Three anti-nuclear activists have been charged with sabotage of the national defense for painting graffiti and throwing some blood against the wall of a highly secretive uranium storage facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
The three activists, Greg Boertje-Obed, Michael Walli and Sister Megan Rice (this one a Catholic nun aged 82) "sabotaged" the facility by writing "The fruit of Justice is Peace" and throwing some blood against a wall of the military facility.
This could be alleged to be vandalism but "sabotage"?!
Well, the US General Attorney's office thinks so and the three have been charged with the felony crime of injuring national-defense premises under the Sabotage Act. If found guilty, they could be sent to prison for 20 years.
The activists, organized in the Transform Now Plowshares group, accuse the US Government of being the actual criminal for building the nuclear weapons to begin with.
They have issued the following communication:
Our consciences compelled us to act at Y-12 Oak Ridge nuclear facility because we knew that the nuclear weapons of mass destruction illegally produced there threaten the well-being of our entire planet. The government and Babcock and Wilcox [a contractor that manages the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant] know these weapons can only be used to inflict massive death and injury on people and on our planet.
The Government threatened to charge us with the more serious crime of sabotage if we did not plead guilty. We chose to exercise our constitutional right to a jury trial and refused to bow down to their threats. So the government has added serious new charges which expose us to an additional twenty years in prison for our peacemaking actions.
We remain convinced that making and refurbishing nuclear weapons at Y-12 is both illegal under US and international law and it is also immoral. Ultimately we are required to follow the law of love and our consciences.
Our present activities include daily community prayer, study of the Nuremberg trials, and public education about the existence of illegal nuclear weapons of mass destruction.
We look forward to presenting evidence to the jury of the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about what goes on at Y-12.
Sources: Transform Now Plowshares, Energy News, Huffington Post.
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