WMD, Nukes & Nuns

WMD, NUKES AND NUNS

WMD, NUKES AND NUNS

A Sequel to Prophets without Honor: A Requiem for Moral Patriotism

By William M. Strabala

Algora Publishing New York

© 2006 by Algora Publishing in the name of William M. Strabala. All Rights Reserved www.algora.com No portion of this book (beyond what is permitted by Sections 107 or 108 of the United States Copyright Act of 1976) may be reproduced by any process, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN-10: 0-87586-446-5 (soft cover) ISBN-10: 0-87586-447-3 (hardcover) ISBN-10: 0-87586-448-1 (ebook) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data —

Strabala, William. WMD, nukes, and nuns / by William M. Strabala. p. cm. “A sequel to Prophets without honor : a requiem for moral patriotism.” Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-10: 0-87586-446-5 (trade paper : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-87586-447-3 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-87586-448-1 (ebook) ISBN-13: 978-0-87586-446-4 (trade paper : alk. paper) [etc.] 1. Political corruption—United States. 2. Iraq War, 2003—Moral and ethical aspects. 3. Weapons of mass destruction—United States. 4. Dissenters—United States. 5. Criminal justice, Administration of—United States—Case studies. 6. Christianity and politics—United States. I. Title. JK2249.S79 2006 956.7044'31—dc22 2006000116

Cover: Bottom from left: Ardeth Platte, O.P, Jackie Hudson, O.P, Carol Gilbert, O.P

Printed in the United States

“When just laws are broken by governments, nonviolent resistance is duty.” — Sister Ardeth Platte, OP

Requiescant in pace For Rev. Philip Berrigan, S.J., who institutionalized draft card burning and the Plowshares organization Sam Day, who founded the Nuke Watch publication and Rev. Paul Kabat, OMI, who was first to jack hammer a missile silo lid

Acknowledgements The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance and encouragement of: Daniel Berrigan, S.J., New York City, for awakening the conscience of America, from his jail cell. Rev. John Dear, S.J., Springer, NM, for books and jail activism stirring that same conscience. Rev. Robert Kinsey, for the Peace and Justice Task Force, United Church of Christ, Colorado. Michael Palecek, Sheldon, Iowa, for his research and inspired writing and jail time. Mary Lou Pedersen, Chicago, for her research and anti-war commitment. Rev. Darrell Rupiper, OMI, for his jail time and continuing commitment to peace and justice. Timothy J. Strabala,Ph.D., Auckland, New Zealand, for daring to edit his father’s work. William Sulzman, Colorado Springs, inspirational founder of “Citizens for Peace in Space.” Joan White, founder of Executive Editors, Denver, for her assistance with the words.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

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CHAPTER 1. A LOOK INTO THE PAST FROM THE FUTURE

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CHAPTER 2. IF THIS BE TREASON

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CHAPTER 3. ANOTHER LIE, ANOTHER WAR, ANOTHER PROTEST

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CHAPTER 4. A QUESTION OF VALUES: WHY ARE THE NUNS IN JAIL?

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CHAPTER 5. RENDERING UNTO CAESAR, OR BEING RENDERED?

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CHAPTER 6. OF POPES, PROPHETS, PULPITS, PATRIOTS, PRESIDENTS AND POLITICAL PUPPETS

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CHAPTER 7. AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH

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CHAPTER 8. OF HUMAN ANGELS AND WOMEN MAYORS

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Sister Ardeth Platte, OP Sister Carol Gilbert, OP Sister Jacqueline Hudson, OP

79 81 83

CHAPTER 9. NUNS AND OTHER MOTHERS WHO TEACH THEIR CHILDREN

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CHAPTER 10. IN THE WRECKAGE OF 9/11

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CHAPTER 11. THE POLITICAL COUP IN AMERICA TOOK PLACE IN IRAQ

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CHAPTER 12. UH-OH: THE COUP’S THOUGHT-POLICE

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CHAPTER 13. LETTERS HOME: WE KILLED THE FATHER TO FEED THE SON

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CHAPTER 14. MORE LETTERS HOME: THESE FROM “BAD ASS” NUNS

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Sister Ardeth Platte, OP Sister Jacqueline Hudson, OP

128 133

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns CHAPTER 15. FIGURES FROM IRAQ

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CHAPTER 16. IRAQ: KILLING FIELD FOR THE WAR BETWEEN TERRORISTS

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CHAPTER 17. THREE NUNS KNOCKING ON THE WEAPONS-GATE OF WMD

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CHAPTER 18. MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE WMD RANCH

167

CHAPTER 19. AMERICA AS A TWISTED THEOCRACY

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CHAPTER 20. OF TRAITORS AND TRADERS: PRESIDENTIAL ARMIES SWAPPED FOR PRESIDENTIAL NUKES

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CHAPTER 21. WMD COMPANIES GET BACK IN LINE FOR SECONDS

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CHAPTER 22. VIVE LA FRANCE, VIVE LE CARLYLE, VIVE LE U.N., VIVE SADDAM

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AFTERWORD: REFLECTIONS FROM EISENHOWER

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APPENDIX A. SACRED EARTH AND SPACE PLOWSHARES II

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APPENDIX B. THE NUREMBERG PRINCIPLES

203

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PREFACE America’s own Weapons of Mass Destruction seem to go almost unmentioned as this nation wages war against a foe that is demonized for “perhaps” seeking to acquire WMD capability. This is a book about those American WMD and about three prophetic nuns who staged a peaceful protest at a missile silo. It’s about political immorality and the meaning of justice in a nation where it seems to be illegal to carry out non-violent protests against mass killing. The stage was set for the nuns’ action by a sequence of events that we will trace to 1991, although they have their roots in earlier diplomatic machinations. In April 1991, UNSCOM (United Nations Special Commission) established a weapons inspection policy to investigate whether Iraq was assembling weapons of mass destruction, military technology that would threaten the world. This UN commission evolved into UNMOVIC (United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission), which sent a second wave of inspection teams. (In 1994 UNMOVIC oversaw the destruction of SCUD missiles and other WMD faculties that the US did not want Iraq to have. It was expelled by Saddam Hussein afterwards.) Just prior to that, in January 1991, President G.H.W. Bush had sent US troops into the oil-rich nation of Kuwait. According to the US, this was a war conducted to liberate that tiny nation from an Iraqi invasion intended to occupy Kuwait for its oil. Even though Iraq had huge oil reserves of its own, Saddam supposedly had decided to capture the oil reserves of his neighbors and monop-

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns olize the common oil geology. However, it turns out that the tiny but oil-rich Kuwait was enhancing its supply to the US by drilling slant wells under the Iraq border and was drawing oil from a shared geological formation. After invading Kuwait, Saddam was then poised threateningly on the border with Saudi Arabia, another strategic oil supplier for the US. Given Saddam’s apparently aggressive move, Bush was able to induce the nation of Saudi Arabia (which is Islamic, but not Arab) to grant him permission to establish a military base on its territory. The President repeatedly said the war “was not about oil”; he did not make it very clear, though, what else it might be about. Neither did he make it clear why the US repulsion of Iraqi troops stopped short of Baghdad and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, who had once been a CIA asset recruited by Bush. More than ten years later, on September 11, 2001, four commercial airliners were hijacked; two of them were crashed into the World Trade Center towers and one into the Pentagon in suicide missions. (The fourth hijacked plane crashed on the ground before reaching its objective.) These acts were labeled terrorism and were considered acts of war by the administration of President G.W. Bush. The majority of the hijackers were officially identified as Saudi nationals; however, they were apparently not acting on government orders and so there was no nation against which to declare war. The news soon reported that the ringleader of the plot was Osama bin Laden, who headed a group called Al Qaeda (The Cell). He was said to be angry that American infidel troops were defiling sacred Muslim soil by their continuing presence in Saudi Arabia. Then it was learned that Al Qaeda and bin Laden had trained in Afghanistan and had been sheltered by the Taliban government that had come to power after the Soviet-backed government there had failed. Congress granted Bush war powers to invade Afghanistan, which he did by making territorial arrangements with Pakistan, another Muslim nation. The Taliban evaporated, but bin Laden escaped the American net. US revenge unrequited, G.W. Bush seems to have used the opportunity to target other Islamic nations. His focus fell on Iraq. His rhetoric suggested Saddam Hussein was complicit in the 9/11 plot and that the next foe in the “War on Terrorism” would be Iraq. The reason given was that Iraq was importing uranium oxide from Niger, in Africa, and therefore had the capability to build nuclear weapons, that is, “Weapons of Mass Destruction.” WMD became a popular new buzzword and Iraq became the new whipping boy.

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Preface Several continents away, in the fall of 2002, three Dominican nuns cut through a chain link fence around a nuclear missile silo in Colorado and declared that they had discovered the WMD Bush was looking for. So much for UN inspectors. Their protest was staged to show the world who was the real threat when it came to the use of WMD. The three women were arrested and jailed for “sabotaging national security” by objecting to the war that was already being prepared against Iraq. In March, 2003, after “pacifying” Afghanistan, President G.W. Bush went on to invade Iraq from the same base in Pakistan. The declared purpose of the war was to find and neutralize the WMD on Iraqi soil that constituted a threat to the security of the US and the rest of the West. Not to mention Iraq’s closer neighbors. But no such weapons could be found. A new justification had to be found. Washington then emphasized that Saddam Hussein was a tyrant to his own people and his neighbors, and it would be better to force a regime change and impose “freedom and democracy.” In February of 2002, the CIA paid Joe Wilson, former ambassador to Iraq, to travel to Niger to check out a report for Vice President Cheney that Iraq was buying uranium oxide to make nuclear weapons. (The report came from the Italian Intelligence Service and has since been determined to have been based on forged documents.) By March of 2002, Wilson reported to the CIA that “it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place” (The New York Times, July 6, 2003). Ten months later, in January of 2003, President Bush cited in his State of the Union message a British dossier on the matter and repeated the charges publicly that Iraq was buying uranium from Africa. In March, Vice President Cheney said on the TV show Meet the Press that Saddam was “trying once again to produce nuclear weapons.” In July 2003, Joe Wilson publicly contradicted Bush and Cheney, telling the New York Times that “If the information was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses.” In reaction, the White House leaked the news to the media that Joe Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent, and suggested that CIA reports by her husband were unreliable. The story was written by columnist Robert Novak, July 14, 2003. The CIA charged that this leak was a breach of national security under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. As events turned out:

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns 1) The UN inspection sanctions begun in 1991 had already eliminated all WMD technology from Saddam’s arsenal. No WMD of any type were found by the conquering US troops. 2) The importation of uranium by Iraq was apparently a fabrication based on forged documents but, because it was endorsed by British intelligence, it was hyped by Vice President Dick Cheney to promote public support for the war. 3) As personal punishment for contradicting the president, Joe Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was exposed as a CIA agent and Wilson was painted as relying on personal and dubious information. At length, feeling persecuted by the Bush administration, Wilson told the Los Angeles Times (Oct. 29, 2005): “More important, they did it as part of a clear effort to cover up the lies and disinformation used to justify the invasion of Iraq. That is the ultimate crime.” 4) The ensuing cover-up of Cheney’s deceit led to charges of national security violations by his office. One Cheney aide, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, has been indicted for lying to the investigators about the national security breach. 5) The truth of the war against Iraq revolves around WMD: who has them, and whether they are ethical in the context of the Geneva Conventions governing the conduct of war. The nuns point the finger at the US. This book explores the injustice of the US federal courts which sent the nuns to jail for their virtue in opposing the ramp-up to the war in Iraq, and the killing of many thousands of human beings — including thousands of America’s own young men and women. As heroic as their sacrifice is, their lives were needlessly cut down by the sword of Bush-invented “religious patriotism,” as this book will show. This book also reveals the corporate sources of the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that were delivered to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. Certainly, he then exceeded his tacit American license to kill, which arguably gave Washington the excuse for the war now at issue The corporate sources of those WMD had close ties to two Bush presidents. They placed WMD in Iraq’s hands when Saddam was a CIA “asset” and before he became “the enemy.” Years later, those presidents found it necessary to remove their own secretly-placed WMD technology by means of two wars in order to obliterate evidence of their personal connections to Saddam Hussein’s non-existent nuclear WMD. At the center of the presidential cabal by two Bush presidents is the investment bank called the Carlyle Group.

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Preface The book lays bare the truth of a classic behind-the-scenes struggle between politics and the morality of an unjust war reflecting from the lives of those who support it. It exposes truths that few Americans will understand or believe, but for which — out of a simplistic version of patriotism that has been equated with morality — they are willing to kill and die. It shows, therefore, how the world was dragged into war even as three gentle nuns were punished for their resistance to such crimes and the lies that hide the truth about the Iraq war. The purpose of this book and the motives of its heroes and villains cannot be understood without first reviewing the relevant law, as constituted in part by the Nuremberg Principles adopted by treaty under article VI of the US Constitution. The most pertinent articles of Nuremberg state: Principle I: Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefor and liable to punishment. Principle II: The fact that international law does not impose a penalty for an act which constitutes a crime under international law does not relieve the person who committed the act from responsibility under international law. Principle III: The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as a Head of State or responsible government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law. [For a complete review, see Appendix B.]

These principles were part of the Nazi War Crimes Tribunal adopted into the Geneva Conventions after the close of World War II and became the law of the land in the US under Article VI of the US Constitution, which declares: “This Constitution and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof and all treaties made or which shall be made under the authority of the United States shall be the supreme law of the land and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any state to the contrary nothwithstanding.” For its part the Geneva Conventions, which are US law, declare the use of weapons of mass destruction or the threat to use them is a war crime. As such, logic leads to the conclusion that the law has been broken both by the federal courts and by the chief executive of the United States under his presidential oath to defend the constitution and uphold the laws of the land. It will warn people who do not believe in evolution of the species about the devolution of American democracy into a theocracy. It will show the public

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns how and where and why its train of morality has been hijacked for political purpose and religious power-mongering. This book will reveal scandals illustrating how two presidents named Bush suborned even the nation’s latest nuclear secrets to war-profiteering for the commercial benefit of a company that they and their political cronies still own. Specifically, this book will show that the same Bush-owned company provided Saddam Hussein with WMD technology, and then used the Iraq War to remove Saddam and destroy evidence of the Bush complicity in its own brand of WMD treachery. It will show how billions of dollars were involved and why millions of people died for a selfish few men in power; and it will show how the scandal of the UN’s Oil-for-Food program lined the pockets of men who held White House positions. In the end this book will render, for judgment by the reader, the contrast between these immoral outrages and the peaceful, moral efforts of three nuns who protested — to both sides — the consequences of WMD policy. It will ask why they languished in jail for trying to prevent a terrible crime against humanity, perpetrated in Iraq at the hands of the US, while those who promoted the war by lies about CIA’s intelligence operations remain free and merely indicted — if it can be proven — for lying. If, in 2020, any Americans look back on the George W. Bush presidency and try to make sense of what happened to their country, these pages will help elucidate the story. And the moral that emerges from this tale will become clear.

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CHAPTER 1. A LOOK INTO THE PAST FROM THE FUTURE It is unlikely that in the year 2020 anyone will be alive who cared why three nuns in the year 2002 were arrested and falsely convicted of sabotaging the national security of the United States of America. By then, if a free world still exists, it will be clear that there was, of course, no such sabotage. By 2020, a wrinkled George W. Bush might still be wearing his mindless smirk at his Texas ranch. He will likely be as unrepentant as ever for the damage he has wreaked within the world, using the pretext of revenge for 9/11 and fear of other nations’ WMD. “What nuns?” he might say. “What nucular [sic] treaties?” By 2020, most of the members of the jury that convicted the nuns will be gone, without ever having come to recognize that they voted to convict despite the fact that the colonel in charge of the missile silo said that the nuns had done nothing to impede the use of the missiles, and thus had not compromised national security (as defined by our holding the means to unleash nuclear Armageddon). By 2020, Judge Robert Blackburn may have suffered some pangs of conscience for manipulating the case against the nuns in favor of a government proclaiming its right to hold WMD even as it went to war over another nation’s non-existent WMD. By 2020, the judges of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver likely will be unable to recall why, except for reasons related to their federal paychecks, they refused to recognize that the nuns were far less a threat to national security than the people who planned the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns By 2020, the strutting federal prosecutor, John Suthers — whose nunhunting exploits in the Bush political jungle earned him the position of Colorado attorney general — perhaps will have satisfied his ambitions enough to pause and reflect; but he is unlikely to be humble enough to recognize that his bullying deliberately over-reached the moral basis of what Common Law, as he learned it at Notre Dame University, is all about. By 2020, the three nuns in question will likely have died but will be very much alive in the heaven where such holy and persecuted people live forever in peace. By 2020, the public will have long since forgotten the confused logic and ego-puffery of the born-again ad-man Rush Limbaugh, who announced on November 3, 1988: And now the liberals want to stop President Reagan from selling chemical warfare agents and military equipment to Saddam Hussein; and why? Because Saddam “allegedly” gassed a few Kurds in his own country. Mark my words, all of this talk of Saddam Hussein being a ‘war criminal’ or ‘committing crimes against humanity’ is the same old thing: Liberal hate speech. And speaking of poison gas…I say we round up all the drug addicts and gas them.

That, of course, was before Limbaugh was revealed to be a closet drug addict whose crime went unpunished, and before the US went to war with Saddam — twice. In his own words, the ultra-conservative Limbaugh blabbed to the world that America was selling WMD technology to Iraq as far back as the ReaganBush years, when dictators like Saddam were cultivated for the sake of their efficiency in eliminating objections to self-serving American policies. While neither of the Bush presidents has publicly expressed support for Limbaugh’s WMD idiocy, over the years they did—through their political influence—supply Saddam with poison gas WMD. If the observers from 2020 hearken back to 2005, they will find that the same wild WMD policy supported by Limbaugh was carried out by two Bush Presidents over the years. Vice President Dick Cheney’s aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby resigned in November 2005 after lying about WMD and the issue of Iraq’s trafficking in uranium for WMD, as noted in the preface. (This claim was the primary reason given by the Administration to justify the invasion of Iraq.) In the fallout, Bush’s stubbornness in keeping the US on a war footing wiped out his ability to respond to domestic needs. His untenable fiscal policies raise broad questions about his clique’s short-term and long-term goals. With a $600 billion tax break for the rich, they put the nation into a fiscal box; the box

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Chapter 1. A Look into the Past from the Future got tighter with the war in Iraq, which cost another $300 billion. The rebuilding of Baghdad drained another $100 billion. When Hurricane Katrina wiped out New Orleans (in part because flood control funds to beef up its dikes had been diverted for the sake of the war), there was no money to cover the emergency. Bush wildly pledged $200 billion “or whatever it takes” to make the shredded Gulf Coast whole again. But months later, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was publicly bemoaning the fact that while money had been found to rebuild cities in Iraq, promises were all he had when it came to rebuilding his city. “It blows me away,” he told CBS News on December 5, 2005. The irony is that when Bush came to office, he inherited from democratic President Clinton a budget surplus. Bush promptly broke Clinton’s piggy bank and created a drain on the economy of more than a trillion dollars — most of it spent on spilling blood in Iraq and applying the bandages. To understand the Iraq War, the people of 2020 will have to learn that such callousness and even the will to create human suffering for the sake of political goals was a part of America at the dawn of the third “Christian” millennium. But one thing will remain: the festering sores of the WMD of nuclear nations. The US seems to be on track to spread the war in Iraq to its neighbors (e.g., Iran, Syria, Libya) and the possibility of peace in the Middle East will have been once again deferred to somewhere over the American rainbow. The public most likely will have no idea why the government and courts sought to imprison nuns and priests and protesters for their peaceful resistance to the WMD of nuclear nations. On the other hand, perhaps those who tire of a war without end may be curious enough to ask questions, such as: Who really owned WMDs at that time? Who was a threat to America’s security? Who unilaterally voided nuclear treaties? Who put the US on a first-strike pre-emptive war footing? Who lied? Who profited from a war designed around the body-bags of 2,000+ American lives? Who once set up Saddam Hussein as a CIA “asset” to wage war against Iran and then double-crossed him?

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns Who made money from the Food-for-Oil scheme that was ostensibly intended to keep the Iraqis from starving? Who deleted from the files the names of the hundreds of companies the United Nations had turned up, indicating Iraq’s sources of WMD technology? Who indeed did all these things, if not two presidents named Bush and their intimate political associates? And yet, who went to prison? The nuns. Who died? Thousands of American men and women, not to mention tens of thousands of Iraqis and others. The events of 2005 necessarily trace their history back through the 10th Circuit decision of March 17, 2005, which denied the appeal on behalf of the nuns. That court with a shrug of its federal shoulders affirmed the condemnation of the lower court because a world war based on WMD weighed more heavily in the scales of justice and security than did the challenge of three simple nuns for the sake of peace. The ruling turned the findings of the anti-Hitler Nuremburg trials upside down. The system broke its own laws regarding citizen responsibility for the actions of their government. In 2005, even as the last of the three nuns is released from jail after serving out her term, Saddam Hussein has yet to be found guilty of any crime. Of what might he be guilty? To explore these issues and questions, we will go back to the 8th District Court in Denver, Judge Robert Blackburn presiding. As he affirmed the sacrosanct nature of WMD by sentencing three nuns, those nuns told him to his face that they would pray for him — as they do for the world—saddled as it is with WMD.

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CHAPTER 2. IF THIS BE TREASON “For my part, I think it is a less evil that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part.” — Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

“Dangerously irresponsible.” That was how US District Judge Robert Blackburn described three blackgarbed nuns in his Denver courtroom on July 25, 2003, as he poised his gavel for the final blow. His words came less than two years after what has come to be known as “9/11.” In the weeks before, the nuns had chosen to wear in court their prisonprovided fluorescent-orange jumpsuits — the color intended to signal that these women were guilty of something. The nuns thought the suits appropriately broadcast the injustice of their predicament to the world. Now, as sentence was to be pronounced, the nuns dressed themselves in traditional black habits, perhaps to signal the kind of “death sentence” they expected, or perhaps to accept the sentence in their proper identity rather than in a costume designed for real criminals. (Before proceeding, Judge Blackburn asked a man in the gallery to remove his hat. Unheard by the judge, the man remarked he didn’t think he was in church.) Blackburn’s description of the nuns, delivered with a judiciary scowl, applied to the way in which the nuns had gone about “discovering” weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Weld County, Colorado. After all, they had cut through a fence to “discover” such WMD. And this was just weeks before Pres-

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns ident George W. Bush launched the second Bush war of “shock and awe” against Iraq in order to discover Iraq’s WMD. The judge’s words (“dangerously irresponsible”) were preamble to the imposition of sentences ranging from 30 to 41 months for “sabotaging the nation’s security.” They had done so by cutting a chain-link fence and defiling with blood, poured from baby bottles, the sanctuary of America’s security: a WMD site. At the time the nuns took their action (prior to the invasion of Iraq), theirs was a case that really amounted to the misdemeanor offense of trespassing at a missile silo that happened to contain WMD. But, if WMD are so egregiously evil that Bush cited them as the primary reason for war against Iraq, then it would appear to be a citizen’s responsibility, not a crime, to call attention to their presence on US soil. This contradiction never even slowed down the pro-war court. In the wake of the 9/11 events, the government chose to equate the trespass of the nuns and their prayers for peace with sabotage and treason. And so the US charged the nuns with an offense designed to defrock the moral principle for which their black robes stood. After all, nuns or not, they were guilty of a sin against the nation and of violating its WMD. The nuns both understood but were perplexed by the schizophrenia of US policy. Bush told the world and the nation that it was necessary to find and eliminate WMD in Iraq because they threatened the world, and that he would go to war to create peace and freedom from the scourge of WMD. He said this after 50 years of American policy that had threatened the world with the US form of nuclear WMD doom. He said this after a history of supplying Iraq with the very WMD technologies now deemed evil enough to cause war. These were the thoughts reverberating in the mind of the nuns. But neither Bush nor his father nor any of their policies was on trial here; the nuns were. Blackburn steered the whole trial in that direction, and he boiled it down to a conclusion about three “dangerously irresponsible” nuns. His shaping of the arguments washed away the basic fact that they were innocent of “sabotage.” The record shows he had even declined to answer a question from the deliberating jury about the issue of sabotage, ordering them to follow his instructions. This trial was about what the nuns did to jeopardize national security. These were the facts:

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Chapter 2. If This Be Treason On October 6, 2002, three nuns, dressed in hazardous waste suits bearing the legend “Citizens Weapons Inspection Team,” cut through a chain link fence at nuclear missile silo N-8 in northern Colorado. They wore the suits to mimic the UN teams who had previously scoured Iraq for weapons of mass destruction that President George W. Bush insisted were still hidden there. The trio also wore T-shirts emblazoned with the ironic words, “We found them.” Indeed they found them in the US just as, by contrast, the US failed to find any WMD in Iraq — even after waging war and turning the country inside out. The purpose of their escapade, according to the nuns, was to show Americans where the real weapons of mass destruction were hidden and from where the real threat of war by WMD emanated. Naively, they hoped their action would stop the war against Iraq that President Bush was then calling for. Of course, it did not. “When we went to this site,” says Sister Jackie Hudson, “we went to symbolically stop a crime from happening and to uphold international law.” Bush, who had earlier abrogated the 1972 disarmament treaty, claimed he was upholding international law by going to war over the same issue. By contrast, the nuns’ defense team could not even get the judge to allow a defense based on international war-conduct treaties such as the Geneva Conventions. Atop the silo concrete, designed to withstand anything but a direct hit by a nuclear bomb, the nuns rapped with household hammers on rails strong enough to handle the pounding of locomotives and missile exhaust. They left behind a rosary, symbolic of their prayers seeking divine help against the nuclear horrors poised beneath their feet. They splashed their own pre-bottled blood in the form of a cross on the silo’s 25-ton lid. They poured the blood from baby bottles, symbolic of new life. With the push of a preemptive attack button, that bloodied lid could rocket on the rails like an anchored Frisbee to clear the silo’s throat for a missile launch. Any such launch, of course, would destroy the protective perimeter fence — the same fence the breaching of which by the nuns constituted their “breach of national security.” The event was thick with such irony. The hammers used by the nuns were symbolic of the Biblical exhortation by Isaiah to beat swords of war into plowshares of peace. The blood was symbolic of the nuns’ prediction that blood was otherwise about to be spilled, and

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns that men women and children were about to be killed in Iraq — all because of the WMD hidden in this silo. The date of October 6 was also symbolic, being the first anniversary of the US invasion of Afghanistan, an event that spilled the blood of many innocent men, women and children as “collateral damage” in the hunt for bin Laden. After cutting a hole in the silo fence, the nuns — members of the Dominican order noted for preaching — prayed and sang and waited for their inevitable arrest for trespassing. Waiting with rosaries in hand were Sisters Ardeth Platte, 66; Jackie Hudson, 68; and Carol Gilbert, 55. One of the rosaries, confiscated by the military, became an exhibit in the sabotage trial — yet another bit of irony. This was not the first confrontation the nuns had forced with the military. In the spring of 2001, all three were arrested for pouring blood and hammering on warplanes at an Air Force base in Colorado Springs during an open house. After they spent a week in jail, the charges were dismissed, ostensibly because the damage was negligible but more for public relations reasons. It wouldn’t do to treat nuns like criminals. The nuns called their incursion beyond the silo fence Sacred Earth and Space Plowshares II. All three are members, by virtue of their actions, of the anti-nuclear Plowshares movement formed in 1980 by eight peace activists, including the Berrigan brothers and Father Carl Kabat, OMI. In 2000, Kabat climbed over a silo fence in the same WMD missile field that sprawls over Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska. The complex contains more than 120 Minuteman III missiles with triple warheads. According to Kabat, a former science teacher, each carries ten times the nuclear clout of the Hiroshima bomb. In 2001 Kabat was sentenced by Magistrate Boyd Boland to 83 days (time served). Upon his release, Kabat served an additional year in federal prison for breaking parole by leaving Illinois without permission. In all, Kabat has served more than 15 years of his life for engaging in such peaceful protests. Along with Philip Berrigan, the nuns and many others view him as a prophet and a role model, though, like Kabat, they are quick to say they are followers of Christ, first of all. Two other activists, Daniel Sicken and Oliver Coe, trespassed in 1998 at missile silo N-7, a sinister neighbor to N-8 chosen by the nuns. US District Judge Walker Miller sentenced Sicken to 41 months in prison and gave Coe 30 months.

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Chapter 2. If This Be Treason To the attack of the nuns, armed with household tools and baby bottles, the military responded with the same reactive force that an alien enemy invasion would have met at the site. Battle-equipped troops in armored personnel carriers with machine guns locked and loaded smashed through huge stretches of the chain link fence in a choking cloud of dust. Barrels leveled point-blank, they valiantly surrounded the nation’s “dangerously irresponsible” foes. At trial, the nuns were charged and sentenced with destruction of the fence as an item of government property essential to national security, even though almost all of the fence damage was caused by the military itself. However, the main charge was obstructing national security, an offense which is found within the US Code that also covers sabotage. Under the obstruction charge, the nuns faced up to 20 years in prison. In motions to dismiss, Walter Gerash and Susan Tyburski, noted Denver defense attorneys, said that the charge was out of proportion to the actions of the defendants, as shown by testimony of military officers in charge of the silo. During the course of the trial, Gerash and Tyburski elicited testimony from the silo’s military officers that the nuns had done nothing that would have interfered with the use of the silo, even if the weapons had needed to be launched. However, utilizing the public impact of the 9/11 mass murders and the USA PATRIOT ACT that was bulldozed through Congress immediately in the wake of that disaster, District Attorney John Suthers prevailed with his contrived national security obstruction charge. Although Suthers was a Catholic, trained by nuns and educated at Notre Dame, he insisted for the record that “this case has been about…upholding the rule of law.” The judge did not allow the defense attorneys to argue that upholding the law included the obligation by the federal government to honor the treaties about the conduct of war. The argument about treaties that prohibit the use or threat of use of WMD, such as the missiles the nuns protested, was ruled out of bounds. At that time, President Bush was in the process of terminating long-established ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) treaties that had been ratified as being part of US law under Article VI of the Constitution and establishing the US right for pre-emptive nuclear strikes. Despite this gutting of America’s cherished rights on behalf of “the rule of law,” Suthers stated: “The defendants have demonstrated a blatant disregard for the laws of the United States. No other country on earth provides as many avenues for peaceful and lawful protest as does the United States. But the defen-

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns dants insist on unlawfully entering onto highly sensitive government installations, damaging government property, and interfering with government operations.” He seemed thereby to shrug off the assertions by his own witnesses that no harm had been done to national security. The post-9/11 jury, left ignorant of Constitutional law by Judge Blackburn, was eager to put somebody behind bars. The jury bought his story and the nuns became the scapegoats. Using national security as a springboard, federal prosecutor Robert Brown, a disciple of Suthers, successfully made the case for sabotage and treason, and he gained a conviction. In court he praised nuclear weapons as a key deterrent in the Cold War and said they were vital to the nation’s continued defense, implying that nuclear weapons had won the Cold War for the US. The suggestion was that the nuns’ action was an attempt to sabotage such wonderful results for domestic security. No mention was allowed that those same WMD violated US law under its own treaties, or that the WMD were causing the beginning of a world war in Iraq. “It would be nice if nuclear weapons had never been invented,” Brown told the jury; “but they work.” (He was referring to the Cold War.) In other remarks he suggested the nuns should have obtained a parade permit, as if such a thing might have been granted under their right to free speech. History shows that anti-war demonstrators at the Republican convention in New York City in 2004 were arrested wholesale even though they did have legal permits. The right to exercise First Amendment freedoms was already gone. The nuns were not easily convicted, however. The jury sent out a question asking Judge Robert Blackburn whether the charge amounted to sabotage. Blackburn merely repeated his obtuse instructions, declining a direct answer to a direct question. He did not want to call it sabotage, even though the charge of obstructing national security and sabotage are both items that fall under the same title of law by which the nuns were being prosecuted. However, the media spoke and wrote of “sabotage”. When the guilty verdict came in, Blackburn was left with a sentencing dilemma. The punishment under the sabotage law was severe (up to 20 years) but the actual offense and damage done were negligible. The public flooded his office with letters calling for probation, something that by law Blackburn could not give. Local newspaper columnists and editorials called for leniency, at least.

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Chapter 2. If This Be Treason Blackburn’s Denver courtroom and the court building’s plaza overflowed with national and international reporters and with sympathizers from around the world. None of them thought that sabotage or treason or even obstruction of national defense had been proven. Yet the jury had been swayed in that direction under the Suthers-Blackburn orchestration. Supporters of the nuns understood that they had trespassed only to prove a point about who really held weapons of mass destruction and who really was guilty of a war crime. In that sense, the nuns felt victorious. Unfortunately, not many among the general public know, even after the trial, that to possess and threaten to use weapons of mass destruction such as nuclear bombs is a crime under international law. The public knows little about the Geneva Conventions on conduct of war, and the principles declared by US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson at the Nuremberg trials in 1945. (Blackburn’s all-encompassing in limine rulings made sure neither the public nor the jury would be exposed to such knowledge.) When it came time for sentencing, Blackburn noted, “Whatever sentences I impose will be wrong. Some will criticize them roundly as too harsh, perhaps, and others as too lenient.” With the word “wrong” hanging on his lips, he proceeded to do what must have been, by his half-admission, wrong: he sent the nuns to federal prison. His lame lament came as a product of his own pre-trial rulings that left the three nuns with no defense at all and no way to explain their motives and action to the jury under international law. Referring to Judge Blackburn’s thirty-two-page ruling, a supporter of the nuns, Bill Sulzman, said the judge’s commentary “makes disdainful comments about the defendants, motions and actions. One is left with the conclusion after reading the full document that Judge Blackburn thinks there is no difference between a piece of pie in a military mess hall, a military sleeping bag or a nuclear bomb. All are equally legitimate ‘national defense’ materials.” Sulzman heads an international peace activist group based in Colorado Springs known as Citizens for Peace in Space. Here is what Judge Blackburn’s in limine motions ordered: 1. That defendant Jackie Hudson’s motion to dismiss due to international law preemption is denied. [She claimed that law from the Nuremberg trials of World War II, imposed by US Justice Jackson, requires citizens of any nation to resist policies and actions that are wrong, such as the building or maintaining of weapons of mass destruction.]

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns 2. That defendant’s motion to dismiss on the grounds that the government has failed to apply or misapplied the intransgressible Laws of War that control and prohibit any threat or use of the Minuteman III at issue at N-8 (site) is denied. [This barred the use of an international law defense.] 3. [The claim] that defendant’s motion to dismiss is required because any threat or use of Minuteman III, N-8, constitutes ipso facto the most egregious crimes: i.e., crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide is denied. [This barred the defense from claiming that to threaten the use of nuclear weapons is a war crime because of their power to kill indiscriminately.] 4. That motion by defendant, Jackie Marie Hudson, to dismiss Count 1 of the indictment is denied. 5. That defendant Ardeth Platte’s motion to dismiss for reasons that defendants had a right, duty, privilege or justification to nonviolently expose, inspect and symbolically disarm a fundamentally illegal and criminal first-strike high-alert weapon of horrific mass destruction, the Minuteman III, N-8, is denied. [This bars the use of the Nuremberg Principle that a citizen must act to resist policies and orders of the state known to be immoral or criminal.] 6 & 7. That Defendant Ardeth Platte’s motion to dismiss the sabotage and depredation of property charges is denied. [The judge agrees that the proper charge is sabotage and not trespassing. He also affirms that she will be tried for actions against the national security: Judge affirms that she will be tried for actions against national security, read: sabotage.] 8. [In line with the above rulings, the judge granted the prosecution’s motions] that the government’s motion in limine to prohibit Defense of Choice of Evils, justification or international law defense, provided furthermore that without an antecedent offer of proof accepted by the Court, there will be no jury voir dire examination; there will be no opening statement; there will be no evidence; there will be no jury instructions and there will be no final argument as to any defense based on necessity or violation of international law that impugns, inter alia, the lethality, legality, morality or political wisdom of the Minuteman III missile system, including but not limited to the variously described defenses: necessity; duress; choice of evils; privilege; justification; Nuremberg; mistake of law; international law violations; jus cogens violations; peremptory norms of international law violations; war crimes violations; customary international law violations; nonderogable jus cogens norm of customary internal law violations; international law violations; US. Army field manual violations; International Court of Justice judgment violations; treaty violations; United Nations Charter violations; Vienna Convention violations; Restatement of foreign relations law violations; and, 9. That the request for the items of discovery identified by the defendants in Jackie Marie Hudson’s motion to discover and inspect under Rule 16 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure (Brady, Giglio and Kyles V. Whitney) is denied.

If Judge Blackburn had any real qualms about imposing a fair sentence on the nuns, they were self-created when he crafted the above set of hanging-judge rulings. In effect, he stripped the nuns of every defense to plead their case and deprived them of a fair trial.

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Chapter 2. If This Be Treason Their high motives were to have no mitigating influence. He tied the jury’s hands in reaching any decision except that dictated by the prosecution: that they broke a law by trespassing onto the American public’s property (which by containing WMD constituted an illicit and illegal action by the prosecuting government). The court faced a predicament with the nuns. If the judge had allowed them a fair trial, on motives that mitigated the evidence, the result would have been to indict all the world’s nuclear powers for war crimes of a WMD nature. To provide a hearing that might result in the release of such peaceful rebels could lead to the incrimination of the US federal government itself for WMD war crimes. Such a result could logically lead to calls for the US, Iraq, Israel and all the world’s nations to dismantle the WMD to which the nuns objected and which Bush banned under pain of war in Iraq. Such a judicial decision is out of the question because it strikes down national policy formulated around nuclear WMD. It is interesting to note that two years prior, in the case of Carl Kabat, another judge made similar rulings that vitiated any possible defense. In that case, prosecutor George Gill (a member of Suthers’ staff) declared that “free speech stops at the wire” (a reference to the silo fence). In a single sentence this obscure bureaucratic attorney blazed new counter-Constitutional law without benefit of Congress, and this was allowed by the judge and stamped into legal precedent by the deliberately underinformed jury. Nobody, including the media, took note; and the Republican-lobotomized American public still does not realize how it degrades their rights under the constitution. Why? In the end, the general public’s outrage over 9/11 influenced the case of the nuns. The public, grasping for culprits, was in a hanging mood and so were the federal courts. This fitted the scheme of Suthers and Brown. The nuns admitted to trespass at a WMD site but in the end, trespass was not the charge levied by the government; so the jury could not convict them of that charge. Neither could the judge — given his own adverse ruling — sentence them for trespass. Lacking that lesser and obvious charge, the jury reasoned the nuns had to be guilty of what was left on the courtroom butcher block: obstructing national security.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns Any scruples over the militarization of America were forgotten in the heat of the public dismay over the attacks on New York and the Pentagon by what appear to have been Muslim fanatics. In that context, there was little sympathy for the idea of US restraint, or moral responsibility. There was instead a rage and an impulse to kill everything Islamic. Meanwhile, frustration with Washington’s failure to “get” Osama bin Laden preyed on the minds of the judge and jury in the case of the nuns, because it was heavy on the minds of the general public. Blackburn handled his juridical discomfort by delivering sentences that even the defense attorneys described as “less than what they expected.” Platte got 41 months, Gilbert got 33 months, and Hudson got 30 months. (By the end of 2005, all three had been released from prison.) Suthers and Brown, who knew they had loaded the case against the nuns, seemed relieved; they had got away with a miscarriage of justice and violation of constitutional principles. Of the sentences, Brown said, “I think it was fair.” Suthers said it was “eminently fair and reasonable.” Judge Blackburn said he based the terms on a previous silo-trespass case (Sicken and Coe), taking refuge behind a 1998 precedent rather than considering the case’s own merits as they existed in 2003. In earlier and truer moments of fairness, Suthers had offered the nuns a pre-trial deal in which they would plead guilty only to damaging government property (the fence) and would be set free. The nuns had refused because they did not think they were guilty of anything except exposing the government’s own international war crime of threatening the use of WMD over the course of four decades. This ran counter to public opinion at a time when America was being told that radical Muslims had used the Koran to justify the 9/11 attack, so that all Muslims were guilty. To be confronted by nuns who did not respond to Islamic hatred for America with America’s own brand of Christian hatred was intolerable at some unspoken level of patriotism. Thus, the nuns quickly found out that America loved its own WMD but were tricked into hating the Muslims and Iraq because they supposedly were trying to gain access to equivalent technology and power. In American minds, the 9/11 catastrophe, which was in context a low-tech WMD attack, had already proved the “evil” of everything Islamic and everything that was not fundamentalist Christian. It created a “we are good and they are bad” mindset.

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Chapter 2. If This Be Treason It is apparent from the case of the nuns that the US judicial system does not test for truth or morality; it is an adversarial contest in which someone wins and someone loses, according to the rules of the system contrived by the whims of a judge. Restrictions imposed by the court can hamper a defendant’s ability to present evidence in its favor, thus stacking the deck for the other side. That proved to be the case with the nuns. They wished only to point to America’s own WMD and invoke the judgment of the people in God’s name and for the sake of humanity’s future. They based their objections on the morality underpinning their Christian faith and Geneva Convention law. Sadly, few in the American public saw through the political propaganda that colored the courts and jury process, so very few recognized that nobler course of judgment. Suthers told the Rocky Mountain News, “When you’re looking for a stage, plea bargains don’t work very well. You have to have a trial.” Frustrated with the refusal of the nuns to take bail and to plea bargain, Suthers got revenge by convicting them with the aid of Judge Blackburn of a crime they did not commit. In 2005, Suthers departed the federal scene to become Colorado’s attorney general. For his part, Judge Blackburn delivered his sentences with a forked tongue. While calling the nuns “dangerously irresponsible,” he justified WMD and even a war based on WMD, using World War II as an example. “The Revolutionary War founded this great nation,” he said. “The Civil War ended slavery, the Second World War put an end to the despot Hitler and, arguably, the war in Iraq put an end to a brutal dictator and his regime.” His irrelevant comments were greeted by groans from the pro-nun observers in the court’s gallery. At the same time, Blackburn said the nuns deserved shorter sentences than the prosecution sought (5–8 years). He cited the fact that they did no significant damage to the silo. He also recognized they had spent their lives in “prodigious” good works and had the support of the local and even the international community. The case caught the attention of newspapers and TV nationwide and attracted some media from abroad to the Denver Federal Courthouse. On April 10, 2003, The Denver Post published the following sympathetic editorial for the record:

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns Nuns’ Case Calls for Mercy Three Roman Catholic nuns were justifiably convicted this week of obstructing the national defense and damaging government property. But is it really necessary to imprison them for up to 30 years? That’s the maximum sentence US District Judge Robert Blackburn can issue under sentencing guidelines. He will sentence the women July 25. Certainly the US government has better uses for prison cells than housing three nuns who were seeking to make a statement about war, not terrorize their countrymen. Prison and jails are overcrowded. Stuffing the felonious nuns into a federal prison at taxpayer expense does little good. The nuns arrived at the N-8 Minuteman III missile silo last October, exactly one year after the United States and its allies launched an attack against the Taliban in Afghanistan. The date was symbolic. They cut through two gate chains and a fence to (again symbolically) tap hammers on the old railroad tracks used to transport the missile [lid]. They then sprayed their own blood in the shape of six crosses onto the 110-ton concrete silo dome. The nuns began to sing and pray, no doubt waiting for someone to show up and arrest them. After all, you can’t make a real statement these days unless you are arrested. Military personnel arrive an hour — that’s 60 minutes — after an alarm went off. (That’s one of the more troubling revelations in this case. (What if real terrorists had gained entry to the site?) The officers pointed guns at the nuns. A Humvee crashed through a fence when the women didn’t obey an officer’s orders. While the protest was symbolic, the nuns’ actions were unlawful. That’s not in dispute. “In the United States, you have the right to protest government policy in a variety of ways,” US Attorney John Suthers said after the guilty verdict was delivered by a federal jury. “But if you violate the laws, you’ll face the consequences. We will continue to prosecute all acts of civil disobedience.” As well he should. But we hope Judge Blackburn shows some leniency when sentencing the three. They’ve already served six months in jail, which one described as “sacred time, but difficult sacred time.” That should be enough. Others have been sentenced to less for doing worse. The nuns, for their part, aren’t expecting leniency. And if it’s not granted, it seems they’re comfortable with whatever final verdict they ultimately draw. “We will not be found guilty under God’s law,” Sister Carol Gilbert shouted to the jury. In a nation founded in large part on the principle of separation of church and state, no zealot is entitled to substitute her or his personal interpretation of “God’s

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Chapter 2. If This Be Treason law,” for the rule of law is derived from elected representative bodies. But secular law, like divine law, is sometimes best tempered with mercy.

The Denver Post’s editorial was not as perceptive as it was crafted to seem. John Suthers said he would “continue to prosecute all acts of civil disobedience.” Yet he never presented the case to the court as one of civil disobedience, a misdemeanor. The editorial writer ignored that point, preferring to agree with a guilty verdict for sabotage of national security, certainly not a misdemeanor, even while calling for mercy. In sum, the Post editorial missed the point. The case of the nuns did not require mercy; it required justice in the first place, as Jim Spencer, columnist for The Denver Post, wrote on July 17, 2003, for the public record: It’s called downward departure. It’s a fancy term that means making the punishment fit the crime. Federal Judge Robert Blackburn needs to do it July 25 when he sentences three nuns convicted of protesting against nuclear weapons. In April, a jury found Sisters Ardeth Platte, Carol Gilbert and Jackie Marie Hudson guilty of obstructing national defense and damaging government property for hammering on a missile silo in northern Colorado. The nuns’ prior civil disobedience, combined with their latest convictions, puts them in the category of dangerous felons as far as federal sentencing guidelines are concerned. The guidelines call for these women, who have devoted their lives to promoting peace and nonviolence, to serve six to eight years in the penitentiary. If this constitutes homeland security in post-Sept. 11 America, the watchdog needs dentures. When they’re not protesting for peace, the nuns teach in poor neighborhoods, helping the least of us. Locking them up is like locking up Mother Teresa. It’s just wrong. So it falls to Judge Blackburn to do what’s right. He’s got the power to depart from the sentencing guidelines. To do it, a judge must decide that special circumstances exist, said Sam Kamin, an assistant professor of law at the University of Denver. “The judge basically has to say that this isn’t what Congress intended when it approved the guidelines,” Kamin explained. In the nuns’ case that statement makes John Suthers, the US attorney for the Colorado region, look brain dead. Suthers’ office plans to formally respond to the nuns’ request for downward departures today, a spokesman said. But the government’s position all along has been that these peacemakers aren’t blessed. “They have been prosecuted in the past for similar acts and sentenced to short periods of incarceration, which have not served as a deterrent,” Suthers said. Suthers apparently sees symbolic protests as security threats. He thinks taxpayers need to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep the nuns off the streets. I propose that the politically posturing prosecutor write the check out of his publicly financed salary. He obviously has too little on his plate and not much more in his head.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns The crimes committed here involve three old women cutting through a fence and whacking a few hammer blows on a missile silo of reinforced concrete several feet thick. What happened posed no more threat to national security than refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance or sing The Star Spangled Banner. As for costing the government money, I’m betting Suthers put more of a hurt on the federal purse prosecuting the nuns than the nuns put on the missile silo. Platte, Gilbert and Hudson spent several months in jail awaiting trial. Time served, combined with some community service, makes sense. The nuns should be required to pay to repair the fence they cut. They might even need to pay for the time soldiers spent responding to their protest. But six to eight years in prison for Hudson, who is 68, Platte, who is 67, and Gilbert, who is 55, mocks justice. Denver University’s Kamin said that only extraordinary circumstances justify downward departures from sentencing guidelines. Devoting your life to peace in a war-torn world qualifies not only as extraordinary, but as exemplary. No matter, Kamin said, federal judges don’t like to depart from the guidelines because the decision to do so is automatically reviewable and reversible. Judges, he added, don’t like to be reversed. They ought to like turning peaceniks into prisoners even less. Federal judges — in this case Blackburn — have wide discretion to decide what factors demand departure from the guidelines. The ability to get around the sentencing guidelines exists because the folks who wrote the guidelines knew the guidelines were not one-size-fits-all. They sure don’t fit these convictions. The nuns never hurt anyone. They never will. They’re sort of like angels. If the whole world adopted their sacrifice and respect for humanity, terrorism and war would cease. So would crime. It would be heaven on earth. Unless Judge Blackburn departs from the sentencing guidelines, the United States will show its angels hell on earth. “You could make an argument that lack of discretion [in sentencing] looks ridiculous because you have people here who aren’t a threat,” Kamin said. “You could also argue that anyone who puts nuns in the pen for six years runs a kangaroo court,” Spencer concluded.

In fact, as Blackburn gaveled the sentencing trial to a close and was retreating to his chambers, cries of “kangaroo court” were heard from the gallery. In a twist of irony, just three days before the nuns were sentenced, five Russian military officers were invited to tour inside a missile silo near Chugwater, Wyoming, where they visited up close the very missiles that at one time were pointed at them. How this squares with the government’s overwrought concerns for national security in the contrasting case of the nuns is impossible to explain.

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Chapter 2. If This Be Treason The Soviet enemies, for whom the weapons were intended, were invited to tour the heart of national security, while three non-violent citizens of America were being sentenced for cutting a fence with intentions to protect both sides from their suicidal WMD threats. Here is the story filed for the public record by Denver Post’s northern bureau reporter, Coleman Cornelius: Russians Tour Nuclear Silo with a Stoli Toast Tuesday, July 22, 2003 — Chugwater, Wyo. — Five Russian military brass climbed out of helicopters on the Wyoming prairie Monday, strode to a chain-link fence guarded by US airmen with M-16 rifles and quickly gained clearance to a nuclear-missile facility originally designed to cow them. Then, in a visit that symbolically upended residual Cold War hostilities, highranking officials with the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces toured a Peacekeeper missile silo undergoing deactivation. “It’s part of an overall process of transforming the relationship between our two countries from one of post-Cold War rivalry to one of working cooperatively,” said Brig. Gen. Frank Klotz, commander of the 20th Air Force. In the silo, about 60 miles north of Cheyenne and 60 feet underground, the Russians saw the inner workings of the United States’ most destructive nuclear missiles. This inconspicuous missile site, visited most often by cattle and antelope, holds the first of 50 Peacekeeper missiles that will be dismantled by 2005 as the two nations redesign their relationship. The missiles, each of which can carry 10 nuclear warheads, are all buried in southeastern Wyoming. Air Force leaders hosting the trip entered the US military when Russia was part of the “evil empire” and the chief reason for amassing US nuclear might, said Col. John Faulkner, group commander at F.E. Warren Air Force Base, which maintains intercontinental ballistic missiles in Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska. But Sunday night, Air Force hosts toasted their Russian equivalents with Stolichnaya vodka during a steak dinner in Cheyenne. And Monday morning, they toured part of the US underground arsenal that more than four decades ago was designed to deter similar forces in Russia. The military leaders discussed shared concerns about terrorism, rogue nations and worldwide political instability, said Col. Kenneth Van Sickle, vice commander of the 90th Space Wing. The Russians, who did not speak to reporters, learned about the deactivation schedule for Peacekeeper missiles, which will help the United States comply with mandates of the 2002 Moscow Treaty, an arms reduction agreement signed by President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The visitors also heard about the 150 Minuteman III missiles that remain on alert under the Western prairies, and remain a concern among peace activists,

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns including three Catholic nuns who will be sentenced in Denver on Friday for breaching a missile site. Gen. Col. Nikolay Solovtsov, commander of the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces, did not descend into the silo Monday. But he wiped the dirt-smudged nose of Airman First Class James Clouse as the young enlistee clambered up a ladder. “Son, you’re dirty. That’s good,” the Russian general told Clouse, 21. He performs missile maintenance. “I was like, yes, sir,” Clouse said later. “It was pretty cool.” On Monday night, the visiting Russians were scheduled to have another taste of the West: They were set to dine on barbecued beef, beans and coleslaw then to attend a bull-riding performance at Cheyenne Frontier Days, one of the region’s biggest and best-known rodeos. That same Monday night in their Georgetown dungeons, the three nuns who never entered a missile silo, had baloney sandwiches.

Judge Blackburn’s sentence turned out to be lenient. It was influenced perhaps by the flood of letters received. But his leniency quite likely was influenced as well by the three defense attorneys who had defended the nuns for free. Scott Poland, who was Platte’s counsel, told the Rocky Mountain News, “These are three elderly ladies — if they don’t mind my saying that — who are about as harmless as any three human beings that I could imagine.” Susan Tyburski, also on the defense team, noted that the main damage to the silo fence came from the military itself when they crashed their vehicles through it. She noted that the part which was cut by the nuns would have cost only a few dollars to repair. Walter Gerash was perhaps the most eloquent in asking Blackburn to be lenient. He cited historic protests in American history. These included the Boston Tea Party, the Underground Railroad that helped slaves escape to the North, and the feminist movements of the 20th century. Gerash noted these were all violations of unjust laws as they existed at the time. Calling the nuns “human angels,” he noted that their protests at the missile silo were in the same tradition of such historic events. “Now it’s coming out that perhaps the American people haven’t been told the whole story about the intervention in Iraq,” said Gerash, who served in World War II. In tears, he noted that “our Gis are being killed now, almost every day.” In that regard, he said the actions by the nuns at missile silo N-8 were “prophetic.”

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CHAPTER 3. ANOTHER LIE, ANOTHER WAR, ANOTHER PROTEST In the long view, what transpired in Blackburn’s court in 2003 was based on a chain of lies from the White House that originated in the struggle for absolute military supremacy. In today’s context that means the goal of being the sole power having access to WMD. Blackburn himself presumably had no specific knowledge of the lies or their indirect connection to the nuns, because he had blinded the court to those issues. What was the fundamental lie? It consisted of 16 words buried in State of the Union Speech delivered by President George W. Bush in January 2003 to the US Congress: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” The lie couched in those fatalistic words, planted by Vice President Dick Cheney, is manifold in its origins and impact: 1) The British intelligence was based on documents passed along by the Italian Intelligence Service that Cheney by then knew were forged. 2) Cheney ignored a report given to the CIA and State Department by Joseph Wilson the previous year, debunking the Italian memo about the purchase of uranium from Niger, because it didn’t support the Bush administration’s excuse for invading Iraq. Wilson says he undertook his special CIA investigative mission about Iraq’s WMD threat at the request of Cheney, channeled through the CIA. 3) That the Cheney-Bush lie about Iraq’s WMD capability was deliberate is proven by the fact that columnist Robert Novak in his article “Mission to

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns Niger” (July 14, 2003) described the Italian documents as forged. Obviously, that piece of information was leaked by the White House to Novak. At the same time, the White House also leaked to Novak that Valerie Plame, the wife of Joe Wilson, was a CIA “agency operative” on weapons of mass destruction. 4) The leak to Novak was motivated by the need for the Bush administration to justify its invasion of Iraq. If Novak was told all of these things, then his arm’s-length source, Cheney, knew them too — long before he fed the president the WMD lie to use in his speech. The convenient source to use was British intelligence. Bush can deny that he was aware of the deception, of course. And while Cheney’s aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby was indicted for lying about the deception, no determination in that regard was made about Cheney himself. But, of course, Lewis could not have been apprised of such vitally important facts without Cheney (and Bush) being apprised of them, too. Congress gave the Administration approval to declare war only because Cheney’s office manipulated them by planting this deception in the president’s speech. The nuns, of course, heard those words. They knew of America’s decadeold program through the United Nations to extirpate WMD from Iraq’s territory. They also knew that the kinds of WMD which were the target of Bush’s verbal war were held in abundance by Bush himself in places such as the prairies of Colorado. They reasoned that if it was wrong for Saddam Hussein to have them, it was wrong for Bush to have them; and they wanted the public to understand that point before the nation went to war. For calling attention to the contradiction, the nuns were imprisoned as traitors and the nation proceeded to invade Iraq. The nuns operate with slogans as basic as “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” However, their prison terms have robbed them of precious time in their lives to make the rest of society and its leaders understand and live up to such a simple, ancient moral imperative. They tried, in a peaceful way, to impeach the American public and found it to be as immune to moral precepts and as unimpeachable as the White House is for high crimes and misdemeanors. In December of 2005, Dominican Sister Ardeth Platte was freed from federal prison after serving 41 months in the slammer. Her compatriots in crime, Sister Jackie Hudson and Sister Carol Gilbert, were released earlier. The federal

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Chapter 3. Another Lie, Another War, Another Protest government took away several years of their lives for trying to prevent the very war catastrophe that has befallen the United States since they went to jail. Basically, the nuns were convicted under the USA PATRIOT Act (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism” Act (of 2001). As President Nixon said many years ago in the Watergate crisis before he resigned, “mistakes were made.” His statement was, as history shows, the closest Nixon could bring himself to apologize to the electorate that sought to impeach him for a lie about how he tried to manipulate his election. Later, that same American public sought to impeach William Clinton for a lie about his personal morals. He, too, apologized, and perhaps more straightforwardly than Nixon. There is no sign that the public can expect any admission by the Bush administration regarding what lies they have told to the world. These events are but didactic preludes to the conviction of the nuns as felons for telling the truth about WMD. However, the nuns expect no apology from the unimpeachable American public for false imprisonment, because there has been no apology from its leaders. At the same time, whatever crimes against humanity Saddam Hussein may be charged with, they do not include possession of WMD. The American public, which persistently falls for Washington’s lies, waged war against Saddam and the nation of Iraq under pretenses falsified by their own leaders. And they persisted in killing Iraqis and in sacrificing their own sons and daughters in an unjust conflict even after they belatedly found out they had been deceived. Finally, in October of 2005, Saddam Hussein was brought to trial in Iraq for using WMD weapons and technology provided years prior by George Herbert Walker Bush (when he was CIA chief and later vice president and then president). Until 1990, Saddam was considered a CIA asset in the Middle East, and the elder Bush was all too eager to use Saddam to take revenge on the Iranians for their earlier Tehran hostage-taking. As the record shows: — Hussein used chemical WMD and other technology that had been provided by the CIA in attacks against Iraq’s Kurdish citizens after they attempted to assassinate him. The technology came from Bush-controlled private companies.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns — America bombed thousands of Iraqi men, women and children throughout all the years between Operation Desert Storm and the war waged by Bush Jr. Daily bombing runs were made in the so-called “No Fly Zone.” Iraq’s own air force was not allowed to operate in its sovereign air space. — The bombing was carried out by both Bush administrations, and the interim Clinton presidency, under the presumed auspices of various resolutions force-fed to the UN by the US. Most foreign nations felt the US took military air actions which exceeded both the spirit and intent of the “No Fly” sanctions. — In addition, the US bullied the UN into prohibiting Iraq from providing for its people by selling its oil on the open market. This was a US-inspired effort to starve the Saddam-controlled economy and thereby force Saddam Hussein to surrender the weapons of mass destruction. These WMD included SCUD and other missile delivery systems under the nuclear, chemical or biological WMD classification. As a result of the oil embargo, thousands of men, women and children were left with no food and no medicine. Enter the UN, trying to soften the inhumanity of its US-inspired sanctions. — The UN organized the “Oil-for-Food” program so that Iraq could sell enough oil to at least feed its people and provide health care under the pains of the embargo. That program was quickly corrupted by European and American companies seeking to make illicit profits through kickback schemes that included Saddam Hussein himself. Some of those companies were controlled by Bush family interests. (See chapters 17 and 21.) — While the US was bombing Iraq, Hussein finally agreed to allow UN inspection teams into Iraq to look for and destroy WMD. They did so for several years, until Saddam kicked them out in 1994. While they found and destroyed a few items of minor consequence, nobody was sure whether all the nascent WMD capabilities were gone. After all, you cannot prove a negative. — The doubt stemmed from the fact that the 12,000-page report (which Hussein provided to the UN concerning the nations and companies and agencies that had provided his WMD technology) was redacted to eliminate the names and sources of that technology. Further, it was unknown whether Hussein had other unexpurgated documents that might connect the White House to the source of the WMD technologies being cited as the reason for going to war. — Worse than two Bush administrations hiding corporate connections to WMD technology in Iraq, is the more recent leakage of nuclear technology to third-world nations such as Pakistan. This amounts to a kind of behind-the-

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Chapter 3. Another Lie, Another War, Another Protest scenes swap of nuclear bomb trigger technology for political allegiance as a means of conducting the Afghan and Iraq wars. (See Chapter 20.) In America, apparently, it is morally acceptable to build and possess WMD, but that same privilege is not acceptable for anyone but very close allies. Consider this report from the New York Times of September 14, 2005: On the verge of America’s invasion of Iraq, four left-wing activists went into the vestibule of their suburban Army recruiting center [this was in Ithaca, New York, where Cornell University is located] and poured vials of their blood, about four ounces each, onto the walls, windows and an American flag. In an unusual move, the protesters are now facing federal prosecution and harsher penalties after a jury deadlocked in state court. The group, which calls itself the St. Patrick’s Day Four because the protest took place on St. Patrick’s Day in 2003, faces charges including damaging government property and conspiracy to impede an officer of the United States. Their (second) trial is to begin Monday in federal court in Binghamton. The case did not automatically end up in federal court. The protesters were first charged with felony criminal mischief in Tompkins County, which includes Ithaca, the place where the protest took place. The district attorney there, George M. Dentes, offered a plea bargain under which members of the group would receive no jail time if they pleaded guilty to reduced charges. The protesters — Daniel J. Burns, 45; Clare T. Grady, 46; her sister, Teresa B. Grady, 40; and Peter J. DeMott, 58 — refused. “It’s a clear attempt to raise the stakes for those contemplating civil disobedience around the country,” said William P. Quigley, a law professor at Loyola University. He is a friend of the defendants and their legal adviser.

The case of the St. Patrick’s Day Four, tried in a county court on rather trivial charges, ended in a hung jury. This is interesting because it shows that when such trials are brought to the grassroots level and all the issues are explained to the jury, there is much more reluctance to convict people for acting on the basis of conscience and morality. In one word, there is justice. Like the St. Patrick’s Day Four, the three nuns in Denver were offered a plea bargain that would have spared them federal jail time, but they refused on moral principle. In their case, the charges were subsequently overblown to the status of national sabotage. Lies from Washington to mislead the public have been abundantly documented: After JFK’s assassination, President Johnson lied to America and got his declaration of war against communist North Vietnam from Congress. LBJ died before the truth about the Tonkin Gulf manipulations and America’s own provocative actions under Operation 34-A became known. However, even before

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns LBJ’s lie was exposed, its effects unleashed a draft-card-burning revolution on campuses nationwide that contributed to ending the war, although Nixon never ceded that point even as he resigned from office. Somehow America, as unrepentant followers of Nixon, forgave itself and the world moved on to another generation willing to swallow the incredible proposition of the continued need for war — this one illegal and secretive, but just as deadly. America went through Iran-Contra and the Reagan-esque lie: the president claimed not to know that laws, passed specifically to stem his unilateral war-making powers, were being broken by executive-appointed agents (e.g., Lt. Col. Oliver North) in the basement of his own residence, the White House. Flip another page of war history and we have President George W. Bush lying about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction to get Congressional approval for going to war with Iraq under the War Powers Act. It wasn’t long before the lie about WMD, made by Bush in his State of the Union message to Congress in 2003, became apparent. However, until the lie was exposed, the public’s protests against the war were mild. The 9/11 tragedy was used to sway the nation as a whole to throw all its emotional energy into the rush for revenge and an outpouring of defensive rhetoric, easily mistaken for patriotism. John Negroponte, then ambassador to the UN and later to Iraq, confirmed that there were WMD in Iraq. (In February 2005 he was named the first director of US national intelligence.) Apparently, he was either mistaken or he lied. There was an insider backlash against the Iraq invasion: These included Joseph Wilson, former ambassador to Iraq; Paul O’Neill, Treasury Secretary; and Richard Clarke, National Security Advisor. But overall the conservative reaction to the truth was one of denial and hostility. To the dismay of the nuns, both the US (headed by a president who calls himself a Christian) and the Muslim side (proclaiming Allah’s power) continue to operate on lies that stimulate fear, hatred, and violence. Yet, who can accept that the God of either religion blesses WMD or the killing of noncombatants for secular purpose and political and economic power? As the nuns see it, by public acceptance Bush’s lies become the lies of the entire American public. His misdeeds are stamped, like his silo bombs, “made in U.S.A,” and so is every campaign and every death in his war.

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CHAPTER 4. A QUESTION OF VALUES: WHY ARE THE NUNS IN JAIL? Why were the nuns jailed? Why is the world at war? Successful democratic government is the process of keeping the voting public confused about the truth and then getting them to blame your opponents. These two questions explore the definitions of morality and patriotism, and the struggle between the two, in the context of two divergent cultures. Those too lazy to think it through over-simplify that contest between two cultures and economies and call it mutual hatred. Today the stakes of the contest are higher than ever, mixed with the economics of oil, political dominance and corrosion of Islamic and Western culture by an America driven by its own short-term interests and a superficial Christian re-enactment of the Crusades. Many verses of the Koran, and many verses of the Bible, can be cited to support each religion’s notion of peace and justice. Many more verses conveniently support the use of sword and scimitar in the name of the Divine. That is always the problem when church and state lie in bed together. Whether we consider that the conflict started with the European conquest of the Holy Land, or the Muslim conquest of Constantinople, the task before humanity now is when, and how, it can be brought to a lasting conclusion. The three nuns, who impute a kind and forgiving God to every religion, are guilty of getting in the way of a historic political and economic power struggle in which religious sentiment is stirred up to silence critics by fomenting patriotic

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns passions. They are guilty of trying to change the course of history in a way that would allow for a kinder, gentler future. They were imprisoned for exposing hypocrisy and crimes. They are guilty of waging peace without weapons, of trying to supplant WMD with reason. Within a few months of America’s declared war victory in Iraq, even the media “embedded” with the US military in Iraq began to catch on to the big lie. Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction to be removed. The prime reason that had been offered for going to war turned out to be false. Furthermore, if George W. Bush actually had feared that there were such WMD, it is because companies with which he and his father were associated had sent the technology to Iraq many years prior. In essence, the lie was a cover up to mask his own complicity in a crime that he placed at Saddam’s doorstep. The US had invented WMD in the first place, nuclear, chemical and biological, had huge stockpiles of them, and even had them ready for instant preemptive use. So much for the Geneva Conventions. The nuns’ value system simply held that nobody should have or want WMD. All policies of church and state that take human life are immoral, because murder on any scale and for whatever reason, including “security,” is wrong. On this score, the nuns have the strongest of moral allies in Pope John Paul II, who once said in a homily: “to kill in the name of God is blasphemy.” They also knew that to use 9/11 to corral public support for a war with a nation that was not part of that atrocity, like Iraq, only compounded that horrid immorality. The nuns would seem to have former President Jimmy Carter on their side. Carter expressed his thoughts in a CBS interview in November 2005, when he said the Iraq war represents a significant departure from previous moral values in America. Carter spoke with Early Show’s co-anchor, Rene Syler, on the occasion of the publication of his latest book, Our Endangered Moral Values. (Many of Carter’s points corroborate those made in Prophets Without Honor: a Requiem for Moral Patriotism, by William M. Strabala and Michael Palecek, Algora, 2002). In part, Carter told Syler: “We need to understand what this administration has done; why we went to war in Iraq when obviously all the reasons they gave were false; and let the people understand: Was it a deliberate distortion of the facts as they knew them? Or were they mistakes made honestly? Who was culpable, if anyone? Going into Iraq was ill-advised and unjust and unnecessary.”

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Chapter 4. A Question of Values: Why Are the Nuns in Jail? Carter believes the decision to go into Iraq was made long before the 9/11 mass murders. He said: “I think it was made long before President Bush was elected president. [The fact that] the people who believed that America should be the dominant force in the world — unilaterally, acting militarily if necessary —is another basic change in the principles that have always guided our country and made us great. “So going to war without our country being directly threatened is a new policy that’s radically changed the basic moral values and ethical standards of the United States of America,” Carter concludes. Bush maintains that he is so Christian that he gets his Christo-centric political messages directly from God, and thereby justifies his righteousness in the matter of the Iraq war. Bush’s spiritual channel is reported by Rupert Cornwell, Washington correspondent for Britain’s The Independent. In his article of October 7, 2005, Cornwell claims that Bush privately confided his divine mission at his first meeting with Palestinian leaders in June 2003. Cornwell bases his claim on advance knowledge about a BBC series that was to be broadcast in October of 2005. That series would have substantiated the Bush claim to having received divine messages. However, the BBC’s independent stance has been under pressure in recent years, especially in regard to reports on the Middle East, and the broadcast was canceled (despite the fact the BBC had issued a press release on October 6 announcing the “major three-part” series which was to start on October 7). The series had the title, Israel and the Arabs: Elusive Peace. The nub of the revelatory series was to be this: Palestinian Minister Nabil Shaath after a meeting in June 2003 said Bush had told him and others in the delegation that God had given him (Bush) “a mission” to invade Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the task of creating a Palestinian state.” If the program had aired, it would have included the Bush comments as quoted by Minister Abu Mazan, “I have a moral and religious obligation. So I will get you a Palestinian state.” (That quote comes by way of an article in the Media Guardian by Tara Conlan.) The White House, through its official spokesman Scott McClellan, said the President had “never made such comments.” He acknowledged, however, that he had not been present at the June 2003 meeting in question. Subsequently BBC said, “The denial by the White House put some program editors off. It probably played a big part in some of the decisions not to run the story.”

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns US journalist Bob Woodward was not as timid. In his book about Bush and the Iraq war, Plan of Attack, which was approved in manuscript form by the White House before publication, Woodward asked Bush if he ever sought political advice from his presidential father. Bush responded by saying he got his advice from his “heavenly father.” Whether or not this was a ploy designed to pander to the Christian Right, it suggests that, in Bush’s megalomania, he believes it was God who told him to invade Iraq. In fact, as documented by Frontline in a broadcast January 11, 2006, Bush claims to have received a divine mission while he was governor of Texas — after he had “accepted Jesus” in order to overcome his alcoholism. On that program Bush held up his “handbook” on how government should be run: a Bible. He also said, “I believe that God wants me to be president.” “We serve one greater than us.” “Our rights are derived from God.” “I support faithbased programs.” Of course, this fits in with the biblical passage of Romans 13 that suggests God creates governments to punish evil (it stops short of saying that Bush gets to judge who is evil). Bush claims to be carrying out God’s will. These example show that there exists in the White House an unholy cocktail of religious, political and military policies which embody the unconstitutional danger of commingling religious and secular powers in one deceptive executive. Here is yet another example from the religious side of the equation: On October 17, 2005, Robert C. Morlino, Bishop of the Catholic diocese of Madison, Wisconsin, was appointed by the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the US Army to the Board of Visitors of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). WHINSEC was formerly known as SOA (the School of the Americas), the CIA-inspired agency that trained the “Death Squads” responsible for the killing of nuns, priests, and many others in Central America during the Iran-Contra scandal, for example. WHINSEC still trains South American teams at Fort Benning in tactics similar to those used to assassinate Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador. For his part, Bishop Morlino said of his appointment, “I am enthusiastic about the opportunity to support our military and our brothers and sisters, neighbors in the Western Hemisphere, by standing up for the truth about morality and justice.”

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Chapter 4. A Question of Values: Why Are the Nuns in Jail? As an officer of both church and state, Morlino seems to sanctify and forgive the war- making that has made the US a political leper. At the same time, by ignoring the need for protest, he appears to condemn the moral stand of three nuns who have a teaching role that is as legitimate and historic within the church as Morlino’s. It took the revelation of sexually shocking conduct by US military personnel at Abu Ghraib to awaken the conscience of Americans back home. But, how is it that the abuse of POWs rouses disgust and protest, while the ongoing destruction and the slaughter of combatants (and unarmed civilians) seeking to throw out an occupying force raises no scruples? President Bush went to great lengths to explain that the nude display of prisoners is contrary to American values, without reference to the fact that he had been trying to kill them, fully clothed, before they were captured. What is the moral position of America in regard to Iraq? Is it more humane to kill or maim people than to take pictures of their genitalia? Is such action more degrading of human values than murder by war? There are Muslims who have also dragged naked through their streets the remains of non-combatant Americans and displayed them hanged and rotting from a bridge; but it is the US that invaded their country, not the other way around. How can a president say he is sorry about such treatment of Iraqi prisoners in the wake of a war that he declared and that causes such atrocities and counter-atrocities? Both sides, the nuns might say, need to get back to the morality of their religions and then reflect it in their politics. Until the Abu Ghraib scandal, the US media published or aired little that would throw question on the validity of the war. The media salved its conscience by merely displaying the Abu Ghraib photos; and the White House and the Pentagon were satisfied, too, to convict two non-coms and let the matter fade. In the end, it does not matter whether Bush knew there were no weapons of mass destruction left in Iraq. It does not matter whether there was good or bad “intelligence” on the WMD matter. Like his father before him, Bush went to war because the power of oil in the Middle East, on which America depended, was in the balance, and any rationale was good enough, especially if it seemed Christian in origin. Quite separate from the declaration of support for the war that Bush extracted from the Congress, which he deceived, the decision for war was made in July 2002. This is clear from the revelation of the “smoking gun” memo attributed Britain’s M16 director, Richard B. Dearlove, nine months before G.W.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns Bush invaded Iraq. This was about the time the nuns were planning their “invasion” of the Colorado missile silo. The Dearlove memo describes a meeting between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and President G.W. Bush: There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove [Saddam] through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC [National Security Council] had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the justification for force. The Attorney General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self defense, humanitarian intervention or UNSC authorization.

This memo proves that it didn’t matter to Bush whether or not Saddam still had WMD after the UN inspections. It did not matter whether his defecting aides knew the policy trumped the intelligence. All that mattered was that WMD and 9/11 would be a sufficient excuse to get the war started; and anything that contradicted that policy should be discredited. Bush’s right-hand man Cheney took care of those tactics. Meanwhile the nuns, operating on the basis of longstanding facts and not inside information about a war that was secretly gestating in Washington, were inspired to take actions that easily could be construed as unpatriotic and made to look like sabotage when the events of 9/11 had been distorted to smear Iraq and foment popular support for the idea of going to war. It did not matter that the nuns took their action before the Iraq war started. It was inevitable that this, or something like it, was coming. What did matter is that the nuns took action after the USA PATRIOT Act had been passed in the heat of passion over the World Trade Center, and the mood of the country was one of fear and vengeance. As Al Franken noted in his book The Truth, Bush won reelection by use of fear about another 9/11 attack. Rather than worrying about lies from the White House, the public was expected to worry about nuns who pointed out embarrassing aspects of US conduct based on that fear. Sojourners Magazine in its 2002 November-December issue interviewed two former CIA analysts about Bush’s WMD lie. Here is a transcript of portions of

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Chapter 4. A Question of Values: Why Are the Nuns in Jail? that interview with Ray McGovern and David MacMichael by Rose Marie Berger and Jim Rice: Sojourners: In the build-up toward the war in Iraq, the Bush administration made allegations that are proving more and more to be demonstrably false. Were they just misunderstandings of intelligence data, or were we being sold a bill of goods? Was it an honest mistake? CIA (McGovern): No, by no stretch of the imagination was it an honest mistake. We were able to tell very early last fall that there was very little substance to the main charges with respect to weapons of mass destruction…. There was little possibility of substantiating Dick Cheney’s claim that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. That, of course, is the mushroom cloud that scared Congress into ceding its power to wage war. Sojourners: Why is that significant? CIA (McGovern): In my experience — and that includes more than 40 years in this town watching these kinds of things very closely — it’s the first time that I’ve seen such a long-term, orchestrated plan of deception by which one branch of government deliberately misled the other on a matter of war and peace. There have been a lot of indignities over the years, but here was a very calculated plan, proceeding from a “Mein Kampf” type of document. The first objective was to deceive Congress into approving the plans. They succeeded masterfully. They had their war, and they thought that in the wake of the war, with Iraqis opening their arms to us, that no one would really care whether there were, in fact, weapons of mass destruction. They were absolutely quite wrong on that. People do care, as one by one our servicemen and women are killed in a war fought on false pretenses. CIA (MacMichael): The use of deception to frighten Congress and secure its consent for the October resolution reflects the way our government has been functioning in the area of war and peace for more than half a century. Congress has effectively resigned its power in these areas to the Executive. This has been done over and over again, most notably in the case of Vietnam, of course, and the response of Congress has been nearly always to pass what is, by my definition, a plainly unconstitutional act, the War Powers Act. It’s not so much necessary to frighten or convince Congress, because Congress doesn’t work that way. It is necessary to confuse and gain public acceptance for this. Sojourners: There is legal, constitutional, and, I’m sure, moral difference between intentionally misleading the public in the State of the Union address and intentionally deceiving Congress over matters of war. Do you think those deceptions amount to high crimes and misdemeanors? CIA (MacMichael): It’s rather more serious than misleading about dalliances with interns. CIA (McGovern): I have lost a whole bevy of progressive liberal friends by being strongly in favor of the impeachment of Bill Clinton. I was of that mind because he lied under oath. That’s enough for me. When a president of the United States lies under oath, he should be impeached, in my view.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns One of the key aspects of this whole situation is that we have a domesticated press. The press is not where it should be, and even though they don’t like to be lied to, the proof will be whether the press will press this case with respect to weapons of mass destruction, deceiving us into war. Sojourners: Let’s get to the issue of credibility. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, for example, and Vice President Cheney — claim to have no culpability, no knowledge of the fact that the allegations about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were thoroughly discredited before they were made public. Are they telling the truth? CIA McGovern: In the course of all this controversy, it [WMD] became something of a red herring, because the information not only was forged, but it was substantively implausible on its face. Namely, Iraq had no need for more yellow cake uranium from anywhere, and Niger, the country in Africa from which it was [supposedly] sought, could not possibly supply Iraq with this uranium. Why? Because it [Niger] doesn’t control it [the uranium]. It’s controlled by an international consortium run by the French. And every ounce of that uranium is accounted for. [This squares with the report made by Joe Wilson.] I go back to Yul Brynner’s famous line in The King and I — “It’s a false lie.” How did they handle this false lie? They handled it by deflecting attention from the fact that the real sin with this false lie was committed back in September and early October of 2002, when that false lie was [knowingly] used as the most persuasive evidence that Saddam Hussein was about to get nuclear weapons in his hands. It was a PR masterpiece. That was where the damage was done. That’s where the constitutional crisis comes in. With respect to the sixteen words in the State of the Union, Condoleezza Rice said, “I told my people, if they want an authoritative statement about Iraq and nuclear weapons they have to go to the most authoritative assessment available.” What she was saying was, “Use the National Intelligence Estimate.” In this case, the supreme irony is that the NIE had already been cooked to the recipe of Dick Cheney’s speech on August 26 of 2002, in which he claimed that Iraq was already embarked on a new reconstitution program for its nuclear weapons. Why did the Director of Central Intelligence permit spurious information about this alleged attempt by Iraq to seek uranium in Niger, why did he let it get into the estimate, his most authoritative product to the president? He allowed it, under great pressure from Dick Cheney and from others, to creep into the estimate. The estimate, of course, is what they used as the basis to brief Congress in the crucial weeks before the vote on October 11 to give the president permission to wage war. Sojourners: In sum, the intelligence was being used to support policy, not to shape it? CIA McGovern: That’s correct. That’s the unpardonable sin for an intelligence analyst. That is a violation of our ethic. It’s a violation of honesty, and it’s a violation of the orderly process of government.

The above assessment by the CIA confirming that Bush’s team intended to go to war with Iraq even before the Dearlove memo justifies the concomitant

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Chapter 4. A Question of Values: Why Are the Nuns in Jail? protest actions taken by the nuns and all of those imprisoned for similar actions — regardless of whether they knew about specific impeachable crimes. The Sojourners piece confirms similar contentions made by Ambassador Wilson, journalist Bob Woodward, security Chief O’Neill and the Pentagon’s Clarke in their books. It even confirms (on a more modern footing) the rulings by US Justice Robert H. Jackson, who headed the Nuremberg Trials in 1945, the issue of what is or is not a war crime, and how the body republic, in addition to its leaders, is to be held responsible. Under Principle One of Nuremberg, which became the law of the land by treaty, even in the US: “Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefor and liable to punishment.” In addition, Nuremberg’s Principle Seven states: “Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity as set forth in Principle Six is a crime under international law.” Possessing and threatening the use of weapons of mass destruction are among the war crimes listed under Principle Six of that law. (See Appendix B.) When they conducted a citizens’ inspection of Missile Silo N-8, the three nuns, therefore, were simply carrying out their responsibility under the Nuremberg law, and alerting their fellow Americans that they collectively could be considered guilty of a war crime if they did not protest the US WMD. To avoid convicting by inference the federal government of breaking its own laws, federal judges such as Blackburn, in the case of the nuns, have consistently excluded from consideration by juries all motives of the accused based on such Nuremberg Principles — even though those principles are linked to the long-recognized Geneva Convention treaties that address the topic of indiscriminate killing by WMD such as poison gas. (Nuclear weapons in addition to indiscriminate killing by massive blast give off highly poisonous and long-lasting gases such as radon.) The judges avoid the hard decision by saying, in effect, that international law does not apply to cases such as the nuns’. Their conclusion flies in the face of the Article VI of the US Constitution, which states: “This Constitution and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof and all treaties made or which shall be made under the authority of the United States shall be the supreme law of the land and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any state to the contrary nothwithstanding.”

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns The judges appointed by the federal system consistently have been sidestepped and violated this part of the constitution by their in limine rulings, just as Blackburn did in the case of the nuns. Why? If the judges did not divorce treaties and international law from contravening domestic laws, they would jeopardize the entire US military system, which relies on nuclear WMD to (supposedly) protect the security of America and thus assures America of its political and economic predominance in the world. That’s why judges also are forced to find reasons for excluding the right of defendants to plead for a fair trial on the basis of conscience and high motive. It is at this point that the legal hair splitting begins. There is in law a Latin creature known as mens rea, translated as “the mind of the thing.” Under this concept, judges and prosecutors can construe that cutting through a fence and pouring blood on concrete and iron contain in their essence something as awful as treason and sabotage that go beyond simple moral motive. To reach this conclusion, all other motives and all other supporting law must be discarded. In any game of cards, this is called stacking the deck, or cheating. Cheating in court or by the court is a crime unto itself, but as often-convicted protester Kabat says, “It’s not real. It’s theater.” That’s why he and the nuns and others like them feel compelled to stage a bit of their own kind of theater. President John Quincy Adams gave a prophetic speech at the July 4 Independence Day celebration of 1821, when he said: “The true American goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. America well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy and ambition. [Though] she might become the dictatress of the world, she would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.”

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CHAPTER 5. RENDERING UNTO CAESAR, OR BEING RENDERED?

The three religious women sentenced today acted symbolically in their missile silo protest and did no serious damage. I’m disappointed that the sentences handed down this afternoon were not equally restrained and symbolic.

Those were the effete and belated words of Denver’s Catholic Archbishop Charles Chaput on the only occasion when he took public note of the nuns’ action. He uttered these words only in response to queries from the Denver press. All the while the three nuns were in the Georgetown jail, 30 miles from his palatial residence, Chaput never visited them or wrote letters of support or preached from his Immaculate Conception Cathedral pulpit to the conservative war-loving Catholic faithful about Christ’s mission of peace that the nuns exemplified. Chaput blithely skipped over the central issue that the nuns were raising, that of the moral issues inherent in the war over WMD. Later, as the nuns saw day after day of their lives wasted in jail, Chaput made headlines by proclaiming that it was sinful for Catholics to vote for politicians such as Sen. Kerry who supported a woman’s right to abort unwanted fetuses. That instruction grossly crossed the line between his church authority and interference in an election. Where did this sudden dogma come from, just prior to Bush’s re-election? Matthew Fox, a Dominican priest banished from the church at the instigation of Germany’s Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, knows the answer. As he related on a recorded message to a gathering of Catholic activists in July 2005, Fox says the directive came from the Pope himself after Bush visited the Vatican

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns and complained in private audience that America’s Catholics were not following the Church’s dogma on abortion. Shortly after Bush’s visit to the Vatican and before the US election, Fox says, all the bishops in the US received a papal instruction from Ratzinger that they should inform the parish priests of a policy to refuse communion to all Catholic candidates who were “pro-choice.” That, of course, described presidential candidate John Kerry. Of course, it also violates the spirit behind the notion of separation of church and state. Fox goes on to say that Catholics in the “close” states of Ohio, Michigan and Iowa subsequently voted in numbers never before seen for Republican candidates. In other words, the Vatican through Ratzinger forced compliant bishops such as Chaput to interfere in the election process in an unprecedented fashion. It made Bush who, for most of his life was an indifferent Christian, seem to be as Catholic as the Pope. This manipulation of the vote in states where the candidates were nearly tied (via a papal memorandum from an “inquisitorial” pope) may be said to have changed history and caused the death of hundreds of thousands by way of war. Bush’s hypocrisy is reflected in the prism of the war in Iraq: life is sacred while in the womb, but not once the baby’s hands were large enough to fire a gun. According to him, killing unformed babies is sinful but killing fully-formed, grown-up babies is not, especially if they are Muslim. In fact, Texas has a record of executions of criminals that is one of the highest in the nation. When Bush was governor, 131 convicts were put to death without compunction. Since he has been president, more than 3,000 Americans have been killed in the war with Iraq, not to mention tens of thousands of Iraqi men women and children. From his Manhattan apartment, the octogenarian rebel Rev. Daniel Berrigan refuses to let America’s bishops check-and-raise, as if state-sanctioned death and WMD were a game of poker. He wrote a pungent bit of poetry entitled The Catholic Bishops Approve Bush’s War. It read: Lest I merge with mountains that surely will fall, their decrepitude my own; Lest I walk shod in blood of Abel, crying from the earth:

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Chapter 5. Rendering unto Caesar, or Being Rendered? “My tantamount, my brother, my undoer” Lest I the Christ disavow, and Him who shackled there I drag through sludge of cowardice and dismay; Lest weighed, I be found wanting, no guest of heaven, a ghost, and no egress from foolish trumpery of time; Lest I disappear, down, down the 110th escalation of pride, and truncated, eyeless, soulless, be found unfit for armed might, for rubble and America; Lest I be sifted like wheat or chaff and under a pall (the appalling flag) am borne away piecemeal to broken doorways of shoal or limbo, the divergencies not large, nor mine to choose; Lest I…

The poem ends as if cut short in Berrigan’s soul like the lives lost at the World Trade Center and in the insane war that followed. As Berrigan was pointing out, the Catholic Church by its silence with regard to war protests took the same dubious “neutral” stance that it had adopted over the years in the dozens of cases when clerics were punished by the courts for nonviolent civil disobedience for the sake of peace. Even now the

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns Church is taking the same neutered stance that the Vatican took in World War II in the case of Hitler, protecting its own institutional assets. Today, as the millennium churns in blood, the nuns, like the Berrigans and dozens of their oft-jailed associates, have been left to practice what the church preached and are left to be punished for their actions by the Pilate-like courts. Berrigan’s closing words, “Lest I…” suggest how wrong it is that WMD should remain the centerpiece of US policy worldwide. They suggest how warped is the morality of bishops such as Chaput, who thinks it heroic to save life in the womb so that it may be destroyed in the baptism of war. The importance of individual morality is countered by the moral dereliction of the church’s leaders in favor of the political correctness of war. Both cannot be correct nor can they be reconciled in any sense. Although their Dominican superiors still hold the three nuns in good standing with the Catholic Church community and even praised their actions, no one from the male church officialdom in the US offered to provide legal defense or bothered to attend the trial of the nuns. In fact, Chicago’s Francis Cardinal George had the opportunity to create at least a “teaching moment” when he was in Denver at the time of their trial, but he didn’t walk through the door his own pope had opened. Pope John Paul II had told President Bush in a private audience that WMD were immoral, in the Vatican’s view, and that the war contemplated against Iraq also was immoral. That message was repeated by the papal nuncio to top officials of the Bush Administration in Washington. This message was ignored, and the war went forward. Perhaps the official papal objections were ineffective because for years the Catholic Church had been derelict in its duty to object to the jailing of priests, nuns and laity who staged public protests over the immorality of war and the threat of nuclear weapons. The Church ignored the assassinations of bishops, nuns and priests in Central America and even sacked some of its progressive members for opposing murderous dictatorships illicitly backed by the Reagan White House. Whatever the case, the three nuns in 2002 took the Pope at his word, while the male hierarchy took the easier course. The weaponry that the nuns pointed to are ensconced in the soil of Chaput’s diocese, and it is a bishop’s duty as “shepherd of the Sunday flock” to provide moral guidance on such weighty matters.

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Chapter 5. Rendering unto Caesar, or Being Rendered? Chaput did nothing of the sort. He was too busy opposing death by abortion to oppose death by war. Protestant minister Rev. Jesse Jackson raised a pertinent thought years ago when he expressed the notion that churchy politicians worry more about what violence they do to the unborn than they do to those same embryos once they are adults. Years prior, in the matter of missile silos designed to kill the world’s adult fetuses, a Catholic priest out of the Denver archdiocese, Bill Sulzman, was stricken from the bishop’s list of practicing priests because he raised the issue about the morality of the WMD silos within that archdiocese. Today, still celibate and still thinking like a dedicated priest, Sulzman leads a group known as Citizens for Peace in Space, in Colorado Springs, where he also works with the homeless. His self-appointed ministry lies geographically at the heart of the US Space Command and NORAD, the lead agencies for promotion of war by the political muscle of missiles and WMD. His work is beginning to attract the attention of international peace groups and officials, even within the United Nations. He has been a speaker at several international conventions on the subject. He has never been excommunicated, but he doesn’t care about that, one way or the other. On November 5, 2005, three of Sulzman’s associates, Esther Kisamore, Barbara Huber and Doug Gale, were subjected to Bush-era justice and freedom. In the space of just one day, their trial for protesting at the Petersen Air Force Base (August 5, 2005) resulted in a denial for an extension, the selection of a jury, trying of the case, a guilty verdict, and sentencing. Operating the assembly-line hammer of justice was municipal judge Spottswood Williams. The reason for such haste was the Iraq war, which the trio was protesting. It seems the witnesses against them were military people about to be sent to Iraq, and it was essential that they testify before departure. This dereliction of moral stewardship even in the courts comes from the top, and is endorsed by America’s politicized Catholic Church and even more conservative Christian cults with voting-booth influence over the White House. On the opening day of the nuns’ trial in Denver, Francis Cardinal George of Chicago was in town to give a speech to University of Denver intellectuals on the subject of “Bridges to the Future: American History and Values in Light of September 11 th .” Bishop Chaput made the introduction. Among Cardinal George’s credentials, he was selected in 2001 to preach a retreat in Rome for the College of Cardinals and the Pope himself — a singular honor. That was before 9/11. What he had to say on that occasion remains unknown.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns The trial of the nuns would seem to be a significant event related to the Denver University seminar topic, yet for political reasons the cardinal passed up the opportunity to associate with the cause of the nuns. It could not have been an accidental oversight or a problem of schedule on the part of the cardinal: two weeks before his visit to Denver, a former seminary classmate of the cardinal and a friend of the nuns wrote Cardinal George a letter suggesting that he could exert a positive influence over those “bridges to the future” by either testifying at the trial of the nuns or at least by sitting in the courtroom gallery. “In case you have the inclination to visit the imprisoned,” the letter concluded, “the trial for the nuns starts at 10:30 a.m., March 31, New Federal Courthouse, 901 19th Street (downtown Denver) Judge Blackburn, Courtroom 8.” The letter was never acknowledged. The Denver Post summed up what the cardinal had to say at the Denver University seminar on the day of the trial: “War May Pit Religions.” A subhead explained the obvious “Head of Chicago Archdiocese Fears Shattered Alliances, Persecution.” Religion writer Eric Gorski wrote the following article about the Cardinal’s remarks: The escalating war with Iraq has the potential to pit religions against each other and serve as a destabilizing event globally for years to come, the leader of the nation’s second-largest Roman Catholic diocese said Monday night in Denver. Cardinal Francis George of the Archdiocese of Chicago, speaking to more than 600 people at the University of Denver, warned of undermined relationships with allies and the possible persecution of Christians overseas, particularly if the war drags on and fails to meet objectives. George, 66, spoke as part of “Bridges to the Future: American History and Values in Light of September11.” [This is] a year-long program sponsored by the University of Denver and Colorado State University that includes lectures, panel discussions, and performances. Pope John Paul II has strongly opposed the Iraq war, saying there is no legal or moral justification for the military action. The pope and other Catholic leaders lobbied for a diplomatic solution. George, who previously led Catholic dioceses in Yakima, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, joined Chicago’s top Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders in urging President Bush in December to avoid war with Iraq. Those beliefs don’t always mesh with those of the Catholic laity. In a survey conducted by the Pew Foundation on Religion and Public Life in the days leading up to the war, 62 percent of Catholics said they supported war.

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Chapter 5. Rendering unto Caesar, or Being Rendered? George said Monday that he prays US forces don’t get bogged down in a Vietnam-like conflict in which the public’s support erodes. He raised the likelihood of a “loss of ability to shape the world on our terms” — the price, he said, for hurting long-standing relationships with the United Nations and traditional allies. He said security concerns will demand more curtailing of individual freedoms. Most of all, George cautioned that the war, despite the Bush administration’s insistence, already is being viewed as Christians and Jews united against Islam. He said the US government has tried to differentiate between “good Muslims” and bad Muslims” — those who practice their faith and terrorists who betray it with violence. “But it is not for us to determine what Islam is to be, nor for us to determine what any religious community is to be,” George said. “So the very interpretation can be resented and misinterpreted, and if in fact it does become a religious conflict, then we will all suffer.” He said the result could be greater persecution of Christian minorities in Pakistan, Indonesia, northern Nigeria and the Sudan. “The Iraqi war is a very uncertain and possibly destabilizing factor — if not in the immediate future, then in the next century, as the consequences make themselves known,” George said.

The consequences of the war have since made themselves known all too harshly both as political and religious reality. Disturbing nuances in the cardinal’s stance include the following: 1) The cardinal speaks of “our allies” as if the Church were politically aligned and supportive of what seems to be the conservative Christian side of the war taken up by Bush. 2) The cardinal speaks about the war as blocking society’s ability to “shape the world on our terms.” Is the Catholic Church part of that “our system” which is now shaping the world by war? 3) The cardinal says “it is not for us to determine what any religious community is to be.” This, of course, is a statement designed not to offend righteous Muslims. But if he means it, who is left to make such moral determinations except those politicians whose goals appear to be so contradictory to those we used to attribute to the Church? Conclusion: the Catholic Church in America is fully aligned with the military-industrial complex and with current conservative political values, including the necessity of war with the Muslim world and the war in Iraq. The Catholic Church wants nothing to do with moral protesters of war, despite the late pope’s direction. And political interference between church and state applies even more so to the conservative non-Catholic Church.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns This is not surprising, given the fact that George is a member of the ultraconservative and secretive society within the Catholic Church known as Opus Dei (which means “work of God”). As Catholic outcast Matthew Fox puts it, Opus Dei is “the ideological preference of the rich and the powerful.” Fox, a Dominican preacher, posted his own 95 Theses (à la Martin Luther) on the cathedral door of then-Cardinal Ratzinger in Germany. Because it was Ratzinger, as head of the Vatican’s Office of Holy Inquisition, who had condemned Fox for his heresies, Fox took special delight in mimicking Luther to mock the cardinal. In any case, the work of God, to evaluate the new Pope Benedict XVI (Ratzinger) and Bishop Chaput and Cardinal George, no longer includes taking a stand on fundamental issues of morality when to do so would offend the current political powers. The interests of the Church have become linked to the secular world order. The other American cardinals are similarly silent. From the Protestant side, Bill Moyers, former spokesman for the LBJ administration and former host of the PBS program NOW, seems to concur with that conclusion about the church. In a 2005 speech to the Union Theological Seminary entitled “Reckoning with the God Squad,” Moyers’ views in regard to Church-State relationships reinforce those expressed by Jimmy Carter. Moyers says, in part: Our democratic values are imperiled because too many people of reason are willing to appease irrational people just because they are pious. Republican moderates tried appeasement and survive today only in gulags set aside for them by the Karl Roves, Bill Frists and Tom DeLays…As I look back on the conflicts and clamor of our boisterous past, one lesson about democracy stands out above all others: bullies. Political bullies, economic bullies and religious bullies cannot be appeased. They have to be opposed with a stubbornness to match their own.

That is the kind of stubbornness that the nuns have displayed in their actions, but without the political impetus or the institutional religious support. They needed only moral motivation. Moyers, a Texas Baptist, continues: Let’s go back to 9/11 four years ago. The ruins were still smoldering when the reverends Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwall went on television to proclaim that the terrorists attacks were God’s punishment of a corrupted America…Critics said such comments were deranged, but millions of Christian fundamentalists and conservatives didn’t think so.

He suggested that, from the other side, Osama bin Laden was reading his holy book to justify his own murderous actions.

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Chapter 5. Rendering unto Caesar, or Being Rendered? The motives behind the war are complex and probably include far more than meets the eye. However, one dimension is that of a conflict between two irreconcilable cultures, one that looks to American eyes like a repressive theocracy and the other an aggressively-Christian democracy, each bent on bestowing its values on the other, by war, if necessary. In that vein, Moyers goes on to say: We know you can go through the Bible and construct a God more pleasing to the better angels of nature. We also know that the “violence of God” tradition remains embedded deep in the DNA of [every] monotheistic faith. Inside that logic you cannot read part of the Bible allegorically and the rest of it literally. If you believe in the virgin birth of Jesus, his crucifixion and resurrection and the depiction of the Great Judgment at the end of time, you must also believe that God is sadistic, brutal, vengeful, callow, cruel and savage. [He is] a God that slaughters.”

Thus Moyers links the God of the Bible, the God of the church, the God of the White House, and the God of war with the God of American voters. Moyers does not exempt the Muslims from his criticism for the grief they have brought to the world when he says: Yes, the Koran speaks of mercy and compassion and calls for ethical living. But such passages are no match for the ferocity of instruction found there for waging war for God’s sake. “Those who believe fight in the cause of Allah, and those who reject faith fight in the cause of evil. (4:76).” So the holy warriors came [as] an airborne death-cult, their sights on God’s enemies [who were] regular folks, starting the day’s routine one minute and in the next engulfed by a horrendous cataclysm. Having lost faith in all else, zealots have nothing left but a holy cause to please a warrior God. They win if we become holy warriors, too; if we kill the innocent as they do; strike first at those who had not struck us; allow our leaders to use the fear of terrorism to make us afraid of the truth…allowing others to tell us what’s in God’s mind.

Moyers then suggests where this attitude has led America: Suddenly we were immersed in the pathology of a holy war as defined by both sides. You could see this pathology play out in General William Boykin. As a member of the US military, Boykin had taken up with a small group called the Faith Force Multiplier whose members apply military principles to evangelism with a manifesto summoning warriors “to the spiritual warfare for souls.” In uniform, Boykin attended evangelical revivals preaching that America was in a holy war as “a Christian nation.” [He said] America’s adversaries will be defeated “only if we come against them in the name of Jesus.” So General Boykin explained how it was that the candidate who had lost the election in 2000 nonetheless wound up in the White House. President Bush, he said, “was not elected by a majority of the voters, he was appointed by God.” Not surprising, instead of being reprimanded for evangelizing while in uniform, General Boykin is now Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns Moyers adds that it also is not surprising that despite Pat Robertson’s call for the assassination of a foreign head of state, Robertson’s “Operation Blessing” was one of the first groups to receive taxpayer funds from President Bush’s “Faith-Based Initiative” for relief work on the Gulf Coast. “We can’t wiggle out of this,” Moyers says. “We’re talking about a powerful religious constituency that claims the right to tell us what is on God’s mind and to decide the laws of the land according to their interpretation of biblical revelation and to enforce those laws on the nation as a whole. For the Bible is not just the foundational text of their faith; it has become the foundational text for a political movement.” Moyers says the US is not yet a theocracy, but he adds, The radical religious right has succeeded in taking over one of America’s great political parties [the Republican Party] driving American politics, using God as a bettering ram on almost every issue. The corporate, political and religious right has converged, led by a president who, in his own disdain for science, reason and knowledge, is the most powerful fundamentalist in American history. Radicals on the Christian right are now the dominant force in America’s governing party…They are culpable in upholding a system of class and race in which, as we saw last week (Hurricane Katrina) the rich escape and the poor left behind. And they are on a crusade against government “of, by, and for the people” in favor of one based on Biblical authority. The Grand Old Party has become God’s Own Party — its ranks made up of God’s Own People, “marching as to war.”

Moyers notes that the descendants of the religious Puritans of New England found a haven for the cause of conscience because they no longer would be subject to what Jefferson called “The loathsome combination of church and state.” Under the Jeffersonian regimen, Moyers says, “Americans could be loyal to the Constitution without being hostile to God, or they could pay no heed to God without fear of being mugged by an official God Squad.” Moyers seems to suggest that such political/religious mugging is now taking place in America against its Constitutional superstructure. The analysis provides a clue as to why many Christian clerics are afraid to discuss the immorality of the Iraq war with their war-mongering faithful, even though the late Pope John Paul hoisted the standard of opposition. That is why bishops such as Sheridan of the Colorado Springs diocese merely note through office spokesmen, “Popes always have to say they are against war.”

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Chapter 5. Rendering unto Caesar, or Being Rendered? Given such concessions to the Establishment, the Catholic Church in America and most of its mainstream Christian brethren have become totally secularized. Institutionally they have fallen in line with America’s national and international policies for the sake of the Sunday collection plate. In fact, there is no more separation of church and state; American politicalmilitary policy has become Church policy. About this mix, Jonathan Turley, professor of law at George Washington University, wrote the following for the Los Angeles Times (October 17, 2003) that connects to the nuns: It has lain dormant in the darkest recesses of American law for 125 years, but this month Attorney General John Ashcroft introduced critics of the [Bush] administration to his latest weapon in law enforcement. In a Miami federal court, the attorney general charged the environmental group, Greenpeace, under an obscure 1872 law originally intended to end the practice of “sailor-mongering,” or the luring of sailors with liquor and prostitutes from their ships. Ashcroft plucked the law from obscurity to punish Greenpeace for boarding a vessel near port in Miami. Not only is the law being used to prosecute one of the administration’s most vocal critics in an unprecedented attack on the First Amendment, but it appears to be part of a broader campaign by Ashcroft to protect the nation against free speech, a campaign that has converted environmentalists into “sailor-mongers” and nuns into terrorists. Ashcroft’s jihad against free speech, however, is not limited to environmentalists. Consider the case of three Dominican nuns. Last year, Sister Ardeth Platte, 66, Sister Jackie Hudson, 68, and Sister Carol Gilbert, 55, participated in a peaceful demonstration against nuclear armament. As part of the protest, the three nuns cut through a chain link fence around a Minuteman III missile silo. There is only a light fence because the missile is protected by a 110-ton concrete cap that is designed to withstand a nuclear explosion. The nuns proceeded to paint crosses on the cap and symbolically hit it with hammers. They then knelt, prayed, sang religious songs and waited for arrest. The most the government could allege in terms of damage was $3,000. However, the Ashcroft Justice Department wanted more than compensation and a common misdemeanor. It charged the nuns with obstructing national defense, which subjected each to a potential 30-year prison term. When the government pushed the court to impose sentences of as much as eight years, the judge refused. However, the judge found, as alleged by the government, that the three nuns had put military personnel “in harm’s way.” Accordingly, he imposed on them sentences ranging from 2 ½ years to 3 ½ years.

The nuns have shown the Church how un-Christian it is while its politicians are busy trying to show the nation how “Christian” nuclear weapons and war can be. It is likely the nuns understand the moral issues better than either their national leaders or their church leaders do.

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CHAPTER 6. OF POPES, PROPHETS, PULPITS, PATRIOTS, PRESIDENTS AND POLITICAL PUPPETS “It is blasphemy to kill in the name of God.” — John Paul II

In ten words, that statement condemns the President, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein while removing God from an immoral political war. That is exactly what the three nuns tried to do. Even so, it seems to be easy for many within the non-Catholic and secular public to think ill of nuns who “invade” the sacred political sanctuaries of military facilities, as if the nuns were pagan druids of an unpatriotic conspiracy against national security. When it is politically convenient, the public clamors for separation of church and state within their political sanctuary. But when that same public has been bombarded with media impressions and political “spin” that lead them to desire genocide, it will close its ears to the minority voice calling for peace. It will willingly invoke a murderous god, even in their Sunday pulpits. As Bill Moyers pointed out in a speech to the Union Theological Seminary, one depiction of the warlike God in Christian theology would seem to make him “sadistic, brutal, vengeful, callow, cruel and savage.” In context, he suggested that American politicians were using their Christian God in the brutal sense rather than the one of love. Religious zealots tend to see their God as a genie who must respond to their wishful prayers. And so it is for millions of Muslims of the Middle East who view the events of 9/11 as justified by Allah. As Moyers also notes of the 9/11 terrorists, “They

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns came in the name of God. They came bent on murder and martyrdom. Yes, the Koran speaks of mercy and compassion and calls for ethical living. But such passages are no match for the ferocity of instruction found there for waging war for God’s sake.” The nuns try to avert such war and do not worship a vengeful god. Their mentors, the Berrigan brothers, have always referred to WMD as “Lord Nuke.” Under the morally schizophrenic view of Bush Christians, the possession of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons is a war crime only when it comes to “nationalists” of other nations, but for “patriotic” Americans it is a legitimate means to ensure peace and freedom. Pat Robertson is a Yale-educated conservative preacher who makes a living by blending politics and religion on TV for consumption by those millions of viewers who voted for President G. W. Bush and his strike-first military policies. But he is more than that — he is a former contender for the Republican Party presidency of America, and he recommends from his TV pulpit the assassination of foreign heads of state. In a message sent August 22, 2005, from his Christian Broadcasting Network show, The 700 Club, Robertson suggested that Hugo Chavez, the democratically-elected leader of Venezuela, should be assassinated. It seems the socialistic president had spoken ill of President Bush and his policies in Iraq. It seems that Chavez had suggested that the US had mounted an attempted coup in Venezuela, the world’s fifth-largest exporter of oil, and had intentions to assassinate him. Even if we have somehow come to accept that such assassinations are business as usual for the CIA, it seems an odd goal for a “Christian” preacher to espouse. Robertson violated the Christian commandment against killing by saying this on national TV: You know, I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he [Chavez] thinks we are trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war and I don’t think any oil shipments will stop….We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don’t need another 200-billion-dollar war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It’s a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.

Then, in January of 2006 he suggested that God was punishing Israel’s Prime Minister Sharon with a stroke for giving away “God’s land” in the Middle East peace process.

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Chapter 6. Of Popes, Prophets, Pulpits, Patriots, Presidents and Political Puppets Robertson’s comments reveal several things about the commingling of politics and religion which has infiltrated both Bush administrations: 1. The conservative Christians believe, or claim to believe, they are following the word of God as set down by President G.W. Bush’s “mission” to wage war in Iraq. 2. They, like Bush, shift the burden of guilt for the Iraq war to Muslim radicals from outside of Iraq. They mis-use the Bible to justify the war. 3. By referring to Venezuela oil shipments, Robertson inadvertently exposes the lie of President G.H.W. Bush when he said the war to liberate Kuwait from Iraq was “not about oil,” and he exposes the lie of President G.W. Bush that the invasion of Iraq was about WMD. Religion and cultural beliefs are used to rally the troops for this war, whereas the leadership’s actual objectives have to do with economic power and world supremacy. Just like the Crusades. 4. Robertson, by whipping up emotions and encouraging millions of Americans to “take out” even democratically-elected leaders if they dare to criticize US policy, is promoting the kind of religion-sponsored suicide-murder that we blame Muslim extremists for fomenting elsewhere. In other words, he promotes worldwide war in the name of Christianity, and then extracts from his TV program viewers, now in a state of irrational passion, millions of dollars in donations. Robertson’s call for assassination and his God-curse on Sharon was an embarrassment for the White House. Now, if Hugo Chavez was “taken out,” by either a sanctioned or unsanctioned killer, Washington could not credibly duck the blame. The White House PR office scrambled to sever itself from Robertson, saying, in effect, that the US has not had a policy to “take out” dictators anywhere in the world ever since President Ford exercised the moral leadership to end such policies. Afterward, Venezuela’s President Chavez (no doubt an “evil” man in the mind of Robertson’s audience) not only turned the other cheek, but offered medical and oil aid to the US following the Hurricane Katrina disaster. For that matter, so did Cuba’s Fidel Castro, whose nation often suffers from the same hurricanes that afflict the US. Both offers were arrogantly rejected in favor of more deficit tithing by American taxpayers toward the American budget. Into this mix comes a woman named Cindy Sheehan, who lost a son in Iraq and asks the White House the question, “Why?”

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns She wanted, like the rest of the nation, to hear from Bush directly why her son had to die, months after Saddam Hussein was deposed and captured. She received only more presidential arrogance, and more refusals to discuss the rationale (much less the morality) of the war. To mothers such as Sheehan, the administration’s affirmation that “we don’t kill the leaders of enemy states” is contradicted by the actions it has taken to remove Hussein. Instead of the old-fashioned coup of a quick bullet, he is to have a fair trial followed by beheading. As of the end of 2005, tens of thousands of Iraqis and more than 2,000 Americans have died, and it’s not over yet. Two days after Robertson’s ill-considered remarks, he took the dodge of saying he had been “misquoted.” Then he claimed: “I didn’t say ‘assassination.’ I said our special forces should take him out. ‘Take him out’ could be a number of things, including kidnapping.” Thus, he gave Americans his version of a Christian choice: to kill or to kidnap an elected leader who did not match their definition of “Christian.” Bush gave Americans a similar choice: they could line up behind any of a number of lies, as long as they lined up in favor of his war. Robertson said his earlier remarks about assassination were made “out of frustration.” Possibly, some Islamic religious leaders are frustrated, too. Does that make killing right for either side? The nuns would say “no.” The blending and adulteration of concepts such as freedom, peace, justice, war, free enterprise, democracy, capitalism and God always wears the cloak of patriotism. Without war, “patriotism” becomes an abstract and boring virtue. Without victory over an enemy, there is no heroism, no future reverence. All that is left is the fog of peace, leaving no sense of accomplishment. That kind of mixed-up Christian-patriotism, now bubbling within society, is illustrated in a single day by a series of newspaper stories in Denver: 1) The front page of the Rocky Mountain News for the day after Easter Sunday, March 27, 2005, shows a picture of a woman attending Easter Sunrise services at Red Rocks Amphitheater wrapped in an American flag — as if Easter and Jesus Christ had some special connection with America. 2) Within the same issue is a centerfold display of a Catholic chaplain baptizing a US Army captain before he goes into battle in Iraq. The accompanying story describes how that same chaplain blesses the weapons and vehicles of soldiers in the name of God as if they were religious items. When all the captains are dead, will they be saints? When all the vehicles are destroyed, will they become sacred relics, like I-beams from the World Trade Center or splinters from the cross on which Christ was crucified?

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Chapter 6. Of Popes, Prophets, Pulpits, Patriots, Presidents and Political Puppets 3) In that same issue is a story confiding that President Bush on Easter Sunday attended church services at Fort Hood, Texas. Again, this suggests to the American public that the war in Iraq and its military machine is honored by the resurrected founder of Christianity and is therefore a holy war, a crusade that exceeds the anti-Muslim fervor of the wars a millennium ago. There is more proof of America’s emerging military-political-capitalistic theocracy. It is found in a true-life story that involves a patriotic church congregation and a war hero who lied to Congress, went unpunished, and is thriving today as a war-mongering fascist on the nation’s radio network. The story is very unnerving. On Sunday, September 22, 2002, just as the first blood-red autumn sun was sinking over the Rocky Mountains, hundreds of parishioners of the Faith Bible Chapel in Arvada, Colorado, gathered at their new and sprawling churchschool complex. These evangelical fundamentalist believers, assembled in their tax-exempt multi-million-dollar cocoon along a five-lane urban highway, gathered en masse to buy a book written by Lt. Col. Oliver North. As few of his young Christian audience knew, North was leader of the Iran-Contra CIA operation that ravaged Central America and the Middle East in the 1980s: North had helped to direct the flow of money from drugs from Central America so that the CIA could buy and sell guns to reinstate dictatorial regimes in nations such as El Salvador and Guatemala and Nicaragua. This also enabled the CIA to funnel guns for sale to Iraq and other Middle East nations, who are now engaging in a war of terrorism with America. This activity, which Washington deemed politically and militarily necessary, was illegal — the US Congress had passed laws against military or financial intervention in Central America (the Boland Amendments) No one reminded the Arvada church members that North was a drug runner, a perjurer, and one who had skimmed at least $17,000 in government funds to improve his own property in the process. No one reminded the Arvada church members that North had lied to Congress under oath, but suffered only a fine and a suspended sentence because he had operated out of the Reagan-Bush White House basement while Regan was napping. No one reminded them that North had dutifully broken laws at the direction of a president who defied Congress. None of them knew, or they chose to ignore, that North was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Central Americans. None of

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns them knew or cared that North’s guns-and-drugs scheme, barracked by the Reagan administration in the White House, was used to bargain with Middle East terrorists for the release of kidnapped Americans far into the 1980s. They didn’t know that North had arranged secret airports for secret planes flying drugs and guns and money between Central America and the US (using landing zones in Arkansas, where Bill Clinton was a compliant governor twenty years ago) for the purpose of killing people who were trying to gain their freedom from their US-backed dictators. One of those dictators was the thirdgeneration of the Somoza family in Guatemala. All they knew about North was that he was a highly decorated hero of the Vietnam War, and that he had now written a book, printed by a Christian publishing house, to make more money from his exploits for the good of such unholy patriotism. And so, on September 22, 2002, as the sun sank slowly in the west, the assembled evangelical believers listened to (and then gave Protestant genuflection to) the man who said that patriotism required they wage war against Iraq. Relying on his Vietnam medals, North was touting his self-serving book of “fiction” on the subject of patriotic war heroes like himself, in order to make that hash of war, Christ, Pentagon and White House look like American apple pie. Apparently, this political message of violence was considered a fit topic for a religious audience — much more so than the peaceful protest of nuns. Ten days prior to North’s “victory tour” selling war books to church audiences, the public sidewalks leading past this church’s entrances had been lined in promenade fashion with hundreds of tiny American flags, placed there in an anniversary remembrance of the 9/11 mass murders. Those mass murders are now being “solved” by murdering masses of other people in Iraq, a nation that had nothing to do with the attacks in Manhattan or the Pentagon. Outside the Faith Bible Chapel on that autumn day was a lone picketer carrying a sign that read: “Why Does This Church Support Col. North, IranContra, Guns and Drugs?” It was a logical question that should have disturbed church members who think they have high moral standards, and who must abhor illegal use of guns and profiteering from the sale of illegal drugs. Did they even bother to reflect on the distinctions between what is sinful, what is illegal, what is immoral and what is political interest or patriotic? Did they understand the killing that they indirectly supported?

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Chapter 6. Of Popes, Prophets, Pulpits, Patriots, Presidents and Political Puppets The answer came quickly to the lone picketer: A curious young woman stopped her car in the driveway, rolled down her window and asked what the sign meant. “What’s that?” She apparently had never heard of the Iran-Contra scandal. Perhaps in her early 20s, she was not familiar with the political angst of a whole nation — indeed, of a whole world — just two decades prior. The young woman wrinkled her brow in puzzlement, parked her car, and — presumably — went to get a personally signed copy of North’s “novel” which he claimed honored the memory of some unidentified wartime compatriot. The book sold thousands of copies at dozens of politically-conservative church functions. North enjoyed a 58-city tour, making the most of his freedom of expression under the First Amendment. It is odd that instead of a God of peace and love, the Christian view of God can be manipulated by military and political “pulpiteers” to promote profits from killing. It is odd that North, a white and supposedly a Christian, should be considered a hero for calling UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in a TV interview an “enemy” of America — supposedly for giving comfort to Saddam Hussein. It is frightening that North is still being treated like a hero, after opening the CIA drug-importing channels from Colombia that led to the rise of Pablo Escobar, the Cali Cartel and Manuel Noriega. Two archbishops and numerous priests and nuns of the Catholic Church were killed in Central America for opposing North’s Iran-Contra actions in the guns-for-drugs barter. Yet, a significant segment of the conservative Christian Church adores him and his brand of politics. North was more recently in Iraq as an “embedded” media correspondent for the war, and still commands the bloody-flag-draped attention of the American public. Here’s the legacy of the North-Reagan scandal: 1) America’s political and military policies are under the control of religious conservatism akin to Britain’s King George III, who was head of church and state in Great Britain at the time of the American Revolution. 2) The Christian Church, on both its Catholic and Protestant sides, allows itself to be used for what North and his presidential patron promote while ignoring their duty to recognize the righteousness of three jailed nuns in their cause against WMD. Here is the scariest part of all, where the world’s future is concerned: in 1998, Pope John Paul II told an audience in war-torn Nigeria (which is 50

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns percent Muslim and 50 percent Catholic), “It is blasphemy to kill in the name of God.” The scary part is that no one pays any heed. In 2002, just before Bush invaded Iraq, the Pope repeated his warning to President G. W. Bush through a cardinal emissary. Bush ignored it and so did most American bishops, including Francis Cardinal George, who did not want to rock the boat. More recently, the Executive Assistant and Director of Communications, Peter J. Howard, S.T.L., blithely commented, on behalf of Bishop Sheridan in Colorado Springs (home of NORAD and the Space Command), that “war is not intrinsically evil” (from private emails of February 2005). A Rome-educated lay theologian who is Bishop Sheridan’s spokesman, Howard arrogantly presumes to note that—the contrary words of his pope notwithstanding— “All wars involve evil, but the [Catholic] Church has never taught that every war is unjustified. Therefore, war is not intrinsically evil, although certain wars can be unjust....The Vatican is naturally going to oppose all war, but it never revokes the heads of state to make that decision.” His logic begs the question: If a given war is unjust, is it evil? Howard’s pope has already given him and the world the answer. Indeed, did not John Paul II rebuke or revoke Bush by instructing that the Iraq war, specifically, was unjust? Just as he had said that the earlier slaughter in Nigeria’s civil war was unjust? Wasn’t one of the most troubling aspects of the Iraq war the fact that it was sold to Congress and the world public on the basis of “bad” intelligence regarding the non-existent uranium flowing into Iraq from Niger? How is such war “not intrinsically evil?” The Pope, even in the days of his final infirmity, seemed to understand these issues. However, some of his bishops embedded in the heart of America’s war-making machine cannot afford to recognize the contradictory facts of war fought in the name of God. Have the bishops become politicians? There are other frightening and irrational facets to the separation of church and state story. One is the way in which the so-called Christian fundamentalist churches support a bizarre pro-Israel, anti-Jewish position in this world for the sake of righteousness at the time of final judgment. Within less than a month of North’s sales pitch in Arvada, 60 Minutes (October 6, 2002) aired a segment revealing such fundamentalists to be antiSemitic, in spite of — or perhaps because of — their patriotic faith in God and their literal interpretations of the Bible and Armageddon and Final Judgment.

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Chapter 6. Of Popes, Prophets, Pulpits, Patriots, Presidents and Political Puppets The TV segment started by showing a Jewish-Christian co-celebration, conducted in a certain “evangelical church in Colorado,” supporting the Jews in their never-ending battle with the Palestinians. This coming-together was viewed as supporting the Jews in the American-Israeli war against Palestinian Muslims as part of the Christian God’s work and will. The evangelicals (70 million strong, according to Jerry Falwell) believe that the current war in the Middle East is the beginning of the fulfillment of the prophecy in Revelations about the second coming of Christ. These fundamentalist Christians temporarily support the Jews, the program pointed out, because they believe that God originally gave the Jews what is now left of Palestine, and the West Bank. Thus, they support American military efforts to back Israel and kill their Muslim enemies. This, of course, is where Middle East and American politics and religions intersect nonsensically, and introduce in distorted format America’s so-called Christian beliefs. The fundamentalist belief, which is entwined in Bush’s WMD politics, supports the notion that once the Jews are restored to the Promised Land, then the Messiah will come again and convert to Christianity any Jews remaining. Those Jews who resist will be destroyed as infidels by the power of Christ in that second coming. What of the Palestinians? The instrumentality of war and politics (US policy in the Middle East) as determined by fate, controlled by God and now unfolding, will dispose of them in Gehenna (hell). The same fate presumably awaits the Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs and Buddhists and all others who do not share the fundamentalist Protestants’ beliefs. In other words, these 70 million American fundamentalists support the current US foreign policy in the Middle East (Israel vs. Palestinians and all Muslims) because they think war is a means of fulfilling the hallelujah prophecy by which they will be saved in heaven at the Final Judgment, when Muslims, Jews, pagans and everyone else will be cast into hell — along with liberal Catholics. Is this part of the thinking of the present Bush Administration, or is it part of the recruiting drive that motivates born-again patriots to go fight the nonChristians in Iraq? The election of 2004 showed that the Republican Party and George Bush would not have won without the support of the conservative Christian coalition.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns Such miscegenation of politics and religion is borne out by a boast that Falwell made on 60 Minutes: He claimed that 100,000 letters from evangelicals across the nation caused the Bush White House to back down in the spring of 2002 from its demands that Ariel Sharon withdraw from Ramallah and Bethlehem, the very cradle of Christianity, and turn it over to the Muslims. Other Christian clerics, like the Rev. Dr. George Regas of the All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California, take a more moderate view. On October 31, 2004, he delivered a sermon called, “If Jesus debated Sen. Kerry and President Bush….” Without telling his parishioners how to vote, he “challenged them” to go into the voting booth “taking with them all that they knew about Jesus, the peacemaker… and then vote their deepest values.” As Regas tells it, he soon received a shocking message from the Internal Revenue Service which warned him that “intervention in a political campaign could cause you [your church] to lose your tax exempt status.” Apparently, someone representing the Bush Administration considered that Regas was campaigning against Bush, or was enough of an irritant to require shutting up. This church-state clash was not reported in the national media until the Bob Schieffer’s CBS news broadcast of November 16, 2005. As Schieffer pointed out, the Christian conservative political regime in the White House was snooping in the pulpits of the nation in violation of the doctrine of separation of church and state. His inference from the IRS action was that governmental agencies are wielding clubs, threatening churches and the Church as a whole, at the behest of the White House, without regard for the US Constitution and the nation’s tax laws. As Regas responded, “I often preached sermons that touched upon what some would characterize as political issues. Many of the political issues that we confront today coincide with deeply held, core religious beliefs: issues relating to marriage, family, community, and yes, even war and foreign policy. It seems to me that fundamentally moral issues, such as peace and the alleviation of poverty are indisputably the province of church pulpits — regardless of which politicians are debating on a Sunday that happens to fall in an election cycle.” The contrasting sagas of North and Bush and Regas and the nuns illustrate the dangers inherent in the confused amalgam of church, state, freedom, patriotism, morality, war and peace in America — and why young Americans are dying in Iraq and nuns are in jail, but no presidents are.

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CHAPTER 7. AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH Pontius Pilate pondered before deciding whether to have Christ crucified, “What is truth?” Did the nuns actually commit a wrong act? Were they, indeed, guilty of sabotage that borders on treason? If they were in the right, surely they would not have been sent to jail? Air Force officers who operated the silo complex testified that, despite their demonstration at the silo, the nuns never put the nation’s security in jeopardy. Yet they went to jail as if they had. Nothing but a fence was damaged, and the only blood spilled was their own, voluntarily. No harm, no crime. On the other hand, the government’s lie about WMD in Iraq launched a thousand cruise missiles and resulted in the sacrifice of thousands of American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives for a cause that was proved to be false. Was that lie promulgated and was the war conducted in Iraq to remove incriminating evidence? To induce regime change? To obtain the power and the revenues that Iraq’s oil represented? To remove a potential threat to Israel? For religion? All these and many other motives have been suggested. Whatever the results as far as oil and other interests are concerned, Saddam Hussein’s regime has been overthrown. What never will change is that he was once Washington’s man, armed years prior by another Bush president when he was CIA director. The question, then, must be: was Bush wrong? Several of his top aides, now reviled as outcasts, and even one respected journalist, indicate that he was.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns When Bush invaded Iraq in March of 2003 with “shock and awe,” he stated two main goals: to unseat Saddam’s regime and to get US forces to find weapons of mass destruction in order to justify the invasion after the fact. Obviously, if Saddam had gone “bad,” no one could sleep at night knowing he had access to WMD. He must be a threat to world peace. Bush and his father had given him weapons and now Bush wanted them back. But Bush’s army never found WMD, nuclear or otherwise in Iraq and it was nearly a year until the troops found Saddam himself. When the nuns were arrested on October 6, 2002, they stated: We hope in the light of that world to name things what they are, to unmask the lies, abuses, and racism hidden in the rhetoric of patriotism, security and moral superiority. We reject the US Space Command Vision for 2020 to dominate space for military operations; to exploit space as a US 4th frontier, making all other nations vulnerable to US conventional and nuclear attacks; to integrate space force for war fighting; to abuse the Aleutian Islands and other lands with interceptors and spy satellites and to waste more billions and billions of dollars and more human and material resources, causing the destruction of earth and the desecration of space. [For complete statement, see Appendix A.]

Some top aides, who presumably stood for the truth while they were within the Bush administration, now are treated as if they no longer speak the truth because they presume to speak a truth contrary to Bush’s party line. They include former US ambassador to Iraq Joseph Wilson; former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill; former National Security Advisor Richard Clarke. Wilson, who issued a report in 2002 indicating that Iraq was not importing uranium oxide from Niger, was discredited for exposing the lie in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union message to Congress. Bush, supported by contrived information from Vice President Cheney, used the trumped-up uranium story to consolidate support for the invasion of Iraq. Bush needed just such an inflammatory reason to build a case for invading Iraq. It has now become public knowledge that Wilson’s wife (Valerie Plame) was a CIA agent in charge of tracking nuclear matters; that to discredit her work and the opinion of Joe Wilson, the Bush administration exposed Plame as a CIA agent. This violated a US national security law. It also endangered the lives of many agents associated with Mrs. Wilson’s activities. An investigation into that breach of national security was at first stonewalled and then swept under the carpet. Publicly, President Bush has said that anyone in his administration leaking security information would be sacked. Later, as the finger of suspicion pointed

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Chapter 7. And Nothing but the Truth to his own advisor, Carl Rove, Bush cray-fished by saying such charges would have to be proven first. In September 2005, Judith Miller of The New York Times was released from her contempt-of-court prison cell in exchange for revealing that her source for a story she had been developing was Scooter Libby, chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney. She spoke out and won her release only after Libby released her from a promise of journalistic confidentiality. Libby has since been indicted for lying under oath about a national security matter. As of the end of 2005, Bush’s own top aide, Karl Rove, remains unindicted but is still under scrutiny. It seems doubtful that anyone of substance in the Bush administration will be fired for violating a national security law, given the violations that Bush himself has committed by way of family corporate interests, especially where release of nuclear technology is concerned (See Chapter 20). Not long after Wilson blew the whistle, former cabinet member (and National Security Council member) Paul O’Neill announced that the Bush administration had become “the deaf leading the blind” on the subject of Al Qaeda. O’Neill resigned at about the time Bush invaded Iraq. Then Richard Clarke, who headed the counter-terrorism office of presidents G.H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and G.W. Bush, charged in his book, Inside America’s War on Terror, that the current Bush administration had pushed the vigilance against terrorism and Al Qaeda to the “back burner,” offering the war on Iraq as a substitute. Clarke’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission has been torpedoed by the Bush administration as being self-serving. In the meantime, Bob Woodward, former Washington Post hero of Watergate, published a book confirming what Clarke was saying. That book, based on interviews with President G.W. Bush, had been reviewed and given the White House imprimatur, just as Clarke’s had been. The problem is, nobody is sure what the truth of the matter is, and that’s the way the Bush administration likes it. When the United States of America was founded, nearly everyone in this country believed in God and those testifying before a court of justice had to swear on the Bible “to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God.” In recent times, belief is far less uniform and the witness oath in the courts omits all reference to God and all use of the Bible. Today’s court oath carries about as much weight as a Boy Scout pledge to be thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. The gravity of the oath depends upon what is at stake for the person

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns raising the right hand. Perjury, if it occurs in any court, is now recognized as simply a convenient lie, punishable to the extent of the judge’s discretion. Lies from the White House would then seem to be nothing but political “spin” without reference to what the truth is. The judge in any case is an interpreter of the law enacted by those who appointed him and the people who pay his salary. The judge is the law, and morality no longer has anything to do with the truth. The question is, as the late Morton Margolin of the Rocky Mountain News used to ask at election time from his news desk, “Who judges the judges?” As Rev. Carl Kabat, says, “[Courts] are legal theater…trials put on by the state to sanction by jury the presupposed verdict of the state and the judge. The judges in such cases don’t give a damn about the whole truth. They take care only to allow enough one-sided truths to create the appearance of a just verdict so that they won’t be reversed. When they rule in favor of the government, they never are.” However, in the case of the nuns. On October 1, 2004, the Appeals Court Tribunal asked enough pointed questions about the deficiencies of the prosecution’s case to suggest that a reversal of Blackburn might be possible. The opposite has since happened and the truth was crushed by the gavel. Kabat, by the way, was convicted of a “crime” similar to that of the nuns and was tried under the purview of the same US attorney, John Suthers, but by a different federal judge within the Denver district. Kabat’s case happened prior to 9/11. He crawled over a missile silo fence in Weld County in 2000 and damaged nothing. He pounded with a household hammer on the silo lid and its metal appurtenances (railroad tracks). Wearing a clown’s suit to poke fun at the government, he spilled some of his own blood. He was then arrested at gunpoint by a squadron of military police and turned over to the local sheriff’s department for disposition. The disposition of misdemeanor trespass, which might have been settled in county court, was taken over by federal authorities because Kabat was a previously convicted peace felon. Kabat’s protest was directed against nuclear weapons (WMD) which, according to the official policy of the government that arrested him, were supposedly being eliminated in compliance with a senate-ratified 1972 treaty. Unfortunately, G.W. Bush unilaterally revoked that treaty. As co-founder of the Plowshares Movement, Kabat had a history (he served 14 years for multiple offenses) of similar peaceful transgressions. He was an associate of the Berrigan brothers, who protested the Vietnam War. (In fact,

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Chapter 7. And Nothing but the Truth the Berrigans started the trend on college campuses to burn draft documents when Philip Berrigan declared draft cards to be “human hunting licenses.”) The problem for Magistrate Boyd Boland in the Kabat case was that, if he allowed Kabat’s motives to become known to the jury, he would likely not be convicted. And if he were found innocent, then the government itself would necessarily be exposed as guilty of a war crime by threatening the use of a WMD — in contravention of the decades-old Geneva Conventions. Boland knew Kabat was prepared to admit that he trespassed into the government’s weapons sanctuary. He also knew that Kabat was prepared to prove: 1) That the missile silo contained weapons of mass destruction which, under the Geneva Conventions, constitutes a war crime. Under the same conventions to use or even threaten to use weapons of mass destruction is a war crime. 2) That Kabat had a duty under the Nuremberg Principles, established through American jurisprudence after World War II (and thereby becoming the law of the land) to inform the public and to resist an evil that the state was forcing upon its citizens. The Nuremberg Principle declares: “Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience…Therefore [those individuals] have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring.” To get around this conflict of law, Boland agreed with the government prosecutors that Kabat’s motive had no bearing on the case. It was simply a case of whether or not Kabat had trespassed. It the end it not matter whether Kabat could prove motive that neutralized the offense, because the judge and prosecutors would not allow such testimony. It did not matter whether the law could be a basis for defense. The magistrate simply barred all such testimony at the entry level of the trial, creating a foregone verdict. What Boland discarded in the process was nothing less than the Sixth Article of the US Constitution, which states, “…all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.” Boland also erroneously rejected the Nuremberg Principles, failing to consider them part of American jurisprudence. By proxy through Kabat’s case, this low-level magistrate was nullifying ex post facto the Nuremberg proceeding against the war crimes of the Third Reich. His purpose in doing so was to avoid

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns establishing the US government as being guilty of war crimes similar to those of Hitler’s regime. Finally, Boland’s ruling nullified the First Amendment in its aspects of free speech in Kabat’s attempt to speak out about government crimes. Under these conditions, the jury had no alternative but the guilty verdict. In this context, the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth went down the judicial crapper, as would the case of the nuns a couple of years later. Of course, Kabat’s attorneys wanted to appeal, but Kabat, ever the selfappointed martyr for a cause, did not. With that decision he passed up an opportunity, perhaps, to make new law in an area of his life’s keenest interest. His best friends and advisors whispered that he was either a saint or stubborn to the point of self-crucifixion. For trespass, Kabat got 83 days (time served), although he subsequently had to serve a year in jail for breaking his probation in Illinois. As it turned out, Kabat was precedent for what happened to the nuns. The case of the nuns, who were friends of Kabat through the Plowshares Movement, came up after 9/11 but just before the US invaded Iraq. It was similar in nearly every respect to the Kabat case, except the nuns used pliers to cut through a missile silo fence, thus “destroying,” as Suthers contended, a vital part of the country’s national defense: a fence. The nuns, like Kabat, were first turned over to the local sheriff’s department for disposition. Their misdemeanor trespass was then taken over by the FBI, and the nuns became the captives of federal marshals, as happened to Kabat. As members of the Plowshares Movement, the nuns had a “criminal” history, with some time served for similar offenses that had been regarded as negligible. They too, were associates of Philip Berrigan. The nuns considered their action to be a prophecy against the second war then gathering force against Iraq. Like Kabat’s prophecy, and like Bush’s war, it focused on WMD. For what should have been the misdemeanor of trespass, the nuns were tried for sabotage and obstructing national defense described by defense attorneys as excessive. However, the US attorney and Judge Robert Blackburn acceded to the government’s plea to proceed with such excessive charges because of public pressures flowing from 9/11.

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Chapter 7. And Nothing but the Truth Thereby, America’s legal wrath against bin Laden became focused against the nuns. America needed a culprit and so the nuns got a “fair trial” and then were, in a sense, hanged. The core of the whole truth that the nuns wanted to present was that the United States, which by then had gone to war, was in possession of the very weapons it ostensibly decried as illegal under international law and UN resolutions. The core of the whole truth was that the nuns had proved the administration’s own political and moral contradiction. In the end, they had to be convicted of sabotage to divert public attention from the embarrassment of the truth: America was at war in Iraq over a “crime” of which the entire nation was guilty in Colorado and Wyoming and Nebraska. (All these states reelected Bush.) The core of the whole truth was that Blackburn wrongfully influenced the jurors by his instructions and rulings so that jurors could only be allowed to think that the nuns were a menace in making their peaceful objections to WMD. This coincided with the ironic assumption that the government was right for killing thousands of people in Iraq over the WMD issue in order to restore freedom American-style. To provide the cover of fairness for the trial record, Blackburn, like Boland before him, allowed the defense in a pre-trial hearing to present an “antecedent proof acceptable to the court” (offer of proof). If accepted, it could be brought before the jury to justify the behavior of the nuns. However, upon hearing what two expert witnesses had to say, Blackburn summarily rejected their plea for such antecedent proof. The whole truth was not to be allowed in his court. WMD, as the prosecution argued, were good things necessary for the nation. The antecedent proof included pre-trial testimony from Professor Francis Boyle, who teaches international criminal law at the University of Illinois. Among his credentials, Boyle successfully proved that the sabotage by terrorists of the airliner over Locherbie, Scotland, was mass murder, not an act of war under international law. In the case of the nuns, Boyle told the judge and the prosecutors that any threat of use of the Minuteman III at silo N-8 is a crime against peace, a war crime and a crime against humanity under binding US and international law. He said that was true because N-8 and all like it are high-alert, first-strike 300kiloton nuclear weapons of mass extermination which does not discriminate between civilians and combatants.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns In other words, they constitute war crimes under the Geneva and Nuremberg protocols. However, the judge did not allow any of his testimony to be heard by the jury. More truth on the side of the nuns, which was never to reach the jury’s ears, was offered by Ved Nanda, professor of international law at the University of Denver on February 23, 2003. The prosecutor seemed shaken when Nanda said that the US threat by Bush to attack Iraq was real and in violation of basic US and international law. He added that the US has not excluded use of the Minuteman III missile in Iraq and threat of its use was thereby imminent. His conclusion was based on the fact that in late January the Los Angeles Times had broken the story that President Bush and the Pentagon had validated first-strike policy for use of nuclear weapons in Iraq. Imminent threat, as the prosecutor and the judge knew, is a war crime. Nanda concluded that the nonviolent and symbolic action by the nuns was reasonable, given the “very dangerous” circumstances. When the expert opinions of these highly qualified witnesses were rejected by the bench, it eliminated another chance for the jury to consider the whole truth. It eliminated the chance that the nuns would get a fair trial and it assured their convictions as saboteurs of the nation’s security. On the subject of national security and the nuns, Denver Post columnist Diane Carman put on public record these remarks April 6, 2003: Nuns’ Faith Finds Chink in US Armor With thousands of US troops poised to overtake Baghdad with shock, awe and whatever else is necessary to subdue the 5 million Iraqis who live there, the question before the US District Court in Denver last week was whether three nuns armed with wire cutters, hammers and their own blood constituted a threat to the national security of the United States of America. The questions were: Were the nuns trying to sabotage the mighty US government? Did they undermine our national defense? Did they damage the most powerful military on earth? Not allowed inside the courtroom was the other issue: Whether at least in principle the nuns might have a point. So with worldwide attention focused on them, the women in blaze-orange prison suits sat before a jury and a smiling judge in a red bow tie and made their case. Carol Gilbert, 55, Jackie Hudson, 68, and Ardeth Platte, 66, admitted to several facts for the prosecution.

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Chapter 7. And Nothing but the Truth Yes, they said, they did carefully snip through the chain-link fence on the site of the Minuteman missile silo near Greeley on the morning of Oct. 6, 2002. They chose the date because it was the anniversary of the start of the war in Afghanistan. Yes, they cut the chain on a gate to enter the property, but they were careful not to damage the lock. A link on a chain or a fence can easily be fixed, Gilbert said. She’d done it many times herself back home in Baltimore. Yes, they did in fact flail away with their household hammers on the rusty railroad tracks that are installed for transport of weapons on the site. And yes, absolutely, they spilled containers of their own blood into shapes of crosses on the tracks and on the wall (lid) of the missile silo. “I’ve been tested. I don’t have AIDS,” Gilbert told the court. “We brought the blood in baby bottles.” Then, with the bloody crosses drying in the autumn sun, the nuns sang a song about the sacred earth and chanted, “Oh God, teach us how to be peacemakers in a hostile world.” After about 40 minutes of this, several soldiers driving Humvees crashed through the fence and, with their weapons drawn, surrounded the grayhaired women and handcuffed them. Oh, there was one other thing in the federal government’s case against the nuns: a rosary Sister Gilbert had left behind. It is Exhibit Z. Despite the barrage of objections from the prosecutor on relevance, the softspoken Dominicans took every opportunity to explain their intent on that day. They are people of conscience, they said. They have taken vows that require them to bear witness. In their church under God, poverty, hunger, homelessness and weapons of mass destruction are abominations. “Any nuclear weapon, even by its very existence, is a crime of genocide,” Gilbert said on the witness stand. “In Germany, when they put the Jews on the trains and gassed them, it was legal. Nobody was breaking a law. Yet we all wonder how the people of Germany could have allowed Hitler to do this.” Now, the US has nuclear missiles on high alert, poised to kill indiscriminately, and the nuns believe it was their duty — under Nuremberg Principles, international law and the tenets of their powerful faith — to stand in opposition to them (the missiles). “I believed I had to go there to stop a crime against humanity,” Gilbert said. “I knew this little hammer wasn’t going to stop the Minuteman missile, but I could say to my God, ‘This is not in my name. I’m not responsible.’” The sisters have long been part of Jonah House, a community founded in 1973 by former Jesuit priest Philip Berrigan. (Note: he was a Josephite, his brother Daniel was Jesuit) Berrigan became famous for protesting the Vietnam war and demonstrating for nuclear disarmament. He spent 11 years in prison for acts of civil disobedience. He died in December. His widow, Elizabeth McAlister, attended the trial of the nuns. In their closing arguments, the lawyers for the sisters reminded jurors that military officers had testified that the women had not jeopardized national defense or harmed the nuclear missiles at the site.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns The prosecutor spoke again of the willful destruction, the bloody crosses, and the affront to law, order and military security. Diminutive Sister Platte thanked them all — the jurors, the judge, the prosecutor, even the FBI agents. She talked about faith, peace and humanity amid war and death. She talked about trying to live a life that’s pure and true and holy. And then the defense of the three nuns in blaze orange prisons suits rested. Some say it was a charade. Some say it was a sacrilege. Some say it was idealism run amok. For the sisters, it is what gives life meaning. They took a stand for peace. They forced the US government and the world to pay attention. This week’s verdict won’t matter. They won.

Winning is what federal prosecutors and judges are most concerned about because it sets precedent; and precedents are either partial to or opposed to their fascist, hang-em-high point of view. Winning, when the verdict is forced by the judge upon the jury to convict, hides the truth from the public. It cheats justice. That there was malice and intent to rig the outcome from the bench is also shown by the prosecution’s effort to prevent the nuns from being called by their professional title, “sister,” in court. (No such discourtesies are attempted in cases where doctors or professors are involved.) Blackburn and Suthers, a Catholic, made sure of it here, however, to avoid any sympathy from the jury. In the end Blackburn delivered to the government he works for a sure-fire conviction. But to the extent that he works for the people of the United States, he failed. He did so by failing to uphold the Sixth Article of the US Constitution and his oath of office to defend the Constitution. Blackburn gave blessing to his government for state-sanctioned murder in Iraq, a policy directed by a president bound on revenge even after his UN weapons inspectors had succeeded in eliminating the chance that any WMD remained there. Blackburn tried to hide his juridical duplicity by quoting St. Paul’s passage in the Bible that the Christian should be subservient to the state. That passage, of course, was written when the Roman centurions were in charge. About the nuns and their self-assigned inspection, US Attorney John Suthers still pretends he does not see their point. Defense attorney Anabel Dwyer had spelled it out for him in a pre-trial letter dated January 22, 2003.

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Chapter 7. And Nothing but the Truth Dear Mr. Suthers and Mr. Brown: I feel sure you are aware that only non-violent exposure, declaration, inspection and disarmament can end an illegal and criminal threat or use of weapons of mass destruction. This includes our own nuclear weapons. As you know, Carol Gilbert, O.P., and Jackie Marie Hudson, O.P., and Ardeth Platte,O.P., conducted a surprise inspection of a United States 300-kiloton nuclear weapon, the Minuteman III, N-8. They found it on high alert and symbolically disarmed it. The Sisters non-violently exposed on-going horrific United States war crimes and yet you prosecute them for such reasonable and courageous acts? They acted lawfully on our behalf. We ask you to release the Sisters now. We all need the services of such knowledgeable, strictly non-violent inspectors. As lawabiding citizens, we must fulfill our common obligation to pursue complete nuclear armament in good faith.

The letter was ignored. However, the federal prosecutors, having faced unprecedented public resentment over the excessive prosecution of the nuns, apparently learned a lesson. A year after the nun-saboteurs were imprisoned and Kabat had been convicted once again and jailed for separate actions, sympathizer Carol Carson cut her way into a Weld County missile silo. She acted alone, with no witnesses. To avoid giving her any publicity, the federales allowed her case to be tried in county court. Because she pled guilty, there was no publicity. In October 2004 she was fined $300 and the case was closed. The media blinked. In the case of the nuns, after the pre-trial hearing (when Suthers turned prosecution of the case over to Assistant DA Robert Brown), Suthers commented to one of their supporters, in an elevator, that he didn’t understand why the nuns, except for the purpose of rousing more public sympathy, refused to take his offer of free bail. “Because,” the supporter replied, “They haven’t committed a crime.” Clearly, the prosecutor and the federal government, on up to the White House never will understand the moral of the story.

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CHAPTER 8. OF HUMAN ANGELS AND WOMEN MAYORS In his closing argument, Walter Gerash, one of four attorneys who helped defend the nuns pro bono, called them human angels. Judging by his wet cheeks, the words were neither empty rhetoric nor flattering hyperbole. A former US attorney general, Ramsey Clark, also was a defense counsel of record; Gerash’s statement was wrapped in flag, history and the righteousness of genuine morality. The three Dominican nuns for years had preached a gospel-by-example of doing good and resisting evil, as St. Paul commanded in one of his epistles. For resisting evil, they stood in danger of being convicted as saboteurs and a danger to national security. Gerash, a 78-year-old liberal firebrand, told the jury that the women, under vows of poverty, chastity and obedience for all of their adult lives, had behaved like guardian angels in human form. Their prophecy and their warning was against the very kind of evil that Bush himself pretended to decry: weapons of mass destruction. The trial’s backdrop was a classic study in moral contrasts: At the time of the trial, Bush was about to declare war and kill people so he could search Iraq for WMD. The nuns had declared peace, and prayed for the world — seeking a solution to the WMD problem that required no search and no killing. Bush was allowed to spill the blood of countless victims with impunity. The nuns were jailed for spilling their own blood in a symbolic prayer of peace. Bush was praised by society. The nuns were punished by his government.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns Bush claimed he was fighting “evil,” and that his war would discover WMD in Iraq. He found none; but he created what, to use his own vocabulary, is the “evil” of an unnecessary war. The nuns found the “evil” of WMD in America. They were punished for it. Where did they come from, these nuns? What were their motives? What inspiration drove them? They didn’t look like angels; more like gray-haired grandmas. There was nothing ethereal about them except for the softness of their smiles and the prickling penetration of their dewy eyes. But for the golden crosses at their throats, they didn’t look like nuns, either. Instead of ankle-length black habits and stiff, funny-looking white coifs and bonnets, they wore faded cotton-print blouses that might have come from the Goodwill store, and modest skirts or baggy slacks with battered tennies. No lipstick, no hairdos, no earrings, just the cosmetics of sincerity and the perfume of honesty. In the courtroom they chose to wear the fluorescent-orange prison jump suits provided by the state, to make a point with the jury about the unjust charges against them. This rankled the prosecution, who would have preferred to see them wear street clothes, the better to depict them as common criminals. At their sentencing, the nuns switched to black shawls and long black skirts, not unlike the robes worn by the judge himself. As sister Gilbert explained, they “dressed as women in black to identify with women around the world who stand in silent vigil for peace.” They stood in silence in the courtroom, at that point. The prosecution was also uncomfortable with the fact that the nuns had refused to take public recognizance bonds. By staying in jail during the trial preliminaries, the district attorney knew they got more sympathy from the newspaper and TV news public, and made the government look like schoolyard bullies. While pretending to extend the usual courtesies and respect that most of society extends to nuns, the prosecution raised the issue of whether or not they should be addressed as “sister” in court, or simply by their miss-so-and-so names. The defense urged that “sister” was a proper term of professional deference, such as that accorded a nurse, or doctor or general or professor, and won their point, although “sister” was generally avoided by the judge and prosecutors.

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Chapter 8. Of Human Angels and Women Mayors Sister Ardeth Platte, OP Something is wrong. You can tell it from the life story of Ardeth Platte. How does a highly educated woman, a devoted nun, an idealistic high school principal and deeply moral mayor-pro-tem of Saginaw, Michigan, find herself declared a traitor to her country? Especially after she helped the state of Michigan become free of nuclear weapons two decades ago? Ardeth Platte was born April 10, 1936, in Westphalia, Michigan, the second of two children, at the peak of the Great Depression when families everywhere were oppressed by the economics of the times. She came from a close-knit family with strong ties to “many cousins.” Her father served in World War II. Ardeth attended Catholic schools, graduating high school in 1953 as valedictorian. After a year in college, she entered the community of Dominican sisters in Grand Rapids, Michigan, taking her first vows in 1956 and her final vows of poverty, chastity and obedience there in 1959. By then she had obtained her baccalaureate and teacher’s certificate. Sister Platte’s teaching career began at the junior high level and progressed to Catholic high schools in several cities in Michigan. “During the summers of 1964-1966 I helped administer an Upward Bound Program at Aquinas College,” Platte says. “Students were in the lowest socio-economic brackets and needed higher grades for college.” From 1966-1971, Sister Platte was principal of St. Joseph High School in Saginaw, Michigan. At the same time, she was coordinator of Adult Education Night School, the School for Dropouts and Retrieval Program and Family Education. In 1973, she was elected to the City Council of Saginaw, Michigan, where she was Mayor-pro-tem (1983). During parts of this period, Platte and Gilbert organized statewide opposition to nuclear weapons that were being deployed on Michigan soil at Wurtsmith AFB in Oscoda on Lake Huron and at K.I. Sawyer AFB in Guinn, near Lake Superior in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Then, until 1995, Platte says, “Sister Gilbert and I worked on other justice issues: poverty, nuclear power plant in Midland, criminal justice issues, racism and discrimination issues, fair housing, environmental issues, death penalty coalition, and so on.”

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns From 1978 to 1995, the two nuns were “missioned to Baltimore’s Jonah House — a non-violent, faith-based community of civil resistance to nuclearism, the arms race, war and killing,” Sister Platte says. Jonah House was co-founded by ex-Josephite priest Philip Berrigan, who was the first to burn Selective Service records with home-made napalm during the Vietnam War, and by fellow activist John Bach. Berrigan’s initiative triggered the practice on campuses nationwide of burning draft cards in objection to the war in Vietnam, especially because the FBI’s manhunt for Jesuit priest Dan Berrigan made him a national hero in the headlines. In 1980, the Berrigan brothers and six others formed the Plowshares movement. Those six others included Oblate priest Carl Kabat, Dean Hammer, Elmer Maas, Anne Montgomery, Molly Rush and John Schuchardt. Collectively, they poured their blood over missile nose cones at a GE factory in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. It was there they used the mantra of the prophet Isaiah who spoke of forming plowshares from swords. From within her community of nuns and outside associates, Platte says, “We commit to growing our own food, living a simple life style, feeding the people made poor, giving retreats, continuing our prayer, study, theological and Scripture reflections, actions directly opposing weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons, and war. We participated in all forms of non-violent direct actions.” Of her record of resistance, Platte says, “I could not recount the arrests; the sentences over the years since Vietnam. “Our [Platte’s and Gilbert’s] major full-time commitment to do nonviolent civil resistance to the weapons of mass destruction began in 1983-1985 in Michigan as we organized Faith and Resistance Retreats to close two Strategic Air Force Bases that had nuclear cruise missiles for deployment on B-52s. Michigan was sixth in the US with numbers of nuclear weapons deployed. We ‘witnessed’ at these two bases until all weapons were removed, the bases were closed and Michigan was nuclear-weapons free. “During these years we also did actions of civil resistance at the Nevada [A-bomb] test site; Offutt Air Force Base; the White House; ELF [Extremely Low Frequency site for Trident missiles] at Clam Lake, Wisconsin; and in Upper Michigan. Wurtsmith AFB in Oscoda, Michigan, was closed and was transformed to civilian use in 1993. K.I. Sawyer AFB was closed and transformed to civilian use in 1995,” Platte says.

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Chapter 8. Of Human Angels and Women Mayors Platte and Gilbert also “continued our quest for disarmament by moving closer to Washington, D.C. We moved to Jonah House in Baltimore in March of 1995. [From there] our regular non-violent actions took place at the Pentagon, White House, NSA [National Security Administration], DOE [Department of Energy] World Bank, etc. We have also done actions at the naval submarine base and Electric Boat in Connecticut, at the US Mission to the United Nations in New York, and Andrews AFB.” Among the anti-nuclear Plowshares actions in which Platte, Gilbert and Hudson participated and which brought arrests, are: Weep for Children Plowshares in 1996 in Groton, Connecticut. (The occasion was the launching of the 18 th Trident-loaded nuclear submarine. The nuns spilled their own blood and wielded hammers.) Gods of Metal Plowshares in 1998 at Andrews Air Force Base in Prince George County, Maryland: (The occasion was an air show at which Father Frank Cordaro of Des Moines was also arrested for spilling blood on warplanes and applying hammers.) Sacred Earth and Space Plowshares in 2000 at Peterson AFB, Colorado Springs. (The occasion was an air show that coincided with the anniversary of the first Plowshares action in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. Charges against the three Dominican nuns were dismissed for hammering on an F-18 fighter plane’s wing and spilling blood. Another object of their symbolic wrath was a ground satellite receiver.) As Platte puts it, “We wanted to show connections in the ‘kill chain’ of outer space, air and land.” Sacred Earth and Space Plowshares II at Minuteman Missile Silo N-8 in Colorado. (The occasion was to protest the emerging war in Iraq that was focused on Weapons of Mass Destruction.) In this action, Platte, Gilbert and Hudson inspected, exposed and symbolically disarmed a WMD. Platte calls all of her actions “my missionary ministries,” and she prays for the time when she can “return to my communities as a more giving and loving person.” Sister Carol Gilbert, OP Sister Carol Gilbert, a constant companion of Sister Ardeth Platte in the Dominican community since their focus on nuclear weapons, is not a former mayor of any city, but she has virtues and intelligence that would qualify her to be one.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns What she chooses instead is to be mayor of the kind of morality that her lawyer describes as angelic. Her choice has directed her, by forces beyond her control, to federal prison at Alderson, West Virginia, where she served a term that the president of the United States should have served, except that the US takes a schizophrenic position on WMD. Carol Gilbert was born in 1947 in Traverse City, Michigan. She was first in a family of two children. The Gilbert family was hard-working middle-class. She grew up to be a Dominican nun, teacher, liturgist and poet. As Denver Post reporter Eric Gorski describes “with her bookish glasses, she looks like the junior high teacher she once was.” In response to mailed questions, the answers Sister Gilbert returned from her jail cell show a gentle person of great humility but deep purpose and with little time for trivia. She would rather answer one-by-one the flood of letters she receives than spend much time talking about her accomplishments. “My time is limited,” she pleads. “The mail is overwhelming.” Then she writes her life story in terse notes, in the kind of script one might expect from a teacher who probably instructed her students that neatness and legibility of thought are part of your grade. “I was a junior high school teacher from 1969 to 1977 in various Michigan schools. Alternative Learning Center in Saginaw, Michigan, from 1977-1979. From 1979 on, I’ve been with Ardeth and she has the dates, places, and actions from memory. I don’t.” The dates, places and actions outlined above by Sister Platte show how totally involved Sister Gilbert has been in the integrity and peacefulness of creation and how closely she has worked with her convent comrades toward those goals. Her notes were written on the back side of a memorandum that announced the three Dominican sisters had been awarded The Nuclear Free Future Award in Munich, Germany, by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. (See Chapter 14.) Sister Gilbert describes in her newsletter, entitled Ponderings from the Eternal Now, the pitiful “wages” prison inmates at Alderson accrue for their work ($5.25$18.00 a month “unless one works for the prison industry, UNICOR, for slave wages”). She mentions in a subsequent note that the women at Alderson prison sew the military jackets of the kind President Bush wore on his Thanksgiving appearance in Iraq.

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Chapter 8. Of Human Angels and Women Mayors From this meager income, prisoners like her must pay $50-$70 for a pair of tennis shoes, for example, or $7.00 for a lock to secure personal possessions, which otherwise are stolen. To keep warm in the winter requires $20.00 if you want a scarf, mittens and hat. Long underwear (men’s) costs $8.00. “Fans, alarm clocks, watches, sunglasses — all must be purchased. Wash is done in the main laundry, but only the clothes they issue are so washed. In the housing units: Wash=$0.40, Dry=$0.40, Laundry soap=$2.00-$6.00. [It is not clear who takes the profit on these sales, but the movie “Shawshank Redemption” comes to mind.) One of the most telling, immoral and degrading parts of prison life for women, flowing from this system of penology by economic dominance, is described by Sister Gilbert: “Of course, selling one’s body for pay is the last resort for some of these women. This gives you an idea of how the poor remain poor…If any fines or restitution are owed, money is taken monthly from these wages. Life can be unbearable for these poor women…Makes one wonder what the difference is between the Prison-Industrial-Complex and the Military-Industrial-Complex.” Sister Jacqueline Hudson, OP Jackie Hudson was born in 1934 in Saginaw, Michigan, second in a family of two children. Situated near Lake Huron, Saginaw’s main industry was fishing — which in the Great Depression was anything but prosperous. Her father had attended seminary as a young man, and as the head of a Catholic household years later he said the rosary with his family every evening. Jackie says she often accompanied her mother on marketing trips with nuns to the local farms so that they could buy eggs and produce for the convent. In those days, nuns did not drive because, unlike priests, they had no vehicles. For 25 years, Sister Jackie taught piano and vocals to youngsters before venturing into the rough-and-tumble world of peace activism. Her early cause was devoted to orchard farm workers in Western Michigan. When nuclear cruise missiles arrived in Michigan in 1983, she joined Gilbert and Platte in protesting their evil presence on Michigan’s Great Lakes shores. When military strategy took the nuclear weapons away from the Michigan bases, Platte and Gilbert moved to the Jonah House in Baltimore, MD. Hudson directed her attention to Poulsbo, Washington, a locale that was home to a naval

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns Trident submarine base. There she drove a transit bus and tuned pianos to support herself. The trio was reunited in 2000 for a common cause at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs. It was the anniversary of the first action taken by the founders of Plowshares, twenty years before, at a GE missile plant in Pennsylvania. At a public air show near Pikes Peak, the nuns sprinkled blood on fighter jets of the type that had been dropping bombs made of depleted uranium on Bosnia. Along with Platte and Gilbert, Hudson and two other nuns were held for a week in jail until federal authorities decided what to do with them. No significant damage had been done to the aircraft. Charges were dismissed and they were released. The real reason, Gilbert says, was to avoid publicity of the base’s Star-Wars nature. As fate would have it, the nuns received some support by way of lodging arrangements from fellow activist Bill Sulzman, whose anti-WMD work had caused his dismissal from the Denver diocese years prior. On hand at that time as Sulzman’s guest was Carl Kabat, who was free on bond facing trial in Denver for his trespass action the year before at missile silo N-7 in Colorado. Two years later (as Phil Berrigan lay dying in Baltimore), the nuns returned to Colorado to cut through a chain-link fence at missile silo N-8. This time, the nuns were treated as saboteurs. After being judged guilty on April 7, 2003, of sabotaging America’s national security, and after seven months in the holding cells of the mountain town of Georgetown, Colorado, the nuns decided to take the offer of personal recognizance bonds to settle their affairs in order to visit friends and supporters before sentencing and to spread their message. An interview by Diane Carman, columnist for The Denver Post, explains for the public their thinking on May 4, 2003: Nuns Glad to Trade Comfort for Jail Time The sisters have a confession to make. While Ardeth Platte, Jackie Hudson and Carol Gilbert are comfortable with their vow of poverty, they are not above savoring a few luxuries. The glorious feeling Wednesday night [April 30] of laying their heads on clean, white pillowcases in a quiet house with the light out after seven months in the Clear Creek County jail was, well, almost sinful. The Dominican nuns will have nearly three months of such exquisite comforts before they are incarcerated again. On July 25, they will be sentenced to federal prison for obstructing national defense and damaging public property. “We will joyfully accept the consequences of our civil resistance,” Platte said.

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Chapter 8. Of Human Angels and Women Mayors The sisters admit to have been surprised by the guilty verdict last month. That snipping a hole in the chain link fence surrounding a Minuteman III missile, praying and making crosses with their own blood could be considered acts of sabotage seemed ridiculous. “I believe under the laws of the land and international law, we are not guilty,” Gilbert said. “There’s no question,” Platte said, “if we had a legal trial, we would have been acquitted. We had a political trial. We are political prisoners.” But the guilty verdict has not left them defeated. “You can jail the resister, but you can’t jail the resistance,” Platte said. In fact, as with the Tibetan Buddhist nun, Ngawang Sangdrol, the longest-held political prisoner in modern China, prison may turn out to be the ultimate pulpit for Hudson, 68; Platte, 66; and Gilbert, 55. While imprisoned in their basement cell in Clear Creek County, they received thousands of letters from supporters around the world. “In one week, we got letters from South Africa, Ireland, Italy, France, Nicaragua, Honduras, Australia and New Zealand,” Hudson said. And they wrote almost as many back, with friends posting messages on websites and in news-letters everywhere. They also became so close to their fellow inmates and guards that there were tears and hugs all around when the women left. “Like Nelson Mandela, who befriended the person who jailed him,” Platte said, “we offered our lives there as one little sample of what the world can be.” But just exactly what is this world they seek? The sisters preach and live a philosophy of nonviolence, simplicity, community, economic justice in which “all 6.3 billion people of the world have their basic human needs met,” and environmental sensitivity “where we are friends of creation.” They pray. They teach. They raise food in a garden, and then give it away. So you wonder, at a time when war supposedly has never been more popular, more exhilarating to Americans, are they simply out of touch? “I really don’t believe that a majority of people in America or in the world support war deep in their hearts,” Gilbert said. “Given the response we’ve had from all over the world, something does not quite jibe.” Americans, they say, have been duped. “Our society lives on sound bites,” Hudson said. “Many Americans are simply misinformed. I’ve read polls that say a majority of people believe that Saddam Hussein had everything to do with 9/11. People actually believe those were Iraqis flying those planes.” Gilbert reached across the table in an instinctive gesture of friendship. “I’m sorry to have to say this to you, but the major news media in this country are in collusion with the government in promoting this war.”

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns Regardless of their beliefs and the devotion to conscience that brooks no compromise, the prospect of up to eight years in federal prison is still daunting to the women. “We have to take it one day at a time,” Platte said. “But sacrifice is essential. To sacrifice means to make sacred. We are trying to make our cause sacred.” The martyr Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero called it “the planting of seeds,” said Hudson, who is the eldest of the three. “The seed must die to bring new life to others. It’s unseeable to us. But we know it will be there. It’s a matter of faith.” That John Suthers, US attorney for Colorado — “he’s a Roman Catholic,” Hudson said, “a graduate of Notre Dame” — celebrated their conviction disturbs them. They pray for him, just like they pray for President Bush. But they have no doubt about their righteousness. “While we were in jail, we heard from the master-general of the Dominican Order in Rome,” Gilbert said. “He wrote us a magnificent letter. He talked about our ‘powerful preaching’.” So I wondered, as the women relaxed in the comfortable convent house in northeast Denver and prepared for what could be a life sentence in prison, would you do it again? “Absolutely,” said Platte, “absolutely. This is not just a whim,” she said. “This is a life.”

Both while they were in jail and out on bail before sentencing the nuns were interviewed extensively by the media. Some “sound bites” from those interviews offer insight as to their motives. They contrast sharply with the course mapped out by President Bush. Karen Abbott of the Rocky Mountain News filed this report for the public on April 2, 2003: A Catholic nun wept Tuesday as she told federal jurors why she and two others cut fences and painted crosses in blood at a nuclear missile silo in northeastern Colorado in October. The crosses were a symbolic protest. The Minuteman III nuclear missile, in an underground silo, is real, and the nuns wanted Americans to know how destructive it could be. “We want to bring about a lasting peace…total disarmament, all over the world,” said Dominican Sister Ardeth Platte in a breaking voice. “We want the people of this world to live. If we have to spend the rest of our lives in prison,” Platte said, “we will.” The three gray-haired nuns in orange jail jumpsuits are on trial for damaging federal property and injuring, interfering with, or attempting to injure national defense material — all federal crimes. Platte, Carol Gilbert and Jackie Marie Hudson admit they deliberately went to the nuclear missile silo in northeastern Colorado. They cut gate chains and chainlink fence panels, banged on the silo’s 110-ton concrete lid with household hammers, painted crosses in blood, sang about the sacredness of life and prayed.

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Chapter 8. Of Human Angels and Women Mayors Prosecutor Robert Brown told jurors as the trial opened Tuesday that the US nuclear missiles in underground silos are vital to the nation’s defense. “They are weapons that have kept anyone from firing a missile at this country for over 40 years,” Brown said. “It’s called deterrence.” “It would be nice if nuclear weapons had never been invented,” Brown said, “but they work.” Defense attorney Walter Gerash said the nuns were moved to commit their symbolic actions by their religious beliefs. “Now, is that bad?” he asked jurors. He accused federal prosecutors of charging the nuns with much more serious crimes than actually occurred, interfering with their constitutional rights to freedom of speech and freedom of religion. The nuns admit they trespassed, Gerash said, “but they aren’t charged with that.” How, he demanded, does painting crosses in blood interfere with the national defense? Defense attorney Susan Tyburski said the nuns were careful to cause as little physical damage as possible — for instance, cutting only one link in each gate chain, which could be replaced easily for about $2.00. Cleaning up the blood, she said, would cost only about $200. Defense lawyers said the government must prove at least $1,000 in damage to convict the nuns of damaging government property. Military personnel who apprehended the nuns were ordered to crash through the fence to get to them, Tyburski said. “The military actually caused more destruction,” she said.

After a 7-month wait, time which they chose to spend in jail, on Friday, July 25, 2003, the three rebels heard the gavel of Judge Robert Blackburn fall as he sentenced them to federal prison terms ranging from 41 to 33 to 30 months, respectively. The Denver Post’s columnist, Diane Carman, captured the drama of the moment in a Sunday column: Underneath his punctilious demeanor, Judge Robert Blackburn was plainly exasperated. The three elderly women before him were incorrigible. Dressed in black with black veils, black socks and shoes, they were engaged in a silent protest, responding to his question with simple nods of the head. They smiled beatifically and their lawyers read to the court their messages of love. One of the lawyers even called them “human angels.” What should the judge do with these blasted women? Carol Gilbert, Ardeth Platte and Jackie Hudson are convicted felons. They’re also Dominican nuns who pray for the judge every day.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns They don’t fit the standard profile of habitual offenders in the US District Court. But when Assistant US Attorney Robert Brown read their considerable criminal records dating back to 1980 into the record Friday, it was clear that at least under the law of the land, they qualify. It’s the law of the land they don’t accept. They do accept responsibility for their symbolic acts, though. They snipped through a chain-link fence surrounding a Minuteman III missile site in northern Colorado, spilled their blood in the shape of crosses, banged on the facilities with small hammers, and chanted prayers. They admit they did it. They just refuse to say it was wrong. As Blackburn said in his soliloquy before he pronounced their sentences for obstructing national defense and injuring federal property, this was “a no-win situation.” Amen. In front of the downtown Denver courthouse was a crowd of demonstrators. They paraded peacefully, chanting and banging drums. A woman dressed as the Statue of Liberty stood in the middle of the crowd, her lamp drooping, her eyes closed, her mouth taped shut. Correspondents from as far away as Germany stood on the sidewalks, videotaping their reports. The judge was unmoved. He accused the women of “exploiting gender, their vocation and their religion” in their pitiable defense, and then he did his best to gratuitously outdo them before he imposed sentence. He cited endless statutes and court cases by number, fulminated on legal philosophy and the profound contribution war has made to our culture, and tossed around enough references to scripture and Christianity to prove he could exploit sanctimony with the best of them. And just when the peacenik supporters who had packed two courtrooms and remained riveted to every word of the three-hour proceeding were shaking their heads and muttering, anticipating the worst, the judge surprised them. No, he didn’t let them go. He just didn’t give them the max. Walter Gerash, the theatrical defense attorney who represented Hudson, said he was surprised. “I expected the women to get seven, eight and nine years,” he said. Hudson got 30 months, Gilbert got 33 months and Platte got 41 months. “They shouldn’t have been charged in the first place,” Gerash said, but with time served and good behavior he figured they’d serve 1½, 2 1/4 and 3 years, respectively. “It could have been a lot worse,” said attorney Scott Poland, who represented Platte.

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Chapter 8. Of Human Angels and Women Mayors But as a standard for justice, that’s not saying much. The nuns were prosecuted because they were insubordinate to the almighty US government. By the government’s own inflated calculations, they did a grand total of $3,080.04 in damage. Not for an instant did they threaten the defense capabilities of the country or hamper the ability of the military to deploy the nuclear warhead. They demonstrated to make a point. They believe weapons of mass destruction — all of them — are immoral. For this, we will pay for their incarceration in federal prison for years. The prosecution, the defense and the judge all cited historic events to justify their arguments. Here’s one they didn’t mention: In 1968, the Chicago Eight were arrested and charged with multiple counts of conspiracy to incite riots, inciting riots and obstructing police officers outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Their subsequent trial was a freak show with anti-war pronouncements, profane outbursts, protests and challenges to the judge. Bobby Seale was bound, gagged and jailed for contempt of court. Demonstrators chanted and picketed the proceedings for days. In the end, five of the protesters were convicted. The longest sentence imposed was five years. Some of them served only a few years. Two years later, their convictions were overturned on appeal. The sentences were dismissed. They all went free. The country survived. I’d venture to say if the nuns had been released it would have made it this time, too.

Now that the nuns are in federal prisons, the nation can come down from its color-coded security alerts and breathe easy. (The nation hasn’t even noticed that since the sentencing of the nuns on July 25 and the middle of November, the Homeland Security Department has not flashed any colored lights of warning about security level hazards.) In the meantime, the attorneys for the nuns have consolidated their appeals on the grounds that the US attorneys Brown and Suthers did not prove damage to national security, and that the judge erred by failing to direct the jury’s attention to the testimony of two military witnesses in charge of silo N-8 who testified under cross examination that the action of the nuns never interfered with national security operations or harmed the silo in any significant manner. In explaining the appeal, Gerash said that Col. Frank Gallegos and other officers testified (in Gerash’s words) that “the hammering and the crosses and the cutting of the fence did not impede national defense or the ability of the silo crew to launch the missiles if necessary.”

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns Gerash went on to explain that under military rule 29 of the US Code applicable to the case, “if there is insufficient evidence (to prove the impedance) then the court must dismiss the charge.” Instead, Gerash claims, Blackburn ruled that the defense had not proved that the officers most directly in charge of the silo complex security were “expert witnesses,” even though they were brought in as witnesses for the prosecution. Further, Gerash says, Blackburn wrongly ruled that the damaged fence was an essential part of the country’s nation’s defense material and that the court erroneously accepted from the prosecution an inflated estimate of damage done by the nuns. If the Appeals Court grants the motion for reversal of these errors, the nuns could go free, Gerash says. He wishes the nuns had waited for the outcome of the appeal before opting to accept their prison terms, because he is confident of a reversal. “I think it [the charge] was outrageous,” Gerash says. “It [the trial and the judge’s ruling] was a legal fraud. They [the prosecution] introduced no evidence that they [the nuns] injured national defense. It [the testimony of the colonels] was just the opposite. All you have to do is look at the transcript.” That transcript is now in the hands of Denver attorney Cliff Bernard who is handling the appeal. [That appeal hearing was held October 1, 2004. The nuns lost in March 2005.]

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CHAPTER 9. NUNS AND OTHER MOTHERS WHO TEACH THEIR CHILDREN “Teach your children well…” — Crosby, Stills & Nash

Some people say that fathers teach about life and death while mothers teach about love. How childless yet nurturing nuns fit into this idealized ebb and flow of life, love and harsh reality raises a question easily answered. Nuns are the spiritual and moral mothers of children they did not bear, but to whom they can impart a spiritual sort of life that is just as important as the flesh-and-blood side. Those nuns who are less-subservient and more critical of the male-dominated war system preach this moral difference by carrying their protests to the sites of WMD which threaten to kill everyone’s children. They decry the warping of the communal conscience — apparently to no avail. The war-dominated US system responds by jailing them. The war-dominated US system doesn’t tolerate impudence and neither will the courts that are dominated by the system. And that is how the strands of maternal influence are removed from the interwoven fabric of church and state and families that live in both the secular and religious spheres of that system. The same thing happens in Islamic cultures. Within that negative framework, these spiritual mothers preach and protest against the use of the weapons of war by both sides, pointing out the horrible consequences of this societal disconnection. War is raw rage and suffering. That is why its survivors return to peace both physically and emotionally

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns shocked. Victory in war is no excuse for the inhumanity of war; and the political “need” for killing cannot make war civilized or just. Such civility would seem to be the raison d’etre for the Geneva Conventions. With the advent of the nuclear weapon, the Geneva question is whether a nuclear bomb is “one big bullet” aimed at a million people, and therefore is just as permissible under Geneva as a billion bullets from a million rifles, or machine guns, or even the fragments of grenades. Certainly, WMD by their nature do not distinguish between civilians and civilians in uniform or between front lines and city boundaries. Such issues are still on America’s conscience in 2006 — or, at least, they should be. The same issues must be on the minds of the three nuns, Cindy Sheehan and President G.W. Bush at Crawford, Texas, as American and Iraqi lives are blown apart in Iraq. Those issues are also on the mind of Noam Chomsky, who wrote for the Independent/UK on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Hiroshima horror in 2005: The recent explosions and casualties in London are yet another reminder of how the cycle of attack-and-response could escalate, even to a point horrifically worse than Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The world’s reigning power accords itself the right to wage war at will, under a doctrine of “anticipatory self-defense,” that covers any contingency it chooses. The means of destruction are to be unlimited. There have been efforts to strengthen the thin thread on which survival hangs. The most important is the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which came into force in 1970…. The NPT has been facing collapse, primarily because of the failure of the nuclear states to live up to their obligation to…eliminate nuclear weapons.... The United States has led the way in [this] refusal.

And America under G.W. Bush undertook on such thin-threaded policy the war against Iraq’s non-existent nuclear weapons in order to preserve its own ownership of the very same kind of WMD. One of the sad outcomes is that the war encourages the free-lance Christian crusaders who follow Robertson or Falwell to do violence for the sake of their idea of God, and in a war that was launched on a lie, at that. As “politically correct” Christians do so, they leave behind the righteous and moral part of the nation that three nuns are trying desperately to preserve. For his part, Chomsky tells the world that “the thread has almost snapped in the years since Hiroshima, repeatedly.” He cites the Cuban missile crisis and former-defense secretary Robert McNamara’s characterization of that event as coming “within a hair’s breadth of nuclear disaster.”

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Chapter 9. Nuns and Other Mothers Who Teach Their Children Among his conclusions, Chomsky says: “The probability of apocalypse soon cannot be realistically estimated, but it is surely too high for any sane person to contemplate with equanimity. While speculation is pointless, reaction to the threat of another Hiroshima is not.” Chomsky’s worry is not without foundation at a time when America is trading nuclear secrets for political suasion in Pakistan.” The probability of such an apocalypse is exactly what three imprisoned nuns were trying to prevent. In the bloody political wash of current events, Americans must decide whether to “stay the course” or look to their moral compass for a more promising way forward. Then there are birth-mothers who think like the nuns do about the war in Iraq; real mothers who have lost children in that war; real mothers who have belatedly joined the nuns in protest; real mothers who have felt the sting of those weapons in brutal action. Take the case of Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a young man named Casey who was killed in 2004 while serving in Iraq. Sheehan, of Vacaville, California, camped for several weeks in the summer of 2005 near the ranch vacation home of President George Bush at Crawford, Texas. She set up a roadside tent village called Camp Casey, and vowed to stay there until the president explained to her, one-on-one, when he would withdraw US troops from Iraq. Bush brushed that request aside, saying he had already talked with her and several other families who had suffered losses in Iraq. At the same time, he defended her right of free speech and protest and the right to appeal to her president, but told reporters that he needed to keep a “balanced” approach in the unfolding national crosstalk about the war. He said he needed his own privacy to keep that balance, and that was why he was on vacation. He indicated that if he talked one-on-one with every individual he would lose that balance and the time needed for presidential decisionmaking (about making war). He soon answered Sheehan’s question with the Republican motto that seems to be his blanket answer to everything: “stay the course.” Bush’s decision about the immediate future, however, seemed as easily made as the one to invade Iraq in the first place. By 2005 he was a “lame duck” president — not eligible for re-election and therefore not subject to any further judgment in the polling booth. Given that immunity from public sanction, he called Sheehan’s suggestion for withdrawing the troops at this time a mistake. (He has done likewise with similar suggestions from some Congressmen.)

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns Sheehan’s protest created media attention and a stir of emotions deep in the heart of Texas. The emotions got so deep that Bush’s neighbors complained of clogged roads. Some voiced worries about the safety of their children traveling such roads on school buses. Ironically, they expressed no worries about the safety of their draft-age children, nor did they sympathize with the concerns of mothers of grown-up children-become-warriors in Iraq. Sheehan’s cause did not die on a dead-end road at the Texas White House. She took it to the Potomac White House gates, where the media picked up the signals from the Oval Room spin doctors. From Sheehan’s more desperate statements, they spun a web of subversive purpose to discredit her, just as the trials of the nuns were designed discredit them. In any case, Sheehan struck a chord with earlier CIA peacenik targets such as Rev. Darrell Rupiper who, but for Jimmy Carter’s debacle in the desert, might have secured the release of America’s Tehran hostages. Rupiper passes along the internet words of Robert Jensen, a journalism professor of the University of Texas at Austin, who acknowledges he is “not of the church.” “We know,” Jensen says, “there can be no difference between how we treat those we love and those on the other side of the world, whom we will never know and never touch.” Basing his comments on the agony of Sheehan over the loss of her son, Jensen continues. “If our lives and the lives of the ones we love have value — if, by virtue of being human, we have a claim to life and dignity in living — then everyone must have that same claim.” “Somewhere in Iraq right now, there is a mother looking into the grave of her child. We live in the most powerful…the most affluent nation in the history of the world…born of violence and maintained by violence. We can choose to be part of that violence, or we can choose to help create a different world…We can imagine a better world — a world in which no one suffers merely to protect our power and affluence.” However, Bush refused to concede anything about his views on the Iraq war or troop withdrawal except to “stay the course.” Like the Iraq war itself, the Sheehan episode is full of ironies. Here was a president taking a vacation in the middle of a war against terrorism — one which Bush chose to expand into Iraq without any real basis. No president in time of true war ever took a six-week vacation. That alone sends a tacit message to the public: that we need not take the war against terrorism seriously. What kind of war is it, when the president has not and cannot declare war on an identifiable enemy except a religion which has

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Chapter 9. Nuns and Other Mothers Who Teach Their Children no boundaries? That’s why the people of Texas cared more about the traffic disruptions Sheehan created than they about the terrorists or the continuing killing of American men and women in Iraq. Another irony is that no clerical representative of any American Christian Church, as of August 1, 2005, has supported the Camp Casey protest as a means to make the point that the US war in Iraq is immoral. Perhaps that is because the role of the church has been taken over by the presidential pulpit of the war on terrorism. In fact, the moral power of the Christian Church itself has become subsumed into the religious-political fabric of America and all of its wars. That war was first announced by Bush to be a “crusade” — as if the White House and Pentagon had become God’s Christian arm for slaying the infidel heathens. The White House has assumed the medieval Divine Right of kings to wage war and kill at will on behalf of their kingdoms. The very purpose of the Constitution, with its dictum separating the church and state into two distinct influences, was to keep presidents from becoming kings in the image of George III of England. The only difference between today’s war in Iraq and the days of the Crusades a millennium ago is the nature of the weapons used and the massive scale on which innocent bystanders are indiscriminately slaughtered — “collateral damage” of a type supposedly outlawed by Geneva Conventions — and the opposition of three nuns, along with mothers like Cindy Sheehan. Nuremberg was perhaps the last time America adhered to the Geneva Conventions governing war and peace; now, Americans seem to be proud of a criminal, violent-minded president who rejects such treaties and undoes what Congress has ratified. Nuns, popularly viewed as pious virgins confined to cloistered convents or used as teachers of children, know that such military thinking adds to the chaos and violence in the world. They learned enough history to see that it was America which had invented the mother of all WMD and they looked for a way to persuade America to recognize and renounce the aggressive stance and the disdain, the disrespect for human life that WMD represent. Like concerned mothers, they predicted that America’s conduct would lead to war, and they ended up in jail. Right now, the nuns and mothers are upset that those whom they educated did not learn their lessons. Three nuns understood that it was America who had inspired even its political foes to possess and use WMD, even in the form of airliners in the case of

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns the World Trade towers. The nuns realized that it was the height of hypocrisy for the world’s self-proclaimed landlord to wage war on the feigned moral ground of forcing “freedom,” American style, upon a nation on the other side of the globe. As the saying goes, “A person convinced against his will remains an enemy stronger still.” Has it occurred to anyone that war cannot create freedom and justice and peace except the unjust peace of death? A newsletter from Sister Ardeth Platte dated January 2004 reflects the way nuns like her would raise us as children: Let us take back our civil rights: In the United States one of every 37 of us has been imprisoned some time. The prison industrial system is collapsing under the Ashcroft-Bush style of “patriotism.” Will we allow them to stop our dissent by fascist and police-state tactics? Will we be complicit in empire building, globalization, preemptive strike policies, permanent war making and obscene corporate profiteering? Homeland insecurity: 1) Disregarding international law. 2) Rejecting the Kyoto Treaty. 3) Pulling out of the ABM treaty. 4) Abrogating the Land Mine Treaty and Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. 5) Building the Missile Defense System. 6) Continuing the dominance and exploitation of space program. 7) New nuclear weapon construction. 8) Increasing War Department spending. 9) Arrogant stances against United Nations and other countries. 10) Rejecting the International Criminal Court. 11) Nuclear Posture Review. 12) US as number one debtor nation. 13) Worldwide malnutrition starving and homelessness. 14) Lack of basic humane living conditions. 15) Rampant disease and little care or treatment. 15) Billions of people living on $1-2 a day. 16) Environmental devastation of water, land, air and space. What is our hope? Ban nuclearism, war and killing…Let us make our country a model of nonviolence, compassion, simpler lifestyle and beatitude living.

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Chapter 9. Nuns and Other Mothers Who Teach Their Children These are the darker aspects of the American culture the nuns tried to put on display by their actions. Their view puts a philosophical finger on what happened and why at the World Trade Towers. The events of 9/11, when Muslim extremists found a way to turn everyday equipment into WMD, convinced Americans that if the extremists had had access to “intentional” WMD, they would have used them to make the same deadly and self-destructive point that America did in 1945. And so the war of terror among otherwise intelligent human beings is renewed. Incredibly, President G. W. Bush uttered the word “crusade” the very day after the Twin Towers were leveled. His utterance confirmed fears in Muslim lands that the West is still out to capture them, and rekindled all the associated animosity between two cultures. Just as incredibly — and exploiting American public outrage and frustration over the failure of the hunt for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan — G. W. Bush declared that Iraq was the center of the threat from WMD. Somebody, some nation, had to pay for 9/11. That nation was to be Afghanistan first and then Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. In America, anyone who objected was considered to be an ally of Osama bin Laden. Few Americans understood that the satanized-Saddam had been armed by former president G. H.W. Bush when he was CIA chief in the mid-1970s, as reported in the book Prophets Without Honor. To this day, few ordinary Americans realize that Saddam was further armed by then Vice President G.H.W. Bush who used Saddam as a CIA “asset” for striking back at Iran for the Tehran hostage taking. Almost nobody cares that Iraq, fighting Iran during the IranContra scandal, received its poison gas WMD from Florida-based companies owned by a Bush-run cartel. Today in Iraq and America, the younger generation in particular has no idea what has been happening behind the scenes of history. All they know is hatred of the other side, because of the pain that theocracies inflict on each other. As the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe put it: “There is nothing more frightening than ignorance in action.” These, then, are the conditions under which the militaristic male-dominated world operates and presumes to teach its children. Nobody but three nuns seems really to see that World War III already have started in a new, splintered and incoherent fashion. How else to explain the violent and politically-sanctioned events that have taken 180 million lives since

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns WW II? Who besides the three nuns sees that the world is now working its way to WW F (Final)? Into this fray, from the feminine side and with no weapons but their minds, souls and long skirts are three nuns who understand the human tragedy of all weapons systems and their political-military-economic consequences. Their interest is to prevent war and the killing of children — and adults — on all sides. Accordingly, three religious and celibate mothers, of the kind who teach children that love nurtures life, drew attention to the location of dozens of WMD on the day of their arrest. The nuns found WMD in Colorado several months before America committed billions of dollars to send troops abroad to begin the deadly and fruitless search for them in Iraq. At issue for the future of the world is whether the children of any land will be taught that the morality of any system, to be civilized, must be life-affirming, as these nuns and mothers such as Cindy Sheehan understand so well.

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CHAPTER 10. IN THE WRECKAGE OF 9/11 “Violence does not and cannot exist by itself. It is invariably intertwined with a lie. —Solzhenitsyn

Many sad things came to pass following the violence of the World Trade Towers. The book Prophets Without Honor, written about US-Middle Eastern intrigue over WMD prior to the World Trade disaster, was an overlooked prophecy about 9/11. Likewise, already forgotten are ex-GI and priest-prophet Philip Berrigan, who was arrested and jailed dozens of times for his peaceful demonstrations in favor of abolishing nuclear weapons. He died at age 79 in 2002. Even so, the next generation will inherit unknowingly the benefits of what he and three nuns set in motion long before 9/11. Their living prayer has been that the combined strength of politics, morality and technology might find a way to immunize the world against weapons of mass destruction. If that is ever done, then their lost prayer and sacrifice for peace will have been found. The book Prophets Without Honor was banned in 2002 by the US military in the Fort Benning-controlled town of Columbus, Georgia, where thousands of anti-war protesters gather each year. Under government pressure, book sellers as significant as Barnes & Noble were convinced not to promote the book. One community relations bookseller in Columbus lost her job after committing to host that book event. Even though the major media were notified of this trampling of First Amendment rights (which should be a keen concern to journalists), the media failed to pick up the story. It would seem we have already lost

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns the right to feel secure in saying anything critical of WMD or the USA PATRIOT ACT. Neither those holding power nor the citizens who yield that power to their leaders are concerned about the unjust imprisonment of prophets and the obstruction of First Amendment rights at the individual level. Collectively, these are greater threats to America as a nation than a dictatorial leader in a far-away land, but there is no war being waged to remove these threats. Since 9/11 ever-greater threats to the lives of individual Americans have been launched by our own elected leaders. The war in Iraq has claimed more American lives than the mass murders at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And as everyone knows, Iraq had nothing to do with those 9/11 events. The 9/11 attacks killed nearly 3,000 people, making it the largest single act of mass murder perpetrated by means of treachery. It was larger even than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which was an act of war perpetrated by a nation in response to a perceived threat. America’s war in Iraq has killed perhaps 100 times more people than the terrorists killed in Manhattan and the Pentagon on 9/11. Does that make us “even”? If you go by body count, the answer is yes. But by running up the score in the process of misplaced retribution, Bush has created more foes who themselves call for revenge and who have no other weapon but suicide. America is promoting the pattern of strike/counter-strike so familiar in Israel and Palestine. For that reason, there is no viable exit strategy for America. Afghanistan and Iraq have been devastated by “ugly Americans” in the worst sense of the term. All Americans, now, whether of good will or nil, are hated as occupiers of those faraway lands. Who can blame them except vengeful Americans? Thus the killing, which the White House said would bring peace, can only foment more killing. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn noted in his Nobel Lecture of 1972, “violence does not and cannot exist by itself; it is invariably intertwined with the lie.” If the nuns and other voices of peace and reason had prevailed, there would have been no need to “get even.” In the 9/11 case, there could have been trials for mass murder at the World Court level as there was for the Lockerbie, Scotland, airline assassinations. But America has rejected the authority of the World Court and even the United Nations. Otherwise, Osama bin Laden might not have become such a

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Chapter 10. In the Wreckage of 9/11 popular figure protected by his adherents. But US politicians and militarists do not look at the world through any lens but that of war. The bellicose G.W. Bush administration diverted hundreds of billions of dollars to war efforts when dollars were needed to prop up America’s own failing domestic economy, repair its ghettos and restore the city of New Orleans and the surrounding region. Now, more dollars are being drained and the nation’s debt ceiling is being raised to make war reparations. Fiscal irresponsibility may yet bring down the tower of the world economy in a pan-caking collapse more calamitous than that of the World Trade Towers. With events still un-spooling beyond control in the Middle East, nuclear WMD are still right where the nuns and their colleagues said they were. These prophets include the Berrigans, the Kabats, and individuals such as Darrell Rupiper, who was negotiating the release of the Tehran hostages, just days before the CIA’s plan resulted in the military debacle in Iran’s desert. Just days before the botched raid, Rupiper’s Iranian student friend was beaten to death in Omaha by the CIA while Rupiper was in Tehran. Rupiper served time in federal prison and for years after was harassed by the CIA who treated him like a traitor. Other moral leaders include Fr. Larry Rosebaugh and Fr. Roy Bourgeois, who peacefully infiltrated Fort Benning with a tape recording of Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador (assassinated by the CIA). It is at Fort Benning and the School of the Americas (Columbus, Georgia) that the US did much of its training of terrorists, terrorists who were expected to unleash merciless brutality in Central America on Washington’s orders. Romero was assassinated while saying mass. Rosebaugh and Bourgeois served time in federal prison. In all, this informal community includes hundreds of anti-nuclear pickets who were arrested and jailed, even before the USA PATRIOT Act came into play. Frank Cordaro and Michael Palecek both served time under federal sentence for protests as non-threatening as stepping across a line drawn by the military at the gates of their bases. It even includes a Congressional Medal of Honor holder, Charles (Angelo) Liteky, a former Catholic chaplain who went eyeball-to-eyeball with General Abrams over body counts and bounties for GIs in Vietnam. When Liteky sided with Bourgeois, he surrendered his Medal of Honor at the Vietnam War Memorial. He is the only recipient in history to do so.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns This kind of exemplary conduct never was the exclusive domain of male prophets. Many of these gently-in-your-face individuals are women of special courage. Their actions are not unique or isolated from that of other female prophetic predecessors. These include Dorothy Day, Elizabeth McAlister, Willa Elam, Linda Ventimiglia, Marilyn Felion, Jean Petersen, Anne Montgomery, Molly Rush, Kathy Kelly and Helen Woodson, to mention just a few. As Solzhenitsyn suggested, there is an underlying political immorality in a system that causes so many to challenge the violence of their government. The US already has peace and freedom; these prophetic people know that attacking other countries will do nothing to enhance those privileges at home or abroad.

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CHAPTER 11. THE POLITICAL COUP IN AMERICA TOOK PLACE IN IRAQ Americans are tolerant of any opinion, as long as the general thrust is sunny and upbeat. Anything else is dismissed as cynical negativism or lack of patriotism. Thus, Americans struggling to make sense of current events may have refused to recognize that the US government was overthrown in the election of 2000, most obviously through the voting irregularities in Florida, if not before. Because the coup was not staged by men wearing black ski masks and because it was accomplished by non-violent means, Americans may have convinced themselves that it was not a coup. In the election of 2004, the coup of 2000 was confirmed more cleanly: just a few polls closed early; just a few “swing” voting blocs were disenfranchised, and there was no weeks-long television spectacle as in 2000 when the world watched the recount being settled by the Supreme Court. This time the popular vote was actually presented as a “landslide” in favor of Bush (48 percent to 52 percent). Between those two elections, Americans missed the fact that the overthrow of the government of the United States of America became violent in 2002 with the invasion of Iraq. A successful coup establishes a dictator. The victor has the power to do whatever he declares necessary. He can invade any country under any pretext, using whatever pre-emptive strike weapons he chooses. He can suspend constitutional rights. In the American context, a coup would vacate the constitutional

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns powers of Congress to declare war, leave the citizens of the republic powerless, and unilaterally invalidate long-established treaties. This is basically what happened in the United States under G.W. Bush. The seeds for the current overthrow were planted under the first Bush president and can be traced to his days as CIA chief and then vice president under Reagan. One of the masterminds was none other than James Baker III, former secretary of state, who also came to the rescue of Bush Jr. in the disputed Florida election of 2000. As he has done for two decades, Baker continues to work behind the scenes of Washington power. The coup was an inside job and was a long time in the making. That it was most visible in Florida, where George W. Bush’s brother Jeb ruled as governor, only makes it more blatant. Just prior to that time, G.W. Bush had been governor of Texas. In the presidential election of 2000, the Bush camp at first conceded Florida on the basis of early voter returns; they thought they did not have the necessary popular vote to win the state’s electoral votes. Then the concession was withdrawn as, almost mystically, the Bush camp was advised in the wee hours of the night that the vote count was (or would be) shifting. And so it did, right in front of America’s sleepy TV eyeballs. Challenges and counter-charges aside, the election had to be decided by the US Supreme Court, which holds no electoral votes, but had an inaugural schedule to worry about. Under the spur of Baker, they rushed to make a lastminute decision before all the re-count results were in. Of course, what the Supreme Court says is law, and Bush made his way into the White House while Al Gore had to grit his teeth and slip into the shade, despite having an edge in total popular vote nationwide. Established in office by the non-violent, legalized overthrow of the US chain of power, the puppeteers behind Dubya’s throne expanded Bush Sr.’s planning for the coup in Iraq. (The techniques for this coup are amplified below and in Chapters 12, 15 and 16.) Meanwhile, the Bush Republican machine began a widespread action designed to assure more solid voting victories in the future, especially 2004. To do so, they looked at a model they had created in winning West Virginia away from the Democratic coal miners in 2000. This model can only be called blame-shifting. As events beyond 2000 would reveal, blame shifting was used to effect political changes in California. For example, the Texas-based Bush machine

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Chapter 11. The Political Coup in America Took Place in Iraq leveraged the electric power-grid fraud set up by its friends at Enron to stage the recall election of California’s governor and install muscle-man Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Politics, as they say, makes strange bedfellows. Arnold is married into the Kennedy family but appears to serve the Republican Bush family interests.) California’s problem was this: It imports most of its electric energy from outside the state because concern for the environment has prompted voters there not to allow more power plants to be built in their own state. When demand began to exceed the supply capabilities of the Enron grid, the company exercised clauses in its contracts that allowed it to charge huge premiums to the State of California because it was buying power from outside. Consumer laws in California require that when prices for power exceed a preset ceiling, the state must bear the excess cost for its citizens. Aware of the open-ended nature of this state obligation, Enron artificially created a shortage of power by shutting down certain of its Texas generating plants for “maintenance” at the time of highest summertime demand. For the cash-strapped Enron, whose executives and accountants (Arthur Andersen) had pumped up the company’s stock to set up a “sell” point for themselves, this energy shakedown was a windfall to disguise their malfeasance. For the State of California it meant bankruptcy. For the Democratic governor (Gray Davis), it meant recall. For the Texas-run Republican Party, it meant the governorship of Schwarzenegger.After Enron’s house of cards collapsed, the Los Angeles Times published an expository story written by Kevin Phillips which said, in part: In 1992, G.H.W. Bush’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission, chaired by Wendy L. Gramm, wife of Texas GOP Sen. Phil Gramm, created a legal exemption that allowed Enron to begin trading energy derivatives — another revenue enhancer for the company. When Bush left the White House in 1993, Enron made Wendy Gramm a company director and signed a joint consulting and investing agreement with James A. Baker III, Bush’s secretary of state, and Robert A. Mosbacher, his Commerce secretary. The two were to do Enron’s global deal-making for natural gas projects. “How much the Bush family and its close political entourage actually collected from Enron and its executives since the company was organized, (1985)” Phillips reports, “is a matter of definition: reportable political contributions, soft money for the Republic Party, finders’ fees, joint investment, inauguration funding, presidential-library donations, speech money, capital gains, consulting fees etc.” “If you combine what the multiple Bush generations received with what loyalists Dick Cheney, Baker, Mosbacher, Rove (and others) got, you certainly have $6 million to $8 million and depending on the success of the Baker-Mosbacher-Enron

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns joint investments, perhaps $20 million to $30 million,” Phillips says. “In retrospect, it’s unclear whether the Bush dynasty built Enron or vice versa.”

In the end, the blame for Enron’s failure, after its top officers had sold their company stock for several hundred million dollars, was shifted to the liberal accounting practices of Arthur Andersen. Blame shifting brings the story back to election-year events in typicallyDemocratic West Virginia. The story is told by the journalistic digging of Tom Hamburger of the Wall Street Journal on June 13, 2001. The story, too lengthy to quote in full, indicates that Bushites used coal barons in West Virginia to gain political persuasion. These barons included William Raney of the Coal Industry Association, James H. “Buck” Harless, a coal union-buster, and Charles “Dick” Kimbler, a former miners’ union official. They broke the Democrats’ hold on West Virginia voters. These men shifted the blame for loss of coal mining jobs onto Democratinspired environmental programs. The ultra-conservative Wall Street Journal even allowed the use of the term “coup” on its pages and it mentions a political “payoff.” Using this ploy, the coal barons succeeded in getting West Virginia’s underclass to vote for Bush. Since then, unemployment there and nationwide has gone up, even in coal-dependent communities, so there was no “payoff” for the coal miners. Who got it? Not the people who mine the coal, at the risk of their lungs and life. “In its first five months,” the article states, “the new administration has retracted a pledge to cut coal-related carbon-monoxide emissions.” This was a gift to the “coal barons” such as Harless, a multi-millionaire Bush supporter. In other words, having lied to deliver the votes by telling miners their jobs were on the line, Harless and his clique delivered a political windfall to Bush. They seem not to care that the gift endangered the health of the people whose wealth and power was created at the human cost of black lung disease. The real payoff goes to the mine operators who can breathe easier, economically speaking, without addressing environmental issues that affect the miners and their impoverished families and which continue to destroy the environment. The captains of the coal industry can continue flying their helicopters and jets to have coffee with the president who is propped up by kingmakers such as Harless. Nothing of what happened in West Virginia seems, on the surface to be illegal, as conversely, events in Florida strongly suggest. But in both states what

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Chapter 11. The Political Coup in America Took Place in Iraq ensued was a power coup that even today harms the American Republic and subverts its people’s right to redress: Whether coal miners or office workers, they can’t even vote out of office a man who took them to war against a nation that has not attacked them. That war is not, by the administration’s own belated admission, connected to the terrorism of 9/11. But the public was deluded into thinking it was, and still behaves today as if it were so. That is blame-shifting at its highest level of political deceit. The lesson of West Virginia is not just that elections can be bought, but that the US populace is so malleable that, when ill-informed, it will surrender not only its own interests but that of the nation as a whole. While it is especially easy to manipulate people when they face unemployment and poverty, it is stunning that these people fell for such a ploy. This is a point that even conservative Baptist-politicians like Bill Moyers worry about. To understand how the three nuns and Iraq connect to all this requires an examination of the coup techniques used in other states. Let it be said first that nuns are not practiced in the chicanery of politics and coups because they focus on what is moral. Perhaps that’s why the nuns, instead of the culprits, are in jail. The Bush attack on the Constitution and success in getting around its safeguards did not end in Florida or West Virginia. With an eye on a second term, the Bush team replicated the West Virginia technique like a virus in other states, including Texas, Colorado and California. In 2004, the nation was split into “red” and “blue,” even as its moral lifeblood was being bled white. On this map, the issues are not just those of partisan politics, but of constitutional issues that bear on the power of the people to elect those whom they wish to represent them in Congress and in the White House. Colorado was a test case. The governor, Bill Owens, is a great friend of the Bush administration. Control over the US House of Representatives was at stake. In determining the future balance of power, the election of 2000 saw a crucial vote in the newly-created 7th District of Colorado. Recounts there gave the nod to the Republican candidate Robert Beauprez over Democrat Tom Feeley by a scant 121 votes. Beauprez was actually sworn into Congress before the final vote count was officially verified by a Republican official. As in the case of Florida, the vote count narrowed in favor of the Democrat before the vote sifting was terminated under pressures of time.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns Not satisfied with such a narrow margin, a year later the GOP-controlled Colorado Legislature tried to gerrymander the new 7th District along lines more favorable to the Bush administration, despite the fact that the US Constitution provides for redistricting by population just once every 10 years — and to be done according to each decade’s census outcomes, at that. To begin with, the boundaries of the 7th District had to be decided before the 2002 election by a Colorado judge because the state’s legislators could not settle their partisan quarrel. Once it was better mobilized, the GOP legislature, with Bush mentor Carl Rove pulling the strings from Washington, sought to undo what the judge had done — the better to fortify their future victory against a counter-coup by other vote jockeys. With the 2004 election, the balance in the US House of Representatives was very much in play. In Colorado’s case, the Republicans were committed to making the 7th district safer for Beauprez. The Democrats regarded the gerrymandered re-redistricting effort in 2003 an obvious and illegitimate attempt to consolidate power — and that is the first order of procedure in every coup, whether in Iraq or America. The coup plan was derailed by the Colorado Supreme Court, which ruled the Republicans could not undo the prior redistricting because it was unconstitutional. The evidence shows that there was, indeed, a coup in America, and that the war in Iraq is really not about “democracy,” as shown succinctly by columnist Mike Littwin of the Rocky Mountain News. In that newspaper’s issue of December 6, 2003, he said, in part: Even as we fight for democracy in Iraq — at least that’s what they tell us we’re doing there — I’m still worried about democracy as it’s practiced here on the home front. I don’t mean John Ashcroft’s assault on the Bill of Rights, although that’s a worthy topic if only we had the time. Instead, we’ll go directly to the redistricting battle, an age-old fight (the word gerrymander dates to 1812) that has reached a crisis point. Of all the House incumbents running in 2002, only eight lost…Four of the losers were matched against other incumbents, so only four incumbents lost in races that weren’t against other incumbents. This is not democracy. And insisting that school children recite the Pledge of Allegiance won’t make it a democracy. In fact, it is the clearest explanation of the hyper-partisanship that is paralyzing government. Safe districts mean representatives moving ever closer to the right and to the left.

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Chapter 11. The Political Coup in America Took Place in Iraq As state Sen. Ken Gordon, who has a plan for redistricting in Colorado puts it, “When they think they get their instructions from God, why should they talk to each other?” In the famously divided state of Florida, which has a Republican governor (Jeb Bush), and two Democratic senators, 18 of the 25 House seats belong to the Republicans, including one for Katherine Harris (the former state official who verified the presidential vote count for Bush). This also is not democracy. And it’s why the Supreme Court will soon hear the case out of Pennsylvania — another gerrymandered state — asking whether partisan line drawing is unconstitutional. We can already conclude it’s unseemly, or maybe you missed the Texas debacle. While a gerrymandered consolidation of power for the Bush coup was cooking in the Rocky Mountains, so were similar efforts in Bush’s home state of Texas.

The GOP legislature there also attempted a post-election-year coup by redistricting. First attempts would have succeeded except that the Democrat legislators fled en masse across the state line to Oklahoma motels, depriving the GOP-dominated legislature of a quorum to conduct their odious business. Later the Bush forces, not forgetting where the president calls home, got the job done and opened the door to more Republicans in Congress. They did so through the instrumentality of House Leader Tom Delay who is under indictment in the state of Texas for illegal transfer of campaign funding. As to all the political issues in all these events, the nuns were not involved. They take a more simplistic and honest view, knowing that concern for what is morally right will inevitably put them in conflict with what is politically convenient. As Phil Berrigan put it in his autobiography, “We aren’t attempting to reform or overthrow the government. We don’t care who [what party] sits in the White House or walks the hallowed halls of Congress. We pour our blood [in this protest] to proclaim the sin of mass destruction. We are confronting the spiritually insane.” Bush could not have conducted his coup in Iraq without pretending they had illicit WMD. Likewise, he could not have staged his coup in America without the behind-the-scenes actions in Florida and West Virginia and, now, many other states. What the nuns gave witness to is what Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., years ago called “the violence of desperate men.” Perhaps Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure said it best: “Man, proud man, drest in a little brief authority; most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d; his glassy essence like an angry ape, plays fantastic tricks before high heaven, as make the angels weep.”

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns Conveniently for Bush the mood in America after 9/11 favored a “follow the leader” brand of patriotism, making possible the double-coup in America and Iraq. Digging deeper into recent history, it could be argued that the coup in America began as long ago as the CIA putsch that put the Shah Reza Pahlavi in power in Iran in 1953. A coup as intricate and long term as the non-violent overthrow of America’s democracy requires a leader as canny as a CIA director. The candidate needs ample opportunity to build a power base, to ensure the loyalty of supporters in many camps. A stint as vice president, for instance, under an octogenarian actor-president, with all the resources necessary to set up national and international schemes to control the flow of drugs, weapons, oil and other highvalue commodities. A UN resolution to bomb an offending nation gets the public used to creating enemies. All that’s left is to rig the election of a family heir to establish political dynasty. A network of ambitious cronies and individuals like Saddam Hussein can always be found to do the dirty work abroad until they outlive their usefulness. Participants in coups often, perhaps almost always, think they are patriots. True patriots like the nuns, who define “what’s good for my country” in different terms, only get in their way.

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CHAPTER 12. UH-OH: THE COUP’S THOUGHT-POLICE If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters. — US Justice Robert Jackson,

Every successful coup uses a system of thought control or intimidation to maintain its power. America’s present predicament, for example, is illustrated by an event that took place just before Thanksgiving 2003 in the streets of Springer, New Mexico, as recounted by Father John Dear, a Jesuit priest serving the Catholic parish in that impoverished town. The Soldiers at My Front Door I live in a tiny, remote, impoverished three block long town in the desert of northeastern New Mexico. Everyone in town — and the whole state — knows that I am against the occupation of Iraq, that I have called for the closing of Los Alamos, and that, as a priest, I have been preaching, like the pope, against the bombing of Baghdad. Last week (November 16-22) it was announced that the local National Guard unit for northeastern New Mexico, based in the nearby armory, was being deployed to Iraq early next year. I was not surprised when yellow ribbons immediately sprang up after the press conference. But I was surprised the following morning to hear 75 soldiers singing, shouting and screaming as they jogged down Main Street, passed our St. Joseph Church, back and forth around town for an hour. It was 6 a.m., and they woke me up with their war slogans, chants like “Kill! Kill! Kill!” and “Swing your guns from left to right, we can kill those guys all night.”

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns Their chants were disturbing, but this is war. They have to psyche themselves up for the kill. They have to believe that flying off to some tiny, remote desert town in Iraq where they will march in front of someone’s house and kill poor young Iraqis has some greater meaning besides cold-blooded murder. Most of these young reservists have never left our town, and they need our support for the “unpleasant” task before them. I have been to Iraq, and led a delegation of Nobel Peace Prize winners to Baghdad in 1999, and I know that the people there are no different than the people here. The screaming and chanting went on for an hour. They would march past the church, down Main Street, back around the post office, and down Main Street again. It was clear what they wanted: to be seen and heard. In fact, it was quite scary because the desert is normally a place of perfect peace and silence. Suddenly, at 7 a.m., the shouting got dramatically louder. I looked out the front window of the house where I live, next door to the church, and there they were — all 75 of them, standing yards away from my front door; in the street right in front of my house and our church, shouting and screaming at the top of their lungs, “Kill! Kill! Kill!” Their commanders had planted them there and were egging them on. I was astonished and appalled. I suddenly realized that I do not need to go to Iraq; the war had come to my front door. Later, I heard that they had deliberately decided to do their exercises in front of my house and our church because of my outspoken opposition to the war. They wanted to put me in my place. This, I think, is a new tactic. Over the years, I have been arrested some 75 times in demonstrations, been imprisoned for a “Plowshares” disarmament action, been bugged, tapped, and harassed, searched at airports, and monitored by police. But this time, the soldiers who will soon march through Baghdad and attack desert homes in Iraq, practiced on me. They confronted me personally, just as the death squad militaries did in Guatemala and El Salvador in the 1980s, which I witnessed there on several occasions. I decided I had to do something. I put on my winter coat and walked out the front door right into the middle of the street. They stopped shouting and looked at me, so I said loudly, publicly, for all to hear, “In the name of God, I order you to stop this nonsense, and not go to Iraq. I want all of you to quit the military, disobey your orders to kill, and not to kill anyone. I do not want you to get killed. I want you to practice the love and nonviolence of Jesus. God does not bless war. God does not want you to kill so Bush and Cheney can get more oil. God does not support war. Stop all this and go home. God bless you.” [This little speech is starkly reminiscent of the sermon for which Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated in El Salvador.] Their jaws dropped, their eyeballs popped and they stood in shock and silence, looking steadily at me. Then they burst out laughing. Finally, the commander dismissed them, and they left. Later, military officials spread lies around town that I had disrupted their military exercises at the armory, so they decided to come to my house and to the church in retaliation. Others appealed to the archbishop to have me kicked out of New Mexico for denouncing their war making. Then, a general called the mayor and asked him to mediate “negotiations” with me, saying he did not want the military “in confrontation” with the church. Really, the mayor told me, they fear that I will

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Chapter 12. Uh-Oh: The Coup’s Thought-Police disrupt the gala send-off next month, just before Christmas, when the soldiers go to Iraq. This dramatic episode is only the latest in a series of confrontations since I came to the desert of New Mexico in the summer of 2002 to serve as pastor of several poor, desert churches. I have spoken out extensively against the war on Iraq, and been denounced by people — including church people across the state. I have organized small Christian peace groups throughout the state. We planned a prayer vigil for nuclear disarmament at Los Alamos on the anniversary of Hiroshima this past August, but when the devout people of Los Alamos, most of them Catholic, heard about it, they appealed to the archbishop to have me expelled if I appeared publicly in their town. In the end, I did not attend the vigil, but the publicity gave me further opportunities to call for the closing of Los Alamos. I received hate mail, negative phone calls and at least one death threat for daring to criticize our country. But New Mexico is the poorest state in the US. It is also number one in military spending and number one in nuclear weapons. It is the most militarized; the most in need of disarmament; the most in need of nonviolence. It is the first place the Pentagon goes to recruit poor youth into the empire’s army. If we are to change the direction of our country, and turn people against Bush’s occupation of Iraq, we are going to have to face the ire and persecution of our local communities. If peace people in every local community insisted that our troops be brought home immediately; that the UN be sent in to restore Iraq, that all military aid to the Middle East be cut; and that our arsenal of weapons of mass destruction be dismantled, then we might all find soldiers marching at our front doors, trying to intimidate us. If we can face our soldiers, call them to quit the military and urge them to disobey orders to kill then perhaps some of them will refuse to fight, become conscientious objectors and take up the wisdom of non-violence. If we can look them in the eye and engage them in personal Satyagrahas, as Gandhi demonstrated, then we know that the transformation has begun. In the end, the episode for me was an experience of hope. We must be making a difference if the soldiers have to march at our front doors. That they failed to convert or intimidate me; that they had to listen to my side of the story, may haunt their consciences as they travel to Iraq. No matter what happens, they have heard loud and clear the good news that God does not want them to kill anyone. I hope we can all learn the lesson.

The lesson is not being heard as the GOP coup of America consolidates its grip, as underscored by other news items that occurred in Colorado, just to use one example. These plans were in the making even as the nuns made their protest in 2002. Bush’s friend Gov. Bill Owens tried to push a bill in the Colorado legislature that required all children in public schools to recite the Pledge of Allegiance daily as they began their lessons. The idea was shelved; although it was standard at the height of Cold War paranoia, this is now seen as bordering on state-sanctioned brainwashing, much like prayer in public schools.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns Then out of California to Colorado (and perhaps to other states) there came a Bush ideologue named David Horowitz, seeking to strengthen the hand of the president by increasing control on the shapers of elite opinion, via the centers of higher learning. Together with Owens, under GOP blessing, Horowitz suggested to the Colorado Legislature an “Academic Bill of Rights.” The “Academic Bill of Rights” proposal suggests that more politically-conservative professors and speakers of fascist persuasion should be invited to campus to offset what Owens has described in the media as an imbalance on the side of liberalism (i.e., Democrats). Owens believes that what professors think and what students are taught in state-supported institutions of learning do not give sufficient prominence, at the moment, to the Bush-Owens style of patriotic state fascism. The GOP administration knows it cannot sustain its grasp on power unless it has the backing of the upcoming generation of “intellectuals,” and the easiest way to influence them is via the various state high schools and universities. Their agenda includes the teaching of “intelligent design,” another term for the Biblical version of the creation of the world by the hand of God and not via evolution. The choice of terminology is a semantic way of dodging the constitutional issue of introducing god into the nation’s schools. “Intelligent Design” is divine creationism in scientific drag. As John Grogan of The Inquirer puts it, “The intelligent design camp knows that to pass muster in public schools, it can’t let on that the ‘designer’ is really God. That would be creationism, and that would not be science.” This serves the GOP political agenda by fronting government-sponsored religious notions as intellectual freedom within the science curriculum, even though everybody knows religion is not even a scientific theory. However, to make it seem so gains popularity for politicians among those with conservative Christian bias. In this spirit, Owens placed the “Academic Bill of Rights” proposal on an agenda for consideration by the Colorado Legislature. The following reports on the Horowitz-Owens plan for turning professors into thought police at statefunded universities appeared in the Rocky Mountain News beginning on Sept. 6, 2003. The following article by Peggy Lowe, excerpted below, appeared under the headline, GOP Takes on ‘Leftist’ Education.

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Chapter 12. Uh-Oh: The Coup’s Thought-Police Top Republican legislators are working on a plan that would require Colorado colleges and universities to seek more conservatives in faculty hiring, more classics in the curriculum and more “intellectual pluralism” among campus speakers. Next year, the GOP leadership hopes to implement the “Academic Bill of Rights,” which sets out to “secure the intellectual independence of faculty and students and to protect the principle of intellectual diversity.” In hatching the idea, Gov. Bill Owens and Republican legislators quietly met in June with David Horowitz, who is leading the national effort with his group called Students for Academic Freedom. “Universities should not be indoctrination centers for the political left,” Horowitz wrote in a letter to supporters. “It should not be a fight for young students to get a complete education, to learn more than half the story,” he wrote. “It shouldn’t be a battle for conservatives or Christians to gain teaching positions, to have their work seriously considered, and to be tenured.” Senate President John Andrews, a Centennial Republican who attended a June 12 meeting with Horowitz at the Brown Palace Hotel, said he hopes to see some plan approved by either the colleges’ governing bodies or the Colorado Commission on Higher Education — with legislative assistance — next year. Owens, in a separate meeting with Horowitz at the governor’s statehouse office in June, had a general discussion on the “need for balance in higher education,” said Dan Hopkins, Owens’ spokesman. But Owens hasn’t discussed any plans with Andrews and won’t take a stand yet, Hopkins said. But Owens has been clear on the issue in the past, saying there are few to no Republican professors on state college campuses and liberal Democrats aren’t offering balance in presenting political philosophy. During a January appearance on Mike Rosen’s KOA Radio talk show, Owens said he had hoped his push for his friend Marc Holtzman to be president of Colorado State University would help to achieve more philosophical balance among faculty there. The CSU board later chose someone else for the job. [CSU’s recently retired president, Albert C. Yates, is black.] Schools don’t ask potential employees their political affiliation because a federal civil rights law prohibits it. But a recent survey by the Rocky Mountain News found that Democrats outnumber Republicans 6-to-1 in political science departments at large public colleges along the Front Range. University officials view this as a perennial debate — Republicans charge that Democrats have a liberal lock on campuses across the country. But schools counter that the reason for fewer Republicans is obvious: Republicans are believers in private industry, not in a public service job that pays much less than the corporate world. While Andrews confirmed that he wanted the Academic Bill of Rights pushed through next year, he denied he would want the schools’ acceptance of it tied to their state funding, which the legislature sets. But another Republican who attended the Horowitz meeting at the Brown Palace on June 12 said Andrews and others talked about how to force the schools to implement the plan.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns “They had the discussion…on how to put teeth into it, to make them accountable to the legislature and the governor….The discussion involved their funding on an annual basis, when their budget is renewed.” Tim Foster, director of the Colorado Commission on Higher Education, said he’s been working on the Academic Bill of Rights, but thinks Colorado leaders may want to change some of the language. The idea will be offered to the state college governing boards in the next few weeks to see if they like it, he said. Both the University of Colorado and Colorado State University, the state’s largest colleges, were unaware of the plan. But both schools stressed they are already inviting speakers from all political spectrums.

The controversy boils down to this: Horowitz and Owens are part of a cadre promoting a GOP-controlled corps of thought police, à la George Orwell’s 1984, even if it is 20 years late in coming. After a media fuss, Owens began to crayfish on the issue. However, it is not dead and some Bush supporters still hope to implement something like it. This controversy was aptly put down by the interim president of Metro State College, a campus in the heart of downtown Denver attended by more than 20,000 students. The following article from the Rocky Mountain News indicates its disposal there: Metropolitan State College of Denver won’t investigate the Republican-led effort to incorporate a so-called “Academic Bill of Rights” on its campus. Ray Kleft, the school’s interim president, also says the proposal isn’t needed at Metro State. Kleft this week turned down a formal request for an investigation by Joan Foster, the Faculty Senate president. Foster wanted Kleft to look into a June meeting between top GOP leaders and David Horowitz, the Los Angeles-based author of the Academic Bill of Rights. “I have no interest in investigating with whom Mr. Horowitz meets, or the purpose and substance of his meetings,” Kleft said in his letter to Foster. Kleft went on to write that the Academic Bill of Rights is not needed on Metro State’s campus because the Board of Trustees has committed to academic freedom in a personnel handbook and a policy manual. He said he knows of no political, ideological or religious discrimination at Metro State. If such discrimination did occur, Kleft said, he would oppose it vigorously and that he’s confident the Board of Trustees would support him. “What I do care about is that academic freedom and the value of intellectual inquiry not be compromised at MSCD through interference, from whatever sources, including elected officials, governmental-appointed officials, or organization intent on ‘pushing’ a particular political, ideological or religious agenda onto the college or its classrooms,” Kleft wrote. Foster said she is happy with Kleft’s response.

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Chapter 12. Uh-Oh: The Coup’s Thought-Police Horowitz and the GOP say their effort is about ending the liberal lock on college campuses and making the playing field fairer for Republicans. But Democrats and others have suggested that it is “affirmative action” for conservatives. The eight-point Academic Bill of Rights calls for barring bias in hiring and firing of faculty based on political or religious beliefs. It also says that students should be graded solely on their knowledge, not their religious or political beliefs.

The Academic Bill of Rights proposal shows how pro-Bush governors such as Bill Owens and the states’ educational institutions have become vectors promoting the coup that is depriving Americans of their liberties. That “Bill” died in its infancy, but something just as sinister was to follow. In 2005, Owens pressured Colorado University to fire tenured Professor Ward Churchill for saying in one of his essays in 2001 that some of the victims in the World Trade Towers were “Little Eichmanns.” Of course, this sounded terribly unpatriotic as well as insensitive to the grief of those who lost family members in World War II and in the 9/11 disaster. And naturally, it stirred vigilante outcries from the Bush’s coup backers. Churchill teaches a course in American Indian history. The point Churchill was making, and which “patriots” like Owens chose to overlook, is contained in the very title of the essay, “Some People Push Back.” Churchill observed that American pressure obliging Muslim nations to accommodate our excesses was a modern continuation of exploitative policies that echoed our treatment of the Indians. His point was that on 9/11 a group of Muslim zealots apparently pushed back at America, in murderous fashion. Using points of American Indian history, he tried to explain why that might have happened and he added the context of fascist Germany. Such analogies are easily misunderstood when emotions take hold. Especially among conservatives, who still do not understand the words of the late segregationist, George Wallace, when he was running for president. Speaking to a disapproving crowd of liberals in Madison, Wisconsin, Wallace taunted: “I always thought it was the hallmark of liberals to listen to any point of view.” It quieted the crowd, because to some extent it was true. Today’s conservatives in the ivy halls of colleges and the barren halls of government seem to have forgotten the Wallace corollary: that closed ears and minds are more amenable to indoctrination than to learning or teaching. Churchill, who was head of Colorado University’s ethnic studies department, where he is still a professor, draws many of his modern inferences about American policy from the way America historically treated the Indian nations of America. Most US citizens today agree that it was a gross injustice to

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns tear the Indians from their lands, but no one is giving up title to property thus acquired. As a way of explaining what happened on 9/11, Churchill draws on some sources that one would think were unobjectionable. “If you want security in some actual form, then it's almost a biblical framing, you have to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt famously characterized the Nazi Adolf Eichmann (who caused the deaths of millions of Jews) as an ordinary person promoting the activity of an evil system. What Churchill was saying is that the Arabs who committed the 9/11 crime viewed those who worked in the World Trade Towers as being a part of an Eichmann-like system by which, in a clinical and impersonal way, ordinary people were brokering deals that exploited and exterminated other people, without any pangs of conscience. The statement is true; and it does not exonerate the villains. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Churchill and http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt.) Needless to say, the families of the victims of 9/11 do not take kindly to having their family members referred to as Eichmanns or Nazis. Neither do the politicians who represent those thousands of families. But personal sensitivities and knee-jerk politics aside, the fact is that America by its policies did invite the 9/11 attack as surely as the bully-of-the-block with a chip on his shoulder invites an attack. With Churchill, the matter goes beyond freedom of speech. It is now a case of thought control by a government originally designed to protect society against such a conservative excess. That’s one of the values that the refuge of intellectual tenure at universities is designed to preserve. In the case of political conservatives, such as Owens at the state level and Bush at the national level, that refuge of tenure as citizens in good standing is at risk for all who do not think like them. The Churchill investigation continues. In matters like these, the GOP works on the emotions of voters to a point that is nothing less than mind control. Thus it gains the power to dictate the way the American public lives and even dies. In dictator fashion, that power has been unilaterally extended to life and death decisions within the borders of countries such as Iraq. Perhaps that is what prompted Mikhail Gorbachev, former president of the Soviet Union, to write an open letter to then President-elect Bush in 2000

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Chapter 12. Uh-Oh: The Coup’s Thought-Police which said: “Not everyone wishes to be American.” Gorbachev holds the Noble Peace Prize. Bush probably never will. It was not by capricious whim that terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center. They were provoked. But it was a capricious whim of President G.W. Bush to threaten pre-emptive first strikes with WMD; to tear up nuclear nonproliferation treaties; and to invade Iraq. These actions were unprovoked and unilateral but had the effect of dragging Americans into a war that they now increasingly regret. The escalation of provocations from both sides then became the excuse for the violent and murderous roads now being followed by both sides. The inherent contradiction of waging war to promote peace and freedom was neatly addressed by Denver Post columnist Diane Carman on August 24, 2003. Here is an excerpt: Destroying Freedoms to Save Them The line that got me was the one Attorney General John Ashcroft used on the stump last week. Ashcroft was trying to rally the masses in support of the one government initiative that has succeeded in uniting the political left and the right, albeit in rabid opposition to it. He said the USA PATRIOT ACT, which expands the law-enforcement powers to levels that make J. Edgar Hoover’s legendary goons look like Girl Scouts, “ensures liberty.” He said this with a straight face. I kept thinking that something about that line rang familiar. So I went to the library and began searching. I scrolled through the computerized card catalog. I searched the Net. I talked to a librarian. I finally found it, right there among the science fiction classics: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” Ashcroft was channeling George Orwell. But now that I had figured it out, I realized that I, too, could be a suspect. And to make things worse, I had left all kinds of evidence of my seditious tendencies there in the library’s computer database. I was brazenly reading 1984, one of the most shameless civil libertarian screeds of all time. Since it was clear that I knew about the totalitarian philosophy of uniting people with endless war and purging those who dare to read unauthorized literature, I could be considered a threat to national security. A thought criminal. Yikes! I need help. So I sneaked back to my office and quietly called Martin Garnar, chairman of the Intellectual Freedom Committee of the Colorado Association of Libraries.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns Like Winston Smith in 1984, Garnar and his 64,000 fellow librarians in the US have become reluctant foot soldiers in the war on terrorism. Under the USA PATRIOT ACT, not only must they submit to police requests for the records of patrons’ reading and internet-searching habits, they are under a gag order not to reveal that the police inquiries have taken place. If they admit they have ratted out their patrons, they can be prosecuted for contempt of court. It’s right there in Section 215. The speech police might arrest them. In a profession founded on intellectual freedom and an unfettered exchange of ideas, this is more than a little upsetting. “We think that people should have the ability to come in and research anything, to learn about anything they want. They should feel safe to explore controversial topics in a library,” Garnar said. It’s still not illegal to read, after all. The American Library Association and 47 of its state affiliates, including Colorado, have endorsed a resolution calling for the repeal of several particularly invasive provisions. But their activism could have consequences. As deficits mount at both the federal and state levels, support for the public libraries has been severely cut in the past few months. Some librarians worry that the more they speak out, the more their funding will be cut. “We can’t help but think there is a linkage there,” Garnar said. I’m not sure. But even if it’s a coincidence, the effect is the same — to smother the opposition. In classic Ashcroft-speak, they’ll be silenced in order to preserve the freedom of speech.

US Attorney George Gill put it another way when he was prosecuting Father Carl Kabat for violating the sanctity of America’s nuclear missiles: “Free speech stops at the wire.” Suppression of free speech has been the answer of oppressive regimes to questions raised by prophets in every age. Ironically, Gill’s comment stands in stark contrast to what he privately admits he fought for in Vietnam: to have no such wires of constraint on human freedom. Now that America is up in arms about “the Muslims” and their adversarial role, the question has to be asked: what has been the role of “the Christians” in this political war between two religious cultures? Ordinary priests, nuns and laymen have raised questions and provoked a public dialogue using non-violent means. Meanwhile, political leaders who tout their own Christianity jail them under the laws of their coup.

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CHAPTER 13. LETTERS HOME: WE KILLED THE FATHER TO FEED THE SON Nothing could be more touching than the letters US troops have written home describing their war experiences. Their deployment made them among the first victims of the WMD war in Iraq, and their letters, shared with newspaper editors, offer the nation an important view from the front. Even there, a scandalous abuse has been perpetrated. Here are some excerpts of a story that appeared in The Olympian of Olympia, Washington, on October 11, 2003, written by Ledyard King. The headline read, “Many Soldiers, Same Letter” Letters from hometown soldiers describing their successes rebuilding Iraq have been appearing in newspapers across the country as US public opinion on the mission sours. And all the letters are the same. The Olympian received two identical letters signed by different hometown soldiers: SPC Joshua Ackler and SPC Alex Marois. The paper declined to run either, because of a policy not to publish form letters. The five-paragraph letter talks about the soldiers’ effort to re-establish police and fire departments, and build water and sewer plants in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, where the unit is based. [ Kirkuk is at the heart of Iraq’s oil fields, disputed by Iran.] “The quality of life and security for the citizens has been largely restored, and we are a large part of why that has happened,” the letter reads. It describes people waving at passing troops and children running up to shake their hands and say thank you.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns It’s not clear who wrote the letter or organized sending it to soldiers’ hometown papers. Six soldiers reached by GNS directly or through their families said they agreed with the letter’s thrust. But none of the soldiers said he wrote it, and one said he didn’t even sign it. Marois, 23, told his family he signed the letter, said Moya Marois, his stepmother. But she said he was puzzled why it was sent to the newspaper in Olympia. He attended high school in Olympia but no longer considers the city home, she said. Moya Marois and Alex’s father, Les, now live near Kooskia, Idaho. A seventh soldier didn’t know about the letter until his father congratulated him for getting it published in the local newspaper in Beckley, West Virginia. “When I told him he wrote such a good letter, he said ‘What letter?’” Timothy Deaconson said Friday, recalling the phone conversation he had with his son, Nick. “This is just not his [writing] style.” He spoke to his son, Pfc. Nick Deaconson, at a hospital where he was recovering from a grenade explosion that left shrapnel in both his legs. Sgt. Christopher Shelton, who signed a letter that ran in the Snohomish Herald, said Friday that his platoon sergeant had distributed the letter and asked soldiers for the names of their hometown newspapers. Soldiers were asked to sign the letter if they agreed with it, said Shelton, whose shoulder was wounded during an ambush earlier this year. “Everything in it is dead accurate. We’ve done a really good job,” he said by phone from Italy, where he was preparing to return to Iraq. Sgt. Todd Oliver, a spokesman for the 173rd Airborne Brigade, which counts the 503rd as one of its units, said he was told a soldier wrote the letter, but he didn’t know who. He said the brigade’s public affairs unit was not involved. “When he asked other soldiers in his unit to sign it, they did,” Oliver explained in an e- mail response to a GNS inquiry. “Someone, somewhere along the way, took it upon themselves to mail it to the various editors of newspapers across the country.” Lt. Col. Bill MacDonald, a spokesman for the 4th Infantry Division that is heading operations in north-central Iraq, said he had not heard about the letter-writing campaign. Neither had Lt. Cmdr. Nick Balice, a spokesman for US Central Command in Tampa, Fla. A recent poll suggests that Americans are increasingly skeptical of America’s prolonged involvement in Iraq. A USA Today-CNN-Gallup Poll released Sept. 23 found 50 percent believe that the situation in Iraq was worth going to war over, down from 73 percent in April. The letter talks about the soldiers’ mission, saying, “one thousand of my fellow soldiers and I parachuted from ten jumbo jets.” It describes Kirkuk as a “hot and dusty city of just over a million people.” It tells about the progress they have made. “The fruits of all our soldiers’ efforts are clearly visible in the streets of Kirkuk today. There is very little trash in the streets, many more people in the markets and

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Chapter 13. Letters Home: We Killed the Father to Feed the Son shops, and children have returned to school,” the letter reads. “I am proud of the work we are doing here in Iraq and I hope all of your readers are as well.” While all of the parents are supportive of their sons, some of them, according to the above article, are becoming less supportive of the war, given its original mission to find and destroy non-existent WMD. And most of the parents are uncomfortable with having form letters represented as being written by their sons. They think of it as a kind of deception, a lie.

