Above photo: From Space4Peace
Bath, Maine – Guilty, guilty, guilty, 10 times said. We ten among our so-called Zumwalt 12, on trial for an act of civil resistance, silently faced our twelve peers and assessors in Bath, Maine’s District Court on Friday, February 3. After two and a half days of testimony, the verdict came back in twenty minutes. In striving to remove the veils that obscure the costs of American militarism, we had served up a virtual seminar, but had not gotten to even one of them: we had broken a law, enough said! It was this simple alacrity, not the verdict, which amazed us. Still, as a bystander overheard two jurors remark after the proceedings, “I was moved by summa that stuff!” and also, “I’m puttin’ protest on my bucket list.”
On June 18, 2016 we briefly blocked the street outside Bath Iron Works (BIW) during the christening ceremony for the USS Michael Monsoor, one of three Zumwalt-class “stealth” destroyers which, we argued, epitomized the misguided priorities and values of American policy that sacrifice other needs to the primacy of military dominance.
Justice Daniel Billings had charged the jury with weighing two determinations: (1) that we were guilty of obstructing a public way, and (2) that it was unreasonable for us to do so. Indeed, we had sat down in the street and locked arms; therefore we aimed our testimony at convincing jurors that each of us might “reasonably” have committed the lesser crime of obstructing traffic to stop the greater crime symbolized by the spook ship. Thus we invited the jury to examine all the evidence that informed our various motivations. Might a “reasonable” person, armed with our persuasions, be moved to act as we did? And what were our grounds? The testimony fell into five categories:
- Economics/Conversion
Our “numbers guy,” John Morris, a member of Veterans for Peace (VFP) and retired math teacher, testified that the Zumwalt-class destroyers amount to a huge boondoggle. In 1999, the Navy had assured that construction and development costs for each ship of the prospective 32 would come in at $1.34 billion.(1) By late 2016, however, the Navy had upped the tab to more than $7 billion each. The Zumwalt thus exemplifies a characteristic lack of accountability at the highest levels in both defense contracting and the military. All four U.S. Navy captains who served as Zumwalt project managers were promoted to admiral shortly after their “tour of duty,” and the lead contractors on the program—Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, and General Dynamics—have gone on getting their hundreds of billions.
Educator Jason Rawn cited the $18-million raise received by the CEO of General Dynamics (BIW’s owner) in 2013(2), while Mainers, in “a nation infected with a terminal case of military socialism,” struggle to get by.
Defendant Bruce Gagnon, Coordinator of the Global Network against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, argued that if BIW were to convert from making big-ticket weaponry to producing wind turbines, commuter rail systems, and solar or tidal power systems, it would save lives, create more jobs, and benefit our planet while addressing climate change. Gagnon cited a study(3) which found military spending to be capital-intensive while most other investment is labor-intensive. “Conversion means more jobs when we build things we really need.”
- Moral conviction
To a person, we testified that conscience drove us to violate the ordinance for worthy and justifiable reasons.
Connie Jenkins, a retired nurse practitioner and psychotherapist, movingly said: “I believe we are each called in this life to stand up for that which we know deep in our souls is the right thing to do, and then to pray for guidance that our action is not in service of our ego, but in service of humanity.”
Brown Lethem, a nationally recognized artist, retired university professor, and long-time Quaker, avowed that his intent “was not to block a public way, but to open a doorway for my country to regain its moral equilibrium and sanity.”
Joan Peck,a retired social worker in Hospice Palliative Care, had come to the demonstration without intending to sit down, yet nonetheless felt compelled to “take a moral stand when seeing others do so.” Her husband John, a former professor of English, Jungian analyst, and a Conscientious Objector during the Vietnam War, cited family military service, including his father’s work on the Manhattan project and Admiral Rickover’s nuclear submarines, as the backdrop for his different path, joining anti-recruitment actions during the Iraq War and now the Bath action. And the Catholic town of Bath, he reminded jurors, was the site of Philip Berrigan’s last Plowshares action against a BIW Aegis-class destroyer in 1996.
- Militarism
Six of the “12,” members of Veterans for Peace, have renounced war as an instrument of national policy and are dedicated to building a culture of peace. Four of them attested to joining delegations that have demonstrated with groups abroad to protest our bases on foreign soil. I testified that while the U.S. has over 800 such military bases, countries in the rest of the world have fewer than 30!(4), and also that the U.S. has become a rogue nation operating outside international law, by:
- waging war without U.N. sanction,
- drone assassinations aka extra-judicial executions,
- torture,
- imprisonment without habeas corpus,
- extraordinary renditions, and
- the bombing of civilian populations, including hospitals.
- Environment and Marine Biology
Russell Wray, co-founder of Citizens Opposing Active Sonar Threats (COAST), made an impassioned plea for nature, citing the Pentagon’s status as the largest institutional consumer of oil in the world in using more than 100 million barrels a year(5). He also highlighted the profound threat presented by sonar to marine life, particularly whales and dolphins.
In 2015 he joined the people of Jeju Island, Korea, in objecting to the desecration of their ancestral territory by a naval base that will harbor the forward-deployed stealth ships made at Bath. He ended by saying, “Our ‘crime’ of protesting the blessing of this destroyer of lives, democracy, and people’s hopes for a more peaceful world was no crime. It was a call for sanity!”
- Normalized Deviancy
In my own testimony I warned of “normalized deviancy,” in which deviant behavior gains acceptance by being rendered commonplace. In a discord that all ten were bringing to the jury’s attention, a broad array of such criminal behavior, aligned with the “inherent goodness of America,” has dwindled into little more than ambient noise. As exhibit A I cite the airstrikes on Friday, February 10 which killed 18 civilians in Helmand province, Afghanistan, but registered as barely an afterthought in the news cycle.
During the sentencing, Justice Billings, when assigning us to 30 hours of community service, the minimum penalty, declared: “These defendants acted with the greater good in mind.” In acknowledging the Justice’s leniency, defendant Cynthia Howard, an architect and life-long activist, quoted poet-songwriter Leonard Cohen: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” When we undertook this action last June, none of us supposed that the trial would take place during an upsurge of national resistance to the normalizing deviant regime now tripping alarms in Washington. So bless those two jurors whose stirrings were tripped by something in the Zumwalt 12, although they whispered them through a crack in their verdict. May that crack grow larger and the light more brilliant.
NOTES:
(1) Fredenburg, Mark: National Review December 19, 2016
(2) http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/03/18/general-dynamics-novakovic/6567801/
(3) “The US Employment Effects of Military and Domestic Spending Priorities” UMASS-Amherst Economics Dept.
(4) Vine, David: Base Nation
(5) Union of Concerned Scientists: http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_vehicles/smart-transportation-solutions/us-military-oil-use.html
Dud Hendrick is a member of Veterans for Peace. He has traveled widely to meet with and to speak about the victims of U.S. foreign policy. He resides on Deer Isle, Maine and can be emailed at dudhe [at] myfairpoint.net. Written with the assistance of fellow defendant, John Peck of Brunswick, Maine