Gone Nuclear
Repeat protestors get harsher treatment for actions at Kitsap submarine base

By CYDNEY GILLIS
Staff Reporter

They expected to get arrested. They didn’t expect to spend a day and a half in jail.

The three unlucky demonstrators who blocked the road last summer at the naval base in Bangor, Wash., say it’s part of a crackdown on people who protest the nuclear weapons carried by Trident submarines.

The protesters, however, plan to use their misfortune to make a point: In a trial that started this week in Port Orchard, they intend to turn the tables and put Trident on trial.

On the morning of Aug. 7, 2006, Brian Watson, Carol Ann Barrows, and Shirley Morrison, an 84-year-old member of Seattle’s Raging Grannies chorus, were arrested by Kitsap County deputies after stepping into the highway leading to the Bangor base, which is home to nine of the nation’s 14 Trident subs.

Of the 40 protesters there, deputies arrested three others but let them go the same morning. Watson says the county singled out Barrows, Morrison, and him — setting bail at $5,000 each — because they had been arrested May 15 in a similar Bangor protest organized by Poulsbo’s 30-year-old Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action.

The three refused to post bond and spent 37 hours in jail. They are now fighting two counts each of disorderly conduct in both May and August. If they lose, each could be sentenced to 180 days in jail and fined $2,000.

It’s part of a crackdown, Watson says, that started after the Mother’s Day protest last May. Since then, he says, deputies have immediately arrested any protester who stepped over the fog line on the road to Bangor. But it’s the first time in nine years, Watson says, that the county has demanded bail of any Ground Zero protester.

“They’re trying to put a stop to people risking arrest,” says the Bremerton sculptor and stay-at-home dad. But, “Their tactics aren’t going to work, because as more and more people learn the truth about what’s at Bangor, more are going to come out.”

What’s at Bangor, according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, are 2,364 nuclear weapons, or one quarter of the nation’s entire nuclear arsenal — something that defense attorney Michael Stowell plans to argue is well within his clients’ right to protest under international law.

To help make the case, Stowell plans to call two expert witnesses: Dr. David Hall of Physicians for Social Responsibility and John Burroughs, an authority on international law who spoke about Bangor in Seattle Jan. 20 (“Our Own Backyard: International law expert sees a ‘holocaust’ in Puget Sound nuclear arsenal,” Jan. 17). The judge is scheduled to rule this week on whether they can testify on issues such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the effect of nuclear weapons.

“It’s very clear that international law prohibits the use of weapons that can’t distinguish between civilians and soldiers,” Watson says. “You don’t have to be an expert in nuclear weapons to know they are horrendous weapons of mass destruction that kill children just as easily as they kill soldiers.”

Under the Nuremberg Principles, a set of guidelines that emerged from the post–World War II trials for Nazi war crimes, Watson says citizens have a duty to resist complicity in crimes against humanity. “We have a responsibility to take nonviolent, direct action to try to change the policy and practices of our government,” he says.

Co-defendant Shirley Morrison, a great-grandmother of six, agrees. “The law,” she stresses, “says [nuclear weapons] are illegal.”

With or without the experts, Watson says he’s optimistic because similar arguments worked after he and other Trident protesters were arrested and tried in 1999.

Going to trial is “an effective way of bringing the public’s attention to an issue that is of life and death consequence but is largely hidden or ignored,” he says. “We’re going to be acquitted because the facts of the case are clear.”

[Resource]

More online about nonviolent opposition to one-quarter of the nation’s nuclear arsenal stationed on the Kitsap Peninsula: www.gzcenter.org.

Everything you wanted to know about Trident missiles and the eight Fleet Ballistic Missile Submarines at Bangor: www.navy.mil/navydata/fact.asp.