In the name of that vague concept of freedom, most Americans can stand nearly any abuse from their leaders, but when the leaders are caught lying in one area, they risk losing credibility in all areas. Presidents can engage in burglary of political opponents’ offices (Nixon); they can conduct clandestine wars in Central America, contrary to laws enacted by Congress, and allow the CIA to deal in drugs and guns illegally (ReaganBush); they can secretly trade hostages for guns in order to win elections (Reagan-Bush); they can engage in sexual misconduct (Clinton); they can send weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein (G.H.W. Bush); but they had better maintain “plausible deniability.” That is, make sure they are not personally caught in a lie about any such matters. Some have been caught in some of their lies and suffered the consequences, such as Nixon and Clinton. Some have eluded blame and escaped the consequences of their lies, such as Reagan and the elder Bush. But such lies, even when they don’t cost lives, cause injury to the nation’s moral fabric as both President Carter and Bill Moyers have pointed out. President Johnson lied about the attack of North Vietnam on US warships in the early stages of the Vietnam War. The result was the Tonkin Gulf Resolution by Congress that declared all-out war, in effect, on Vietnam. The general public did not know he was lying until it was too late. The second President Bush is in the same leaky boat. Whether G.W. Bush will get away with his lies about terrorism in Iraq seems likely, given a Congress that follows the party-line and a public that fell for the misleading tactic of constantly talking about 9/11 and Iraq in the same breath, as if they were one and the same. The number and scope of lies that have made the case for launching and supporting the war are impossible to measure. Nobody quite knows the real source of the form letters or who authored them. Their purpose, however, is obvious: to blunt criticism of the Bush administration for invading Iraq against the will of the United Nations and considerable numbers of patriotic US citizens.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns Furthermore, the GI letters were sent to hide another lie, by boasting about the good that war in Iraq has brought. The reality is far different. The truth is, America has engaged in a foreign war that kills the fathers and at best claims to be providing for those left behind. It needs letters from its soldiers in the field to propagate the notion that their war is good and just. Certainly, the Americans are trying to rebuild the destroyed oil pipelines and, to regain lost prestige, has rebuilt some of the schools, hospitals and sewer systems that they first destroyed. Letters home describing that process are morale builders for the families of the young men and women involved. But faking such letters in the name of those who have been fighting for their country compounds the political lie lurking behind the war. Other letters home, from others fighting to secure a better future for the world, carry a different truth. Consider these words from Sister Cathy Breen. She is living in Baghdad. Her “boots-on-the-ground” peaceful witness contradicts what Bush and his henchmen tell America that his $87 billion pacification program accomplishes. Without expecting that any newspaper will publish her letters home, Breen said, through Electronic Iraq, on October 16, 2003: The roar of the helicopters circling low overhead as I write is unnerving. It is so hard to concentrate. One is filled with a sense of dread wondering what is going on. Yesterday we had a most unexpected visit from two prestigious Shia imams from Hilla, the site of a holy shrine. Bearded, tall and stately, they were cloaked in black robes and turbans. They know of our group, as one of the imams is the brother of a friend of ours, someone who is a constant guest at our house. Haythem “just happened” to return home and, after greeting them with the utmost respect, he sat down willingly to translate for us. “We have a 7,000-year-old history, with a religious history that dates back 3,000 years,” they relayed, “and we don’t want the Americans to imagine that we will give up our history easily.” They do not recognize the current government. The governing council is an American council. They want to shape their own future, and for this reason, they are seeking to create a shadow government, asking first for the “help from God, but also needing the help of our brothers of humanity.” They said that to date they have not found any groups working for humanity in Iraq. “Someone who does not share the people’s sadness doesn’t share in humanity.” They explained that they might face difficulties in Hilla at the [planned] demonstration. “American forces are distributing papers saying that no one has the right to demonstrate without advising the US forces beforehand, or they will be punished. Naturally, we will not take permission from the forces as it would mean recognizing their legality.”

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Chapter 13. Letters Home: We Killed the Father to Feed the Son They [the imams] think that force might be used. We [Breen’s group] agree that this is a likely possibility. We asked what they imagined our role to be. They said they want us to convey their voice and message to the world. We explained our position on non-violence, and stated that we don’t work with violent groups. What ensued was a lengthy and enlightening discussion on the beliefs in which our positions are rooted. At one point, they asked whether we could reach the pope with their voice. They [said they] would like to greet him, to discuss with him their views. “We share many of the same origins. Would such a meeting be possible? We are not terrorists,” they explained. “But it is difficult to get out of Iraq.” I said this was not outside the realm of possibilities, but suggested that they might first want to meet with the Papal Nuncio, the Holy Father’s representative here in Baghdad. Thinking that we might be of some help to arrange such a meeting, we parted with the understanding that we would try and contact the nuncio. Some months ago, I had the opportunity to meet with the Papal Nuncio, Fernando Filoni, together with Cliff Kindy and Tom Cornell. I remember him for his compassion, courage and convictions. This morning (Oct. 16) Neville, Cynthia and I set out to the Papal Nuncio. He was unable to meet with us at that moment. However, we were graciously received by his colleague, Monsignor Jean-Francois Lantheaume. In our conversation he said that he felt that there would be an Islamic revolution if the occupation forces were to leave now. While the nuncio would be willing to receive the imams, he felt that it would be better if they would first meet with Msgr. Wardoni, the patriarchal administrator in charge of the local Chaldean Church. Msgr. Waldoni told us that he had met on various occasions in the past with people from Voices in the Wilderness. One got a feeling from him of deep sadness as he spoke of the current situation. He cannot understand how the Americans could have caused such bedlam and destruction in his country. He felt that we (Americans) have no understanding or respect for their ancient civilization and culture. He[said he] feels that it is worse now than under Saddam. When I asked him what he felt might be done, he said despondently, “I don’t know. It is so complicated.” He will speak, he said, with the nuncio about the imams’ request. They are open and willing, and in ongoing discussion with the Muslim leaders. But we must be cautious, he said, because people are very, very fearful. We got home to find Neville and Ed at the kitchen table. They had returned from the press conference in Najaf, and were understandably very tired. But their mood was somber. The roads, they said, around Karbala were blocked by the Polish coalition troops. It seems that two major Shia factions were mortaring each other’s headquarters. A friend told us that we would do well to stay close to home in the next couple of days.

The form letters home of the soldiers, versus the letter from a non-warring humanitarian group such as Voices in the Wilderness, raises a question. Who is lying and who is being betrayed?

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns The Commander-in-Chief of these soldiers knows this war was really unnecessary but he’s not writing home about it. Bush knows there could have been peaceful ways out of the predicament in Iraq but the administration has never talked to the right people in developing their strategy. Thus the war continues so the president and his party can save political face. It turns out that Bush’s people and the obsequious media are too busy manufacturing or promoting letters home to read the genuine ones that speak of morality and decry the immorality that flows from an unjust war.

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CHAPTER 14. MORE LETTERS HOME: THESE FROM “BAD ASS” NUNS “In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” — George Orwell

From their federal prison cells the three nuns, named by Jane Magazine as the “Bad Ass Prisoners of 2003,” have been writing their own letters home to friends and supporters. They revel in their sobriquet.Reading their letters, at moments you would think President Bush and the nuns have the same agenda. From opposite sides, all of them speak of peace, freedom, justice, God and the evils of WMD. The difference between them, other than prison bars, is their position on war. Bush hails WMD as promoting conditions beneficial to the world, as long as they are in the hands of the US. The nuns would banish them everywhere as promoting nothing but criminal slaughter. The Bush gospel of peace is war and the threat of WMD. The gospel of the nuns is peace by getting rid of WMD so that peace may blossom. Bush insists the way to bring justice to nations such as Iraq is war. The way to protect and disseminate freedom is war. The way to protect WMD power is war. The nuns insist that WMD block those very goals. Bush outlined his war strategy in his speech June 1, 2002, to the graduating class of West Point. At the same time he introduced America’s new policy of preemptive first strikes with WMD, putting both servicemen and nuclear missiles

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns on high alert status, months before he followed a pre-arranged Pentagon plan to invade Iraq. Since the declared end of war in Iraq, there has been no peace, no freedom, no justice delivered to the Iraqi people in spite of American-style elections. Instead, there have been more letters home, many from field commanders to bereaved parents. Here are some of the thoughts of the nuns, in their letters home from jail: Sister Ardeth Platte, OP On November 3, 2003, noting it was the liturgical festival of Saint Martin DePorres (a black Dominican priest), Sister Platte wrote: Our inspection, exposition and symbolic disarmament of the N8 Minuteman III missile, which was on hair trigger alert, was threatened to be used by George W. Bush — and the very threat-to-use and use are illegal, criminal. We went to the silo to stop the crime from happening, and to assume our responsibility to uphold the laws, treaties, protocols, conventions, [and the] International Court of Justice, July 8, 1996, decision. During 2002, the Nuclear Posture Review was issued by George Bush. The news regularly covered information that the US had identified seven “Axis of Evil” nations and that the US would respond with first-strike nuclear weapons in retaliation. Iraq was continually blamed for and connected with the September 11th attacks on the Trade Centers and Pentagon. They [Iraq] were accused of having weapons of mass destruction. They were demonized in every way and it was evident to us as we prayed, studied, reflected that the president was preparing and planning to complete his father’s war in Iraq. In our study, we were made aware of the desire of the US to build a pipeline for oil in Afghanistan; the connections of the bin Laden family with contractual business in Saudi Arabia; and the ongoing accusations against Saddam Hussein, when he was dropped from credibility in the 1990s. We were aware of US financial assistance and military technology bestowed upon Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq conflict. It was evident to us that these new wars to be waged against first Afghanistan and then Iraq had more to do with superpower domination, military control, economic and political reasons. The stage was set by lies and propaganda over terrorism and terrorists, over fear tactics and false intelligence reports, exaggerated to rally troops and encourage war-making patriots. We chose Colorado as we prayed over what we were to do, experiencing being led by the Spirit. It was there [Colorado] that 49 Minuteman III missiles were on alert. It was the so-called Missile Defense System of Petersen AFB, Schriever (AFB) and trained personnel of the Air Force Academy that would be used for communication, targeting, surveillance in newly chosen battlefields.

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Chapter 14. More Letters Home: These from “Bad Ass” Nuns In her Newsletter 4 for Christmas of 2003 Sister Platte includes a reflection from Troy Chapman, a supporter: War has lied to us — again. War told us it would make the world a better place. It told us it would increase goodness and reduce evil. So we said, “yes, let’s wage war.” We’ve said yes so often that war has become part of who we are. Yes to war on crime. Yes to war on drugs. Yes to war on poverty. Yes to war on abortion. Yes to war on communism and terrorism. Yes to whatever we think is evil. War promised to win, to stamp out evil. But war has become the evil it set out to kill. The more war we wage, the more evil worms its way into our world. We attack it in one place and it changes form and crops up somewhere else. We assume that if we kill enough evil, goodness will simply rise up spontaneously. This is a deadly error. Goodness isn’t just what “happens” when evil is eradicated. Goodness is something that must be cultivated, planted, tended, grown— like growing wheat. But we’ve left the fields and gone off to war. Ultimately, war is an attempt to control. If we want to say no to it, we must trade our impulse to control for a desire to influence. We can’t make people do what we want. What we can do is influence them. And nothing influences people more toward goodness than love. When we realize that life is inherently uncontrollable (the only way to truly control is to kill), we will return our attention to mastering the art of influence that we have abandoned for the promise of control. Only love will increase goodness and make the world a better place. If love seems impotent, it’s only because we’ve starved it out of creativity, energy and respect, choosing instead to pour these into war and control. What would happen if, instead of pouring resources into war, people poured into prisons, there to teach, validate, restore, confront and provoke offenders to be whole? What would happen if we went into the juvenile homes claimed these children as our own and acknowledged that we have failed them? What if we wanted them to change for their own benefit rather than for ours, that is, simply that we love them? We want goodness without the bother of having to love people. That’s the promise of war: that we can make people “be good” without loving them. How many times must this promise be broken before we realize it’s a lie and abandon it?

Sister Ardeth’s thoughts form a stark contrast with the letters from troops who speak of helping the children whose parents they have killed, who speak of doing good deeds after done bad ones as a if that would make their victims love America.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns Sister Carol Gilbert, OP Sister Carol Gilbert sends news that, on October 15, 2003, under the auspices of the Altes Rathaus (City Hall) of Munich, the three nuns were awarded the Nuclear-Free Future Award. It is endowed with a prize of 30,000 Euros. Under the patronage of the Mayor of Munich (currently Christian Ude), and in cooperation with the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and the Seventh Generation Fund of California, the award has been presented annually since 1998. It honors individuals, groups and communities working successfully to end the Nuclear Age. It is a neat coincidence that the mayor of Munich should, in this fashion, honor the former mayor of Saginaw, Michigan, Sister Ardeth Platte, for going to jail for doing something peaceful. This year, Carol Gilbert, Jackie Hudson and Ardeth Platte were chosen collectively as recipients of the prize in the “Resistance” category. On their behalf, Sister Diane Zerfas from the Dominican community in Germany accepted the award in Munich. The award reads: “For working to transform swords into plowshares as an act of conscience out of love for humanity.” What do the people of once-war-torn Germany and Munich know that Americans and the White House do not? Mayor Ude, in making the presentations, proclaimed, “For the sake of the coming generations, each of this year’s Award recipients has courageously spoken out and labored for a world more caring, more sane — one in which uranium remains in the ground.” The uranium in the ground, such as that allegedly coming from Niger to Iraq, and the uranium in the tips of weapons of mass destruction used by America, was exactly at the ground-zero of why the nuns waged peace and the president waged war where Iraq was concerned. The award also explains why the nuns, having killed no one, are in jail and Bush is still pushing the buttons of war. Given Sister Gilbert’s imprisonment, the award seems incongruous. She includes in one of her letters the following reflections on the Nuclear Free Future Award. Whose side is God on? George W. Bush, a born-again Christian, felt that the Almighty was on his side at the beginning of 2002 when he demanded the destruction of all weapons of mass destruction. But then things got complicated:

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Chapter 14. More Letters Home: These from “Bad Ass” Nuns On Sunday, October 6, 2002, operating under the umbrella of Sacred Earth and Space Plowshares II, a national movement for nuclear disarmament, three Dominican nuns…wearing white mop-up suits emblazoned with the words, Disarmament Specialists and Citizens Weapons Inspection Team, broke into a N-8 missile silo [fence] in northern Colorado to paint a cross on the structure using their own blood “because it identifies the effects of war and portrays the essential element of life.” (Their symbolic intent was) to hammer at the silo and the tracks that carry the lid of the silo to its firing position. They concluded their action with a liturgy. When Air Force personnel arrived in Humvees to arrest the nuns at gun-point, Sister Gilbert tried to explain that they were simply following the call of President George W. Bush to get rid of all weapons of mass destruction. The rocket complex in northeastern Weld County houses 49 missiles, which the Defense Department recently outfitted with new W-87 nuclear warheads — each with 25 times the explosive force of the Hiroshima bomb. The sisters believe nuclear weapons are the “taproot” of social and economic injustice because the billions of dollars spent on them could go to programs for the poor and needy. In their action statement they [the nuns] affirm: “We religious women have come to Colorado to unmask the false religion and worship of national security so evident at Buckley AFB, in Aurora; the Missile Silos; and in Colorado Springs: Schriever AFB (the Space Warfare Center), the Air Force Space Command Center at Petersen AFB, Cheyenne Mountain (NORAD) and the Air Force Academy. We reject the mission of these along with the Space Command and Stratcom in Omaha, Nebraska….We act in the many names of God the Compassionate, ar-Rahim, our Life, our Peace, our Healer, to transform swords into plowshares, our violence and greed into care for the whole community of earth and sky — not as masters but as servants and friends.” During the nuns’ trial, U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn barred the jury from hearing international law and Nuremberg defenses. Blackburn also granted an in limine motion by the prosecutor, prohibiting the sisters from speaking about the moral and legal justification for their actions….He waived all the fines, but ordered that the nuns reimburse the government what it reportedly spent to fix a fence the nuns damaged: $3,080.04. Blackburn labeled the Dominican sisters “dangerously irresponsible.” Meanwhile, the Bush administration had embarked on a quest for a new generation of nuclear bombs that are smaller and less powerful — bombs that the Pentagon might actually use in battle. Also presently in the pipeline is the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, a weapon that would be used to destroy deeply buried targets such as weapons stockpiles or military command bunkers. George W. Bush is quite assuredly tilting the world towards a new nuclear arms race. As Sister Gilbert asks, “Who is dangerously irresponsible? And whose side is God on?”

Sitting in jail and having sent this letter home, Sister Gilbert answered her own question. Even so, her federal jail experience causes moments of personal shock. From her prison in Alderson, West Virginia (not far from where the fake war-heroine created in the Iraq war, Jessica Lynch, cringes) Sister Gilbert spoke

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns of the travail of prison life in a letter, dated September 19, 2003, under the heading Ponderings from the Eternal Now. There are two very distinct sides to life these days — light and dark. Most of the guards intimidate us every chance they get. It is almost impossible not to be full of tears, but not so much as time passes. Each of us has two people assigned: 1) a case manager, who deals with all matters outside the compound: release planning, processes visitor lists, etc. He serves as a liaison between the inmate, the administration and the community. Mine is a young arrogant man. 2) A correctional counselor deals with all issues while here at Alderson. Mine is a woman who has heard of “Plowshares” and seems a bit more human. September 17th was my first team meeting, what is called “classification.” I met with six people and was put on the “hot seat” at 6 p.m. Besides my case manager (who ran the meeting) and the Correctional Counselor was a man from Education, another case manager and counselor as well as the Unit Team Manager. She and my case manager already had problems with me. The 15-minute meeting started by informing me that I was a “violent criminal” and was required to submit to a DNA test. (On 9/30/03 I was notified that I did not need to submit to this test.) The education person then told the rest of the group I did not want to sign up for any of their programs. The unit manager and case manager lost it. With voices raised, they announced I would be “programmed.” (They said) you will take anger management, claiming I really need this one. The women laughed and said “you are the gentlest person we know.” Still they insisted that I will take Turning Point, which is taken mostly by women at the end of their stay in the drug program, helping a person to find God, and Effective Ministry, a year-long program on lay ministry. The camp gets money for each program we take! I was told my attitude needs to be monitored by the guards and they want programmed leisure time. I told them I was weaving and knitting. I have tons of mail and I’m capable of monitoring my time. I could go on, but you get the feeling….

Sister Gilbert’s life in prison seemed to be as incongruous with reality as it was outside of prison; she closed with a quote from aesthete-theologian Blaise Pascal: “Justice and power must be brought together so that what is just may be powerful and whatever is powerful may be just.” Then she added some words from George Orwell: “In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Did the Bush government in Washington or the prosecuting attorneys in Denver know what they were doing, when they tried and convicted women like Carol Gilbert who leveled their own WMD charge (with proof) against an internationally criminal war? In a spirit of generosity to America’s leader, we might allow a possible doubt. But the nuns would say they don’t deal in shadows of morality, they deal in the black-and-white of truth.

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Chapter 14. More Letters Home: These from “Bad Ass” Nuns Sister Jacqueline Hudson, OP Communications with Sister Jackie at Victorville prison in California went through third parties. Here is one of her passed-along messages: Greetings and blessings from Victorville, FPC: I give thanks this day and every day for each of you. The fires have ended, thanks be to God. The cold days have come yet the sun shines most every day. My 69th birthday was truly a celebration of life. Many women signed cards; one crocheted a beautiful afghan and a warm cap, and many, many greetings! We had lemon pudding cake for lunch. Alex backed a “cookie cake” in the micro as well: crushed cookies, dry milk, and a Snickers bar. Absolutely delicious! Carol and Ardeth’s letters have been forwarded (through friends) to me, so I have learned what goes on in Danbury and Alderson. Carol and I have permission to correspond about legal matters, so I sent her a “legal birthday greetings.” Her birthday was November 22. In many ways, Victorville provides more than either Alderson or Danbury. Carol’s experience with her “team” was much more brutal than mine and I don’t have to see them again until March, 2004. The staff counselors and case managers must take a course to learn the best way to negate and demean their inmates’ lives. This process certainly leaves them less than human. I pray for them daily as well as for their families who must experience the aftermath of a day at work. The sad part is that so many of the jobs here are very low paying. This inevitably draws many desperate folks, with the job market what it is today. Carol mentioned the number of older women arriving at Alderson. Here too. Mid-November brought us Frieda (80 years old) to serve a 12-month sentence. She can hardly walk. She has been provided a wheelchair to get around for meals, etc. Her crime was committed in 1996 and was just now prosecuted. She is a perfect candidate for house arrest or probation. The sentence reflects where we are as a nation under Ashcroft and Bush. There are 10 of us between the ages of 65 and 80 serving time in the American gulag. I have been given three work assignments since I’ve been here — none of which I could accomplish — all involving walking a total of 4 miles a day just to get to the job site. The medical person has me listed as unable to work but this designation needs to be reviewed monthly. So far so good. Besides, I don’t have time to work! Reading, praying and writing keep me busy each day. Hopefully something physically less strenuous will open up soon, as I do not want to be sent to Carswell, Pa. This is the prison hospital. The medical unit there is one horror story after another. I just keep my mantra going: Thank you Jesus for keeping me healthy. A collage of pictures was sent to me from the Sisters’ action in Colorado last August. Sister Barb Hansen was the main speaker. Three other Grand Rapids Dominicans were there also. I had this collage up on the bulletin board. The administrator came in, saw it and removed it. He called me into his office after the 4 o’clock count. The page was to be “destroyed,” sent home, or hidden. Mr. Chapa said it was inappropriate; it was

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns against the government and “we are the government, so it is against us.” What twisted logic! He then added that is was for my own protection. “What if somebody came in that really loved war and loved fighting? They would be all over you and we cannot let than happen.” So much for free speech at Victorville! My niece has a book called Bad Girls of the Bible. Well, Carol, Ardeth and I were nominated by Jane Magazine as “Bad Ass Criminals for 2003” in the October issue. Folks voted on the Internet and we won! Am I having fun with that! The results were posted in the December issue. They had several categories — Bad Ass and Ass Bad — Bad Ass being the good category…. I have received many gifts of books. These arrive in clear plastic bags, stapled shut with the address label showing, but no return address showing. Many thanks if you have sent something and I have not acknowledged it. Large brown envelopes are received intact if marked “Authorized by BOP policy.” My love to each of you — Jackie.

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CHAPTER 15. FIGURES FROM IRAQ “Show me a hero and I will show you a tragedy.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

What was the hottest action-hero figure to hit the toy market in 2003? If you guessed a nun inspecting WMD at a missile silo, try again. If you guessed President Bush garbed in a flight jacket on the deck of an aircraft carrier, you win. Trouble is, when kids order the Bush miniature, manufactured by KB Toys, they don’t get what they bargained for. Seizing on a publicity opportunity to promote the war in Iraq, Bush was flown onto the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln as it prepared to dock on May 1 so that he could pose for cameras. The carrier was back from service just in time for Bush to declare from its deck that the war in Iraq was over. Bush portrayed the image of an all-conquering heroic emperor. A banner hanging from the bridge of the ship proclaimed “Mission Accomplished.” Newspapers worldwide ran photos of the president dressed like a combatready pilot. (Bush was once a Navy pilot, but never flew in combat.) To KB Toys, the photo seemed ready-made for the GI-Joe style toy market. By September 15, 2003, the company made the following announcement via its Internet website, replete with color photo of the toy item: Elite Force Aviator: President George W. Bush, US President and Naval Aviator 12th Action Figure. Price $39.99, pre-order: Available 09/15/03. Description:

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns BBI proudly introduces the latest issue in its Elite Force series of authentic military 12-inch figures, President George W. Bush in naval aviator flight uniform. Exacting in detail and fully equipped with authentic gear, this limited-edition action figure is a meticulous 1:6 scale recreation of the Commander-in-Chief’s appearance during his historic Aircraft Carrier landing. On May 1, 2003, President Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) in the Pacific Ocean, and officially declared the end to major combat in Iraq. While at the controls of an S-3B Viking aircraft from the “Blue Sea Wolves,” of Sea Control Squadron Three Five (VS-35), designated “Navy 1,” he over-flew the carrier before handing it over to the pilot for landing. Attired in full naval aviator flight equipment, the President then took the salute on deck of the carrier. This fully poseable figure features a realistic head sculpt, fully detailed cloth flight suit, helmet with oxygen mask, survival vest, g-pants, parachute harness and much more. The realism and exacting attention to detail demanded by today’s 12inch action figure enthusiasts are met and exceeded with this action figure. This incredibly detailed figure is a fitting addition to the collection of those interested in US history, military memorabilia and toy action figures. Actual figure may vary slightly from item shown.

KB Toys offers no comparable models to instruct children at an impressionable age about the heroics of peace instead of war; after all, inciting peace at WMD missile silos has been made a punishable political crime — especially under the non-constitutional USA PATRIOT ACT (see C. William Michaels, No Greater Threat: America After September 11 and the Rise of a National Security State. An analysis of the USA Patriot Act, Algora 2002). For toy manufacturers, there is no profit, after all, in extolling “criminals” — even those who never killed or maimed anyone. Events caused by Bush have stimulated parents to encourage the promulgation of the political gospel of war rather than the gospel of peace. But, having taken their cue from expediency and the opportunity for profit from the politics of war, KB Toys, suitably rounding out the ironies of the Iraq war, became a victim to its own action — just as the impulsive George Bush was. KB Toys followed Bush over the cliff in a patriotic stampede in the following fashion. A month after KB announced its Bush action figure, MSNBC News through its Newsweek home page posed the question, “Can the news be funny?” Apparently, Andy Borowitz in his columnist’s report thought so with these words: A GI Joe-like action figure depicting President George W. Bush as an “Elite Force Aviator,” was recalled today (Aug. 20) by its manufacturer after consumers discovered that the $39.95 toy did not include the weapons of mass destruction pictured on the toy’s packaging.

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Chapter 15. Figures from Iraq The Bush action figure was packaged in a box showing the president in his naval flight suit made famous in his landing on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, uncovering weapons of mass destruction in a suspicious-looking Iraqi warehouse. But once parents bought the toy and brought it home, they found that the box contained only the action figure of the president and no (toy-sized) weapons of mass destruction whatsoever. Janis Martino, 32, a mother of two in Lansing, Michigan, said her son, Tyler, was “really disappointed” when he opened the toy’s packaging and found no weapons of mass destruction inside. “He felt tricked,” Martino said. “You can’t tell someone that there are weapons of mass destruction and then have there not be any.” Martino also said she felt “gypped” by the high price, saying, “If there are no weapons of mass destruction, what were we spending all this money for?” As it announced the recall, the action figure’s manufacturer today apologized for the words on the packaging that read, “Make Elite Force Aviator George W. Bush Find and Destroy Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction!” “We apologize for that phrasing,” the manufacturer said.

If anyone needs to apologize, those feeling the loss of loved ones should direct their cries for redress to the current occupant of the White House and the corporate world which so happily follows and profits from their leader by manipulating the public, even in childhood. There are no action hero figures of those who have experienced the real and awful traumas of ordinary heroes: the destruction, the deaths, the pain of the forever-injured, the emotional trauma of families irreparably broken by unnecessary bullets and bombs. For them, recall comes too late. It would seem that most Americans, including Mrs. Martino, have forgotten the words to the song, Teach Your Children Well (Crosby, Stills, & Nash). Such irony suggests that reality, religion and symbolism have merged in America just as they have in the Middle East. Political puppeteers and military tacticians and corporations from all sides work together, relying upon the technology of war for profit. Worse, they start by influencing children by means of toys, just when their minds are at the most formative stage. Goebbels did this with his Hitler Youth program. What happened to America’s proud claims of free thought and independent action of the individual? Constraints on such freedoms are the first signs of a coup. Sometimes brainwashing proceeds as much from what is erased from people’s minds as by what is put there. Consider an article posted on the Internet by a cyber-publication known as Daily Misleader. That group quotes on December 18, 2003, an article from the Washington Post. The quote is headlined White House Covers Tracks by Removing Information.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns In a high-tech cover-up, The Washington Post reports this morning the White House is actively scrubbing government websites clean of any of its own previous statements that have now proven to be untrue. Specifically, on April 23, 2003, the president sent his top international aid official on national television to reassure the public that the cost of war and reconstruction in Iraq would be modest. USAID Director Andrew Natsios, echoing other administration officials, told Nightline that, “in terms of the American taxpayer contribution the American part of this will be $1.7 billion. We have no plans for further-on funding for this.”

The president has requested (since then) more than $166 billion in funding for the war and reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan this year. But instead of admitting that he misled the nation about the cost of war, our Iraq action-hero figure has allowed the State Department to purge the comments by Natsios from the State Department’s website. The transcript and links to it have vanished. Rather than correct the error, if that is what it was, the administration went on to lie about it. A Bush spokesman said the administration was forced to remove the statements because “there was going to be a cost” charged by ARC for keeping the transcript on the government’s site. But as the Post notes, “other government websites including the State and Defense Departments routinely post interview transcripts, even from Nightline and, according to ABC News, ‘there is no cost’.” This story is not the first time the president has kept information harmful to his administration from the public. For instance, the president resisted the creation of the independent 9/11 investigative commission and has refused to provide the commission with critical information, even under the threat of subpoena, according to many sources. Similarly, after making substantial budget cuts, the president ordered the government to stop publishing its regular report detailing those cuts to states. And when confronted with a continuing unemployment crisis, the president ordered the Department of Labor to stop publishing its regular mass layoff report. It is also not the first time the administration has sought to revise history or repress public records when those records become inconvenient. As The Post reports, “After the insurrection in Iraq proved more stubborn than expected, the White House edited the original headline on its website of President Bush’s May 1 speech, President Bush Announces Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended, to insert the word Major before Combat. And the “Justice Department recently redacted criticism of the department in a consultant’s report that had been posted on its website.”

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Chapter 15. Figures from Iraq It is said that, in war, history is written by the winners. This is an example of how history is being rewritten to create the winner, in public perception if not in fact. As yet, there are no action hero figures of former retired NATO commander Gen. Wesley Clark, and it’s not likely that there will be, now that he is calling out President Bush for misleading America. While in Denver, Clark campaigned against his former boss, according to an article in the Rocky Mountain News (November 10, 2003): Clark, who served two tours of duty at Fort Carson during his military career, lashed out against the war in Iraq, accusing the president of pulling “the most classic bait-and-switch effort in American history.” “I never thought I’d run for president, but I never thought our country would be in trouble like it is today,” he said. “Our president misled us into war….We’re in a mess that is costing the lives of our soldiers almost daily.” He vowed to support teachers…while embracing the country’s “new spirit of patriotism. We are going to protect the essence of our democracy, [of] dialogue, discussion and the right to disagree.”

It is not known whether Clark includes in his “essence of democracy” the three nuns who would seem to agree with him that Bush “is reckless, radical and wrong.” As far as action hero figures go, former Pfc. Jessica Lynch certainly was set up to become one. After an eventful tour of duty she was rescued from her Iraq prisoner-of-war status amid the orchestrated adulation of America. Upon her return to the States she was set up with lucrative book and TV contracts, and public praise. The promises of wealth and glory failed because she preferred to tell the truth about herself: she had been injured in the crash of her ambushed truck, and never confronted the enemy or shot at them, despite the fabricated stories. Like the nuns, she is a woman who prefers to tell the truth. The former POW accuses the US military of exploitation. By insisting on the truth about what really happened she is as heroic as the nuns; she, too, stood up to the lies of Bush’s war. Here is a report published by the Rocky Mountain News, November 8, 2003, under the widely dispersed Associated Press byline of Allison Barker: Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch accused the military of using her capture and dramatic nighttime rescue to sway public support for the war in Iraq. Dramatic video of US commandos whisking the former Army supply clerk from an Iraqi hospital to a waiting chopper April 1, helped cement Lynch’s image as a hero, but the

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns 20-year-old private told ABC’s Diane Sawyer there was no reason for her rescue to be filmed. “They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff,” Lynch told Sawyer in a Prime Time interview to be aired Tuesday (November 11). “It’s wrong.” The network posted the excerpt on its website Friday (November 7). Lynch suffered broken bones and other injuries when here 507th Maintenance Company convoy was attacked after taking a wrong turn in the Iraqi town of Nasiryah on March 23. Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife wounds and bullet wounds. Military officials later said Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle. She was awarded the Bronze Star, Purple Heart and Prisoner of War medals while still in the hospital in Washington, D.C. Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I did not shoot, not a round, nothing…I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.” On Thursday, (November 6), Lynch won admiration in her hometown for having the courage to reveal she was raped by her Iraqi captors. The attack is documented by medical records cited in I Am A Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story. The authorized biography, written by reporter Rick Bragg, is being released by Knopf Publishing on Tuesday, Veterans Day. Family spokesman Stephen Goodwin acknowledged that the book discusses the sexual assault. In Nasariyah, Iraqi doctors who treated Lynch on Friday dismissed claims that she was raped by her Iraqi captors. Dr. Mahdi Khafazji, an orthopedic surgeon at Nasariyah’s main hospital, performed surgery on Lynch to repair a fractured femur and said he found no signs that she was raped or sodomized. Today (November 8) Lynch is receiving two hours of physical therapy five days a week and taking about 18 pills a day. She’s up to about 100 pounds from a low of 70. She still has not regained feeling in her left foot and uses crutches.

Years ago, when TV cowboys were popular in the movies, cap pistols were popular among boys and girls as they played in their backyards, killing imaginary Indians. But the kids of that era knew — even as they took aim at one another — there was a very real difference between their games and the reality of life. What their parents never told them was that their grandfathers of generations ago really did kill real Indians. Today, adult games of war have fused fantasy and reality for kids in America and Iraq. Adolescents play video games

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Chapter 15. Figures from Iraq training them to kill enemies with the flex of a finger, just like the computer keyboards in the Pentagon. The nuns weren’t the only ones sucked into the moral vortex comprising the 9/11 horrors. Besides the “rogue” Muslims, vengeful politicians, and angerstricken patriots, there were decent human beings and victims on both sides. Even “do-gooders” were made to suffer. Through the Treasury Department, the Bush administration is trying to extract prison terms and fines ranging over $120,000 from members of Voices in the Wilderness, an American group of humanitarian volunteers who transported medicine and toys and blankets to Iraq between 1990 and 2003. This was during the period when America was bombing that nation’s population on a daily basis. The group’s crime was failing to obtain official permission to do so. They thereby violated the United Nations economic sanctions against Iraq imposed after the first Bush president’s Persian Gulf War. Among those who lived in Iraq as the bombs fell and participated in such violations are Kathy Kelly and Denis Halliday, both nominated in 2000 for the Nobel Peace Prize. Kelly is a former teacher. Halliday is a former UN assistant secretary-general and humanitarian coordinator in Iraq. Assisting them as part of Voices in the Wilderness were dozens of others, including Charlie Liteky, an ex-priest who earned the Congressional Medal of Honor as a chaplain in the Vietnam War, and Catholic priest Jerry Zawada, an often-jailed peace activist and Jesuit priest. Over the years, many members of Voices in the Wilderness have been arrested, convicted and jailed for their nonviolent protests in favor of peace and the abolition of weapons of mass destruction. The prosecution/persecution of Voices in the Wilderness shows the continuing duplicity of Bush’s “compassionate conservatism.” (Dropping bombs on people who had nothing to do with bombing the US on 9/11 is neither compassionate nor conservative.) Neither is it compassionate or conservative to punish those who express with food and medicine compassion for humans caught in the crossfire of “collateral damage.” They were operating without being “licensed” by a government that was dropping bombs instead of bread. Only the government conducting the war has the right to decide what is humanitarian. Only the government conducting the war has the authority to imprison those who bring Band-aids to the battlefield.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns The Bush administration brooks no disagreement and no form of criticism, compassionate or not, and it takes desperate measures to punish those whose criticisms are true.

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CHAPTER 16. IRAQ: KILLING FIELD FOR THE WAR BETWEEN TERRORISTS “Terrorism is a mode of governing, or of opposing government, by intimidation.” — Webster’s Dictionary

Did Iraq really pose a security threat to America? If not, why did it become such a major battleground? One answer is that America wanted to set up a battlefield in the “enemy’s” part of the world, away from the streets of Manhattan, and entice its foes to fight it there. President Bush has said as much, on several occasions. When G.W. Bush declared war on terrorism, he made sure Americans thought he meant war against the terrorists who had brought down the World Trade Center. They pursued the villains to Afghanistan. But when the President declared war against Iraq, the war against terrorists became the war between terrorists, with Iraq as the designated battlefield. Iraq was chosen because in years past, America had armed Saddam as a terrorist and commissioned him to attack Iran. At that time, Saddam presumably thought it was for control of the Kirkuk oil fields. America gave its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq several early and unfortunate names including Bush’s word, “crusade”; then “Enduring Justice” and “Enduring Freedom.” None envisioned a peaceful end, except on terms set by Bush as conquistador. In his Bismarckian way, Bush knew politics came out of the gun barrel. For him, war has just two drawbacks: it is noisy and it is messy. On the plus side, it

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns gains votes both from blue collars who love a fight, and from white collars who protect their interests over the bodies of others. From the outset, Bush’s military advisors knew such a war without boundaries could not be successfully carried out. It needed a designated killing space on the enemy’s terrain; preferably in a place where war would not disrupt the existing flow of oil and the economy or comfort of America. It wouldn’t do to attack every Muslim nation where the terrorists might hole up. They had to be lured out of their mosque-sanctuary dens. Iraq was chosen because its leader, Saddam Hussein, was a pariah in the eyes of Islamic radicals such as Osama bin Laden. If Saddam was unhorsed by war, not even devout Muslims could cry sacrilege or rally effectively over his downfall. That’s how Saddam Hussein, once America’s CIA asset in Aladdin’s land, came to be selected as the proxy bad-guy, the target substituted for the elusive Osama bin Laden. Saddam and his nation would become Bush’s voodoo doll to take the poison pin-pricks intended for all Arab terrorists. That plan seemed to be effective in drawing the terrorists out of their hiding places, but it shows signs of working so well it may backfire endlessly. Many knowledgeable sources fear the war will expand in the coming years. Cardinal Francis George of Chicago told an audience of educators at Denver University that he fears the war will grow into a long-range religious conflict worse than the Crusades. President Vladimir Putin of Russia predicts a futile war of the kind that mired the Soviet Union and now America in Afghanistan. As he told the New York Times in an interview, Iraq could “become a new center, a new magnet for all destructive elements.” He pointed out that “a great number of members of different organizations” are being drawn into Iraq since the fall of Saddam, and, by their tactics of hit-and-run, are ruining US credibility in setting a deadline for withdrawal. Putin, who once headed the KGB in the Soviet Union, disagreed with one of the core reasons given by President Bush for attacking Iraq: the assertion that Saddam had ties to international Islamic militancy and terrorism. As the Times interview concluded, Putin thinks that the Bush invasion of Iraq has created a terrorist haven where one did not previously exist. To any objective observer, this would suggest that the “war against terrorism” might just as well be called the “war between terrorists.” After all, the US supplies and holds a monopoly on methods and weapons of mass destruction. Whoever has them had to get them from somewhere. The

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Chapter 16. Iraq: Killing Field for the War between Terrorists US offers this WMD umbrella to Israel as part of a complex carrot-and-stick plan for continued conflict. Facing such threats Palestinians and their allies will continue the violence of resistance. After all, in 2003, Bush used a weapon of terror when he put nuclear weapons on high alert and claimed preemptive first-strike rights for America and its allies. It is that policy change which changed the war on terrorism to a war in which America takes on a terrorist role of its own. That role will continue as long as the public chooses to sustain the daily killing of US service personnel in Iraq and the economic drain of continued occupation. In Bush’s TV address on September 7, 2003, he himself revealed the strategy for using Iraq as the designated battle field when he asked for $87 billion and said, “We are fighting that enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan today so that we do not meet him again on our own streets, in our own cities.” On June 30, 2003 during a GOP fund-raising tour, Bush told American Legion members in St. Louis, “We are confronting the terrorists in Iraq so we don’t have to confront them in New York…or St. Louis.” For the first time in three decades, Israel in 2003 went outside its disputed borders to bomb Syria. The rationale was to strike a terrorist base there. The US was in no position to censure Israel for copying what it is doing in Iraq. Perhaps it is even encouraging them to do so. The Syrian event suggests that the war between terrorists is spreading. Lebanon and Iran may not be able to avoid being drawn in, not to mention North Korea. Putin, who told the New York Times he considers himself an ally of the US, calls the old Saddam regime “a criminal one.” At the same time he more softly calls the invasion of Iraq by Bush “an error.” Bush could never have scheduled a war to be hosted by Iraq if he hadn’t first convinced the American public that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. Their emotions ignited by the 9/11 event, and trusting Bush, the people followed his lead. He has betrayed them. How did 80 percent of the American public come to think Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks? Simply through repetition of anti-Saddam rhetoric in speeches made by Bush, Cheney and other top administration officials implying Iraq involvement in those attacks. Time after time, in sound bite after sound bite in the summer of 2003, the war on terrorism, 9/11, Al Qaeda and Iraq were mentioned in the same breath by Bush and some of his cabinet members. For example:

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns In his speech requesting of Congress $87 billion, he spoke of continuing the fight against our “enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan…so we do not meet him again in our own streets, our own cities.” In his speech to the American Legion in St. Louis, when he said “We are confronting the terrorists in Iraq so we don’t have to confront them in New York…or St. Louis.” In his speech at the American Enterprise Institute’s annual dinner in Washington, D.C., on February 26, 2003, he said, “Our coalition of more than 90 countries is pursuing the networks of terror with every tool of law enforcement and with military power. We have arrested, or otherwise dealt with, many key commanders of Al Qaeda. Across the world, we are hunting down the killers, one by one…And we are opposing the greatest danger in the war on terror: outlaw regimes arming with weapons of mass destruction. In Iraq, a dictator is building and hiding weapons that could enable him to dominate the Middle East and intimidate the civilized world…The same tyrant has close ties to terrorist organizations, and could supply them with the terrible means to strike this country.” In his speech to the United Nations on September 12, 2002, commemorating the anniversary of the fall of the World Trade Center, when he said: “In the attacks on America a year ago, we saw the destructive intentions of our enemies. This threat hides in many nations, including my own. In cells, in camps, terrorists are plotting further destruction and building new bases for the war against civilization. And our greatest fear is that terrorists will find a shortcut to their mad ambitions when an outlaw regime supplies them with the technologies to kill on a massive scale…Twelve years ago, Iraq invaded Kuwait without provocation…Saddam has made the case against himself.” There are numerous examples of presidential rhetoric that was keyed to subtly convince Americans that Saddam and 9/11 were linked. Once that link was created, it was easy to motivate patriotic Americans to support the invasion of Iraq. As it turns out, Saddam, a one-time ally of America, was no friend of Osama bin Laden. In fact, Osama considered Saddam himself an infidel — an apostate from Osama’s brand of Muslim conservatism. Putin in his Times interview said Saddam “struggled against the [Muslim] fundamentalists. He either exterminated them physically or put them in jail or just sent them into exile.”

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CHAPTER 17. THREE NUNS KNOCKING ON THE WEAPONSGATE OF WMD We are inclined to confuse freedom and democracy, which we regard as moral principles, with the way in which those are practiced in America. — J. W. Fulbright

The politics of today will affect the next generation’s assumptions about life, liberty and the pursuit of security, otherwise known as the pursuit of happiness. The question is: security of or from what? Does security or happiness lie behind the threatened blast of the bomb? Will that threat remain as a security policy forever? Ardeth Platte expressed this concern in a letter to Father Carl Kabat, dated March 22, 2004, from her jail cell: So much going on these days that it is hard to keep up with the news and counter-news. I’m avoiding as much politics-as-usual in the campaigning. This is not the day for the political, as it would be unjust no matter who is running the ship for the wealthy. It is the day for popular movements to unite and testify with bodies, spirit and voices. How do we rouse each state, site by site? That is the question.

Not long after those words were written, a smirking President Bush declared his second election victory. He had already told the public, on Feb. 27, 2003, that it would be necessary to go to war with Iraq because it possessed weapons of mass destruction that endangered the US through a chain of potential terrorists including Saddam Hussein. It was a message that he was to repeat over and over again through the lips of Secretary of State Colin Powell at the United Nations and the lips of Vice

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns President Cheney until the US and Britain, with Spain as cheerleader, decided to join him in launching war against Iraq without the sanction of the United Nations. Such was the core of the non-existent “90 nation” coalition which Bush cited just the day prior, when he was speaking to the American Enterprise Institute. At that time he told the bald-headed barons of free enterprise that there was an outlaw regime armed with “weapons of mass destruction.” On these back-to-back war-mongering occasions, he continued to hide the truth about how his father and former Secretary of State James Baker III and others of Bush Sr.’s Wall-Street cronies had provided WMD technology to Saddam Hussein years prior. He would use America’s own weapons of mass destruction, if necessary, to make sure Iraq had none left in Saddam’s US-supplied arsenal. At the heart of this presidential conflict of interest lies a privately-held military investment company known as the Carlyle Group. It was headed by former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci (recently replaced by ex-IBM chief Louis V. Gerstner); former Defense Secretary James Baker III; former President G.H.W. Bush; and former British Prime Minister John Major, not to mention exPresident Fidel Ramos of the Philippines — a nation which has an extensive Muslim population hostile to the capitalism-with-no-conscience that these men represent . Like lesser men of history, this international cast of political godfathers had not only a large appetite for personal wealth gained through politics, but also the power of concealment. The plot to do so has culminated in two wars, the loss of a million lives, the jailing of thousands of people of all backgrounds (including at least three nuns) and a fraud upon the American and international public. In 2002, before the second war with Iraq, G.W. Bush denigrated the integrity of Iraq’s 12,000-page report that detailed its program of weapons of mass destruction. The report, demanded by the United Nations under US-dictated conditions, asked for the names of all companies from whom Iraq had received technological assistance with its weapons. Bush, while not directly involved in the process, supported the deletion of 8,000 pages of that report and then called it “incomplete” and a nonsensical rehash of Iraq’s 1991 report (when the UN put its first inspection team in place). There were more than 2,000 corporate names in those deleted pages.

