Patrick O'Neill Sentenced

On Friday last, 16 October, Patrick O'Neill was sentenced in Georgia to 14 months in prison for a non-violent protest In Kings Bay Trident Nuclear Base on 4 April 2018. He is the third of the Kings Bay 7 to be convicted.

One by one these defendants, all of whose actions are faith based, have been making powerful statements about their witness - so powerful that they cannot but impress those of us who are not  faith based. They have also lifted a veil on court proceedings for those who were not present there. In the case of Patrick O'Neill who was one of four who opted for bail, he also exposed the cruelty of US ankle monitoring.

His statement is packed with challenging one-liners:

"Although the base commander testified that he would neither confirm nor deny that Trident is a weapon of mass destruction, it is common knowledge";                                                                          "in this courtroom, the fact that Trident is a diabolical death machine has been deemed irrelevant";    "If the Trident D-5 missiles are ever launched and millions of people die, including many of you who reside here at the center of Ground Zero, one fact will remain clear: No laws were broken".               "Rather than criminals, we are Messengers, just like the abolitionists were in the face of legalized slavery, or pacifists who went to prison rather than kill";                                                                    Historically, the Boston Tea Party and biblically, Jesus cleansing the temple of the money-changers, both involved damage to property to make a point and to challenge injustice"                                    "So, off to jail and prison we go, all 7 of us thrice convicted felons"                                                         "I think the message we brought to Kings Bay and to this court is painful to hear, and unthinkable to contemplate".                                                                                                                                                "... you, Judge Wood, in perhaps the only time you expressed your personal opinion during the trial, said Trident is probably not unlawful"                                                                                                  "Giving agency to Trident submarines and their cargo of nuclear weapons of mass destruction carried the day over our sincere religious intentions. So our jury never heard any evidence about the Religious Freedom Restoration Act".

To Irish people who find Covid-19 lock downs intolerable the following account of how gentle pacifists were ankle monitored and surveilled in the USA for two and a half years will make stark reading:

"From Day 1 of our arraignment, this court has taken a very hard line against the 7 of us, and for more than 2 and one half years now that punitive policy has been unrelenting.

"First came a high cash bond, house arrest and ankle monitors; justified by claims that we were a danger to community safety. Requests for loosening those restrictions were mostly denied. Since my release from the Glynn County jail in the spring of 2018, my life has been under the daily management of my probation officer, Woody King, who I personally like and have gotten to know. However, he treats me like a teenager, not an adult.

"When Woody stopped by my house as I was taking out the trash, he said, 'Mr. O’Neill, you’re supposed to be in your house.'

“ 'I’m just taking out the trash,' I replied.

'Tell Mary to do that,' Woody said.  I’m not sure that was the way Magistrate Stan Baker saw my house arrest, but that´s what Woody thought.

"When I had my first meeting with Woody and his supervisor, I was told I was allowed to go to Mass on Sunday, but I was not permitted to stay after Mass to share a cup of coffee with my faith community. I was only allowed out for two hours on Sundays.

"In addition, my more than two years under supervised house arrest and curfew will not count toward my sentence, despite the fact that I have now spent more than 400 days (thatś 400 24-hour days) confined to my house.

"Three times since my release under these strict conditions I have had my children hospitalized outside the Eastern District of N.C., so I was unable to get permission to visit with them because of my home confinement, even though the Chapel Hill hospital was just 35 minutes from my home.

"When I told Woody my daughter Brianna was in the hospital with postpartum complications following the birth of my grandson, Luke, Woody said coldly, matter of factly, he could not approve the hospital visit. He never said anything kind or comforting about my daughter’s plight or ever asked again about her well being.

"Like your families need you, my family needs me. The harsh conditions of pre-trial and post-trial release were hard on all 14 of us — Mary and I, our 8 children, two grandchildren and two sons-in law. I think it is clear that all seven of the Kings Bay Plowshares are honorable people who devote our lives to making the world a more peaceful, loving and safe place".

The full text of Patrick's statement and that of his daughter Bernadette Naro can be found at http://www.nukeresister.org

Steve Kelly sentenced to 32 months

Plowshares activist Fr Steve Kelly was sentenced today to 32 months in prison for his part in the protest action in Kings Bay Nuclear submarine base on 4-5 April 2018.

He is the second defendant to be sentenced - already Liz McAlister had received a 3 year sentence for her part in the same action: declaring Trident weapons a crime.

Neither Steve nor Liz will be too perturbed by the ridiculously long sentences as they both have been in prison awaiting trial    In effect Liz was sentenced to "time served" - to be followed by "supervision"! (she is 80 years of age); Steve(59)  may have to serve 3 months and will probably refuse supervision.

Liz's daughter, Frida Berrigan, made a statement of love and support at the sentencing of her mother. It is not just a beautiful, heart-rending tribute from a daughter, it is also a brilliant defence of non-violent action and a powerful indictment of the system of oppression and inequity which her mother Elizabeth fought against non-violently throughout her life. Everything is there: George Floyd's murder, jogger Ahmaud Armery's murder, Martin Luther King's inspirational targetting of racism-militarism-materialism, the $720+ billion spend on the military during a pandemic, poverty,  the brokenness of every fiber of the social safety net: because her Mom has wed her anti-racist philosophy  with her anti-nuclear analysis.   

For her "Black Lives Matter" and "Trident is a Crime" may be one and the same.

Steve Kelly, a priest coming from the same faith base as Liz, had a character witness, Dennis Apel, who made a similarly resounding statement to the court.

"I am no stranger to the typical U.S. courtroom where the 'law' is treated as God while justice takes a back seat" he said "where even the most fundamental morals are ignored for the sake of upholding the system designed to maintain idolatry to the Pentagon; where witnesses are sworn in with the admonition 'to speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God' and then [are] essentially gagged in front of a jury of their peers through motions In Limine, denied the ability to speak the truth about why they did what they did, the horrors they are confronting and the spirituality behind their actions. ...  In what kind of system could a person with the spirituality, conviction and love of God’s children that Fr. Steve Kelly has, be dismissed as a criminal and left to languish for two and a half years in a county jail, while his basic message is expunged in the courtroom; the message that the most horrific and abominable weapons designed by human technology... are allowed to exist and proliferate.

"Fr. Steve Kelly is a man of deep faith who speaks truth to power and accepts the consequences. That is his character. Any other assessment of his character is false. I know this because I have known Steve for decades. He has spent more than 10 years of his life behind bars, giving up the warm embrace and camaraderie of loved ones as well as the comforts of a truly-accessible easy life, to instead speak the truth that God sees nuclear weapons as an abomination. I defy anyone in this courtroom to make a case for a God who embraces weapons of indiscriminate destruction and human misery. It’s not complicated. We who accept nuclear weapons are wrong, wrong, wrong. Fr. Steve just says that with his life and body. That is his character. He has taken up his cross to follow Jesus, pure and simple. We dismiss that fact at our own peril. ..."

All of this seems a long distance from the days when Cardinal Spellman visited the US troops in Vietnam in December 1966 and told them that what America expected was total victory.  

Or maybe not.  Pope Paul VI rebuked Spellman for his warmongering.  Also the same Cardinal Spellman condemned the Berrigan brothers, Philip and Dan for their anti-war activity, 

And just by coincidence, Liz McAlister is Philip Berrigan's wife and Frida Berrigan is their daughter

 Five more Kings Bay Plowshare defendants await sentencing.

 

Apology for lacuna: For some unknown reason I have been unable to post to this site since November 2019. Apologies to readers.

Letter to Queen Elizabeth II re Julian Assange

Dear Queen Elizabeth

In the Summer of 2012 I wrote to you  asking for your intervention on
humanitarian grounds in the case of Ms Marion Price in Northern
Ireland.  In my correspondence I made it clear that as a pacifist I had
publicly opposed the violence of the IRA (and of all armies) but that Ms
Price was gravely ill in prison and was in danger of imminent death
without some intervention.

You graciously replied to my plea informing me that you had passed it on
to the Northern Ireland Secretary of State for consideration - and  in
the event Ms Price was released.  Again I thank you sincerely for your
intervention on humanitarian grounds.

Now I have another request.

It is for Mr Julian Assange, a non-violent whistleblower who revealed
among other matters that some serious atrocities were committed by the
US forces during the war in Iraq. On 1 May this year he was sentenced to
fifty weeks in prison for skipping bail on an entirely different charge
in Sweden  - a charge that was later withdrawn. The judge stipulated
that he was to serve only half of that sentence. His term expired on 22
September past but he has not been freed.  He fears extradition to the
USA where he faces a maximum sentence of 170 years for charges under the
Espionage Act.

