Peace Activists Face 25 Years for Action at US Nuclear Submarine Base

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. A group of activists have been jailed for over a year before trial for entering the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in Georgia last April to protest U.S. nuclear weapons. The action took place April 4th, 2018, the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Armed with hammers, crime scene tape, baby bottles containing their own blood, seven anti-nuclear activists secretly entered Kings Bay — one of the largest nuclear submarine bases in the world — under the cover of night. Their goal was to symbolically disarm the six nuclear ballistic missile submarines kept there. Each submarine carries 20 Trident thermonuclear weapons.

One year after this historic action, three of the Plowshares activists remain jailed in Georgia. The other four are out on $50,000 bond with electronic ankle monitors. All seven face up to 25 years in prison. They’ve been charged with three felonies and a misdemeanor. On Thursday, global leaders, activists and scholars, including the Nobel Prize-winning former South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Daniel Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky, released a petition addressed to U.S. Attorney General William Barr demanding all charges against the Kings Bay 7 be dropped immediately. The petition reads in part, quote, “We who share the moral vision of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 proclaim our support for their courage and sustained sacrifice and call for the immediate dismissal of all charges against them,” unquote.

The Kings Bay protest builds on a history of similar anti-nuclear Plowshares actions around the world, beginning in 1980 in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. That first Plowshares act was led by the late Father Daniel and Philip Berrigan. Phil’s widow, Liz McAlister, is one of the seven arrested last April. She remains locked up, alongside Jesuit priest Stephen Kelly and Mark Colville in Brunswick, Georgia.

I recently sat down with the four Plowshares activists who are out on bond. Martha Hennessy is the granddaughter of Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement. Carmen Trotta helps run the St. Joseph Catholic Worker House here in New York. And Patrick O’Neill is the co-founder of a Catholic Worker House in Garner, North Carolina. Clare Grady is a member of the Ithaca, New York, Catholic Worker. They joined us in our New York studio for their first joint interview since being arrested. I started by asking Patrick O’Neill to take us back to that night of April 4th, 2018.

PATRICK O’NEILL: Well, the seven of us cut a lock and got into the naval station, Kings Bay. We had already done our homework. And —

AMY GOODMAN: Where is Kings Bay?

PATRICK O’NEILL: It’s in St. Marys, Georgia, right on the Florida-Georgia border. And the sub base was the baby of Jimmy Carter. He’s the one that brought that nuclear system to southeast Georgia. And so, we cut a lock, and we went in. And we we were together for probably about an hour, and then we split into three groups, and we had already planned to go to separate places. So, Carmen and Liz McAlister and Steve Kelly went to the bunkers, where nuclear warheads are stored. Martha and Clare went to the headquarters of the facility. And Mark Colville and I went to what we call the shrine, but it was actually statues of nuclear weapons surrounded by flags coming up out of the ground, many, many of them.

AMY GOODMAN: And why did you choose that site to perform this, to engage in this Plowshares action?

PATRICK O’NEILL: Well, it seemed absurd that we would have a shrine to nuclear weapons. In North Carolina, where I live, we’re taking down Confederate monuments. But here we had monuments, literally phallic monuments, that were actually replicas of weapons of mass destruction surrounded by flags, including the U.S. flag. And I thought, “This is the most incredible example of modern-day idolatry we could find, maybe on planet Earth.” And it was it was the responsibility to smash idols. So that’s why we went there.

AMY GOODMAN: And what did you particularly do? You went with?

PATRICK O’NEILL: Well, it was Mark Colville and I,

AMY GOODMAN: Who is in jail.

PATRICK O’NEILL: And we went to the monument. And I had gotten some hammers from Shane Claiborne from The Simple Way, that were made from melted-down guns. And I went running up to the monument of the D5 missile, which is the Trident missile, that is the most insidious, deadliest weapon ever made in the history of humanity, a first-strike accurate-within-a-hundred-yards nuclear weapon. And I went running up to it with the hopes that my hammer would put a hole in it. But when I hit it, it went “bong!” And it was made of cement, and the hammer had broke off. So, it was a strong idol.

AMY GOODMAN: And then what?

PATRICK O’NEILL: We threw blood on the insignia of the base and also on the missile replicas and hammered on some of the stuff around there.

AMY GOODMAN: And why this base in particular?

PATRICK O’NEILL: Well, oddly enough, even though that base has been there for 30 years — I mean, it was loaded with the nuclear warheads back in the late ’80s. There had been a huge action at Cape Canaveral in 1987, when the bombs were being flight tested. And, you know, Dr. Spock — it was 5,000 people went down there to oppose the flight testing of the D5 missiles at that time. But even after that 30 years, the Trident base had very little resistance from the community down there, not like out in Washington state where the other Trident base is, in Kitsap, where there’s always been a lot of ongoing resistance. There just had never really been much happening here, and we thought it was a good place to call attention to, in light of the horrific nature of the Trident system. And we were hoping, too, that this would somehow show our solidarity with the triplets that Martin Luther King spoke of. We wanted to make the connections, on the anniversary of King’s assassination, to militarism, consumerism and racism. So, we we wanted to just, I guess, what we call, educate the base.

AMY GOODMAN: Clare Grady, talk about why you made this decision to engage in this. You face years in prison.

CLARE GRADY: Thanks, Amy. I had been part of a Plowshares action in the ’80s, 1983, with the Griffiss Plowshares, with Liz McAlister and six other friends.

AMY GOODMAN: And Griffiss was?

CLARE GRADY: At Griffiss Air Force Base, where they had the cruise missile being built, B-52 bombers that had been used in Vietnam with payload of death. But now, at that point, it was being reoutfitted to carry first-strike cruise missiles. So, the Doomsday Clock was three minutes to midnight, and these first-strike weapons were a big part of that. So, as a young woman in my twenties, I was very conscious of this, the omnicidal weapons of that time. Now, in 2018 — well, last April — the compelling reason for me was —

AMY GOODMAN: And that was in Griffiss, as in Rome, New York, upstate.

CLARE GRADY: Griffiss is in Rome, New York, yes. Griffiss is in Rome, New York. And I lived about an hour and a half from there, in Ithaca, New York, in Cayuga territory.

AMY GOODMAN: How many years did you serve for that action, if any?

CLARE GRADY: We were the facing the charge of sabotage, which carried 25 years. But we were acquitted of that charge after a 5-week trial, jury trial. And I got a 2-year sentence in federal prison. And I served my time in Alderson, West Virginia, at the women’s federal prison.

But now, in my — well, I’m 60 years old now. But at this point, I really see and understand how these weapons are not just omnicidal if they’re launched; they’re deadly now, every day. And so, I see them as the capstone to the systems of violence, from the top down to the police gun in the street that kills and threatens to kill, but that these weapons are the bully stick that’s used in the same way that a gun is used when it’s held to the head of someone. Even if you don’t pull that trigger, you’re using that gun. So we’re using these weapons every day. And I’m not just concerned about if they’re launched, but how they’re used every day in a way that’s, my friend Poko says, to extort. So they are the enforcement mechanism that’s necessary to enforce these systems of white supremacy and global capitalism, is how I see it. And so, going to Kings Bay with my friends was my way of withdrawing my consent from that system.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, what exactly did you do, along with Martha?

CLARE GRADY: So, Martha and I went to the administration building, SWFLANT, and we put up crime scene tape at the front of the door. So this is in the middle of the night. And yet there are people, parked in the parking lot, working inside that building. We didn’t go inside the building, but we chose to put up this crime scene tape in the front, put up the indictment indicting for war crimes, from the chain of command, the head of the base, the commander of that base, up to the president, for war crimes. We brought Daniel Ellsberg’s book The Doomsday Machine, which is Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. It’s as in-depth as you can get about our nuclear war policy from back in the ’50s and ’60s. So we brought these things as evidence to show why there is an urgency, why is there not just a right, but a necessity, for us to disarm our first-strike, First World nuclear weapons. Then we brought a small amount of our blood. We poured that on the ground at the entranceway. And we bought spray paint, and we spray-painted “Disarm Trident, Love One Another” and a few other things.

AMY GOODMAN: And how did you get caught?

CLARE GRADY: So, nobody was coming in and out of that entrance, so we chose to go over to where Patrick and Mark were disarming, at that shrine, that Patrick just described. And we were there for probably an hour, in plain visibility of the security guards that were driving back and forth. And at that point we realized that they were much more interested in arresting — well, Carmen, Liz and Steve went to the bunkers, which was a really highly secure area with deadly force, so they did not even look at us, until they finished that arrest.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Clare, why did you do this on the anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination?

CLARE GRADY: Well, for me, it’s been really important, identified — the triplets that the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King identifies, of racism, extreme materialism and militarism, are the key things that work together, all the time together. Not one by itself, but all together make a deadly, deadly combination. And so, Dr. King is known for many, many things, but I feel like he’s been stripped of many of his messages and life’s purpose. And so I want to honor what he gave us in that moment.

AMY GOODMAN: Martha Hennessy, you, together with Clare, engaged in this particular action at that site, but, together with the seven activists, participated in this Plowshares action. Again, you’re the granddaughter of Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement. For people who aren’t familiar with it, explain what the Catholic Worker Movement is about, why you, as Catholics, did this.

MARTHA HENNESSY: The Catholic Worker Movement began in 1933, you know, under the duress of the Great Depression. And Dorothy, of course, was a journalist. And Peter Maurin, the other founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, instructed her in the Catholic social teaching. And so, the newspaper was there to be the voice of the people on the street who were voiceless. And since then, it has grown into a movement. It’s into its 85th year. And there are perhaps 200 communities around the United States and around the world. They call themselves Catholic Workers. And we minister to the poor. We practice the works of mercy: to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked. And Dorothy died in 1980, and we continue to try and walk in those footsteps of the disciples and of Dorothy.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, your decision to engage in this action? Have you engaged in one before?

MARTHA HENNESSY: No, never.

AMY GOODMAN: So this is a major decision you’ve made in your life.

MARTHA HENNESSY: Yes, with some trepidation regarding the Catholic Worker Movement and the Plowshares Movement and the two trajectories of those movements.

AMY GOODMAN: What was your trepidation?

MARTHA HENNESSY: The whole question of nonviolence and secrecy. I mean, Dorothy and Gandhi and King all operated in a different way. They weren’t sneaking onto U.S. military bases. And so my trepidation was what we did have to undergo to make this action possible. And I had to go through a disarmament process of myself; the war in my own heart is always just under the surface. And this was part of my faith journey. And the people that I was able to be with and to do this action with made all the difference to me.

AMY GOODMAN: And what stands out most for you about that action, what you remember, as the seven of you went onto this base on the anniversary of King’s assassination with your own blood, with hammers?

MARTHA HENNESSY:* Well, the utter fear in my heart of walking in the dark to challenge the greatest, most violent force on Earth: my own government and its military. And that was in great contrast to the man who arrested us, who was incredibly kind, incredibly professional, incredibly considerate. And he even began to tell us about losing a child, losing a child in its infancy. And the combination of this dreadful, dreadful place and this man who worked at the base, his humanity just became so clear to me in that setting. So, the combination of great fear and great love.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to the words of the late Father Dan Berrigan, who helped launch the international anti-nuclear Plowshares movement with his brother, Phil. Phil, of course, was the husband of Liz McAlister, lives as his widow. Dan Berrigan and seven others poured blood and hammered on warheads at a GE nuclear missile plant — Dan, Phil and others — in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. I asked Father Berrigan about this during an interview I did with him in 2006.

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: We went in with the workers at the changing of the shift and found there was really no security worth talking about, a very easy entrance. In about three minutes, we were looking at doomsday. The weapon was before us. It was an unarmed warhead about to be shipped to Amarillo, Texas, for its payload. So it was a harmless weapon as of that moment. And we cracked the weapon. It was very fragile. It was made to withstand the heat of re-entry into the atmosphere from outer space, so it was like eggshell, really. And we had taken as our model the great statement of Isaiah 2: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares.” So we did it, poured our blood around it and stood in a circle, I think, reciting the Lord’s Prayer until Armageddon arrived, as we expected.

AMY GOODMAN: That was the late Father Dan Berrigan, talking about the action they took back in the ’80s — this is during the Reagan-Bush years — at King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, which really launched the modern-day U.S. Plowshares movement. Carmen, you were a dear friend of Father Dan Berrigan. This also was your first action, though you have been a leader of the Catholic Worker Movement in New York City for decades. And talk about the decision you made to engage in this action, now facing years in jail.

CARMEN TROTTA: I could mention that I was a part of three prior Plowshares action development groups and wasn’t able, myself, to go forth with those actions, and I really put it off for a very long time. So it’s 30 years later or thereabouts, when it comes back around to me, or 20 years later. A great deal of it had to do with the community that had gathered, so many of them coming out of the Catholic Worker. These were dear friends. Four of the seven of us went to Guantánamo together. So we’d been —

AMY GOODMAN: To protest the prison.

CARMEN TROTTA: Protest the U.S. militarism, to protest the torture going on at Guantánamo at the time. There was a prisoner strike, back in 2005. And so, to walk into the room and see the people — once I had decided to explore it again, to see the people that were there was phenomenally compelling. Also, all of this occurs in the context of all those years at the Catholic Worker, there is war, and there is war, and there is war, and we are 17 years at war in Afghanistan. And so, all of our work, all of our other protests in the city had been seemingly easily dismissed. Every arrest in this city led to — the only punishment that they gave you was that you went to court six times, and they would never actually give you a trial. And then they would dismiss the case, but they made you come to court six times over the period of a year. And so, this is the taproot of violence, really, the nuclear system. The Berrigans pointed that out pretty early. And we could not have chosen, in a certain way, a better time to do it, given the nature of the weapon systems now and the pulling out of the treaties, the INF Treaty and if we pull out of the START treaty. My understanding is, nuclear weapons will be entirely unregulated for the first time since 1972.

AMY GOODMAN: Carmen Trotta of Kings Bay Plowshares. We’ll be back with him and his co-defendants after break. They face up to 20 years in prison for entering a U.S. nuclear submarine base in Kings Bay, Georgia. This is Democracy Now! Back in 30 seconds.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “We Will Rise” by Colleen Kattau. This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue our conversation with four members of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, who face up to 25 years in prison for breaking into the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in Georgia last year to protest nuclear weapons. I recently spoke with Patrick O’Neill, Carmen Trotta, Martha Hennessy and Clare Grady in their first joint interview since being arrested. They’re out on $50,000 bond each while they await federal trial. They’re all required to wear electronic ankle monitors. I asked Martha Hennessy, the granddaughter of Dorothy Day, about the conditions of their release.

MARTHA HENNESSY: We’re all on curfew. We spent the first two months on house arrest, and we were only allowed to go out with a schedule, dictated by the parole officer, related to five criteria. And now it’s curfew.

PATRICK O’NEILL: And I would like to point out that —

AMY GOODMAN: Patrick O’Neill.

PATRICK O’NEILL: Yeah. I would like to point out that the primary use of these ankle monitors in the United States now is for undocumented people. It’s a very, very oppressive system. The ankle monitors hurt. They’re used to track people. It’s a very sophisticated form of imprisonment. And, in fact, many people are sentenced to house arrest and have to wear these ankle monitors. So we’re serving a sentence, in essence. And I don’t want to make it in any comparison to what Mark and Steve and Liz are going through, because we’ve been in the jail, but the point is, this is a very oppressive “advance” in the technology used to oppress people, and especially people of color, especially the poor. So, our suffering is minimalistic compared to how it’s being used all over the country.

