Protestors at Pentagon August 9, 2005 Remember Nagasaki

In Remembrance of the bombing of Nagasaki 60 years ago, people at the Faith and Resistance retreat in Washington D.C. went to the Pentagon early this morning. Dressed in sackcloth, some 40 protesters held signs, prayed and sang. They held a banner that read: "We sit in sackcloth and ashes to repent the sins of war and nuclear weapons."
Those risking arrest wore sackcloth and sat in ashes they poured on or around themselves while blocking the way of workers going into the Pentagon.
Arrested were Steve Baggarly, Kathy Boylan, Brian Buckley and Susan Crane, Art Laffin, Liz McAlister, and Bill Frankel-Streit. The Pentagon police were unusually rough, reminding us all that we never know what to expect when we engage the powers. They told us that they had been expecting us since Friday a.m. and were mustered by 3:00 a.m. each day. All those arrested have a court appearance on November 18.
As we were blocking the entrance way, some of us were remembering a video of footage taken directly after the bombing of Hiroshima, where we heard in detail that school children were killed in their classrooms, prisoners were killed in their cells, half the medical doctors died in hospitals, people were killed going to work. After this description of the bombing of Hiroshima and of Nagasaki, we wonder how we don't see our own terrorism in the world.
The resistance at the Pentagon creates hope. That was manifest when one of the arresting officers (one not using compliance holds or gratuitous violence) said that he agreed with most of what we were saying.

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