KNOXVILLE, Tennessee — Any courtroom in China or Iran could have been the scene: An 84-year-old Catholic nun in prison garb, chained hand-and-foot and surrounded by heavy Marshalls, is led shuffling into court. Her attorney asks if she could be permitted to free one hand in order to take notes. The nun has been convicted of high crimes trumped up after a bold political protest. She is then lectured to about law and order by a high-ranking judge who then imposes a three-year prison term. Life expectancy for white women in the United States is 81 years, so hers may be a death sentence.
Like a Mullah thundering against an Infidel, the judge also ordered the penniless convict, who has lived her entire adult life within a vow of poverty, to pay $53,000 in restitution — what federal prosecutors claimed was cost of fixing four openings in wire fences and repainting a wall.
The nun, Sr. Megan Rice of New York City, who spent 40 years building schools and teaching in Africa, had fearlessly declared to the court, “To spend the rest of my life in prison would be a great honor and I hope it will happen.” The judge may have granted this appeal.
What had the frail, retired missionary done to bring the weight of the US Justice Department down upon her? With spray paint, poured blood and prayers directed at the “Y-12” H-bomb factory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Sr. Rice (and two retirement-aged US Army veterans) dared to call the US government a criminal enterprise in its production and threatened use of nuclear weapons. Speaking to the court, she said she’d walked up to the weapons uranium fortress at Oak Ridge which, “… we were able to reach, touch and label with statements of truth.”
The Mullah, US District Judge Amul Thapar, sternly told Sr. Rice her action, “evokes complete disrespect for law, total disregard for law,” and, “at some point the law demands respect,” and, “we need to … protect the law,” and that she “transgressed laws of the United States, a great country,” that “No man or group is above the law,” and finally, “Courts aren’t the places for judges to disregard the law.”

“International law is not an  empty promise”
– President Obama

Never mind that UN General Assembly Resolution 1653, the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions, the Treaty of Paris, the Nuremberg Convention, the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and other binding international humanitarian laws prohibit the threat or commission of massacres, any deliberate long-term damage to the environment and any construction of new nuclear weapons — all of which is today planned and prepared in Oak Ridge.
Never mind that the US Constitution holds all such treaties “supreme” to all other US laws, and says treaties are binding on “every judge in every state.” Never mind that the US Supreme Court has upheld this “Supremacy Clause” five times.
Never mind that President Obama said Sept. 24, 2009: “International law is not an empty promise, and treaties must be enforced.”
Never mind any of this — because nuclear weapons are considered above the law in federal court. All defense testimony about the outlaw status of nuclear weapons is considered inadmissible there. Contraband is not legally in anyone’s possession, but if qualified experts offer proof that nuclear weapons are contraband, the offer is excluded by federal courts.
Oak Ridge’s W78 and B61 nuclear warhead production, forbidden by the Nonproliferation Treaty, can’t even be described to a federal jury. Even the expert testimony of a US Attorney General — that Oak Ridge’s mission is a criminal conspiracy to produce banned weapons — can be kept from the jury by US judges who rely on four US Appeal Court orders.
Appeals courts have said juries would be confused by this shocking testimony. On the contrary, the news that H-bombs are illegal would burst the vacuum that protects the nuclear weapons complex from judicial scrutiny. Any evidence of the fact that planning and preparing massacres is criminal, that nuclear weapons can only produce massacres, and that the government is presently building new H-bombs, would dissolve the fog of legitimacy surrounding the Bomb and put the nun’s protest in a new context — that of whistle-blowing and crime prevention.  Sr. Rice told the court her action had pierced “an enormous cloud of deception covering up the humanly constructed monstrosity of Y-12.”
The illusion that H-bombs are lawful and benign is embraced by almost no one outside the weapons complex and the judiciary. Only a swarm of increasing protest can possibly break through this willful blindness.

— John LaForge works for Nukewatch. You can write Sr. Megan Rice at: # 88101-020 / MDC Brooklyn / Metropolitan Detention Center / P.O. Box 329002 / Brooklyn, NY 11232

– Ralph Hutchison is staff director of the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance.