennessy, 62, also of the New York City Catholic Worker, was sentenced to 10 months incarceration, three years probation, and restitution.

Fr. Steve Kelly, 71, a Catholic priest from California, has been incarcerated in Georgia jails ever since the action (32 months) for refusing to accept the conditions demanded for pre-trial release. Steve was sentenced October 15 by the same judge who gave him 33 months in prison, three years probation, and restitution. With the time he’s already served, and with credit for “good time,” Steve would normally be released. However, he faces additional prison for an alleged probation violation stemming from protests at the Bangor Trident sub base in Washington State. He will likely be transferred from Georgia to Washington State to face the judge there.

On October 16, Patrick O’Neill, 64, a Catholic Worker from Garner, North Carolina, was sentenced to 14 months in prison, restitution, and three years of probation. Independently of the others, Patrick, the father of six children, has appealed the sentence.

Sentencing for the 7th defendant, Mark Colville, 59, a Catholic Worker from New Haven, Connecticut, is scheduled for December 18. Mark has refused to travel to Georgia because of the coronavirus and has insisted on his constitutional right to be sentenced in person before the court.

All seven defendants delivered personal sentencing statements to the court, and we share that of Fr. Steve Kelly, below.

—For complete coverage of the action, trial, and sentencing hearings see: kingsbayplowshares7.org; and/or nukeresister.org. Both contributed to this update.

Filed Under: Direct Action, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Weapons, Quarterly Newsletter

January 2, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Not Guilty Verdicts for Irish Peace Activists

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2020-2021

In Dublin Circuit Court on October 23, a jury of 12 Irish citizens acquitted Colm Roddy and Dave Donnellan of four-year-old charges of criminal damage at Shannon Airport. The trial was presided over by Judge Karen O’Connor.

Nonviolence, bronze by Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd “What an act of faith and hope! How brave it is to believe that in today’s world, reasoned, nonviolent protest will register, will matter.” —Arundhati Roy, War Talk

The anti-war activists entered the airport in northeast Ireland early on May 25, 2016, to investigate US military aircraft being refueled on their way to and from US wars in the Middle East. There were two US air force aircraft inside the airport at the time of the action—an 8-passenger Learjet C-21A used to fly air force commanders, air force academy heads, federal officials, members of Congress, and other high-ranking officers, and a Boeing C-32B airline-size plane used by US special forces and the CIA.

Colm and Dave were charged with causing criminal damage to a fence at the airport, and damage to the runway by writing on it. The government claimed that the cost of the repairs was €3,500 ($4,153).

Speaking after the trial, Colm Roddy said, “Our peaceful nonviolent actions in May 2016 were undertaken to highlight Irish complicity and participation in US wars in the Middle East that have caused the deaths of millions of people … including the deaths of up to 1 million children since the Gulf War in 1991.” Dave Donnellan said, “As Irish citizens we felt compelled as a matter of conscience to highlight Irish government complicity in war crimes, and it is a matter of deep regret to us that this complicity is still ongoing—almost daily since 2001.”

The successful defense case was based on the argument that the two had a “lawful excuse” for their actions. In previous trials resulting from similar peace actions taken by five Catholic Workers, Deirdre Clancy, Nuin Dunlop, Karen Fallon, Damien Moran, and Ciaran O’Reilly in 2003, a jury also acquitted the five defendants; and also in 2003 the Court of Criminal Appeal overturned the conviction of Mary Kelly for damaging a US navy aircraft.

—Ed Horgan for Ireland Veterans for Peace; and The Nuclear Resister, Oct. 26, 2020

Filed Under: Direct Action, Newsletter Archives, Quarterly Newsletter

October 11, 2020 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nuclear Free Future Awards

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2020
Jack and Felice Cohen-Joppa, above, in St. Mary’s, Georgia where they reported on the trial of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7.

This year’s winners of the international Nuclear Free Future Award include our friends and colleagues Felice and Jack Cohen-Joppa, editors of the Nuclear Resister. The editors were honored in part because, “Over the past 40 years, the Nuclear Resister has chronicled more than 100,000 anti-nuclear and anti-war arrests around the world, while encouraging support for more than 1,000 jailed activists.”

The Nuclear Free Future Foundation, in Munich, Germany, established the award to “honor the largely unsung heroes of the worldwide anti-nuclear movement for the work they do to end both the military and civilian use of nuclear energy.”

Congratulations!