Throughout his incarceration Mr Assange has been kept in solitary
confinement for 23 hours of every day.  I am informed that he has had
but one half hour of fresh air per day and one half hour to "compete"
with other inmates for the use of a telephone.  I believe that if this
is true, it constitutes unusual and inhuman punishment for a non-violent
truth teller, especially given the fact that he had already spent almost
seven years without fresh air in the Ecuadorian embassy and that his
health is delicate.

Since 22 September it would have been expected as normal for a prisoner
in his situation to have the ordinary rights of prisoners restored to
him but I understand that this has not happened.

In light of this my request should normally have been twofold:

(1) that you would exercise the royal prerogative of mercy to release
this non-violent prisoner forthwith   and

(2) that you would  appeal  to his captors to treat him humanely and
with respect while he is in their care and allow him all of the
privileges accorded to other prisoners of whatever category.

However, I understand that the royal prerogative is in the gift of the
Home Secretary and given that he (the Home Secretary) has already signed
the indictment to start the process of Julian's prosecution in the
United States, there appears  to be little hope that he would request a
royal prerogative for mercy.

I am appealing to you therefore, as a person endowed with humanity and a
sense of justice, to intervene solely on a matter of
administration; and,  insofar as it is in your power, to ensure that the
harsh conditions that continue to be imposed on Mr Assange in Belmarsh
prison are relaxed significantly so that from now on he will be treated
humanely and with respect, on an equal footing with every other
prisoner, during his sojourn there.

Thanking you

With best personal wishes

Justin Morahan

Human rights activist and pacifist 

[Address attached to letter  

Sent by post, 10/10/2019]

Breaking News Shock

Kings Bay Plowshares 7

Found Guilty on All Counts

BRUNSWICK, GA – More than 18 months after they snuck onto the site of one of the largest known collections of nuclear weaponry in the world, a jury found the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 guilty of all four of the charges brought against them.  
The defendants face more than 20 years in prison for destruction and depredation of government property in excess of $1,000, trespassing, and conspiracy.

“The Pentagon has many installations – and we just walked out of one of them,” Colville said outside the courthouse. “It’s a place where they weaponize the law. And they wield it mostly against the poor, the people who have all the red lined neighborhoods in this county know that very well.
"And once in a while the people who are privileged like us get a taste of it. And when we do we should hear the word guilty as a blessing on us because it gives us an opportunity to stand with people who hear guilty all the time every day.”

The seven expect to be sentenced in 60 to 90 days. Until then, six of them have been released under bond conditions each had prior to trial.

Late at night on April 4, 2018 Mark Colville, Clare Grady, Martha Hennessy, Fr. Steve Kelly, S.J., Elizabeth McAlister, Patrick O’Neill, and Carmen Trotta used a bolt cutter to enter a remote gate at Naval Base Kings Bay in St. Mary’s GA. They walked two miles through swamp and brush. They then split into three groups and prayed, poured blood, spray painted messages against nuclear weapons, hammered on parts of a shrine to nuclear missiles, hung banners, and waited to be arrested.


During the course of the trial, which began Monday morning, the defendants and their supporters had expressed pleasure with the unexpected amount of information they had been able to provide to the jury about their reasons for undertaking their protest. Federal Judge Lisa Godbey Wood had issued an order late last Friday night restricting any evidence or testimony having to do with a necessity defense, international law and treaties restricting nuclear weaponry, and religious and moral reasons.


“I really think that the verdict was, frankly, reactionary,” Carmen Trotta told supporters outside the courthouse. “They (the jurors) heard a lot. The judge allowed them to hear a lot. And it’s a little frightening that nuclear weapons could be hidden in plain sight. We have to understand that we are a remnant.… We remain a remnant of the spirit that I think was stronger in our country at other periods on time.

“But we all know which way the wind is blowing. There’s the Black Lives Matter movement. There’s the Extinction Rebellion. There’s the Me Too movement. There’s an activist community waiting just behind us.” 

(With thanks and solidarity to the Kings Bay Plowshares)