By Joshua Daniel Hershfield 11/17/06
Three men were recently sentenced to federal prison terms
and ordered to pay $17,000 by a federal judge in Bismarck, ND. They are Fr. Carl Kabat, 73, a Catholic
Priest, Greg Boetje-Obad, 52, a former Naval Officer living with his family in
the Catholic Worker community of Duluth Minnesota, and Micheal Walli, 58, also a member of the
Catholic Worker community in Duluth. Their crime was protesting the site of the
intercontinental Minuteman III nuclear missile.
They broke a lock on a fence, put up peace banners, and poured some of
their own blood on the site.
The Minuteman III missile has over 20 times the destructive
power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima
and can reach a target within 6000 miles in 35 minutes. Its very purpose is to slaughter hundreds
upon hundreds of thousands of people in an instant. It is part of the nuclear arsenal of the United States
that is reportedly capable of blowing up the planet one hundred times over.
There is something very crooked about our society when it is
criminal to protest such horrific and monstrous weapons, but it is not criminal
to make them, not even criminal to use them, if you have the right job
description. There is something terribly
broken about our society when it is legal and accepted for the government and
military to consciously annihilate whole populations of people and all other
life in the area, while trying to prevent such grand-scale devastation will get
you put in jail.
As Bill Quigley wrote in an article for Common Dreams,
“What does it say about our society that personal sacrifices to go to war
to kill people in war are praised, while personal sacrifices for peace are
condemned? What does it say that
intentional destruction of cities and communities and families and individuals
are considered totally legal, while actions trying to dismantle weapons of mass
destruction send people to prison?”
The United
States military has used white phosphorous
on the Iraqi people. The US also sent a rush shipment of cluster bombs to
Israel that soon thereafter
littered the neighborhoods of Lebanon. Bush has refused to take the nuclear option
off the table as the plan of attacking Iran develops. Who are the criminals here?
The United States,
meaning tax paying citizens in the United States, pay more than $6
billion a year for the maintenance, modernization, development, and production
of nuclear weapons. This is happening
while 11,000 children around the world starve to death on a daily basis.
In a more balanced and sane country these three men would be
heroes, but in the United
States in 2006, they are behind bars.