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Plowshares Please

Several people requested we post this song, performed at the most recent Festival of Hope. Lyrics are by Ralph Hutchison; the performed version lifted the tune from Joel Rafael’s excellent piece, China Basin Digs.

Plowshares Please

They cut the fence and they started in about a half past two
They had no doubt when they thought about what they were called to do
The prophet said that hammers would make plowshares out of swords
And people turn their hearts to study peace instead of wars

They scaled the ridge in darkest night, couldn’t see what lay below
But they knew the bomb plant was out there, they headed toward the glow
One building gleaming white stood out ‘gainst the darkened July sky
Three fences blocked the way ahead, but they knew they had to try

The second fence had a low wall, and bright light shone beyond
They sprayed a message “Disarm Now” before the chance was gone
In a moment they’d be surely caught, and so they poured their blood
A symbol of the justice that will flow down like a flood

Before them stood the Y12 plant, where nuclear bombs are made
Where Hiroshima’s death was formed, and where the devil’s paid
Their cutters snipped the second fence and they headed for the third
Compelled to act by lessons they had learned from Nuremberg

When people see the government is bent on doing wrong
They have no choice, they have to act, they can not go along
Whispering prayers they forged ahead, the nun was first in line
They reached the third fence and they read the lethal warning sign

But the cameras failed to capture them, the alarms were all ignored
They crept ahead and came to where the nuclear swords were stored
But no guards came—they later said it was a miracle
They were kept at bay, heads turned away, the angels in control

They unrolled crime scene tape to say, “What happens here is wrong”
Poured blood and painted “Plowshares please;” they wouldn’t have too long
They painted on, each letter seemed a dove that was released
The words were like the voice of God; the fruit of justice, peace

And when the guard finally arrived, they met him with a bow
No gun was drawn, the guard could see there was no danger now
They offered him some bread to eat; the offered him their prayers
He radioed his bosses he had peace protesters there

They locked the Transform Plowshares up, for how long no one knows
But the seed of peace they planted there has sprouted and it grows
Who knows what act will turn the tide and lead the way to light
It’s the reason we’re required to do what we see is right

You don’t need all the answers, may not know precisely how
But ignorance is no excuse; the time to start is now
It’s enough to know we can not stand in silence anymore
Every dollar spent on bombs and guns is stolen from the poor

What started at Y12 that night in Oak Ridge, Tennessee
Is somehow still a living thing, it lives in you and me
A dream, a vision, a prayer, a call for all those who have ears
Transform swords to plowshares, please, make pruninghooks from spears

Michael Walli reflects in verse from prison

“STOPPING BY THE U. S. CONSTITUTION ON A SNOWY EVENING”

 

Poem by MICHAEL WALLI , with thanks to Robert Frost

 

Whose world this is

I know altho

The CIA thinks it

Is the Federals’ so

Surely they see us

Stopping here

To fill the jails

With empty show

 

The Founding Fathers

Must think it queer

To adjudicate without

A Constitution near

Between the paychecks

And frozen chosen

The biggest hypocrisy

Of the year

 

They give their burial

Shrouds a shake

To ask if there

Is some mistake

The only other

Sounds you hear

Is contractor money

And greedy take

 

The Constitution is lovely

Dark and deep

So many promises

You do not keep

Winter’s coming

When no one can sleep

Arise! Awake!

Forsake your sleep!

 

          — February, 2014

 

Megan Rice’s allocution

Here is the prepared statement Megan Rice read to the court on Tuesday, February 18, 2014:

PART I

 

            As I sat observing the facial expressions of participants present in the hearing on January 28^th, I sensed a clear sense of a shared mental reaction during the arguments on this restitution evidentiary Table submitted by the Prosecution (identification…) (display my Exhibit I)

I think we felt something of a Master’s compassionate consternation with the hypocrisy at his accusers.  (Luke 6:5-11  Mark 4:20-30)

I was stunned that 8 months had elapsed with apparently no prior conversations, out of court, between the opposing sides and the court in this case, and would have imagined it had been resolved by negotiation during those delays, and relegated to where it deserved to be disposed. – unworthy of evidence in any court of law.

This very document [hold up Exhibit 1] is self-incriminating evidence for all the world to see.  It represents in microcosm an enormous cloud of deception, exaggerated expenditures in time, energy and cost under which Y-12 has hidden these 70 years since its inception.  It reveals but a sample of the extortion by unaccounted for or unaccountable profiteering and blatant miscalculation over Y-12’s entire evolution till today. – Draconian extortion of the hard-earned labor of the people in this country over the last 70 years, and perhaps before.

It provides evidence why we are in deep trouble today. – A perfect analogy to what Greg spoke of as “Emperor’s new clothes.”

