The Mixed-up Trial of the Transform Now Plowshares (TNP) By Anabel Dwyer 5/14/13

The Mixed-up Trial of the Transform Now Plowshares (TNP) By Anabel Dwyer 5/14/13


Stand up and demand release of Sr. Megan Rice, Greg Boertje-Obed and Michael Walli.

A jury convicted the TNP -3 of two felonies depredation of US property over $1000 and injury to the national defense for cutting through four fences and putting peace messages and blood on the Highly Enriched Uranium Building at the Y-12 nuclear weapons production site in Oak Ridge Tennessee.[1]

The Court labels the Transform Now Plowshares “violent” and sends them to prison before sentencing. Does our system of law allow nuclear bomb-builders to fight for $22 billion 10-year contract at Oak Ridge [2] while punishing an elderly for, “Let’s stop pouring billions into false and impossible security?”[3]

What avenues/arguments for release and acquittal of the TNP should be still be pursued?

Flawed “Damage” assessment:

The “damage” figures that the Y-12 staff administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)/Department of Energy (DOE) testified to at trial need vigorous re-challenging. Those figures were based on an “unsupported assumption[4]” that overtime Saturday emergency workers needed to be called in on the day of the TNP action on July 28, 2012 to “clean” the HEU building walls and “repair” the fences which had not been functioning for months

1. The TNP should demand again detailed accounting as to who ordered the emergency repairs and who calculated the charges assessed to the defendants. NNSA relied at the time on of the TNP action on G4s/WSI Wackenhut, the security contractor and Babcock and Wilcox Technical Services (BWXT) Y-12 LLC, the management and production contractor(a subsidiary of BWX Technologies and Bechtel National).

2. Why would NNSA rely on figures submitted, ordered or claimed by these contractors? On September 12, 2012 responded to NNSA’s letter to show cause as to why its’ contracted should not be terminated because of the fraud and negligence which “allowed” the TNP to reach the HEU building for a peaceful action. On September 28, 2012 BWXT Y-12 LLC terminated the security contract of WSI. NNSA informed BWXT Y-12 LLC in January 2013 that its contract would not be renewed. [5]

3. Col. Anne Wright testified at trial, the TNP action was merely a “wake-up” call that these highly dangerous materials and nuclear weapons are treated carelessly even within the US’s own truncated version of security.[6]

What “Security” in nuclear weapons?

The Y-12 NNSA Productions Manager Steve Erhart testified that nuclear weapons were necessary for security and about his opinion that the “credibility of US’s nuclear deterrent” was compromised by the TNP action. The problem of the TNP security breach, he said was the “normalization of deviations occurred culturally overtime.”

By permitting this testimony, the Court bizarrely based the TNP trial on a presumption of innocence not of the Defendants but of Y-12 production, life-extension, refurbishment of thermonuclear warhead secondaries and cases at Y-12.

Using updated information from the Oslo Conference on the Catastrophic Humanitarian Effects of Nuclear War, the TNP presented to the court non-refuted evidence of the known and intended catastrophic humanitarian and environmental consequences of the specific thermonuclear warheads secondaries and cases produced or refurbished at Y-12 ( Ira Helfand Declaration).

The Court admitted at a pre-trial hearing that the Y-12 warheads are indiscriminate but claimed that Ramsey Clark was not a scientist and thus could not say they were uncontrollable.

The TNP showed the court in numerous briefs and testimony that that acts of the US at Y-12 amount to known US plans and preparations for war crimes and genocide well outside the Constitutional war powers of the US Congress or Executive. In addition as Ramsey Clark testified the plans and preparations at Y-12 constitute a grave breach of the Disarmament obligation agreed to in Article VI of the NPT in violation of the Article 6 of the US Constitution.



Deterrence not disarmament found to be US legal obligation?

According to the government’s witnesses, the TNP injured the national defense by putting into question the “credibility of US nuclear deterrent.” The prosecutor “justified” the planning, preparation of unusable thermonuclear warheads at Y-12 by arguing that they are for “deterrence.”

1. The US knows or should know that the “policy” of nuclear deterrence” consists of a “credible threat to use” and is therefore fundamentally unlawful.

2. The Court could not yet get beyond the hump that these specific Y-12 warheads are in the category of nuclear weapons which violate ipso facto in any circumstance the bedrock rules and principles of humanitarian law. The Courts and prosecutors continue to read the ICJ Opinion wrongly to say that whatever is not specifically prohibited in or of war by name or per se, is permitted.

3. The court again wrongly applied the “protection of property statutes” declaring that they are wholly independent of (or even trump) well-established legal limits to constitutional war powers including the Hague and Geneva Conventions.

4. The US then claimed and the Court agreed that the TNP had no right or privilege to raise the fundamental unlawfulness of planning and preparation of these particular Y-12 thermonuclear warheads at Y-12 because this is a political question not within the purview of the court.



This court must enter a judgment of acquittal for these defendants since it has admitted that it has no subject-matter jurisdiction over the lawfulness or unlawfulness of the admitted subject matter of this case (the Y-12 production of thermonuclear warheads and the unprotected HEU, weapons grade uranium).

This court further does not have the power or authority to presume legality of planning and preparation of warheads known and intended to threaten or inflict catastrophic harm and damage well outside legal limits to providing for the Common Defense.

And if continuing production and deployment of thermonuclear warheads at and from Y-12 warheads “assures domestic Tranquility, promotes the general Welfare, and secures the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” I’ll eat my hat.

Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs