Civil Disobedience at Bangor: Four Olympia activists are singled out for prosecution

author : Alice Zillah topic : nuclear weapons

by Alice Zillah

In mid-November, Shannon Bushnell, Patty Imani, Bryce Brown and I received letters from Kitsap County informing us that we would be prosecuted for "failure to disperse" dating from our action of nonviolent civil disobedience committed on August 8.

On that morning, we were four of the 19 people who stood and knelt in the middle of Luoto Road in Poulsbo, blocking the main gate to Bangor Submarine Base, home of the Trident nuclear submarine. Dozens of fellow peacemakers stood in vigil at the side of the road, offering us support as we were cuffed and put into police vans.

The letters came as somewhat of a surprise for two reasons. First, no one has been prosecuted for civil disobedience at Bangor in six years. During the late 1990s, juries in Kitsap County repeatedly voted to acquit defendants brought before them for blocking the road. Even though Kitsap is an area in which over 40% of the jobs are military-related, jury members who heard testimony about the illegality and immorality of nuclear weapons found activists "not guilty" again and again. Following a 1999 trial, the presiding juror stated that she was "proud to sit with these people." In 2000, after repeatedly failing to get a conviction, the prosecutor simply stopped pressing charges.

It was also surprising that out of 19 people arrested, only the four from Olympia were prosecuted. Deputy Prosecutor Jeffery Jahns explained that this was because, "We decided to keep people more local; it seemed like a fair thing to do." But, as the prosecutor's office knows, two arrestees live much closer to Port Orchard (where we will be tried) and seven other arrestees live in Seattle, which is just as close.

However, far from feeling persecuted, those of us being charged see it as a tremendous opportunity to share our feelings about nuclear weapons with a broad audience, and to deepen our own personal commitment to nonviolent resistance.

On that morning in August we were joined by Sister Jackie Hudson, a 70 year-old Dominican nun. Jackie spent a year and a half in federal prison recently for, along with two other nuns, breaking into a nuclear missile compound in Colorado and pouring her own blood on the silo lid. From jail she wrote, "What are we willing to sacrifice? What next step are we willing to take to provide a nuclear free future for our children and children's children? Are we willing to fill the jails and prisons of the nation to nonviolently bring about this nuclear free future?"

In the United Kingdom our Scottish allies are also willing to "fill the jails" to bring about nuclear abolition. Faslane Peace Camp has housed resisters outside of the Faslane Trident Submarine Base for 24 years. Father Bill "Bix" Bischel, a Tacoma Catholic Worker who recently traveled to the UK, reported that he was "pleasantly surprised at how much resistance there was among the Scottish people at every level" to nuclear weapons. A huge grassroots movement is trying to make the UK the first country to abolish its own nuclear weapon supply. Next fall activists will be undertaking an ambitious campaign to shut down the base for a full year. They are asking people to travel from around the world to join in the blockade, called Faslane 365.

In light of the sacrifices that Jackie Hudson and others have made, our misdemeanor trial seems like a small price to pay. It is just one step in the larger journey we are all on: ending our commitment to global power maintained through violence. Nuclear weapons are a key component to this power: they are the ultimate expression of violent force, and their very presence is an ongoing threat to all life on the planet. By resisting Trident we are standing up for a world where annihilation is not an option of the most powerful, and one nuclear mistake cannot wipe out life in a hundred-mile area.

Many people have generously asked what they can do to support the four of us. We have an excellent attorney who has donated his services to our defense. We have a pre-trial on January 20, at which our attorney and the prosecutor will enter motions for the trial. The trial will likely be in March or April, and we will publicize the dates when we know them.

The next action at Bangor will be on Martin Luther King's birthday on Sunday, January 15. The day will begin with introductions, discussion and nonviolent training in the morning, followed by a potluck lunch. The vigil and civil disobedience will begin at 1:30. Dr. King wrote, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." We invite you to join us in resisting the spiritual death Dr. King warned of. A carpool will leave Olympia for Poulsbo at 6:30am from Ralph's Thiftway parking lot. Shannon is coordinating the carpool, and can be reached at (360) 352-1274. Complete information about the action, and directions to the base, are available at the web site of the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, http://www.gzcenter.org .