Last May 8, Sister Megan Rice, Michael Walli and Greg Boertje-Obed were found guilty by a federal jury in Tennessee of felony damage to property and “injury to the national defense,” after they had earlier spray-painted slogans on structures and poured human blood on a uranium storage building and the Y–12 nuclear weapons factory near Oak Ridge, TN. They will be sentenced January 28.

I write regarding the upcoming sentencing of Megan Rice, Michael Walli and Greg Boertje-Obed. I attended their May trial in your courtroom where their anti-nuclear protest was transformed into felony damage and “sabotage” convictions that allow for up to 30 years in prison as punishment.

Like you, I saw the prosecutor’s video tape of Megan, 82, Michael 63, and Greg, 57, waiting patiently for a guard, any guard, after they’d reached Y-12’s weapons uranium storage building, strung banners there and painted slogans. With you, I saw that the guard, Kirk Garland, was so much at ease with the three that he did not draw his weapon or even arrest them for a long while. It is clear from the tape that the protesters did not for an instant “interfere with or damage national security.” Such an electrifying “sabotage” allegation should rightly be applied to bombings, bomb threats, chemical or cyber-attacks, or acts or threats of war.

It appears that the slow-moving and clumsy senior citizens did make an international laughing stock of the U.S. National Nuclear Security Agency and humiliated the Y-12 security patrol. Still, their only impact on “national security” was to expose the prestige and credibility of government protection contractors as unearned. Nevertheless, the three “sabotage” convictions give the impression that the protesters endangered the United States. Please acknowledge that they didn’t for a moment do so and that their conviction on this charge is both an abuse of language and a miscarriage of justice.

Cutting openings in fences that belong to another can be considered “property damage” for which reparations can ordinarily be demanded. If U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal allowed political defendants to present evidence at trial of the unlawful nature of nuclear weapons, even this charge could be defended against as a lesser offense committed to prevent a greater harm. If you must require restitution, please consider the damage estimate made in sworn trial testimony by Brig. Gen. Rodney Johnson of $8,000, rather than the government’s exaggerated $52,000 assessment.

I urge you to weigh the irony that the “victim” in this case — the nuclear weapons establishment — has spread radioactive pollution with bomb production and testing that has damaged the environment of every state and the health of every person in the country. The National Cancer Institute’s 1997 study of iodine-131 in bomb test fallout concluded that at least 75,000 thyroid cancers would result among the U.S. public and that at least 15,000 cancer fatalities could result. “Any person living in the contiguous United States since 1951 has been exposed to radioactive fallout and all organs and tissues of the body have received some radiation exposure,” the study found. It is frightening that authorities from the Atomic Energy Commission, the Energy Dept., and the NNSA have never been called to task for this deliberate reckless endangerment of national security.

After the findings of the President’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, no one can argue that the government’s radioactive pollution of the continent was not deliberate. The committee found that the U.S. military knew as early as 1951 there were deadly health hazards in the radioactive fallout from its bomb testing and, although a safer site was available in Florida, chose to detonate A- and H-bombs at a test site near populated areas in Nevada.

As the imminent Dr. Arjun Makhijani notes in his massive study Nuclear Wastelands: “Today, it is evident that nuclear weapons have profoundly damaged the very people and lands they were supposed to protect through the adverse environmental and health consequences of production and testing.” At Y-12, there are 600 contaminated sites where for decades operators dumped hundreds of trillions of Becquerels of uranium into the water, buried it, and released it to the air. Thousands of trillions of Becquerels of technetium-99, lanthanum-140, iodine-131, argon-41, xenon-133, cesium-137 and strontium-90 were also released at Y-12.

It is not the defendants but the government that has damaged national security: the United States broadcasts bomb threats each and every day it produces and deploys our self-poisoning nuclear weapons. The government calls its threat of mass destruction “credible deterrence.”

Please use the Jan. 28 sentencing hearing to restore a semblance of proportionality in this case. Direct your righteous indignation toward the real perpetrators of felony damage to U.S. security — the builders, testers, protectors and users of nuclear weapons.

Sincerely, John LaForge

 You too can write:
Hon. Amul Thapar, U.S. District Court Judge, C/O Prof. Bill Quigley, Loyola Law Clinic, 7214 St. Charles Ave., New Orleans, LA 70118