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KNOXVILLE, Tenn. ¾ If the peace activists had been allowed to present even one rebuttal witness to refute the bologna testified to by government witnesses, they may have had a chance. As it was, disarmament advocates Greg Boertji-Obed (of Duluth), Sr. Megan Rice and Michael Walli face a maximum of 35 years in prison, having been found guilty May 8 of felony “damage to property” (10 yrs) and “interference with national defense” (25 yrs). The three were hurriedly convicted by an all-white jury following a 2-day federal trial here and are being held in jail until sentencing Sept. 23.
 
Sitting through the show trial in Knoxville was to observe a real Kabuki Dance. The prosecutors and the federal court had made certain before trial that experts would not testify for the defense. The court’s two pre-trial gag orders (March 26 and April 30) were a measure of how simple it is to show that nuclear weapons are instruments of a criminal conspiracy in violation of U.S. and international law ¾ and do more harm than good.
 
(It is literally so easy to prove, that four of us did exactly that without lawyers in a 2004 jury trial in Minneapolis. We were found not guilty of trespass after arguing that our refusal to leave a Minnesota firm’s foyer was excusable because its production of depleted uranium weapons was a violation of U.S. treaties. Likewise, Donna Howard and Tom Hastings ¾ who damaged the Navy’s E.L.F. transmitter ¾ were found not guilty of sabotage in Wisconsin in 1996 when they showed that the Trident missile system is an offensive “first strike” weapon and not a part of “national defense.”)  
 
Boertji-Obed, Rice and Walli had intended to prove that their July 28 sloganeering and banner-hanging at the Y-12 nuclear weapons factory in Tennessee was a lawful act of crime prevention. But as Federal Magistrate Clifford Shirley wrote in his March 26 order, “[T]his court finds that the defendants may be prosecuted for interference with national security and destruction of government property irrespective of whether the United States’ possession, manufacture and policy regarding nuclear weapons violates international law.” To ensure the jury would never acquit, he further that, “The defendants may not present a defense of necessity or justification … [or] evidence that the operations at Y-12 violated international or domestic law, evidence that their actions were compelled by the Nuremberg Principles…”
 
The evidence was to have come from former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark who on April 23 presented 1.5 hours of sworn testimony in what’s called an “Offer of Proof.” The Hon. Mr. Clark explained to the court how a reasonable person could conclude that deploying nuclear weapons (“deterrence”) is a violation of the UN Charter, the Nuremberg Charter & Principles, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT) and the U.S. Constitution. Even though Mr. Clark had negotiated the NNPT as a member of Lyndon Johnson’s Administration, his expertise was rejected by trial judge Amul Thapar’s April 30 order ¾ as were similar offers presented by experts in international law, nuclear weapons and nonviolent resistance. Without a chance to explain the legal basis for their action, the defendant’s conviction was a foregone conclusion.
 
At the end of the day, Judge Thapar had the slyness to instruct the jury: “Nothing that I have done at trial should have affected the facts you find in this case.” This was true enough, since he had cast the die before trial began.
 
Mag. Shirley in his 3/26 order telegraphed the actual purpose of the kangaroo court ¾ namely, to guarantee a conviction and to sully the image of the accused. He wrote, “[A] group of individuals breaking into Y-12 could have different motives or overarching goals ¾ one to prevent nuclear war, one to reduce government funds spent on the military, and another because he was a terrorist seeking to give advantage to another country ¾ and all have the same intent to injure, interfere with, or obstruct the national defense.”
As hundreds of pre-trial wire stores reported, and as the three would later testify to the jury, the unarmed, anti-war pacifist trio consists of two U.S. Army veterans (Walli is a combat veteran of Vietnam; Boertji-Obed was a medical service officer), and a missionary who spent 40 years building schools in Africa.
 
Assistant District Attorney Jeff Theodore did his part to smear the nonviolent “Transform Now Plowshares” as they call themselves. He told the jury in closing that just because security at the Y-12 bomb factory improved after the defendants’ action doesn’t make their action reasonable ¾ “any more than the 9/11 terror attacks were ‘good’ because airport security improved afterwards.”
 
This first and only reference to 9/11 was so shocking in its conflation of the defendants with terrorists that Sr. Rice’s defense attorney Francis Lloyd rose to his feet and moved for a mistrial. He argued that the comment was prejudicial in the extreme and unsupported by any evidence. Judge Thapar denied the motion. The jury deliberated barely over 2 hours.
 
Now FOX News, USA TODAY, the commercial networks and talk radio can paint the abolitionists as “saboteurs” and they can be kept in county jails for months as “dangers to the community” and “flight risks.”
 
¾ John LaForge works for Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog group in Wisconsin.