Filed Under: Direct Action, Newsletter Archives, On The Bright Side, Quarterly Newsletter, Uncategorized

October 11, 2020 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Germany: US Nuclear Weapons Shamed in Broad Nationwide Debate

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2020
By John LaForge

“We need a broad public debate … about the sense and nonsense of nuclear deterrence.”  —Social Democratic Party Leader Rolf Mützenich

 Public criticism of the U.S. nuclear weapons deployed in Germany bloomed into a vigorous nationwide debate this past spring and summer focused on the controversial scheme known diplomatically as “nuclear sharing” or “nuclear participation.”

“The end of this nuclear participation is currently being discussed as intensely as was, not so long ago, the exit from nuclear power,” wrote Roland Hipp, a managing director of Greenpeace Germany, in a June article for Welt.

 The 20 US nuclear bombs that are stationed at Germany’s Büchel Air Base have become so unpopular, that mainstream politicians and religious leaders have joined anti-war organizations in demanding their ouster and have promised to make the weapons a campaign issue in next year’s national elections.

Today’s public debate in Germany may have been prompted by Belgium’s Parliament, which in January came close to expelling the US weapons stationed at its Kleine Brogel airbase. By a vote of 74 to 66, the members barely defeated a measure that directed the government “to draw up, as soon as possible, a roadmap aiming at the withdrawal of nuclear weapons on Belgian territory.” The debate came after the parliament’s foreign affairs committee adopted a motion calling for the weapons’ removal from Belgium, and for Belgium’s ratification of the new International Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Belgium’s lawmakers were forced to reconsider the government’s “nuclear sharing,” when in February 2019 three members of the European Parliament were arrested on Belgium’s Kleine Brogel base, after they boldly scaled a fence and carried a banner directly onto the runway (“Europe Free of Nuclear Weapons”).

Back in Germany, Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer raised an uproar April 19 after a report in Der Spiegel said she had emailed Pentagon boss Mark Esper saying that Germany planned to buy 45 Boeing Corporation F-18 Super Hornets. Her comments brought howls from the Bundestag and the minister walked back her claim, telling reporters April 22, “No decision has been taken (on which planes will be chosen) and, in any case, the ministry can’t take that decision—only parliament can.”

Nine days later, in an interview with daily Tagesspiegel published May 3, Rolf Mützenich, Germany’s parliamentary leader of the Social Democratic Party’s (SPD)—a member of Angela Merkel’s governing coalition—made a clear denunciation.

“Nuclear weapons on German territory do not heighten our security, just the opposite,” they undermine it, and should be removed, Mützenich said, adding that he was opposed to both “prolonging nuclear participation” and to “replacing the tactical US nuclear weapons stored in Büchel with new nuclear warheads.”

Mützenich’s mention of “new” warheads is a reference to US  construction of hundreds of the new, first-ever “guided” nuclear bombs—the” B61-12s”—set to be delivered to five NATO states in the coming years, replacing the B61-3s, -4s, and -11s reportedly stationed in Europe now.

The SPD’s co-president Norbert Walter-Borjähn quickly endorsed Mützenich’s statement, agreeing that the US bombs should be withdrawn.

Mützenich and Walter-Borjahn were immediately criticized by Foreign Minister Heiko Mass, by US diplomats in Europe, and by NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

Anticipating the backlash, Mützenich published a detailed defense of his position May 7 in the Journal for International Politics and Society, where he called for a “debate about the future of nuclear sharing and the question of whether the US tactical nuclear weapons stationed in Germany and Europe increase the level of safety for Germany and Europe, or whether they have perhaps become obsolete now from a military and security policy perspective.”

“We need a broad public debate … about the sense and nonsense of nuclear deterrence,” Mützenich wrote.

Commemorating the 75th anniversary of US atomic attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Greenpeace Germany inflated its message balloon near the Büchel Air Force Base, whose jetfighter runway control tower is in the background in this Greenpeace photo.

NATO’s Stoltenberg hastily penned a rebuttal for the May 11 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, using 50-year-old yarns about “Russian aggression” and claiming that nuclear sharing means “allies, like Germany, make joint decisions on nuclear policy and planning …, and “give[s] allies a voice on nuclear matters that they would not otherwise have.”

This is flatly untrue, as Mützenich made clear in his paper, calling it a “fiction” that the Pentagon nuclear strategy is influenced by US allies. “There is no influence or even a say by non-nuclear powers on the nuclear strategy or even the possible uses of nuclear [weapons]. This is nothing more than a long-held pious wish,” he wrote.

Most of the attacks on the SPF leader sounded like the one May 14 from then US Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, whose op/ed in De Welt urged Germany to keep the US “deterrent” and claimed that withdrawing the bombs would be a “betrayal” of Berlin’s NATO commitments.

Then US Ambassador to Poland Georgette Mosbacher went round the bend with a May 15 Twitter post, writing that “if Germany wants to reduce its nuclear sharing potential …, maybe Poland, which honestly fulfills its obligations … could use this potential at home.”

Mosbacher’s suggestion was broadly ridiculed as preposterous because the Nonproliferation Treaty forbids such nuclear weapons transfers, and because stationing US nuclear bombs on the Russia border would be an dangerously destabilizing provocation.

On May 30, the National Security Archive in Washington, DC, confirmed Mützenich’s position and put the lie to Stoltenberg’s disinformation, releasing a formerly “top secret” State Department memo affirming  that the US will alone decide whether to use its nuclear weapons based in Holland, Germany, Italy, Turkey and Belgium.

Moral and ethical shaming of the nuclear weapons in Buchel has recently come from high-ranking church leaders. In the deeply religious Rhineland-Pfalz region of the airbase, bishops have begun demanding that the bombs be withdrawn. Catholic Bishop Stephan Ackermann from Trier spoke out for nuclear abolition near the base in 2017; the Peace Appointee of the Lutheran Church of Germany, Renke Brahms, spoke to a large protest gathering there in 2018; Lutheran Bishop Margot Kassmann addressed the annual church peace rally there in July 2019; and this August 6, Catholic Bishop Peter Kohlgraf, who heads the German faction of Pax Christi, promoted nuclear disarmament in the nearby city of Mainz.

More fuel kindled the high-profile nuclear discussion with the June 20 publication of an Open Letter to the German fighter pilots at Büchel, signed by 127 individuals and 18 organizations, calling on them to “terminate direct involvement” in their nuclear war training, and reminding them that “Illegal orders may neither be given nor obeyed.”

The “Appeal to the Tornado pilots of Tactical Air Force Wing 33 at the Büchel nuclear bomb site to refuse to participate in nuclear sharing” covered over half a page of the regional newspaper Rhein-Zeitung, based in Koblenz.

The Appeal had earlier been sent to Colonel Thomas Schneider, commander of the pilots’ Tactical Air Force Wing 33 at Büchel air base, and is based on binding international treaties that forbid military planning of mass destruction.

The Appeal urged the pilots to refuse unlawful orders and stand down: “[T]he use of nuclear weapons is illegal under international law and the constitution. This also makes the holding of nuclear bombs and all supporting preparations for their possible deployment illegal. Illegal orders may neither be given nor obeyed. We appeal to you to declare to your superiors that you no longer wish to participate in supporting nuclear sharing for reasons of conscience.”

In February 2019, Members of the European Parliament and others from the Green Parties in Italy, the UK and Belgium boldly scaled a 7-foot fence around the Kleine Brogel air base in Belgium, and carried their banner directly onto the runway used by Belgian pilots in rehearsals for using the US nuclear weapons stored there.

Roland Hipp, a co-director of Greenpeace Germany, in “How Germany makes itself the target of a nuclear attack” published in Welt June 26, noted that going non-nuclear is the rule not the exception in NATO. “There are already [25 of the 30] countries within NATO that have no US nuclear weapons and do not join in nuclear participation,” Hipp wrote.

In July, the debate over the US bombs focused on the colossal financial expense of replacing the German Tornado jet fighters in a time of urgent global crises.

Dr. Angelika Claussen, a psychiatrist a vice president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, wrote in a July 6 posting that “[A] significant military build-up in times of the coronavirus pandemic is perceived as a scandal by the German public … Buying 45 nuclear F-18 bombers means spending [about] 7.5 billion Euro. For this amount of money one could pay 25,000 doctors and 60,000 nurses a year, 100,000 intensive care beds and 30,000 ventilators.”

 Dr. Claussen’s figures were substantiated a July 29 report by Otfried Nassauer and Ulrich Scholz, military analysts with the Berlin Information Center for Transatlantic Security. The two found the cost of 45 F-18 fighter jets from the US manufacturer Boeing Corp. could be “at a minimum” between 7.67 and 8.77 billion euros, or from $9.1 billion to $10.4 billion, about $222 million each.

Germany’s potential $10 billion payout to US weapons giant Boeing for F-18s is a cherry that the war profiteer dearly wants to pick. Germany’s Defense Minister Kramp-Karrenbauer has said her government also intends to buy 93 Eurofighters, made by the France-based giant Airbus, at the comparably bargain rate of $9.85 billion—$111 million each¾all to replace the Tornadoes by 2030.

SPD leader Mützenich has publicly promised to make the “sharing” of US nuclear weapons a 2021 national election issue. The Suddeutsche Zeitung reported Aug. 12 that he said, “I am firmly convinced that if we ask this question for the election program, the answer is relatively obvious. … we will continue this issue next year.”