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Chapter 17. Three Nuns Knocking on the Weapons-gate of WMD In other words, before the second UN-requested report’s release to the rest of the world, Bush agreed to the deletion of the names of 24 US companies from Iraq’s list of corporate allies. (Details are discussed below.) Bush further assured the report’s “incompleteness” by agreeing to the deletion, under pressure from his allies, of the names of hundreds more corporations doing war business with Iraq from Europe. In the process, about two-thirds of the pages of Iraq’s 2002 report were expunged from public scrutiny. In the end, by year 2005, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was made the “fall guy” in what came to be called the “Oil-for-Food” scandal. With the deletion of corporate names that otherwise would connect Bush and friends to the supply line of WMD technology to Iraq, the Bush family’s criminal exposure was masked while Iraq was depicted as non-responsive to UN resolutions and Annan was left holding the bag. At the same time, those nations who were major US allies were spared the embarrassment of having the world know they and corporations under their control had contributed to Iraq’s WMD. It is this “incomplete” part of the report that is most informative and potentially most damaging to the Bush regime, because the expunged part of the report contained names of companies connected to both Bush regimes. In other words, the report with all its names is one of the reasons why President Bush and America’s European allies needed to wage war against Iraq: they needed to get rid of the “evidence” about WMD sourcing that still remained on the ground in Iraq. How were the deletions carried out? Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter says the corporate name deletions were done after consultation with Security Council members by UN inspection officials. (The US, of course, leads the Security Council.) The action was taken, Ritter says, in order to secure cooperation for inspections from the nations that otherwise feared they would be identified as exporters of contraband war materiel. This deletion process necessarily involved Kofi Annan under pressure from the US. “It was UN policy,” Ritter says. The policy was one that he contends was continued by UN inspector Hans Blix. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan described the loss of integrity of the original Iraqi weapons document as “unfortunate,” a diplomatic euphemism for “disastrous.” In any case, the list included corporations based in Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Belgium, among other European nations, according to the

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns December 18, 2002 Die Tage Zeitung of Berlin, and the Sunday Herald of Edinburgh. The significance of the deletions has been ignored by the American media and even members of Congress. Why? One explanation is that exposure of the corporate names could bring such blame and shame on two Bush White Houses and Britain’s John Major that the whole world would know (for sure) that the Iraq war was being waged on false grounds. If it looked like personal imperialism dressed in international patriotism, this would eviscerate America’s credibility, sink its entire foreign military policy, and reveal that Bush had betrayed his presidential oath. Further, Wall Street and the world’s capital markets could not withstand the blow if word got out about how many blue chip companies were implicated in the arming of Iraq. Bush had plenty of cover, by then, due to the wave of knee-jerk flag-waving that was the public’s response to the 9/11 attacks. Sen. Robert Byrd (D.-WVa.) suggested in the Senate that Bush’s declaration of war against Iraq had not been properly considered by the only political body which had war-making authority. Then, in an interview with Larry King, explaining the public’s reluctance to challenge the war and its White-House-rooted causes, Byrd noted that following the 9/11 disaster, those who raised such criticism were characterized by the White House as being unpatriotic (even as dangerous and traitorous). The sense of the country now linked peace with a war to dislodge disloyalty. In the context of the USA PATRIOT Act that stripped citizens of basic liberties, such thinking placed nonconformists upon the quicksand of treason. Indeed, this seemed to be the operative thinking of Federal Judge Blackburn in Denver when he sentenced the three nuns for clipping a fence and leaving their rosaries on Federal property. Their action was readily equated to sabotage of the entire nation’s security. Why were the major media so silent about the evisceration of the Iraq WMD report? Records on the Internet show that The New York Times, Dow Jones, and Gannett are owners of stock in some of the very war-profiteering companies that Iraq put on its list of weapons suppliers. Like the Presidents Bush, the media prefer to hide the Iraqi war investments on which they capitalize, even as they patriotically support war against the enemy whom their hidden investments indirectly aid and abet. When such a conflict of interest involves war, it is a crime. When it involves presidents, it is a high crime worthy of impeachment. But after the

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Chapter 17. Three Nuns Knocking on the Weapons-gate of WMD travail of the Nixon and Clinton administrations, the country was weary of that kind of talk. President George Herbert Walker Bush said over and over again that the liberation of Kuwait from Iraq in the 1991 Operation Desert Storm was “not about oil.” However, the countries whose future oil supplies and political status in the Middle East are most threatened by the latest Iraq war (France, Germany, Japan and China) are among those who supplied Iraq with contraband weaponry and technology. Contrarily, when Bush decided to invade Iraq, most of the nations protected from WMD-related discovery declined to support him on the ground. No matter who carried out the deletions of more than 2,000 worldwide or multi-national corporation names from Iraq’s report, a peek under the covers of both Bush administrations gives some clues. G.H.W. Bush supplied arms to Iraq as America’s bully-proxy in the Middle East. Later, he was encouraged by the Reagan-Bush White House to use those arms against Iran. And Iraq went to war with Iran, ostensibly over oil in the Kirkuk Field (which geologically extends beneath the borders of both countries.) The patriotic virtues of CIA Cold War techniques, made to seem noble, are irresistible among the American public when refocused on any enemy of choice. That’s because a whole generation had been brain-washed by living in that political pressure-cooker. The elder Bush also recognized an opportunity to make money for himself and his friends under cover of covert war policy without the need for Congressional approval or funding. The strategy resulted in the Iran-Contra guns and drug scandal at the same time Iraq was waging war against Iran. Bush Sr. through Iran-Contra continued to arm Iraq during the Reagan administration while the Soviet Union was at the same time trying to set up a communist regime in Afghanistan. In that conflict, Osama bin Laden received US training as a CIA soldier-asset against the Soviets. Behind Carlyle

In 1987, William E. Conway, Jr., Daniel A. D’Aniello, and David M. Rubenstein set up a a military-based investment company with White House and Pentagon policy connections, called the Carlyle Group. (One or more of the founders had ties with Carlyle University.)

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns But there were predecessor companies with even more obscure and sinister ties to WMD through James Baker III, Bush senior’s former secretary of state and partner in a Texas law firm. (Those ties are discussed below.) Carlyle’s initial corporate investment focus was on airlines, and they relied on contracts granted by political connections. Among Carlyle’s early investments was a company called Cater Air, set up to provide in-flight meal services to domestic airlines. By 1991, under Bush Jr., the company went bankrupt. At the behest of Bush Sr., James Baker III stepped in. Frank Carlucci, former Defense Secretary, then joined the Carlyle. Baker and Carlucci began to resuscitate Carlyle and transform it into an international corporate military supply-and-war-policy force with which the world still is reckoning. With Baker and Carlucci at the helm, the Bush family could be kept discreetly in the background. War, which they were in a position to declare, would make them all rich. By 2002, Carlyle Group was the No. 11 supplier to the Pentagon and ranked as a $12 billion company within its specialty. By 2005, Carlyle had nearly doubled its assets. Once Baker got involved, Carlyle’s cash came from investments in companies the Pentagon looks to for its war technology. War has become a necessity for America’s economy and during the past 25 years the two Bush presidents have led, or had a dominating influence upon, the CIA, the Pentagon and war policy. Carlyle’s recent investments include government contractors building the $11 billion Crusader artillery system and the $200 billion all-service fighterbombers (Rockwell-Martin). Both of these will be enormously lucrative for the foreseeable future — as long as there is a White House leader willing to keep the nation on a war footing to support the call for such military contracts. Huge chunks of the world’s industrial ability to wage war bear the fingerprints of Carlyle, but it is difficult to quantify because Carlyle is a privately-held investment company with no obligation to report its holdings. Barbouti and Baker

During the administration of G.H.W. Bush, connections were made to a Boca Raton company known as Ishan Barbouti International, named after an engineer of Middle East extraction.

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Chapter 17. Three Nuns Knocking on the Weapons-gate of WMD Back in the early 1980s (in West Germany and then in Libya) Barbouti had found a way to produce WMD chemical technology as a spin-off from an innocent-sounding food flavoring. The toxin was code-named Prussian Blue. Later known as tabun, it was a nerve gas made in part from a derivative of cherry pits, otherwise used as food coloring and flavor. Much of this byproduct was later made in Florida for export. About the same time, Barbouti had established a plant for the poison in Rabta, Libya, through his West German company, IBI. The Prussian Blue part of the chemistry was reputed to be capable of penetrating the best military gas masks at that time. For the sake of America’s own defense establishment, the CIA and Bush Sr. were highly interested in providing support to Barbouti’s work, the better to control and apply it for America’s own military-political purpose. By 1990, Carlyle gained that control through Baker’s law firm in Houston, which also represented Barbouti’s corporation. In this manner, Barbouti had CIA ties through Vice President G.H.W. Bush even before the founding days of Carlyle. All Barbouti needed back then was a way to ship the poisons he was making under the guise of food flavoring. That pathway to Iraq, which seemed convenient for the CIA’s efforts to repair relations with Saddam, eventually came through investment in IBI by Carlyle, as directed in its early stages by Baker’s law firm. The poison’s dissemination was made all the easier because Barbouti’s production of Prussian Blue in the US had been preceded by production by another of his companies in Germany. This company proved to be the early source of chemical weapons for Iraq that Saddam Hussein used on the Kurds at the close of the unsuccessful war with Iran — a war which the CIA had backed. Barbouti’s Boca Raton plant was producing poisonous gases during the time when the United States, through its proxy (Saddam Hussein), failed to settle America’s grudge with Iran. It was at a time when the first Bush regime was verging on war with Iraq over the Kuwaiti oil issue. These conflicts of national interest, however, did not deter the Bush administration from its war profiteering even as they pursued the political goal of regaining control over the oil-rich Middle East. That control was by then being jeopardized by America’s erstwhile ally Saddam Hussein. The first sign of this changing relationship came way back in 1983, when Saddam denounced the US in a speech to the UN for providing weapons to Iran. Until then, Iran was supposed to be the mutual enemy of the US and Iraq. In

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns other words, Saddam was the first to blow the whistle on the Iran-Contra gunsand-drugs scandal. But he couldn’t gain any political sympathy for his complaint on the international scene. What Saddam was complaining about was the duplicity of the US in supplying arms to both sides of the Iran-Iraq conflict — as he tried to rid the world of Iranian tyranny at the behest of the US. Scorned by his own ally and abandoning the US-fomented war with Iran, Hussein set about building his own WMD, especially chemical ones, based on the technology that the US and Germany had already released to him. (Eventually, he would be checkmated in that effort by the UN inspection teams.) But before that happened, Saddam already had all the names and corporate contacts for WMD technology in Germany and now there were new ones in the United States. Enter Ishan Barbouti, from the American side. Some details of Barbouti’s Iraqi-run Boca Raton poison plant were duly noted in articles by the Wall Street Journal and even broadcast on Ted Koppel’s Nightline (July 19, 1993). But Barbouti’s creativity extends beyond Prussian Blue (or Tabun). His weapons program involved several other companies and products that were supported by investments from the Carlyle Group. Barbouti also headed a company based in Oklahoma City called TK-7, named after a proprietary chemical reputed to increase the range of jet aircraft and Saddam’s liquid-fueled SCUD missiles. (Indeed, the Associated Press reported on February 27, 2003, that “The short-range Al Samoud 2 sometimes flies a few miles farther than allowed. But rocket experts have reported no sign of any longer-range missiles that could strike Israel or neighboring oil nations as Washington fears.”) Dr. Barbouti also owned a Houston-based company known as Pipeline Recovery Systems. That company produced a coating for oil pipes that also makes them useful against corrosives encountered in nuclear reactors and chemical weapons plants, such as those thought to be on Saddam’s drawing boards. Whether Bush-owned companies (such as Harken, discussed below) and Bush-connected Enron were aware of this potential for dual use of the pipes is uncertain, but they knew all about Ishan Barbouti; and both companies focused their financial powers around the pipeline benefits of Barbouti’s product. Concerned observers suspect that these oil-pipe tubes were exported by companies owned by Carlyle Group to Iraq under the guise of pipeline equipment at a time when the CIA was encouraged to look the other way. (An

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Chapter 17. Three Nuns Knocking on the Weapons-gate of WMD investigation by the UN weapons inspection team in the 1990s searching for specialty tubing for use in missiles and nuclear reactors was aborted.) The Carlyle reasoning behind its support for Barbouti was simple. The US needed to counteract the decade-long Soviet influence in Afghanistan, where they were seeking to sustain a pro-communist regime. That war had started in 1979, and the US (through Carlyle) was anxious about Barbouti’s technology going to the Soviets. Political pressures convinced Bush Sr. to let WMD technology flow to Iraq by letting Barbouti operate and profit, because it would steer his loyalties away from the Soviets. It mattered not to Carlyle that the US was supplying a future potential enemy (Iraq) because Carlyle, under a Bush team, was profiting handsomely. In any case, they were promoting a war policy that served White House interests at that time. So Barbouti’s company was on the list of Iraq’s weapons suppliers, but Bush was keen to quash any connection. This convoluted tale also explains why the second Bush president was so sure there were WMD in Iraq prior to invading, even though the United Nations inspectors had spent four years destroying them. In case any of Barbouti’s weapons did turn up, Bush had to make sure it was his people who found them and dealt with them. Bush had to erase the connection. But back to Boca Raton, Florida, and the late Eighties: Dr. Barbouti, as it turned out, is an architect-scientist-terrorist with links to Osama bin Laden through his association with Khalid bin Mahfouz, who was married to Osama bin Laden’s younger sister. Barbouti was aided in his poison business by contracts drafted by James Baker’s law firm, Baker-Botts of Houston. By the late 1990s, Barbouti was being sought as the central figure in a lawsuit brought on behalf of thousands of Gulf War veterans by Texas attorney Gary Pitts against the industrial suppliers on Iraq’s weapons list. He alleges the GIs have contracted diseases linked to Barbouti’s poisons. However, Barbouti by that time was reported to have died. The Independent (London) on July 17, 1994, reported that Barbouti faked his own death to escape German and US investigations into his activities. As a result, neither Pitts nor US authorities know his whereabouts. In the meantime Saddam Hussein, by selling black market oil at a surcharge under the UN Oil-for-Food program, gained the money he needed to exploit the weapons technology he had gained under the Reagan-Bush umbrella and weapons-dealer Barbouti in friendlier times.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns As independent journalist Wayne Madsen reported via internet in May 2005 through Global Research, “Under the Oil-for-Food Program, the Saddam regime was charging a hefty surcharge per barrel of oil — money that went directly into the bank accounts of Saddam.” Madsen went on to say: “There was another Florida connection to the illegal arms shipments to Iraq. Iraqi arms dealer Ishan Barbouti worked with Iran-Contra felon Richard Secord to secretly ship large amounts of cyanide from Product Ingredient Technologies, a food-flavoring factory in Florida, to Iraq for use in Saddam’s nerve gas production during the 1980s.” Madsen then connects this criminal intrigue to the Bush administration by adding: “All of these transactions involving Giangrandi, Cardoen, Secord and Barbouti, were known to President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker.” (This refers to the subsequent Enron-linked Bayoil scandal detailed in Chapter 24.) But for the intervention from the UN weapons inspection teams of the early 1990s, Saddam presumably would have succeeded in his WMD quest. As events indicate, by the time Saddam kicked out the UN team, they had dismantled his WMD war machine, but no one knew that for sure. Not knowing for certain that all the evidence had been obliterated, President G.W. Bush needed to invade Iraq and have a look for himself, as it were. And so he did, on the excuse of WMD technology whose origins had been giftwrapped by his father’s White House years before. To flash back to the first Bush administration: before engaging the United States in the first war against Saddam Hussein, President G.H.W. Bush issued a presidential memorandum of waiver-of-conflict-of-interest, August 8, 1990. On that date and in regard to Iraq, G.H.W. Bush declared that 10 members of his advisory, security and cabinet-level staff, including Secretary of State James Baker, had no conflict of interest, in spite of personal financial dealings to the contrary through Carlyle Group. That three-page memo, unearthed by independent journalist Tom Flocco, says, in those lines that were not inked out for security reasons: In my judgment, the nature of the current crisis [Iraq] and the gravity of the measures under consideration by the United States are such that even vast financial interests could not be deemed likely to affect the integrity of the services the government may expect from its chief foreign policy officers. …In my view, national security considerations at stake in the current situation are so great as to diminish to insignificance the likelihood that individual employees could be swayed by their private interests. On this basis, I hereby determine that

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Chapter 17. Three Nuns Knocking on the Weapons-gate of WMD the financial interests held by the individuals indicated above are not so substantial as to be deemed likely to affect the integrity of the services that the government may expect from them in the course of current United States policy making, discussions, decisions, and actions in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

The memorandum was signed with the scrawled signature of G.H.W. Bush. Who were the Bush people so invested and so exempted? The memo, once classified, lists: The assistant to the president for national security. The assistant to the president and deputy for national security. The attorney general (Richard Thornburgh). The chief of staff to the president. The director of the Central Intelligence Agency (Robert M. Gates). The secretary of commerce (Robert A. Mosbacher). The secretary of defense (Richard B. Cheney). The secretary of energy (James D. Watkins). The secretary of state (James Baker III). The secretary of treasury (Nicholas F. Brady). It is not clear from the memo, which preceded the Gulf War by a few months, what investments these officials held that placed them in a situation of potential conflict, requiring presidential exemption. However, it is now known that Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney was connected to oil deals throughout the Middle East through Halliburton, of which he was CEO. An earlier Bush memorandum (with half of the document still blanked out) sheds some additional light. It is dated October 2, 1989: Access to Persian Gulf oil and the security of key friendly states in the area are vital to US national security. The United States remains committed to defend its vital interests in the region, if necessary and appropriate, through the use of US military force, against the Soviet Union or any other regional power with interests inimical to our own. The United States also remains committed to support the individual and collective self-defense of friendly countries in the area to enable them to play a more active role in their own defense and thereby reduce the necessity for unilateral US military intervention. The United States will encourage the effective support and participation of our western allies and Japan to promote our mutual interests in the Persian Gulf region.

If policy by the second Bush administration in regard to Iraq seems to be an echo of this memo by Bush’s father, it is. But instead of the “read my lips” mantra about taxes and “it’s not about oil,” the current Bush regime has conveniently adopted the theme of “war on

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns terror” — a theme driven opportunistically by 9/11 and other frightful attacks around the world. There is, of course, a connection between Bush and Carlyle and America’s Arab oil producers. That scandalous relationship constitutes what can only be called “Weapons-gate.” In all, 24 US corporations are named in Iraq’s report as supplier to its weapons of mass destruction program. The list, according to Andreas Zumach of Die Tagezeitung, comprises: Honeywell, Spectra Physics, Semetex, TI Coating, Unisys, Sperry Corporation, Tektronix, Rockwell, Leybold Vacuum Systems, Finnigan-MAT-US, Hewlett-Packard, DuPont, Eastman Kodak, American Type Culture Collection, Alcolac International, Consarc, Carl Zeiss, Cerberus, Electronic Associates, International Computer Systems, Bechtel, EZ Logic Data Systems, Inc., Canberra Industries, Inc., and Axel Eletronics, Inc. Because of the deletions of these and even foreign company names, it is not known whether this list is complete or exactly what any of these companies did by way of supporting Iraq’s weapons program. In addition to the companies deleted by Security Council nations from Iraq’s report, the article in Die Tageszeitung claims top-secret nuclear research centers in the US, such as Sandia Laboratories and Lawrence Livermore, have also supplied technical information to Iraq. Obviously, such information can be moved only at the request of the nation’s highest officials. In any case, the list provided by Zumach provided these clues from among five weapons technology classifications: Honeywell (owned by GE with some stock held by Carlyle) supplied Iraq with technology in the missile and conventional weapons arenas. Spectra Physics (in which Carlyle is invested via subsidiaries) supplied Iraq with technology in the conventional weapons arena. Semetex supplied Iraq with technology in the missile weapons arena. TI Coating supplied Iraq with technology in the nuclear and conventional weapons arenas. Unisys (in which Carlyle has holdings through subsidiaries) supplied Iraq with technology in the nuclear and conventional weapons arenas. Sperry Corporation supplied Iraq with technology in the missile and conventional weapons arenas. Tektronix supplied Iraq with technology in the missile and nuclear weapons arenas.

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Chapter 17. Three Nuns Knocking on the Weapons-gate of WMD Rockwell (whose semiconductor division was acquired by Carlyle) supplied Iraq with technologies in the conventional weapons arena. Leybold Vacuum Systems supplied Iraq with technology in the nuclear weapons arena. Finnigan-MAT-US supplied Iraq with technology in the nuclear weapons arena. Hewlett Packard (partly owned by Carlyle) supplied Iraq with technology in the nuclear, missile and conventional weapons arenas. DuPont supplied Iraq with technology in the nuclear weapons arena. Eastman Kodak supplied Iraq with technology in the missile weapons arena. American Type Culture Collection supplied Iraq with technology in the biological weapons arena. Alcolac International supplied Iraq with technology in the chemical weapons arena. Consarc supplied Iraq with technology in the nuclear weapons arena. Carl Zeiss, US supplied Iraq with technology in the conventional weapons arena. Cerberus Ltd. supplied Iraq with technology in the nuclear weapons arena. Electronic Associates supplied Iraq with technology in the missile weapons arena. International Computer Systems supplied Iraq with technology in the nuclear, missile, and conventional weapons arenas. Bechtel (in which Carlyle is invested) supplied Iraq with technology in the conventional weapons arena. Former Secretary of State (Reagan-Bush administration) George Shultz is a Bechtel director. EZ Logic Data Systems supplied Iraq with technology in the missile weapons arena. Canberra Industries supplied Iraq with technology in the nuclear weapons arena. Within a few days of the printing of this list, the Sunday Herald (Edinburgh) filed a confirming report. In addition to the 24 American companies, Zumach says there are more than 50 subsidiary companies implicated. Queries to Zumach on this point have gone unanswered. His article also identifies dozens of companies throughout Europe that have supplied Iraq with weapons technology. Every permanent member of the UN Security Council which holds veto power (i.e., US, UK, France, Russia and

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns China) has companies or industrial entities within their borders that Iraq claims provided assistance. Significantly missing from the Die Tageszeitung article are the 80 German companies that Zumach says are on Iraq’s list. Zumach does not explain their absence. Zumach’s only reply to an e-mail was: “Thanks for your message, greetings from Geneva.” Apparently, and understandably, he is avoiding the heat. At the least Zumach’s list shows that Carlyle, with all its high-powered connections, was invested in the technology of six companies on Saddam’s list of WMD suppliers. These include Honeywell; Spectra Physics; Unisys; Rockwell; Hewlett-Packard; and Bechtel. Any company making profits by owning stock in those companies, Carlyle included, would seem to be an accomplice to whatever WMD crime is alleged by the Bush administration. Likewise, countries exacting taxes from such companies or licensing their operations are complicit. By deleting the names of the guilty companies, Bush gutted the work of the UN as it tried to eliminate WMD in Iraq by peaceful means. The world now has every reason to believe the UN had succeeded in doing so by the time G. W. Bush decided to wage war. There is no doubt that the Bush family and administrations had many intimate financial connections to the Middle East oil powers even outside Carlyle Group. Given its corporate investment focus on war-making industries, the Carlyle Group had added opportunity and motive through the Bush oil interests to know of pending military or oil contracts and make the appropriate investments. With this knowledge, and with the power to create war, Carlyle could thus customize the contracts to supply weaponry to both sides. That is exactly what caused Carlyle’s meteoric rise to financial prominence. As for Mahfouz (Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law), who had invested millions of dollars of Saudi money in Carlyle’s military venture pool, when 9/11 occurred, he cashed in his Carlyle chips at a handsome profit. This was about the same time that New York City’s Mayor Rudi Giuliani rejected the sympathy offer of $10 million from Saudi Prince Awaleed bin-Talal. An effort to trace the Carlyle power-and-money trail from its origins Indicates that the extant Carlyle Group formally coalesced first around ex-Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci in the early nineties (during the presidency of G.H.W. Bush), but the roots of its present day board of directors go back to the elder

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Chapter 17. Three Nuns Knocking on the Weapons-gate of WMD Bush’s role as CIA director (1976) when he directed the Bank of Credit & Commerce International (BCCI). That bank, which submerged from public view with $20 billion after scandals identified it as an international money laundering operation, was the bank of choice for such CIA pals as Iran’s Shah Reza Pahlavi, Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega and Saudi Arabia’s Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz. Thus the CIA’s bank had access to a huge amount of cash, some of which provided operating capital for Carlyle Group. How much any of these foreign investors knew about BCCI’s operation is irrelevant. These were politically-connected leaders who went along to get along with the Bush system under which the United States still operates. They didn’t set the rules, but they learned how to play by them. This prepared the way for Carlyle’s emergence as a legitimate major investment bank. Just as certainly, many of Carlyle’s roots can be traced to former Secretary of State James Baker, who arranged the contracts for Barbouti’s Boca-Raton chemical company and who also represented Mahfouz in some of his financial ventures through contacts with James Bath, a secret agent the Bush family recruited from the CIA. Even more tightly connecting the Bush clan to Mahfouz is the fact that Mahfouz, who once served as banker for the Saudi royal family (Prince Aziz), was an officer of the BCCI bank. As Larry Chin of Online Journal reports, it was through BCCI and BNL (Banca Nazionale del Lavoro) that the elder Bush with his CIA connections funneled financing and loans for Iraq’s war machine, both when he was CIA director and Vice President under Reagan. Assisting in this long-spooled caper as late as 1984 was Kissinger Associates, which helped to arrange loans for Saddam’s regime through BNL — loans made for arms acquisitions by way of Italy’s Fiat Corporation. It is interesting to note that Brent Scowcroft, later awarded the Medal of Freedom by President G.H.W. Bush, and Lawrence Eagleburger, G.H.W. Bush’s secretary of state, were executive employees of Kissinger Associates at that time. Henry Kissinger, of course, was Secretary of State under Richard Nixon. A supreme political puppeteer, Kissinger still operates an international think-tank consulting firm in Washington and exercises an abiding ability to influence world affairs while hiding his sordid foreign policy strings. Any sleuth studying the daunting maze of BCCI, BNL and Carlyle-connected companies and their principals eventually will find an exit, through

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns Middle East oil connections, to the company known as Arbusto (Spanish for Bush) and then Harken Energy. It was from Harken that the current President G.W. Bush extracted nearly a million dollars just before it went broke and he became president of the United States. Such a detective also will have to tramp through the related maze of the savings and loan scandals and later the Enron debacle that brought down several high-flying telecommunications companies at nearly the same time the World Trade Center towers came down. Neil Bush, Bush Sr.’s youngest son, was director of the Silverado Savings and Loan. As Pacifica Radio reminded its audience in a March 12, 2004 broadcast, it collapsed in 1988, costing taxpayers more than $1 billion. Neil Bush is now obliged to turn his talents to non-banking activities, but seems still to be hovering on the brink of scandal despite family efforts to avoid further political damage. It seems clear that the only interests being protected while the two Bush presidents were on watch were their own, not those of the nation or its citizens or its Constitution. In retrospect of the Iraq war declared by G.W. Bush, the whole Enron scandal has become a separate Bush family-circus sideshow, played sotto voce in the key of patriotism. The Bush family never made its money from drilling oil wells through Arbusto but rather by investing Arab and American oil money in oil schemes that put the “crony” into crony capitalism. Among their investors, supporting banks run by the CIA, was Saudi Prince Aziz. The financial maze is daunting and furthermore, information is being removed from public access. Where thousands of website pages formerly showed connections between Carlyle and Iraq, dozens have been systematically withdrawn. Just after 9/11, American fears were further fanned by a bizarre anthrax scare in which aerosol-sized anthrax bacteria was mailed to several high-visibility targets including the network news and Congress. A few people were actually killed, enough to make the scare credible, and certainly enough to ensure massive media coverage and maximum public fear. Even Congress had to shut down to allow for the cleansing of its buildings. It may be nothing more than coincidence that the first victim of the anthrax terror in 2000 worked in Boca Raton offices of American Media just one

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Chapter 17. Three Nuns Knocking on the Weapons-gate of WMD block away from where Barbouti had operated his chemical plant with the blessings of President G.H.W. Bush’s CIA. What the main goal of this anthrax exercise was, and who perpetrated it, are not clear, but Sandra Sobieraj, writing for the Associated Press on October 23, 2001, says that the White House Medical Office began protecting at least some White House staff, including Vice President Dick Cheney, with the antibiotic Cipro several weeks before the attack. As for Iraq’s weaponry and its corporate sources, it does not matter whether either of the Bush presidents instigated the deletions from the report or merely encouraged it from the UN sidelines. More important is the extent to which a company such as Carlyle has been turned into a shadow government run by former White House figures. For the years when he was president, the elder Bush allowed former Defense Secretary, Frank Carlucci, to act as CEO of the Carlyle Group — as if to put time and distance between the Bush regime and more current Iraqi events. Below are some details on Carlyle’s connections to Iraq’s list of weapons suppliers. As noted above, Carlyle has investment and executive connections to Rockwell, former operator of the Rocky Flats nuclear bomb plant near Denver. Carlyle is or has been heavily invested in EG&G, successor to Rockwell at Rocky Flats. Prior to that, EG&G headed programs such as Project Rulison and Wagonwheel, which exploded nuclear weapons underground in the Piceance Oil Shale Basin of Colorado — ostensibly to fracture tight oil sands to enable production. These programs succeeded only in serving as fronts for testing Rocky Flats nuclear bomb triggers. Unfortunately, the program wound up sealing by atomic heat the rock pores they were supposed to fracture for the release of oil, and irradiating the oil shale layer, thus placing it off limits for future use due to fear of radiation. This reduces the prospect of American oil independence. The companies like Rockwell — who had knowledge of handling and processing nuclear materials and knew how to operate an A-bomb factory — have been named by Iraq as being a WMD technology supplier. And Carlyle Group, with all its Bush connections, owned part of Rockwell and EG&G at some point. Thus, Carlyle and its owners profited from and participated in the relationship those companies had with Iraq’s weapons program. Big names like Honeywell, Rockwell, Hewlett-Packard and Eastman Kodak are on Iraq’s list. Several of them, including Rockwell, Bechtel, Honeywell and Unisys, also appear on the Pentagon’s list of its Top 100 suppliers. Carlyle

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns itself ranked No. 11 in 2002. By 2004, Carlyle’s capital assets grew from $12 billion to more than $18 billion — a healthy 50% in the wake of the Iraq war. Its growth was based on the acquisition of such companies in anticipation of the military contracts they were destined to receive, and their consequent increased value and profits. When the Sunday Herald of Edinburgh confirmed Zumach’s story, the headline screamed: America Tore out 8,000 pages of Iraq Dossier. The story, written by James Cusick and Felicity Arbuthnot. Zumach’s allusion to the 50 corporate subsidiaries that went unnamed sheds light on Carlyle’s technique for “laundering” its equity holdings to mask the way in which it profits from Iraq’s war machine (or any other, for that matter). However, some idea of how the smokescreen works can be obtained from an example: In 2000 Carlyle acquired Rockwell’s semiconductor business (Conexant), including a factory that makes state-of-the-art silicon-germanium circuitry chips that are used in nearly every weapons and missile system in the US arsenal (e.g., the Crusader artillery system, fighter aircraft built and supported by companies such as Vought, Northrop and Grumman, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, plus tanks, submarines, etc.). This spin-off of Rockwell’s semiconductor business was handled through a Carlyle subsidiary, Conexant. Carlyle appointed two of Conexant’s directors, Robert E. Grady and R. Brent Whisenant, to the board of USBX, an intermediary in the series of Carlyle’s corporate spin-offs. (An interlocking board of directors among corporations is accepted in business circles as a sign of mutual control or a business “trust”.) In turn, Conexant’s equity and technology were quickly spun off into an arms-length network of subsidiary companies called Alpha Systems, Washington Group, Skytel and Alcatel. Eventually, Conexant’s semiconductor and telecommunications technology was employed in China to modernize the telephone systems through Nortel. The electronics and telecommunications systems controlled by the Carlyle group are adaptable to those used in the Bradley Fighting Vehicle owned by another Carlyle asset, United Defense Company. This raises the question: Have China or North Korea or Iraq found a way to create effective war-byproducts using some of the technology United Defense Company has sold to them? It is known that Alcatel offers semiconductor technology useful for “satellite, submarine and mobile networks,” as described by Alcatel’s own website.

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Chapter 17. Three Nuns Knocking on the Weapons-gate of WMD It is also known that Carlyle has a corporate relationship to Alcatel, and through that connection by several subsidiaries it has links to Rockwell, Hewlett Packard, and even Germany’s Hoechst Chemical. All are listed by Iraq as its WMD suppliers, among others. Carlyle Group is noticeably invisible because of its corporate camouflage of secondary and tertiary subsidiaries. Here is a possible corporate model illustrating one way by which Carlyle could be shielding its strategy from prying eyes. The actual details might be different, but the general thrust is the same: Here is one investment model that would account for how the Carlyle Group has masked its WMD and military supply relationships with Iraq: The Carlyle Group

Officers: Frank Carlucci, G.H.W. Bush, James Baker III, John Major, Fidel Ramos Resources: $12.5 billion investments in defense technologies such as Northrop, Vought Aviation, etc. Strategy 1. Hire former high-level administration/Pentagon officials to influence contracts. 2. Invest in companies selling telecommunications to the Pentagon. 3. Take over government consulting positions by acquiring key defense contractors and subsidiaries. Tactics 1. Invest in technologies owned by companies such as Rockwell (a Saddam military equipment supplier). 2. Create corporate spinoffs such as Connexant. 3. Spin off Connexant technology into military suppliers such as Alpha Systems, Washington Group, Skytel and Key Plastics, who provide military products on earth and from space. 4. Control confidential information and provide credible cover for certain activities by acquiring or owning vital telecommunications and energy supplier companies for Asia, Europe and North/South America. 5. Put a US company in a position to influence decisions to go to war or use WMD, while making profits for its directors.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns 6. Form third-tier subsidiaries under control of this company, thus creating by way of investments, Enron, Nortel, Qwest and World Com, among others. 7. From the Conexant spinoff, create and control the satellite/telecommunications faculties of companies such as Alcatel and Zeta — all the while supporting on the side covert Pentagon programs. 8. While achieving this measure of control, simultaneously acquire the transportation faculties of companies such as CSX to render CIA innocent of sending any contraband technology to any destination. This schematic describes just some of the simpler corporate strategies, which even a freelance researcher can identify, that enable the Carlyle Group (and, no doubt, others) to sell WMD technology and other proscribed materials not only to Iraq but to anyone in the world today. These maneuvers make it extremely difficult to trace the actual origins and relationships of such transactions (see Perkin-Elmer scandal, Chapter 20), although evidence on the ground somewhere could still be compromising. The Bush presidents are hiding information that American voters need to know — things that explain the reasons behind the war in Iraq; things that expose the Bushes to a scandal so terrible it would spread guilt to the entire population.

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CHAPTER 18. MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE WMD RANCH “We must guard against…the military-industrial complex.” — President Dwight Eisenhower

About the same time as the nuns’ protest, Carlyle was peddling Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Crusader artillery systems — which are dependent upon WMD-related semiconductor technology — to Taiwan. At the same time Carlyle acquired a huge chunk of South Korea’s banking system to assist with the international financing of Carlyle’s Asian ventures in arms and technology deals. Former President G.H.W. Bush, ex-ambassador to China and ex-CIA director, now directs the Asian branch of Carlyle with the help of Fidel Ramos, former president of the Philippines. In the corporate shell game of equity spinoffs to subsidiaries, Rockwell and its connection through Carlyle to Iraq’s defense industry has been rendered invisible and almost totally deniable. This process of laundering corporate equity applies also to Carlyle’s connection to Honeywell, another Iraqi supplier. Leo Guthart, a Honeywell director, joined the board of directors of USBX, another Carlyle creature, at the time of Carlyle’s acquisition of Conexant In the case of Spectra Physics, an Iraqi supplier that specializes in lasers and semiconductors, the company’s CEO, Patrick Edsell, has Carlyle connections. Woven into the mix is a subsidiary named Captiva, specializing in military software.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns Then there is Unisys, which has subsidiaries such as Key Plastics for supplying parts to the automotive, space and other hardware industries. Carlyle holds investments in Key. Carlyle has, or at some time did have, investments or interests in Hewlett Packard and Bechtel through a web of subsidiaries. Other connections to Iraq may be too deeply submerged to detect. Nobody knows who really owns Carlyle’s non-public companies. Is it the directors, such as Bush, Carlucci, Major and Ramos? Is it the United States, through the CIA? Is it the founder, Rubenstein? Regardless of how cleverly Carlyle disguises its influence on G.W. Bush’s foreign and military policy, its presence became obvious following the President’s “axis of evil” speech in 2002. After President G.W. Bush incriminated North Korea in that speech, the elder Bush sent his son a memo authored by Donald Gregg, G.H.’s former National Security advisor. (Gregg also was the White House linchpin in the CIA’s Bush-Reagan Iran-Contra program). The memo, according to an article authored by Tim Shorrock in The Nation, urged the Bush administration to ease up on North Korea. Sure enough, a few weeks later, G.W. Bush said he was willing to talk to the North Koreans “any time or any place.” But by that time, it seems, the North Koreans had been too deeply insulted by Bush’s earlier rhetoric. At a time when Bush was conducting a war against “terror,” North Korea took Bush’s earlier words as the nearest thing to a declaration of war and so they publicly renounced their nuclear non-proliferation obligations. After all, Bush had cancelled the 1972 Nuclear Arms Proliferation Treaty. With a few words, Bush undid years of work by the Clinton administration in the interest of nonnuclear peace. Today America cavalierly portrays the Koreans as a threat to peace and the political balance of nuclear power, without worrying about who started what. From the beginning of the second Bush administration, Carlyle was busy making business and armament deals with Taiwan and South Korea, which could only make North Korea and China nervous. In March 2001, Carlyle’s Carlucci held private meetings involving the US Taiwan Business Council, Taiwan’s defense minister, Yao-Ming, US defense officials, and US military contractors, including Carlyle’s United Defense Industries (which manufactures the Crusader artillery system). This closed-door meeting

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Chapter 18. Meanwhile, Back at the WMD Ranch was adjourned only after Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz arrived and finalized whatever deal came down. Within days, President Bush was pushing expanded arms sales to Taiwan, where Carlyle has significant equity investments. None of this political and corporate intrigue surrounding the Iraq weapons report has been reported by the media in any connected sense, even though Bush’s deletion of corporate names from Iraq’s WMD list is well known throughout Europe and the halls of the United Nations. The mechanisms behind the scandal remain unknown to America’s patriotic working class, which has come to love Bush’s war with Iraq — mainly because their relatives make up so much of the US fighting force. Any connections, however tenuous, between Saddam Hussein’s outlawed armament program and Carlyle and the elder Bush should be cause for profound dismay among truly patriotic Americans. President G.W. Bush had to urge the deletions of the corporate names from Iraq’s report because they form the links in a chain showing the two Bush presidents to be in an embarrassing conflict with America’s announced geopolitical, economic, industrial and military interests — not to mention their presidential oaths of office. To some extent President Bush was able to brush aside the deletions because the shocking attacks of 9/11 had temporarily united the world with America and no one wanted to challenge the importance of fighting a war against any extremists wild enough to hijack airliners and use them as WMD. If the public knew the truth about Iraq’s armament history, Bush would have had no support for targeting Iraq for its alleged WMD. Then the public might reasonably have concluded there was a “Weapons-gate Scandal” behind the scenes of the War on Terror. The public doesn’t know, or didn’t learn in time, of this scandal because Bush’s war has since wiped out the evidence. Innocent enough on the surface, Carlyle through its Bush connections has direct influence over the political policy process that affects the interests of the nation and world in matters as serious as war. In terms of the proper conduct of business, Carlyle is in a permanent conflict of interest when the leaders of the nation are the same as those who lead Carlyle in its purpose of making its money from war products. The conflict of interest and the harm to the nation should be obvious. Certainly, any nation that takes its military security seriously has to accommodate companies such as Carlyle because they can provide the industrial support for the nation’s security needs.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns That said, in terms clarified and agreed in the Geneva Conventions, the directors of Carlyle and the Bush regime — which are one and the same — have committed war crimes because of their contribution to proliferating weapons of mass destruction and the technology that is their basis. The same people who have the power to get the US to declare war so they can make a profit in the process must be guilty of transgressions that meet the Constitutional definition of “high crimes” on the part of two presidents named Bush. Where such abuse of power leads is pointed out by a recent event: Halliburton, formerly directed by Vice President Richard Cheney, recently received a $7 billion non-competitive contract to put out seven oil well fires in Iraq that were ignited in response to the war of aggression that Bush and Great Britain’s Tony Blair jointly declared. Grounds for the non-competitive nature of the contract were given as “national security.” Before he resigned as Carlyle’s chief, Carlucci was always at pains to say that Carlyle executives “never have lobbied” Congress or the Pentagon over such contracts. Of course, given the big-shot names involved on its board, Carlyle doesn’t have to lobby. It automatically has access to information that is vital to making sound and profitable investment decisions based on war policies that friends in the Bush administration are pleased to confide. In fact, Carlyle executives are in a position to steer White House and Pentagon policy in matters where war industries are concerned without lobbying — as pointed out in an article written by Tim Shorrock of The Nation (March 26, 2002). Shorrock says in his opening sentence: “By hiring enough former officials to fill a permanent shadow cabinet, Carlyle has brought political influence to a new level and created a twenty-first-century version that blurs any line between politics and business.” It also blurs lines between war and peace, “liberation” and occupation, and morality and immorality, whether here in America or Iraq. Carlucci stepped aside and Louis V. Gerstner took the Carlyle helm in November 2002. IBM is known for its oft-quoted motto, “world peace through world trade” and its one-word mantra: “Think.” What Gerstner has Carlyle thinking about, beyond trade in militarily useful semi-conductors for computers and the weapons in which they are embedded, remains to be seen. IBM, ever since the race to the moon a generation ago, has had a lock on missile-related software and hardware. Its on-board and ground-level computers directed the flights that landed men on the moon.