AMY GOODMAN: Michelle Alexander, who wrote The New Jim Crow, talks about e-carceration and the dangers of this kind of digital incarceration.

PATRICK O’NEILL: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: But it does mean you can be outside of prison for the moment. Liz McAlister, the widow of Phil Berrigan — Liz McAlister has been in jail for almost a year now. She celebrated her — if you can call it celebrating — her 79th birthday in jail. Steve Kelly turned 70 in jail. And there’s Mark Colville. So, how did you all decide to leave jail, and they decide to remain? Talk about the decision you made.

CLARE GRADY: So, I very much think, Amy, that the time in jail, time in court is also part of the witness, just as much as going to Kings Bay. And so I had actually planned or intended to stay in, but my health was deteriorating. And that’s really important. The jail — we were in Camden County Jail for the first five weeks of our time, and then we were in Glynn County Jail. And I got out in the middle of July. I have low blood pressure usually, and it went — started going really high, and I thought, “I’m getting blood clots.” And, like, the food was — like all jail food is. I’ve been in prison and jail. But I was feeling like I actually want to get out alive right now. And —

AMY GOODMAN: And are you communicating with the other prisoners at this time?

CLARE GRADY: So, we are. And yesterday we had a really sobering conversation with Mark Colville, who got out because he had a cancerous growth that developed on his nose while he was in. And I can’t say enough about the healthcare, the lack of healthcare in prison, and lack of anything. And so, Mark just reiterated all that for us on the phone yesterday in his little 15-minute call from the jail. There’s little movement, little outside, little access to a library, little — like no access to good food, even on commissary. And so, if you’re there for any extended time — and he was describing one friend who had had a stroke, and another friend who had died of a heart attack, who — people that were in their thirties. So, it can’t be said enough. And all of us, as we seek to abolish nuclear weapons, completely connect that prison abolition and jail — you know, all of this incarceration is part of the same system that we seek to abolish. So…

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you, Patrick, about the legal strategy you’re going to use in court, the theory that you’re going to apply, using the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Talk about your case.

PATRICK O’NEILL: Well, I guess I would say it’s in a holding pattern right now. We’ve been dealing with these pretrial motions now, you know, since May. And I’d like to think that we’ve sort of flummoxed the federal government a little bit, because the Religious Freedom Restoration Act has primarily been used in administrative cases or civil cases, and not so much criminal cases, but also it has been used frequently by people on the right, to — you know, the case in which Hobby Lobby won, they used —

AMY GOODMAN: Explain.

PATRICK O’NEILL: Well, they were challenging — Hobby Lobby, the corporation, was challenging their — that they didn’t want to provide insurance for birth control, for example. And they used the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to say — to claim it as a religious right. And they won. But it’s also been used by others, a man who was not allowed to have a beard. He was —

CLARE GRADY: In jail.

PATRICK O’NEILL: — Muslim. And he won.

CLARE GRADY: In jail.

PATRICK O’NEILL: He was in jail, and — that’s right. Important point. And he won using the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. So it’s pretty unique now that some of our lawyers who are helping us — most of us are representing ourselves, but with standby counsel and many, many other lawyers helping to write briefs and to do this background work, a talented group of lawyers from around the country. And the idea came up: How would you guys like to look at the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, for us? So, it turned out that when we initially told the government we wanted to pursue this, they were sort of caught off guard, and didn’t do their homework. And they kind of blew it off. And what the magistrate realized was that the U.S. attorney had made a tactical mistake in not taking this seriously. In many ways, if you look at the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, it almost trumps the First Amendment. It really gives a lot of —

AMY GOODMAN: How does it apply in your case?

PATRICK O’NEILL: Well, it applies because the criteria is that you have to have a religious belief that is sincerely held. And you also have to show that you’ve been burdened by the government’s reaction to what you’ve done and that this burden is limiting your practice of your religion. Well, of course, as Clare mentioned, and everyone else, our whole religious symbolism going into the base was clear. It was documented in our statement. It was documented by the blood. It was documented by scripture, by the Bible, by the spray painting of the religious scripture quotes. So —

AMY GOODMAN: And it was?

PATRICK O’NEILL: You know, “They shall beat their swords into plowshares,” like Dan Berrigan said in the previous interview. So, we really did establish a case that our religious beliefs were sincerely held. So then the government ended up having to grant us oral argument on this, in which we brought in Jeannine Hill Fletcher, a theologian at Fordham, who came all the way down to Georgia. And what was the bishop’s name?

MARTHA HENNESSY: Joseph Kopacz from Jackson, Mississippi.

PATRICK O’NEILL: Jackson, Mississippi. So we were able to call witnesses, which is absolutely unprecedented in the 39 years of Plowshare history, to make our case that these weapons are illegal and immoral. And the hearings were absolutely astounding in the content, because not only were our two expert witnesses able to speak, but all of us were, to speak about our religious convictions and make all the arguments that Clare just made about the immorality of these weapons.

AMY GOODMAN: And where did that hearing go?

PATRICK O’NEILL: Well, it went over two days in November, and we are actually still waiting for the government’s response. And one of our lawyers here in New York, Vern Walker — he’s in Westchester County — he met with us, day before yesterday, and he said, “The holy spirit has hijacked your case.” But he really thinks that the government is really taking their time because they’re worried. They don’t really want a court precedent that would be in favor of us.

AMY GOODMAN: And how does this, using the Religious Restoration — And how does this, using the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, relate to what’s often used, Martha Hennessy, and that is the necessity defense? And explain what that is.

MARTHA HENNESSY: Well, the necessity defense has been something that the Plowshares Movement has attempted to use all of these decades, and has essentially been stripped of that, that if you are walking past a burning house and there’s a child inside, you have the right to break down the door and rescue the child. And so, we would like to bring forth, to the federal courts, expert testimony to show that the necessity defense and the international law defense are relevant in this case. And that has been obstructed for the past 36 years. We need expert testimony on the legality of the nuclear weapons.

AMY GOODMAN: How much time do you face in jail?

MARTHA HENNESSY: Oh, they say that the counts against us are good for 10 years each — depredation of property, destruction of property, conspiracy. And then, of course, the misdemeanor of trespass, which is up to six months.

AMY GOODMAN: So, the number of years you’re all facing?

CLARE GRADY: I think it was 25, is how I remember.

AMY GOODMAN: And are you prepared to serve years in jail?

MARTHA HENNESSY: I’m 63. I am facing maybe 20 years left of my life. And this is all — my personal life is irrelevant compared to the creation of God being destroyed. So…

CLARE GRADY: The weapons of empire are always the threat of death and torture and incarceration and dehumanization. And so, when we undertake this, as white people of privilege, we are just adding a little tiny bit to what is ongoing of the struggle of people, where the Doomsday Clock has already hit midnight for them and their children and their grandchildren and the Earth where they live. But I think that what we want to do, or I want to do and we want to do, is be invitational to other people with similar privilege to say that we enjoy these privileges — we’re not really enjoying it; there’s just tremendous cost that comes with all this — but that in stepping over that line and taking that hammer and actually hammering a dent in some of these weapons system, that they give you this 25-year threat, but you don’t know what the outcome is, and that the whole process is to encourage each other to walk in love and not fear.

AMY GOODMAN: Clare Grady of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, along with Patrick O’Neill, Carmen Trotta and Martha Hennessy, whose grandmother, Catholic Worker co-founder Dorothy Day, is being considered for sainthood by the Catholic Church. The Kings Bay Plowshares 7 face up to 25 years in prison for entering a U.S. nuclear submarine base last year in Georgia. Three of their co-defendants remain in jail. The Nobel Peace Prize-winning South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky and others have just backed a global call for charges to be dropped against them.