Why can we not call a spade a spade?

Why can we not admit the bare truth, and just get on with what is humanly possible: transforming this humanly constructed horrific monstrosity, an entity which has, effectively un-impeded, evolved into risks of perilous portent to the very existence of this sacred Planet and life as we have known it; for whose transformation we all readily long to give our lives.

Who or what is capable of naming, and being heard to name,

this Emperor’s new clothes?

(if not already named in countless ways and forms.)

When will we be willing to listen,

and to face the truth?

PART II

 

Good morning!  Thank you, Judge Thapar, and each of you, in this Beloved Community.  We are so grateful this morning, in the depths of our hearts.  Grateful to each of you for gracing us from your very busy lives, to be here once again.  Your coming here from Kentucky, your honor, and up from New Orleans, Bill and Anna.  Down form Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Anabel and David, faithfully giving time, and so much zesty, passionate energy and legal expertise in popular education for tru­th and justice’s sake on current status of international and domestic law; and here, also from a crowded date book at Yale’s Schools of Divinity and of Forestry and the Environment, Dr. Mary Evelyn Tucker, to witness on behalf of our entire Planet.  A Beloved Community joins us in Spirit, from the four corners of the Earth, speaking truth from people in places like Seychelles, Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Denmark, Finland, France, Belgium, Qatar, Bolivia, Alaska, Africa, Scotland, Ireland, Montenegro, Sri Lanka, Mauritius, Britain, and many places in between.  These messages from the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers came by post for this court. May I deliver them now?

It is indeed fitting as the issue here before us today has touched with perilous risk, for 70 years, the very existence of our sacred, lovely home, which we all share and try to treasure – our Planet Earth, which many of us revere as Mother!  So thank you.  We treasured the time all you gave in attending the trial in one way or another.

This trial has exposed, quite gratuitously, in the evidence, thanks to the prosecution’s witnesses, the truth about what is happening.  That this one facility is part, of what Kristen Iversen says, the U.S. has become: one, huge, bomb factory, of which Y-12 is but one very significant part.

We are all grateful, as Anabel Dwyer points out, with the Defense team of Lawyers, that the details of the goings-on at Y-12 were revealed by the witnesses for the government, details kept mostly secret, over nigh to 70 years – the specific warheads being “enhanced” and “modernized” – the enormous quantities of highly enriched uranium material (HEUM) produced and stored there, in the very building we were able, almost unknowingly, to reach, to touch, and to label with statements and symbols of truth.   This alerted Y-12 workers to what has been kept secret for nearly 70 years.

The secrecy began in 1943, when worker women, by thousands, could not tell fellow workers or family.  Still now, secrets are kept between workers, officials, and managers.  The secrecy prevailed to try relentlessly to turn these United States into a “super power,” an empire.  As Germany tried to be under the Third Reich.  When I was growing up, to our generation, these were very evil terms.  Has any empire, or aspiring super-power not declined, not fallen apart from exceptionalism into decadence?  So we had to come to this facility to call it to transformation.  Thank you for revealing these secrets as evidence.

Many who were here on Jan. 28^th had attended plowshares trials around the country, your honor, from the most recent in Tacoma, WA – the Disarm Now Plowshares (seniors also, I allege, aged from 84-60: One Sacred Heart Sister, Anne Montgomery of happy memory, 2 Jesuits Frs. Bill Bicshel and Steve Kelly, and 2 grandmothers, Susan Crane and Lynne Greenwald.)  In many of these earlier trials, even the words, nuclear weapons, have been called “classified” and denied to be alluded to.  Despite being components for weapons of mass destruction, contrary to the Non-Proliferation and other treaties and laws, to which the U.S. is legally bound, and for which crimes we citizens bear shared responsibility by law to expose and oppose as crimes, when we know they are being committed.

And still we have more room and reasons for gratitude, you honor.  Because recent laws, by the U.S. congress, gave you distress, you felt that you had to keep these jury-convicted, conscience-bound peace-makers as “violent saboteurs,” felons accused of “seriously damaging the national defense of the U.S.” in detention while awaiting sentencing.  Detention in a privately-contracted, for profit, rendition warehouse, which punishes and tortures unsentenced people, partly because of the enormously overcrowded courts and prisons in this country.       These facilities are not effectively overseen nor accountable.  Because of our experience of the ill-equipped conditions and inadequately trained personnel in those for-profit warehouses, we now know how U.S. citizens and non-citizens are treated for nonviolent crimes of “conspiracy” and other medical, drug laws as they exist.  Crimes engendered by the failed socio-economic situation which prevails today in a national security state.  The direct fall-out from gross misspending to maintain a nuclear industrial complex – of ten trillions of dollars over these last 70 years.  An economic system devoid of any outcome other than death, poverty for the masses in a debt-ridden country, with obscene wealth for the less than 1% of the people – individuals wealthier than the GNP of entire countries and I would ask, from war-profiteering?