Filed Under: Direct Action, Military Spending, Newsletter Archives, Quarterly Newsletter, US Bombs Out of Germany, War

August 1, 2020 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

First US Citizen Convicted for Protests at Nuclear Weapons Base in Germany

L to R: Dennis DuVall, Chris Danowski, and Susan van der Hijden, before their trial in Cochem District Court in Germany. Photo by Marion Küpker.
By John LaForge
Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2020

COCHEM, Germany — A US Air Force veteran of the US war in Vietnam and two other nuclear weapons protesters were found guilty of trespassing and damage to property in Cochem District Court May 11, 2020, as a result of July 2018 protest action at Germany’s Büchel Air Force Base, where the United States positions 20 of its nuclear bombs and where German pilots train to use them in possible attacks against Russia.

Dennis DuVall, 78, a long-time member of Veterans for Peace from Arizona and now living in Dresden, Germany, became the first US citizen prosecuted in Germany for civil resistance against the threatened use of the US nuclear weapons. (US Catholic Priest Carl Kabat was thrown out of Germany for a disarmament action against US Pershing missiles deployed there in the 1980s.)

There have been repeated arrests and detentions of US citizens during protests at the Büchel base since 2017, but no charges have been brought to trial until now. Also convicted by Cochem District Court Judge Andre Zimmermann were Susan van der Hijden, 51, from Amsterdam’s Catholic Worker House in The Netherlands, and Chris Danowski, 50, from Dortmund, Germany, a founder of the Hamburg Catholic Worker. The judge sentenced all three to fines equivalent to 30 times their daily income plus court costs. The fines ranged from 150 to 900 Euros ($165 to $990). Refusing to pay could see the defendants jailed for up to 30 days.

The three were among 18 war resisters — seven from the US, six from Germany, four from The Netherlands, and one from England — that gained entry to the base in five groups and in broad daylight on Sunday, July 15, 2018, after cutting five separate holes through its perimeter fence. Three others among the 18 were convicted of similar charges in January, and three are scheduled for trial in June.

In his defense, DuVall read a detailed statement which was in turn read to the judge by an interpreter. DuVall focused on international treaty law that forbids any planning and preparation of mass destruction. In particular, DuVall reminded the court that the Nuremberg Charter and Principles have established individual responsibility for violations of laws of war. “Planning for nuclear war at Büchel AFB is a criminal conspiracy violating international law and the Nuremberg Principles,” he said. DuVall also said in part, “While weapons of mass murder have found their way into the arsenals of nine nations, international law has not found its way into the courtroom.” And in a rebuke of the court’s silence on the question of unlawful war planning going on within Judge Zimmermann’s jurisdiction, DuVall said, “At the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Auschwitz survivor Batsheva Dagan could also have been thinking about Büchel when she asked, ‘Where was the world [which] did nothing?’ ”

DuVall, van der Hijden and Danowski all admitted going into the base, but said that the stationing of US nuclear weapons there was illegal under US, German, and international law, making their action one of crime prevention. In her testimony, Susan van der Hijden asked the court, “Are fences more important than human lives?”

The court found the three guilty of the charges based solely on allegations made by the state prosecutor, without the use of a single witness. The procedure surprised defendants and observers from countries where charging documents are not considered evidence. In explaining his verdicts and the penalties, Judge Zimmermann drew guffaws from the gallery by twice comparing fencing around nuclear weapons to a fence around a garden where, he said, no one would like to have a hole cut. After trial, peace activist Hops Hossbach, of Greifenstein, Germany, noticed Judge Zimmermann in his open courthouse office and walked in to lambast the comparison. “It’s not the fence which is at issue,” Hossbach told the judge, “it’s what’s going on behind the fence.”

The 2018 protest was just one among dozens in a years-long campaign of nonviolent resistance against the 20 US “B61-3” and “B61-4” nuclear bombs stationed at Büchel. Pilots from Germany’s 33rd Tactical Air Force Squadron or Wing at Büchel routinely train in German Tornado jet fighters to detonate the US H-bombs against areas in Russia — in the event they are ordered to do so by a US president. The German base is also home to the US Air Force’s 702 Munitions Support Squadron, which maintains the 20 Cold War-era “dumb” nuclear bombs it calls a “Protection Level 1 Resource.” The US H-bombs are reportedly set to be replaced in the coming years in spite of massive public opposition in Germany and in violation of the 1970 Treaty on Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

Filed Under: B61 Bombs in Europe, Direct Action, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Weapons, Quarterly Newsletter, US Bombs Out of Germany

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