Guilty of Peace Making.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Michael Sprong and Bonnie Urfer found guilty of destroying government property, even though they claim they were trying to prevent a nuclear war - Brief Article

I spent two days in February in a federal courtroom in Madison, Wisconsin, that was packed with peace activists. Even Dave Dellinger was there, one of the Chicago Seven, still keepin' on at eighty-five.

He and the rest of us wanted to witness the fate of two modern-day abolitionists, Bonnie Urfer and Michael Sprong. Part John Brown, part Mahatma Gandhi, Urfer and Sprong were on trial for the crime of attempting to save your life and mine.

That wasn't the official charge, of course. The official charge was criminal destruction of federal property.

On June 24 last year, Urfer and Sprong used a hand saw to chop down three transmission poles at the Navy's ELF facility in Clam Lake, Wisconsin, dismantling it for twenty-four hours. No one was hurt. (See page 19 of our August 2000 issue, "Giving the Ax to Nuclear Subs.")

ELF stands for Extremely Low Frequency, but there's nothing elfin about that naval operation. It's deadly serious business: the business of waging nuclear war.

The ELF towers send one=way messages to the U.S. fleet of Trident submarines loaded with nuclear warheads. And if the orders come for nuclear war, they would be delivered from the wires on the very poles that Urfer and Sprong chopped down.

At the trial, Urfer said, "ELF is the hair trigger to start nuclear war. It's continuously cocked and ready."

She and Sprong maintained they were acting in accordance with international law when they sawed down the poles.

"I believe that stopping the annihilation of life on this planet is lawful," testified Urfer.

But the judge wouldn't let them present a defense based on that argument. The only defense they were left with was that they were relying on the advice of a lawyer they had consulted months before they took up the ax. This lawyer, an expert in the field, assured them they had a legal right to do what they did.

Well, the jury didn't buy...