We thank you, Judge Thapar, for giving us this time to become inspired by truly great human beings, so patiently enduring flagrantly inhuman conditions.  We can now report to you and the general public, who are the government, of the conditions where people are experiencing punishment and torture as unsentenced, awaiting changing court dates, or places in federal prisons today.  We have seen how this far-profit detention contract system fails to accomplish any kind of restorative justice or rehabilitation.  Women and men who are the victims of a nation, impoverished by the violence and cost of an economy based on manufacturing WMDs and war-making – inhumanly separated by distance and poverty, managerial incompetence; inordinately separated from contact with loved ones and families.

I am grateful also for what Daniel Berrigan called in a letter to me in Danbury Prison in 1998, “my time under federal scholarship.”  We have tried to make the most of it.  (Have learned enough for 2 or 3 Masters degrees, and written and received letters to and from enough to do a doctoral dissertation!)  We are activated by the people who suffer under disempowering conditions of detention.  Activated to invite U.S. prison reform, which calls for transformation of minds and hearts from violence.  Violence of profiteering from the “fall out” of constant, unending war-making, by a military industrial complex.  Those engaged in the production of ever more massively powerful, death-dealing weapons, – nuclear, chemical, biological, unmanned weapons, which rob the poor and sabotage and pollute all of life and creation on this Planet.  Imagine the profit accrued by charges like mine: $15 for one 10 minute call to Washington DC from Knoxville Detention Facility.  TN instate calls can be close to $3.00 each for 10 minutes.  Or a sick call, which can cost an inmate $15 to obtain a dropped, previously sanctioned prescription for a nightly Claritin tablet for controlling an allergy condition.  Medical records denied to be passed on from facility to facility as inmates are moved along to prisons.

We are energized to call for life-enhancing alternative projects: like disarmament, depleting radioactive isotopes and toxins, and those which meet real needs – social, cultural, spiritual and environmental: restoration, healing, harmony, balance and peace in non-violence.

May I close with a prayer?  A rendition of an ancient Hebrew country song – PS 98 (according to Nan Merrill) as again we thank you, Judge Thapar, honorable jurors, our defense team, lawyers on behalf of the government (whose crimes, we as law-abiding citizens attempt to disclose, oppose, and heal), and for each of you, you in this most honorable Beloved Community, a prophetic peace-making remnant, from whom we receive hope and inspiration and encouragement to carry on as grateful participants in your noble pursuits:

Let us sing to the Beloved a new song.

For Love has done marvelous things!

By the strength of Your Indwelling Presence, (Your right hand)

We, too, are called to do great things;

We are set free through Love’s Forgiveness and Truth.

Yes, for Your steadfast Love and Faithfulness

are ever-present gifts

in our lives.

All the ends of the earth have seen

the glory of Love’s Eternal Flame.

Make a joyful noise to the Beloved,

all the Earth;

Break forth into grateful song

and sing praises! [-Sacred the Land, Sacred the Water, Sacred the Sky, holy and true!]

Yes, sing songs of praise extolling

Love’s way;

Lift up your hearts with gratitude and Joy!

Let the voices of all people blend in harmony,

in unison let the peoples magnify the Beloved!

Let the waters clap their hands!

Let the hills ring out with joy!

Before the Beloved who radiates Love to all the earth.

For Love reigns over the world

with truth and justice,

bringing order and balance, [harmony]

to all Creation!

In keeping with all that is just and Fair.

and may we go forth

as Your holy right hand, to do great things, in Love!

(MK 3: LK 7)

 

Megan then asked the judge if it would be all right to sing a song. He agreed, then was taken aback as she turned to the audience and they rose to join her in singing “Sacred the Earth.”

Sr. Megan Rice, SHCJ, February 18, 2014

U S Federal Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN

Judge Sends Transform Now Plowshares Resisters to Prison

 

Judge Amul R. Thapar passed sentence on Greg Boertje-Obed, Megan Rice

and Michael Walli on Tuesday, February 18, 2014 in federal court in

Knoxville, Tennessee. The three were convicted in May 2013 for their

nonviolent action called Transform Now Plowshares at the Y12 Nuclear

Weapons Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on charges of depredation of

property and sabotage—the convictions carried possible maximum

sentences of 30 years in prison. Sentencing guidelines, based on

factors including history,  recommended sentences ranging from 6-10

years.

 

Sentencing began at 1:30pm; the three were permitted to be in the

courtroom together by Judge Thapar.

 

Michael Walli received a sentence of 62 months on each count, to be

served concurrently, followed by 3 years of supervised release.

 

Greg Boertje-Obed received a sentence of 62 months on each count, to

be served concurrently, followed by 3 years of supervised release.

 

Megan Rice received a sentence of 35 months on each count, to be

served concurrently, followed by 3 years of supervised probation.

 

“Judge Thapar has tried to strike a compromise that reflects the

nature of this nonviolent action but satisfies the government’s

demand that Megan, Michael and Greg’s sentence send a deterrent

message to the wider community. For now, their bodies remain in

prison. But their voices are free, reminding us that the central

issue of this action and trial have not been resolved—as long as the

government continues to produce thermonuclear weapons of mass

destruction in Oak Ridge or anywhere, people are required to resist,”

said Ralph Hutchison, coordinator of the Oak Ridge Environmental

Peace Alliance.

 

At the hearing, each of the Plowshares resisters spoke, reminding the

court of the central purpose of their action—to call the court’s

attention to the ongoing violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation

Treaty at the Y12 plant in Oak Ridge. In testimony at hearings

leading up to the trial, former Attorney General of the United States

Ramsey Clark called the production of nuclear weapons components at

Y12 “unlawful,” and the work there “a criminal enterprise.”

 

Megan, Michael and Greg entered Y12 in the wee hours of the morning

on July 28, 2012, cutting four fences and traversing a lethal-force-

authorized zone, arriving at the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials

Facility, the nation’s warehouse of weapons grade highly enriched

uranium. They poured blood on the walls of the HEUMF and spray

painted “Plowshares Please Isaiah,” and “The Fruit of Justice is

Peace.” They also chipped a corner of the concrete wall with a small

hammer, a symbolic act reflecting the Old Testament prophecy of

Isaiah who said, “They shall beat their swords into plowshares.”

 

The statement issued at the time declared the United States in

violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and said Y12 was

chosen for the action because of plans for a multi-billion dollar

bomb plant to be built there—the Uranium Processing Facility. The

sole purpose of the UPF (pricetag now $19 billion) is to produce

thermonuclear cores for warheads and bombs. Y12 is an active weapons

production facility—workers today are performing Life Extension

Upgrades on the W76 warhead at Y12.

 

Supporters outside the courtroom said, “The United States is breaking

its own law when it builds bombs in Oak Ridge. Any goverment that

would lock up Megan, Michael and Greg is desperate to hide the truth.

By their actions, they have broken the silence; their sacrifice

challenges each of us to speak up for a safer world. In prison or

out, Michael, Greg and Megan will continue to pray and work to save

the life of the planet.”

 

Judge receives brief from sentencing expert: Defense responds

Judge Amul Thapar received a sentencing brief from sentencing law expert Douglas Berman on the eve of the Transform Now Sentencing hearings. Berman’s brief dealt with several questions raised in court at the first session of the sentencing which was disrupted by snow on January 28.

One argument put forward by the defense at the initial hearing was the use of the sabotage law against nonviolent protesters was outside the “heartland” of the law—meaning the law was intended for use against real saboteurs, not in cases like this. The prosecution argued, and the judge appeared to agree, that since the sabotage law was upgraded, it was rarely used against civilians, in fact, it had been used only three times, and all of them were in nuclear weapons protest cases. The logic was “if this is what it is being used for, it must be what it was meant for.” The judge, ignoring the fact that in two of those three cases judges had ruled for the defendants that the case was “outside the heartland,” concurred with the prosecution. Professor Berman disagrees.

The defense attorneys labored into the evening Monday, February 17, and filed their response to Bermans’ brief, noting Judge Thapar now not only has the discretion to provide some relief in sentencing, but has the opinion of an expert who suggests the Transform Now Plowshares defendants need not and should not be treated as though they were terrorists bent on actual sabotage.

You can read the Berman brief here:

Berman Friend Brief for Judge Thapar

And you can read the superb response by the defense team here:

Defendant’s Reponse to Court’s Request for Guidance 2-17-14

 

Sentencing on February 18 is expected to begin at noon with Michael Walli, followed by Greg Boertje-Obed at 2:00 and Megan Rice at 4:00pm.

 

Sentencing schedule shifts to afternoon

Judge Amul Thapar issued an order this morning shifting the time of the sentencing hearings for Michael Walli, Greg Boertje-Obed and Megan Rice. The sentencing hearings will still take place on Tuesday, February 18. Michael Walli will be sentenced at 12:00noon; Greg Boertje-Obed at 2:00pm; Megan Rice at 4:00pm.