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Chapter 18. Meanwhile, Back at the WMD Ranch Carlyle takes a globalized approach to investment; its 49 managing partners have responsibilities parceled out like a geopolitical grid and managed by those with connections in high places. “Carlyle’s advisory boards are peppered with corporate executives from Boeing, BMW, Toshiba and other big multinationals.” The set-up is aptly described in Shorrock’s headline “Crony Capitalism Goes Global.” Perhaps he should have added a sub-head, “Crony Capitalism Goes Ballistic.” Carlyle big shots chuckle, according to the article, when they hear their capitalistic version of an American cosa nostra described as “secretive.” In fact, Carlyle is neither secretive nor illegal, as Shorrock points out. It is more like an iceberg, visible but mostly hidden. The Carlyle strategy, the one exposed to public view, is to invest in key industries through buyout funds, venture capital funds, or ordinary stock acquisition. Carlyle acquires promising but cash-poor technologies and sets them on their feet by connecting them to the feeding tube of military cash flow contracts inflated by a White House-made war. This is how, for example, Carlyle came to control such war equipment companies as Grumman, Northrop, and Vought. In the case of Rockwell, they simply bought its semiconductor-telecommunications arm, crucial to the armaments industry, and formed Conexant in a corporate spin-off. That company has spawned several others. (Many of these companies have since merged.) Identifying Carlyle’s apparent connections to Iraq’s war machine is extremely difficult, first of all because of the evisceration of Iraq’s war supplier list; second because of the intervening tiers of subsidiary ownerships by Carlyle on a global basis. If it became clear that a company was on the list of WMD suppliers to Iraq, Wall Street would drop it like a hot iron. These are major firms whose success is critical to pension funds and the hardworking people whose future is invested in them. These include the California Public Employees Retirement System, for example, which holds 5.5 percent of the private stock of Carlyle. Many other pension funds are invested in the Carlyle military portfolios. Investors in Carlyle’s various funds include the investment banks of Goldman Sachs and Salomon Smith Barney; investment authorities in Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Brunei; Wells Fargo; huge insurance groups such as American International Group and Union Labor-Life; public pension funds in Ohio, Florida, Michigan and New York; and the corporate pension funds of

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns American Airlines, Boeing, BP Amoco, GM and the World Bank. Having put their money there, they have no course but to support war, right or wrong. The Carlyle Group, with holdings of more than $18 billion in private equities in 2004, is divided into nine investment funds with offices in Charlotte, N.C.; New York City; Washington; San Francisco; Greenwich, Conn.; Tyson’s Corner, Va.; and Newport Beach, Calif. Its foreign investment fund offices are in Barcelona, Spain; London; Milan; Munich; Paris; Hong Kong; Seoul; Singapore; Tokyo; and Bangalore, India. Besides its 49 managing directors, Carlyle has 140 investment professionals handling its nine corporate arms. Carlyle’s investment picks have favored not only energy but aerospace or military-related operations and high-tech stocks in the telecommunications and semiconductor industries where military applications are the government’s best weapons. This has drawn Carlyle ever more tightly into the global armament scene that started with Iraq. Because Carlyle’s insiders have knowledge of White House and Pentagon military strategies, and even the power to influence those policies, it cannot help but be a self-fulfilling prophet of its own financial success. Clearly, Carlyle’s success is not based on a policy that pursues peace in the world, but one of free enterprise warfare in pursuit of the economic, military and political power for controlling oil sources and military technology. In this sense, the Bush family provides to President G.W. Bush a non-governmental tool that is useful for determining military, political and economic policy, including the wisdom of using WMD, or not. Thus the conflict of interest unfolds on three levels key to presidential power. Even the Saudis recognize the problem. After 9/11, it became inappropriate for the Carlyle-Bush interests to be so richly supported by investors from the bin Laden and the Saudi royal families. Carlyle cashed them out of its portfolio within days. For its part, Carlyle is legalistically correct about the care it takes to keep its connections to war-profiteering companies at arm’s length through holdings at second- or third-tier companies. This makes it difficult for the casual outside observer to connect Carlyle and its White House kin to anything suggesting conflict of interest. For example, if you look at the list of the Pentagon’s top 100 contractors for 2001, you will find that the Carlyle Group boxes the collection from the No. 11 spot by also holding the No. 100 spot with its Carlyle EG&G group holdings. In between are Carlyle’s other properties: Bechtel, the No. 20 supplier to the Pen-

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Chapter 18. Meanwhile, Back at the WMD Ranch tagon; Honeywell, the No. 14 supplier; Rockwell, the No. 45 supplier; and Unisys, the No. 59 supplier. Carlyle has or has had ties to all of them, and all of them are on Iraq’s list of weapons suppliers as well. Public servants such as Kenneth Abramowitz, Alan Greenspan and Paul Volcker and the World Bank’s Jessica Einhorn and IBM’s Louis Gerstner are among the world’s notables on international policy boards connecting them to Carlyle founder David Rubenstein and to the WMD policies of both Bush presidents. (They variously serve, for example, on the boards of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Institute for International Economics and Carlyle’s own network of corporate cousins.) Continuing into March 2006, the Carlyle Group is a name that connects the dots among Osama bin Laden, 9/11, WMD in Iraq and America, worries about national security and Dubai Ports World of the United Arab Emirates. Any Google check using the words “Carlyle Group Dubai” produces the proof of conflict of interest within the Bush Administration. As previously noted CSX Lines, which primarily ships cargo for the U.S. military, was acquired by Carlyle Group in February 2003 for $300 million. By way of its investments in Carlyle, Dubai Ports (DP) shared in that action because DP and the prolific bin Laden family have held Carlyle investments since the days of Bush Senior and now Junior. Fast forwarding to February of 2006, Carlyle sold CSX (renamed Horizon Lines) to Castle Harlan, a private New York equity firm, in which DP also is heavily invested. Thus Castle Harlan, hand-in-hand with DP, owns and operates Horizon’s 16 merchant ships and 21,000 cargo containers worldwide. Together they already handle more than one-third of the marine container shipments in and out of US ports. Now the Bush-related plot thickens. — On February 7, 2003, the CEO of CSX (Horizon) was appointed Treasury Secretary by President G.W. Bush. —In January 2006, Bush appointed David Sanborn to be the new administrator of the Maritime Administration of the US Department of Transportation. Sanborn is a former director of Dubai Ports World for Europe and Latin America, where DP already own dozens of ports. The deal, although subject to a useless and belated investigation, has positive economic benefit for Carlyle and its directors. These include, as mentioned above, the ex-president and father of G.W. Bush; James Baker III (the elder Bush’s secretary of state); Frank Carlucci (Reagan’s defense minister while the

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns elder Bush was vice president); and John Major (Britain's former prime minister). Now President G.W. Bush threatens Congress with a veto (his first ever) should they attempt to reverse the takeover by a dubious Arab nation of some of America’s most important ports — all nestled at the home and hearth of 10% of its population. When the deal first became public, President Bush claimed he really didn't know anything about the ports deal until after his administration cronies had signed off on it. Given his connections to the Carlyle Group, his claim would seem to be disingenuous. But these are arcane matters of which the three nuns have no knowledge. They only know what is right and what is wrong.

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CHAPTER 19. AMERICA AS A TWISTED THEOCRACY

“Whoever knew the truth put to the worse in fair and open encounter?” — John Milton

The Bush family dynasty in the White House was at least temporarily, or at least superficially, interrupted by the election of President Bill Clinton. This was at most a brief digression in American history as the nation molted into a Protestant theocracy run by Sunday-amen Texas oilmen. The regime’s spoils program gained momentum with the invasion of Iraq and the demonizing of everything Islamic. It was then that America ran off the rails of democracy. The Bush push for ruling through a twisted sort of theocracy was helped immensely by the 9/11 attacks. Saudi radicals called Americans infidels and Bush called his attacks a Crusade. The war on terrorism eventually became the war on Iraq in the name of two conflicted gods. The first step in the Bush family call for God to bless America was the war against Iraq in Kuwait. The second step was Dubya’s program to wage war against Afghanistan in order to get Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. The US quickly killed enough of Osama’s Taliban supporters to effectively occupy the country and establish a new regime there, but they never got to Osama bin Laden and it is far from clear how long the Afghan regime can last without the presence of American troops. All of this is good news for the Bush-run Carlyle Group which makes its living off of investing in companies that produce military supplies for wars

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns declared by Bush presidents. And so Bush’s third step in his God-bless-America crusade was to invade Iraq. If he could not actually have Osama executed, he could use Saddam Hussein as a proxy. By exhibiting religious feelings in public alongside his war efforts, Bush further evoked and exploited the emotions of his easily-led Christian-conservative taxpayers. He encouraged the confusion of political and religious differences by pitting Christianity once again against Islam. Separation of church and state be damned, it was the perfect occasion for America’s democracy to be twisted into a theocracy. As a backdrop, in 1993 it was widely reported that the first President Bush had been targeted by Saddam Hussein for assassination. In fact, G.W. Bush noted in his speech to the UN in September of 2002, “Iraq attempted to assassinate the Emir of Kuwait and a former American president.” In that same speech Bush declared that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction which he intended to find and destroy. But what was going on behind the scenes, while crack troops were hunting for Osama bin Laden? An article in the New York Times (October 13, 2002) charged that the Carlyle Group was financing a secret army of retired generals and officers capable of running wars outside the purview of Congress. That article also charged that — in fact — cadres of such hired political/military hit men, recruited from retired Pentagon brass, were involved in the battlefields of the Persian Gulf War, Bosnia and very likely Afghanistan. “One in fifty” of those involved, says the Times, were members of the Carlyle-Bush army or officer-level mercenaries. This makes Bush’s urging for war against Iraq doubly troublesome as he insisted the US could go it alone if it had to. The idea that the US president is backed by a private army is chilling, to say the least, and leaves the shredded Constitution churning in his wake. At question, then, is not only the justification given for the war, but what lies at the heart of the US military-political-industrial-economic system that the nuns challenged at the WMD fence in Colorado. On July 6, 2004, the headline in the Rocky Mountain News was based on a syndicated story out of the New York Times by James Risen, screamed: CIA Takes Hit over Iraq. The subhead reads: “Agency Didn’t Report Doubts on Weapons to Bush, Officials Say.”

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Chapter 19. America as a Twisted Theocracy But in fact Joe Wilson had reported such doubts to the State Department, and he was not anonymous; he was commissioned by Vice President Dick Cheney. In other words, Bush lied to America about Iraq’s WMD. As a result, more than 2,000 of America’s sons and daughters have been killed and 16,000 have been wounded by Bush’s lie. Iraq, which entered this decade as a nation of over 30 million, has suffered not only tens of thousands of deaths and countless of injured, but also the ruin of its physical and social infrastructure. All of them were innocent of any dealings in WMD. The New York Times and Rocky Mountain News stories in effect prove ex post facto that the nuns were correct and therefore not guilty of anything except helping to expose the WMD lie. Fortunately, theirs was not quite the hanging offense that the Denver federal courts tried to make it. It takes only a few quoted paragraphs of the news story to explain how the federal courts and, indeed the Bush administration, have shifted their own guilt in regard to Iraq and the non-existent WMD. Of course, one has to expect the administration to circulate “cover stories” when things start to heat up, especially in an election year: The CIA was told by relatives of Iraqi scientists before the war that Baghdad’s programs to develop unconventional weapons had been abandoned, but the CIA failed to give that information to President Bush. The lapse took place even as Bush publicly warned of the threat imposed by Saddam Hussein’s illicit weapons, according to government officials. The existence of a secret prewar CIA operation to debrief relatives of Iraqi scientists — and the agency’s failure to give their statements to the president and other policy-makers — has been uncovered by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Notably, there is no mention of Joe Wilson’s findings about the absence of any uranium from Niger. The story came long after the nuns had been jailed. Odds are that Bush can claim he has never been informed by the CIA or anyone else about the WMD discovery of the nuns or their trial and conviction for breaching national security.

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CHAPTER 20. OF TRAITORS AND TRADERS: PRESIDENTIAL ARMIES SWAPPED FOR PRESIDENTIAL NUKES “Just win, baby.” — Al Davis

Carlyle-controlled companies are still active in the Middle East and have become the target of further counter-attacks by angered Muslims rallying around the remains of Al Qaeda. Among these companies is the Vinnell Corporation, a subsidiary of Northrop-Grumman (owned by Carlyle Group). Camp Vinnell, as it informally was known on the streets of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, was blown to pieces by terrorists May 12, 2003, bringing the deaths of at least 25 people. Robert Koehler, of Chicago Tribune Media Services, says in a recent article, “Poke around in the rubble of Camp Vinnell, the most heavily damaged [by] the Riyadh [suicide] bombers, and good and evil suddenly becomes complicated.” Koehler goes on to explain that the suicide bombers of 9/11 did not act out of a sense of hatred for Americans, as suggested by President G. W. Bush, but as a counter-offensive against military targets in the indiscriminate war declared by Bush against elusive criminals, such as Osama bin Laden, who had backed even the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. “Camp Vinnell is a luxury housing complex,” Koehler says. “[But] be assured that jealousy of the good life (swimming pools, gymnasiums) wasn’t what drove nine Saudis to blow themselves up in order to damage it. They were attacking a military target.”

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns The Vinnell Corporation is, according to Koehler, “one of about 35 US companies staffed with ex-military men, CIA agents and the like, and tied into the highest levels of government — that are cashing in big time on the global business of war.” Koehler cites an article (mentioned above) by New York Times writer Leslie Wayne. That article describes mercenary companies, those that specialize in the mobilization of high-level soldiers of fortune. Leslie says they constitute a “secret army” directed by the White House and the Pentagon to carry out war-style missions for the sake of undeclared political/military objectives. Such companies are known as PMCs, or Private Military Companies. This means that companies such as the Vinnell Corporation are targeted because their corporate parents have the power to conduct paramilitary operations beyond the control of the US Congress. (That power comes indirectly from G.W. Bush through Carlyle Group.) This means, in turn, that the Carlyle Group itself is a mercenary military operation working under the illicit, illegal and unconstitutional control of current and former officials of America’s White House. And it makes a profit for its war-mongering board of directors. Here is how Koehler expressed it: You’ll find them [PMCs] wherever there’s conflict and money. They’re America’s ‘for-profit, secret army.’ They’ve tapped into a global market worth $100 billion a year and growing.…PMCs market expertise in every phase of warfare, and are as indispensable to beleaguered Third World governments as F-15 fighter jets, TOW missiles and Apache helicopters. They carry out the Defense Department’s dirty work, dealing directly with foreign governments as clients, no matter how wretched the governments’ human rights record may be.

If Americans want to understand how and why the attacks occurred on the USS Cole; on the embassies in Africa; on the Pentagon/World Trade Center; on the American complexes in Saudi Arabia; they need look no further than the Carlyle Croup and its self-promoting but negative influence over the economics of America’s politics in the Middle East. Scavengers with the leverage of White House careers run paramilitary companies like Vinnell as if they were an entitled part of our government. President Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex” has become a political-military-industrial complex feeding off the government under the guise of free enterprise turned loose at the discretion of the White House.

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Chapter 20. Of Traitors and Traders: Presidential Armies Swapped for Presidential Nukes This characterization of the Bush/Carlyle Group rule is exactly what drew Osama bin Laden and other radical Muslims to attack the World Trade Center, where companies connected with Carlyle were officed. The Carlyle Group is much more than an investment bank. It is an economic/political power behind the presidential throne, controlled by Bush interests. It is a megalopoly quite like what Bush Sr.’s father Prescott Bush and the Brown Brothers Investment Bank and the Rockefellers and the Morgans and the DuPonts had organized prior to World War II in order to draw profit by doing business with the Nazi regime. That kind of megalopoly reaches out with many fingers in surprising places. In March 2005, Frontline/World (PBS) in a joint investigation with the Center for Investigative Reporting and Mother Jones magazine, reported that federal agents in Denver had arrested a South African businessman, who “who attempted to export 200 nuclear bomb triggers from the United States to Pakistan via Cape Town.” The American company that makes those illegallyshipped parts (Perkin-Elmer) can be traced by stock ownership back to the Carlyle Group. The news could not have come at a worse time. Stepping back from the brink of a nuclear confrontation, Pakistan and India had agreed to talk through their difficulties. The news came at a time when Pakistan’s leader, Pervez Musharraf, had been induced to risk his life and reputation by agreeing to permit Bush to stage his war against terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq through Pakistan’s territory. Was his agreement bought at the price of the nuclear spark plugs? Was the Denver arrest simply a smokescreen for the White House? How did the Carlyle Group decide to drop its Perkin-Elmer investment just before the WMD arrest was made in Denver? The answer can be ferreted out, but it is not easy. Karen Abbott, federal beat reporter for the Rocky Mountain News, wrote this report on January 9, 2004, about an event that happened a week before. She may not have been fully aware of the importance of the information her story uncovered. Under the headline, DIA Arrest Tied to Nuke Control Law, the heart of the article reads: Federal authorities have a man from South Africa in custody for allegedly sending US-made parts that can detonate nuclear weapons to Pakistan. Asher Karni, 50, of Cape Town, was arrested around New Year’s Day at Denver International Airport when he arrived for a Colorado ski vacation.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns The documents said a New Jersey export company with which Karni had corresponded ordered 200 “triggered spark gaps,” high-speed electrical switches that can be used as detonating devices in nuclear weapons, from the manufacturer, PerkinElmer Optoelectronics of Massachusetts. The triggered spark gaps are on a US government list of items that cannot be shipped to certain countries, including Pakistan, without a special US export license. The license requirement is intended to stem the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

What is a “spark gap?” It is a miniaturized version of a pulsed power generator, developed at Los Alamos nuclear laboratories, home of the atomic bomb. Using magnetic pulsed compression in the manner of an electrical capacitor, the spark gap uses high pressure, high temperature energy stored by magnetic compression to release a pulse of power that can trigger concentrically-applied conventional explosives to set off a nuclear bomb. In the original atomic bombs developed by the Oppenheimer team, such concentricity was achieved with mirrors and other devices internal to the core of the bomb. Nowadays, the triggering or amplifying device physically looks like a stubby metal cylinder attached to a small black box which would fit in the pocket of a man’s overcoat. Anyone who has seen the film of the first nuclear explosion at Los Alamos has seen the granddaddy of the first spark gap. Remember the lightning-like stabs of light alongside the mushroom cloud? That is the manifestation of an Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) inherent in nuclear fission reactions. In the years since the 1940s, scientists at Los Alamos have captured such nuclear lightning in a bottle, as it were, but on a small concentrated scale. That bottle is called the triggered spark gap. It is a miniature version of what helps to trigger, and results from, an atomic bomb. The fission bomb itself is but the trigger for a fusion (hydrogen) bomb or a neutron bomb (blastless radiation that incinerates life forms). While Abbott’s article did not make the connection between spark gaps and EMP, it did go on to say that Perkin-Elmer officials claimed to be cooperating with US agents when they sent the first shipment of 66 triggered spark gaps to the New Jersey firm, as scheduled by Karni in September 2003. PerkinElmer also claims it irreparably disabled the devices first. The New Jersey export company allegedly disguised the nature of the triggered spark gaps on shipping documents, describing them as a different item— something ordered by a hospital in South Africa. The subterfuge enabled the New Jersey firm to avoid having to get the special export license.

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Chapter 20. Of Traitors and Traders: Presidential Armies Swapped for Presidential Nukes The triggered spark gaps apparently have an alternative and legitimate use by hospitals. They can destroy kidney stones without surgical intrusion. But manufacturer Perkin-Elmer told federal agents that no hospital had ever ordered more than a handful of them and that even the largest hospitals have very few. As the story goes, Karni received the triggered spark gaps in South Africa from the New Jersey firm and then allegedly shipped them on to a company in Pakistan. Then, according to court documents, Karni E-mailed the New Jersey firm with this message: “Have sent them off to the customer and have not had any complaints yet. I hope I will not have. Is there a reason for the question?” The government’s affidavit for Karni’s arrest indicates he admitted the scheme when South African police searched his business, Top-Cape Technology of Cape Town. The government also said it had a fax sent by Perkin-Elmer’s French sales agent to Karni in June 2003, explaining that a US export license was required to ship the triggered spark gaps to Pakistan. Karni’s case was transferred from Denver to the jurisdiction of District Judge Ricardo Urbina in Washington D.C. In a quiet in-chambers trial there, in May of 2005, Karni pled guilty and was sentenced in August to three years, far below the maximum penalty. Under court guidelines, Karni could be out by May of 2006, assuming time for good behavior. This is even less prison time than any of the three nuns served for trumped-up charges of sabotaging nuclear security. Karni placed in the hands of Pakistan a top secret device for exploding nuclear weapons at a time when the Bush administration needed to use Pakistan as a base of war operations against Pakistan’s fellow Muslims. The nuns neither compromised nor gave away any nuclear secrets. It is hard to read this any other way than that Pakistan was paid with WMD technology for cooperating with the Bush administration; and the Carlyle group, as temporary owner of some portion of Perkin-Elmer, profited from the transaction. The details of the Karni deal must have been known to the Bush/ Carlyle people even as it was ongoing; and the Carlyle sold its stock in EG&G/ Perkin-Elmer at a profit ($250,000,000 by some estimates) before news of the connection could leak. The new super-agency, the Department of Homeland Security, stood quietly by as Karni took a judicial slap on the wrist. Numerous questions remain unanswered: Why was Karni not tried in Denver’s federal court, in the jurisdiction where Karni was arrested? Was the trial transferred to Washington, D.C. to ensure special treatment or secrecy from a federal judge whose ear was closer to

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns the White House? Why was there no publicity splash about the Karni trial like the one that broadcast the news of the Rosenbergs’ trial, who were executed as nuclear spies more than 50 years ago? These questions bring us back to Valerie Plame and her husband Joe Wilson and Bush’s falsified claim that Iraq had received WMD raw materials from Niger. It seems Valerie Plame was working undercover for the CIA and was hot on the trail of Asher Karni who was an Israeli agent doubling as a CIA asset. She knew (and told her husband, who confirmed it) that Iraq was not buying yellowcake uranium from Niger, because such shipments were tightly monitored by France. When this inconvenient fact made its way out, the Bush administration had to destroy Plame’s investigation and her CIA cover. Simultaneously, when the Karni-Bush connections to WMD spark gaps seemed in danger of exposure to the world, Karni was arrested as a spy as he traveled through the Denver airport en route to more secure territory. The arrest covered the tracks of the Bush administration, while maintaining Bush’s favor with Pakistan and Israel. Karni had to go to jail to cover his double-agent role, but he received a paltry three years in a “country club” prison. Meantime several related events ensued: A federal indictment is pending against Humayun A. Khan, a Pakistani businessman who the government says was Karni’s partner. He seems to have disappeared. A reporter for The New York Times, Judith Miller, went to jail for not telling what she knows about the compromising of Plame. Miller is now silent. Columnist Robert Novak, who helped the White House to blow Plame’s cover, never was called to testify about who compromised national security. Watergate’s journalist hero, Robert Woodward, belatedly claims to have knowledge about the Plame matter but was muzzled by the White House under pretext of protecting a source. Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, has been made the fall guy for the WMD-related security leak, but only on charges of lying to the special investigator who brought no other charges once he found out that the guilt traced all the way to the Oval Office. Clearly, Karni’s arrest and trial in the shadow of the White House were contrived and indicate his special status. After all, WMD secrets as vital as those supposed to have been divulged by the Rosenbergs years ago are involved in the Karni case, but there is no proportionate governmental or federal court concern.

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Chapter 20. Of Traitors and Traders: Presidential Armies Swapped for Presidential Nukes Such trading of technical levers of power in exchange for military bases of operation worked quite well in Saudi Arabia in 1990 as the US attacked Iraq. But as has been noted time and again, even by the Council on Foreign Relations, the presence of 5,000 US (non-Muslim) troops on Saudi Arabian soil, home to Islam’s two holiest sites, gives Osama bin Laden and his followers a solid reason to hate America and distrust its motives. The continued presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia, and the continued presence of American troops in Iraq two years after Bush claimed “mission accomplished,” provokes patriotic Arabs and pious Muslims (two groups that overlap but are not necessarily the same) to use the only weapons they have. In other words, Bush policy is driving them to become suicide bombers in Iraq, Israel and elsewhere. Thanks to President G.W. Bush, nuclear technology has leaked from Pakistan to India, to North Korea, and to Iran. As a result America is less secure now than when Saddam was in power, and the world is far less free than the day three nuns protested America’s WMD policy at a nuclear silo in Colorado.

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CHAPTER 21. WMD COMPANIES GET BACK IN LINE FOR SECONDS When they say we’re fighting for freedom, ask first from whom it is being taken, then to whom it is being given, and at what cost to you. The Bechtel Corporation, which was on the list of Iraq’s WMD technology suppliers that Saddam sent to Bush and the UN, has switched sides now that the Iraq war has “ended.” Bechtel is back in line for a second helping of war profiteering, this time as a contractor to the US instead of supplying Iraq’s deposed patron. It wants to be paid to clean up the war mess it helped to create through Carlyle. No one can be sure what Bechtel’s contribution to Saddam’s WMD program was, years ago, because President Bush wanted it kept a secret, even as he went to war over the WMD issue. Certainly Bechtel is not alone. The prize for this reversal of Bush’s demolition derby will simultaneously revive and drain the American economy; a lot of money is changing hands. With an $87 billion annual budgeted to continue US military operations and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush is generating debt that is certain to take the country from stagflation to inflation. Ironically, it was Clinton who handed Bush a balanced budget and a tax surplus longdesired by the GOP. Bush promptly threw that out the window with his irresponsible $600-billion tax cut that strongly benefited the upper income brackets. Halliburton is another among those in line for second helpings. Halliburton, formerly chaired by Vice President Cheney, was awarded a non-compet-

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns itive $7 billion contract to bring Iraq’s oil infrastructure back on line. After two years, that still has not happened. Seeking some of the Iraqi reconstruction action alongside big boys such as Halliburton are small companies like Directed Electronics, founded by US Rep. Darrell Issa. He is the man who delivered the head of California Governor Gray Davis to Bush and Schwarzenegger by funding the recall vote in 2003. Issa now wants his self-serving politics to be rewarded with technology contracts in Iraq. He even sponsored a bill on his own behalf that would require use of his company’s technology. How much of a contract for cellular phones in Iraq will $2 million buy? The question, like the answer, is rhetorical; Bush doesn’t care because the public doesn’t care. If injustice to nuns doesn’t disturb them, neither will the injustice of bearing the cost of an unjust war. The public takes its cues from its leaders. What did it cost to destroy Iraq in the search for WMD that did not exist? (As of year-end 2004, $240 billion.) What is the Bush investment of taxpayer funds per Iraqi cadaver in Iraq? ($240 billion divided by an estimated 150,000 equals $1.6 million per Islamic body.) Given this investment, what is the perbarrel cost so far of all Iraqi oil reserves? ($240 billion divided by 400 billion barrels equals a bargain 60 cents per barrel.) These equations tell oilmen like Bush that life is cheap because oil, even won by means of war, is cheap. In the wake of such profligacy abroad, US citizens are penalized at home as poverty and societal problems remain unaddressed. Having inherited a budget surplus in 2000, the Bush administration is piling up a national debt that will create hardship for future generations. The key to understanding Bush’s position is money. The world has entered an era of unfettered free enterprise and winner-take-all capitalism. That might explain how America’s leaders have done so nicely. Former cabinet member George Shultz sits on Bechtel’s board. He also served on the board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Associated Press calls Science Applications International of California (SAIC) “the most influential company most people have never heard of.” The company is ranked as one of the Pentagon’s top ten defense suppliers. (Carlyle is merely No. 11). Retired Army General Wayne Downing, a SAIC director, was a lobbyist for the US-backed Iraqi National Congress headed by Ahmad Chalabi. Downing served with Shultz and Chalabi on the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Chalabi, now resurgent, is a CIA “asset.”

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Chapter 21. WMD Companies Get Back in Line for Seconds SAIC’s chairman, William Owens, sits on the boards of five companies that received millions of dollars in defense contracts in 2002, and he is a member of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s internal think-tank, the Defense Policy Board. SAIC was fined $2.5 million in 1995 for cheating the Air Force on a fighter cockpit display. Nine members of Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board have ties to companies that were awarded more than $75 billion in defense contracts in 2002. Using such inside connections, the Pentagon formed the Iraqi Reconstruction and Development Council in February of 2003, nearly two months before Bush invaded Iraq. Much of the $87 billion Iraq reconstruction pie has already been earmarked for SAIC, but not even those awarding the contracts (the Pentagon) will ever be sure how much was funneled their way because so much of the work is done under subcontracts with other prime contractors. Some of SAIC’s work comes through the Vinnell Corp., a subsidiary of the aerospace firm TRW. As noted above, Vinnell was sabotaged in 2003 at its complex in Baghdad by antiUS guerillas. SAIC has done research on anthrax and its former employee Dr. Steven Hatfill became a “person of interest” to the FBI following the October 2001 anthrax attacks in the US. Although the company promptly fired Hatfill, who has not been charged with anything, Hatfill was brought back as a consultant to finish work on several projects, according to the Weekly Standard of September 16, 2002. SAIC was asked to investigate the “serious flaws” detected by JohnsHopkins researchers in the voting machines provided by Diebold for the 2000 presidential election in Florida. The Johns-Hopkins report said, “Diebold’s electronic voting system did not meet even the most minimal security standards.” If SAIC issued a subsequent report, it has not been made public. When issues like these are raised about either Bush administration or their corporate connections, or their relationships to the Iraq war, the name of James Baker III always surfaces. Baker is the Houston attorney who was secretary of state under G.H.W. Bush and who was called upon act as G.W. Bush’s representative in the disputed Florida election. As noted above, Baker is the legal director of the Carlyle Group, which, in terms outlined above, has connections to the flow of Iraq’s WMD tech-

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns nology. As recently as April 2005, Baker’s law firm has been connected to the UN “Oil-for-Food” scandal. Move On, a politically progressive nonprofit organization created by George Soros, tracks the wayward doings of government. It has compiled a 24page report entitled A Band of Brothers: The Rebuilding of Iraq. The points posed above are based on Move On’s report. The following revelations and conclusions, which connect some of the political dots, are also based on that report. It is apparent from the mix of corporations and quasi-governmental entities directing their attention to the Iraq “reconstruction” project that politics, not “free enterprise,” is at work. In December 2002, before the start of hostilities with Iraq, the Council for Foreign Relations, a long-standing presidential advisory board, joined with James Baker III to release an outline for rebuilding post-war Iraq. The outline was entitled “Guiding Principles for US Post-Conflict in Iraq.” The committee that conducted the study was chaired by Edward P. Djerejian, a director of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. As it happens, Djerejian is also a director of the compensation committee for BakerHughes. Baker-Hughes and Halliburton subsequently “won” contracts for work in Iraq. (Note: Baker-Hughes is not named after James Baker III.) More recently, James Baker III himself went to the head of the line for a second helping of handouts. President Bush appointed him special envoy to visit dozens of nations to whom Iraq owes money — perhaps as much as $100 billion. Baker’s job is to convince these nations to reduce or forgive Iraq’s debt as a way of helping to restore the economy that the Bush regime wrecked. The nature of his success or failure in this mission is unknown. There are several other major Defense Department contractors also standing in line. One is Fluor International Corp., rooted in Houston. Its guiding light is Peter J. Fluor. Adding to the deeply intertwined Houston-based corporate relations in Iraq, Fluor is also a director of Ocean Energy, Inc., now a part of Devon Energy, which is on the list of companies already contracted for work in rebuilding Iraq. Devon has oil field development relationships with Halliburton. Devon’s CEO, Larry Nichols, sits on the board of Baker-Hughes. Moreover, Devon’s CEO, Larry Hackett, sits on Fluor’s board. SAIC board member Bobby Inman holds a seat on Fluor’s board. When President Bush decided Iraqis needed some lessons in business economics, he chose his good friend Thomas Foley, 51, to teach them. Bush and

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Chapter 21. WMD Companies Get Back in Line for Seconds Foley both attended Harvard. Foley is chairman and founder of the NTC Group, a private equity investment company. He was chairman of Bush’s Connecticut campaign finance committee in 2000, after raising more than $100,000 for his college pal. Under his appointment, Foley is in charge of advising more than 200 Iraqiowned enterprises, including mining, chemical, cement, and tobacco companies. In this capacity, he will draft a privatization plan for state-owned businesses. He also manages all trade and foreign investments coming into Iraq. Before he left for Iraq, Foley had to qualify for a top-secret clearance from the CIA. In addition, a law firm that donated more than $41,000 to George Bush’s 2000 campaign has been chosen to rewire Iraq’s laws. That firm is Squire, Sanders and Dempsey. One of the law firm’s partners, James Dempsey, is personnel chief for the Department of Homeland Security. Dempsey used to work for Donald Rumsfeld back when Rumsfeld was in Congress. The Dempsey law firm will work under an $80 million contract to rewrite Iraq’s business and regulatory code. In the financial services world, when a bank or other financial institution gets so big that its failure would send shock waves through the economy, that institution is deemed TBF (Too Big to Fail). Once a bank achieves TBF status, the government will step in and do whatever it takes to plug the holes and keep it afloat. Sometimes executives will be fired and occasionally even prosecuted. But the institution will live on. However, the biggest contractors who have cornered critical chunks of defense work, such as Halliburton and SAIC and Bechtel, have achieved even more blessed status with the government: They are TBF/TBJ. That means Too Big to Fail and Too Big to Jail. The Bush family is not as much at arms length as their Carlyle smokescreen makes it appear. On February 24, 2005, Rupert Cornwell, an American correspondent for the UK Independent, reported that G.W. Bush’s uncle William “Bucky” Bush profited about $450,000 by selling his stock options in a Pentagon supplier. That contractor is ESSI (Engineered Support Systems, Inc.) of St. Louis. Bucky Bush is on its board of directors. ESSI’s stock hit its peak in January 2005, based on $158 million worth of no-bid Pentagon contracts gained in 2002 after Bucky had joined the board. ESSI’s contract was for equipment to help expedite cargo planes headed for Iraq. In 2003, other contracts were awarded for equipment designed to search for, and protect US soldiers from, Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons. The contracts,

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns Bucky Bush’s arrival at ESSI, and the simultaneous declaration by President Bush that the war was being conducted to destroy WMD (now publicly known not to exist) goes beyond coincidence. It speaks to a war profiteering plan directed from the White House.

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CHAPTER 22. VIVE LA FRANCE, VIVE LE CARLYLE, VIVE LE U.N., VIVE SADDAM No matter how you slice logic, “freedom” bestowed at the point of anyone’s gun remains tyranny. It can be supposed that politically embedded conservatives, having been informed of all these illicit and immoral dealings of their leaders where Iraq is concerned, still may not be convinced of any wrongdoing in the matter of Bush’s war in Iraq They may not buy into the connections between the Bushite Carlyle Group and the WMD technology that put the nuns in jail and plunged America into a war from which there seems to be no happy exit. On January 15, 2004, NBC and Tom Brokaw broadcast the information that a French company, Tripette & Renaud, had participated in a 10% kickback to the regime of Saddam Hussein during the oil embargo imposed during the 1990s by the UN. In other words, a major European food supplier profited by bribing Saddam even as it supplied food paid for by Saddam’s oil as part of the UN’s “Food for Oil” humanitarian program. The program was intended to keep Iraq’s population from starving during the UN/US economic embargo of Iraq. The embargo prohibited all commerce in and out of Iraq by the world’s nations. It was designed as a punishing, non-violent means of subduing the Saddam Hussein regime. But under the US interpretation, the embargo included a US pogrom consisting of daily bombings in the unilaterally declared “No Fly” zones of Iraq — a ten-year assault on Iraq’s sovereignty and the lives of thousands of civilians.

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns (These zones were imposed as a means of aerial inspection of Iraq to make sure it did not have hostile weapons capability. But when anti-aircraft radar from the ground locked onto the inspection warplanes, it triggered a “defensive” response from the aircraft that brought bombing.) The UN quickly discovered that the embargo was resulting in the starvation of Iraq’s population, so Saddam was permitted to sell oil in exchange for food. This became known as the “Oil for Food” program. Companies such as Tripette & Renaud were told by Saddam that if they wanted to do business with Iraq they had to provide to his banks a kickback on the value of the “grocery bill.” This illegal barter amounted to $65 billion worth of oil over the years for a similarly marked-up amount of food and medicine flowing from dozens of suppliers worldwide. Tripette & Renaud was just the tip of the iceberg in such commerce. International oil companies buying Iraq’s oil also had to pay a kickback premium. By April 2005, a Houston-based oil company known as Bay City, some of whose stock was owned by Carlyle, and which was a client of Baker’s law firm, was indicted in the UN “Oil-for-Food” scandal. Other Texas oil barons known to the Bush family are also implicated. As NBC previously reported, at least $6.5 billion went into Saddam’s bank accounts and was used in some part to fund the Iraq military in fighting those who opposed his corrupt regime. NBC suggested that some of that money was spent by Saddam to fund resistance to America’s latest invasion of Iraq. It was just about the only avenue left to him. Whether the people of Iraq got all the food and medication paid for is questionable. It’s possible the food never made it to their mouths but found its way instead into the mess halls of Saddam’s military. Who owns Tripette & Renaud? Tripette & Renaud’s parent company is Insensia Group. And through a chain of wholly-owned subsidiaries, Insensia Group is owned by the Carlyle Group. (The networked subsidiaries include Aimquote, Aim Investor, Bin Laden Investment Group, Rexnord, and Invensys.) All are or were owned in part, or have been bought and sold at a profit, by the Carlyle Group. The exact connections are unclear because Carlyle Group is a privately held investment bank and has no legal obligation to report its holdings. And who controls the Carlyle Group? As noted above, the controls are in the hands of President Bush the elder, and former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci, and

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Chapter 22. Vive La France, Vive Le Carlyle, Vive Le U.N., Vive Saddam former Secretary of State James Baker III and former British Prime Minister John Major. (G.W. Bush was a former director of one of Carlyle’s companies.) Thus, the Carlyle Group and the Bush family are “grandparents” of a French company that has profited from the deal with Saddam Hussein that subverted the purpose of the embargo. And so, while the Bush-Carlyle consortium was profiting from its military investments during the “No Fly” bombing of Iraq, it was also taking investment profits from the “Food-for-Oil” exchange through the deal with Saddam. More recently, Bayoil, Inc. of Houston, and its owner, David Chalmers, have been indicted for profiting from the same kickback scheme. The Bushes participated in Carlyle’s investments over the years in companies such as Bayoil, Chevron, Exxon-Mobil and Koch Petroleum. As independent journalist Wayne Madsen declared in his internet site in May 2005, “The US oil companies involved in the (Iraq) sanction-busting have long-standing connections to the Bush family and their largest corporate benefactors.” (The Bush-Carlyle-Bayoil connection is explained below.) In support of Madsen’s report, he notes “The Democratic minority report (on the Oil-for-Food program) stated ‘From 2000 to 2002, Bayoil and its affiliates…became one of the largest importers of Iraqi oil into the United States‘.” The report also states Samir Vincent, an Iraq-born American, obtained Iraqi oil allocations through his company, Phoenix International (McLean, Va., where the CIA is headquartered) and sold them to Chevron Products Company. As Madsen also points out, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sat on the board of Chevron before being elevated to her cabinet position with the Bush administration. Thus, the plot and the cast of characters would seem to thicken. As Madsen points out, “A Chilean-Italian named Augusto Giangrandi, a resident of Florida, served as chairman of Bayoil. While others were indicted, Giangrandi was not touched. “Giangrandi has a history that goes back (beyond) the first Iran-Iraq war when Donald Rumsfeld was helping to arm Saddam and when the Reagan-Bush administration was violating the UN arms sanctions imposed against both warring parties,” Madsen says. During that war, Iraq bought billions of dollars worth of cluster bombs and other weapons from Carlos Cardoen, who was close to Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet. In 1983, Madsen says, Cardoen hired Giangrandi, then a resident of Florida, to obtain zirconium, a metal used in the manufacture of cluster bombs (and also useful as a lining for pipes in atomic reactors).

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns “According to a 1995 deposition by Howard Teicher, a Reagan National Security Council official, Cardoen was working for the CIA to illegally ship military hardware to Saddam,” Madsen says. If that is so, Bayoil forms another link in the chain of scandal clamped around the ankles of the Carlyle Group and the Bush family. But as Madsen also points out, “Giangrandi’s operation was part of a much larger criminal conspiracy involving loans guaranteed by the Department of Agriculture’s Commodity Credit Corporation and funded by Italy’s Banca del Lavoro (BNL).” (See previous BNL discussion, Chapter 17.) “The failed Bank of Credit and Commerce International (once chaired by G.H.W. Bush) had connections to BNL,” Madsen says, noting that BCCI was also known as the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International. In 1992, as Madsen notes, “The Wall Street Journal reported that George W. Bush and Jeb Bush had been named as potential witnesses in the class action lawsuit brought about the clients of BCCI who had been defrauded in the bank’s collapse.” They never were called to testify. That would seem to complete the suspicions about Bayoil and its connection to Carlyle and the Bush family through Cardoen except for one other sinister aspect reported by Madsen: “Between 1990 and 1991, three journalists who were investigating various aspects of Cardoen’s activities were found dead in suspicious circumstances. They were freelance writer Danny Casolaro, found dead from wrist slashes in a bathtub in a Martinsburg, West Virginia, hotel; Lawrence Ng, a stringer for the Financial Times, found shot to death in the bathtub of his apartment in Guatemala City; and Johnathan Moyle, a British aviation journalist found hanging in the closet of his hotel room in Santiago, Chile. “Moyle,” as Madsen noted, “had uncovered details of Cardoen’s role in the Bush 41 (G.H.W.) deal to illegally ship weapons to Iraq.” Getting back to the Democratic minority report on the Oil-for-Food scandal, Madsen had this to say: “While French companies such as Total-Final-Elf objected to paying (Saddam’s) surcharge, American companies like Exxon-Mobil and Texaco began to acquire Iraqi oil through third parties that were paying the surcharges. These third parties included Bayoil.” The scandal, of course, does not stop there. As Madsen concludes, “Minority report documents indicate that one of the largest recipients of Bayoil Iraqi oil shipments was Enron, the bankrupt

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Chapter 22. Vive La France, Vive Le Carlyle, Vive Le U.N., Vive Saddam company that served as a virtual slush fund for the political campaigns of George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.” The combined contributions to the G.W. Bush campaign from these oil companies in return for Bush’s blind eye added up to millions of dollars; and a military invasion of Iraq increased the revenues for all involved in the Carlyle Group. In November 2005 the final report of Paul Volcker on the UN Oil-for-Food scandal was released. The 623-page report accuses more than 2,200 US and foreign companies of colluding in kickbacks to Saddam Hussein between 1996 and 2003. Many of the companies named on that list were also on the Bushredacted list of companies who had contributed WMD technology to Hussein. Among the companies cited in the Volcker report are Daewoo International, rescued from bankruptcy by Carlyle Group, and its Asian president, Michael Kim. In 1987, Carlyle bought the KorAm bank that Daewoo helped to found, along with BankAmerica. Then there is Daimler-Chrysler, which has vast holdings in Asia. Among its leading stockholders, according to Jules Kroll & Associates, were Saddam Hussein and Carlyle Group. Sherman H. Skolnick reported in December of 2003 that the Wall Street Journal had published that fact in 1991 in an article detailing Saddam’s holdings. Daimler-Chrysler is high on Volcker’s list, as is Siemens-AG. At least two of Siemens’s former officers/directors (Dr. Wolfgang Hanrieder and R. Ulrich Schumacher) are on the board of Carlyle’s European Ventures Group — through which Carlyle Group conducted its Oil-for-Food dealings with companies such as Tripette & Renaud. From Barbouti to Perkin-Elmer to Tripette & Renaud and now Bayoil, President Bush is benefiting from an old family talent in trading with the enemy. (Dubya’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, was involved along with the Rockefellers in banking deals with Nazi Germany.) Thus, the oil and food deals that were supposed to be guided by UN oversight went corrupt under Prescott’s grandson, G.W. Bush. What happened in fact is that Saddam was able to strengthen his military while Bush’s pals lined their pockets through Carlyle. Some members of the UN team serving the Oil-for-Food program were cited or indicted as sacrificial lambs in 2005 for participating in kickbacks from the sale of oil. Of course, if companies such as Carlyle were benefiting from the scheme, there had to be cooperative officials to help make it happen. That’s how UN Sec-

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns retary-General Kofi Annan came under suspicion. He became the target of finger-pointing by the Bush administration, while other fingers point back at them. Other executives included Samir A. Vincent, who pleaded guilty in New Orleans in 2005. To date nobody centrally connected to Tripette & Renaud or a Carlyle subsidiary has been brought to trial. Meantime, Saddam Hussein’s trial for crimes against humanity is proceeding at a pace that indicates he may die in jail before the American form of justice imposed on Iraq will reach a conclusion. By January 2006, the three nuns who brought the world’s attention to the real presence and impact of WMD, had been released from jail.

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AFTERWORD: REFLECTIONS FROM EISENHOWER “Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.” — George Santana

On leaving office in 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the general and president who understood so well America at war and America at peace, issued a warning. That warning obviously has been lost to most Americans and has been ignored by its current leaders. Here are the vital excerpts: We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these holocausts America is today the strongest, the most influential and most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America’s leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and betterment. A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. Our military organization today bears little relation to that known to any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea. Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political,

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Even before Eisenhower spoke those words, he was concerned about the effects of putting the nation on a wartime footing in peacetime. He spoke for the yet-to-come Plowshares protesters and the concern of the three nuns, when he said: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in a final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed — those who are cold and not clothed.”

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APPENDIX A. SACRED EARTH AND SPACE PLOWSHARES II Nuns’ Statement Left at Silo N-8 October 6, 2002 Who abides in God’s heart [are] Those who heal rather than hurt, and those who love rather than hate… Psalm 15 We, women religious, naming ourselves Sacred Earth and Space Plowshares II, come to Colorado to unmask the false religion and worship of national security so evident at Buckley AFB in Aurora, the Missile Silos, and in Colorado Springs: Schriever AFB [the space warfare center], the Air Force Space Command Center at Peterson AFB, Cheyenne Mountain (NORAD), and the Air Force Academy. We reject the mission of these along with the US Space Command and Stratcom [formerly SAC] in Omaha, Nebraska. We come in the name of Truth, an-Nur, the Light. God alone is master of space, of the heavens that “pour forth speech…There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard” (Ps. 19:2), a voice that proclaims world community, not domination of the world’s economy; peace, not planning for space warfare. We hope in the light of that world to name things what they are, to unmask the lies, abuses, and racism hidden in the rhetoric of patriotism, security and moral superiority. We reject the US Space Command “Vision for 2020” to dominate space for military operations; to exploit space as a US 4th frontier, making all other nations vulnerable to US conventional and nuclear attacks; to

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns integrate space force for warfighting; to abuse the Aleutian Islands and other lands with interceptors and spy satellites and to waste more billions of dollars and more human and material resources, causing the destruction of earth and the desecration of space. We walk in the name of the Shepherd, ar-Rashid, the One who leads us on the path to justice for the “have-nots” rather than military power “to deny others the uses of space” and even of their own resources. We walk unafraid. We trust the Shepherd who is also the Way of active nonviolence and generous sharing that will lead to true security. We act in the many names of God the Compassionate, ar-Rahim: our Life, our Peace, our Healer to transform swords into plowshares, our violence and greed into care for the whole community of earth and sky, not as masters, but as servants and friends. We pray in the name of al-Qabid, the One who holds the whole world, who said, “I will do whatever you ask in my name” (Jn. 14:13). Shalom Salaam Shanti

Peace

Carol, Jackie, Anne, Ardeth Oh, my God, teach me how to be a peacemaker in a hostile world (Ps. 120).

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APPENDIX B. THE NUREMBERG PRINCIPLES (These, by virtue of Article VI of the US Constitution, are law in the US.) Principle I: Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefor and liable to punishment. Principle II: The fact that international law does not impose a penalty for an act which constitutes a crime under international law does not relieve the person who committed the act from responsibility under international law. Principle III: The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as a Head of State or responsible government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law. Principle IV: The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him. Principle V: Any person charged with a crime under international law has a right to a fair trial on the facts and the law. Principle VI: The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law: (a) Crimes against peace: (i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances; (ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (I). (b) War Crimes:

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WMD, Nukes and Nuns Violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation of slave-labor or for any other purpose of the civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons of the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity. (c ) Crimes against humanity: Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds, when such acts are done or such persecutions are carried on in execution of or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime. Principle VII: Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity set forth in Principle VI is a crime under international law.

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