Peter DeMott's Sentencing Statement

I would like to begin my remarks by observing a moment of silence to honor the dead of the war in Iraq, the 2300 or so United States military and coalition personnel who have died as well as the tens of thousands of Iraqis who have been slaughtered, ninety percent of them civilians, thirty or so percent of that number innocent children.

I was present in this courtroom yesterday morning in solidarity with my friend Danny Burns. While here I heard Mr. Lovric characterize Danny, Clare, Teresa and myself as arrogant, as people entirely lacking any respect for the law, and yet, perhaps even more reprehensible to Mr. Lovric's way of thinking, completely devoid of any sense of remorse or contrition for what we have done.

And what have we done? What acts have brought us to this court? Out of what context did they arise?

In the months leading up to the war on Iraq hundreds of thousands of people, in fact millions of people in different cities and towns around the world turned out to protest against this war. Some of the largest anti war protests in human history took place to voice opposition to what everyone knew would be a bloodbath of gruesome proportions. Our act of civil disobedience was not the only one of its kind. Many others came from their communities of concern to say “NO!” to the war.

On March 17th, Saint Patrick's Day of 2003, two days before the United States launched its illegal, unjust war of aggression on Iraq Danny, Clare, Teresa and i went to our local Army and Marine Corps recruiting station and after carefully and prayerfully pouring a small amount of our own blood in the lobby, we knelt in prayer and read the following statement:

“Killing Cannot Be With Christ”-St. Patrick
“Our apologies, dear friends, for the fracture of good order.” As our nation prepares to escalate a war on the people of Iraq by sending hundreds of thousands of US soldiers to invade, we pour our blood on the walls of this military recruiting center. We mark this recruiting office with our own blood to remind ourselves and others of the cost in human life of our government's war making.

Killing is wrong. Preparations for killing are wrong. The work done by the Pentagon with the connivance of this military recruiting station ends with the shedding of blood, and God tells us to turn away from it. Blood is the symbol of life. All life is holy. All people are created in the image and likeness of God. All people are family and everyone is loved by God.

Dr. Martin Luther King reminds us that “we are called to speak for the weak, the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers [and sisters]”.

We come here today with pictures of Iraqi people-mothers, children, those who have been the victims of US bombardment and sanctions for the past twelve years. We come here with love in our hearts for the young US service people, also victims of warmaking.

We find hope in these dark times when sisters and brothers around the world resist the spirit of hatred and violence, lift up prayers for peace-together with works of peace.

Our peaceful, nonviolent protest helps to make up part of the rich history of civil disobedience which has been a central element of the American democratic process from its very beginning. On December 16, 1773 American colonists boarded ships in Boston harbor and destroyed large quantities of tea to voice their oppostion to injustices perpetrated by the English Parliament. During the nineteenth century right up to the Civil War people of conscience helped African slaves escape from bondage, in some cases smuggling them into Canada all in direct violation of the laws of that benighted era when slavery was legal, proper and part of the status quo. In 1920 with the ratification of the Nineteenth Ammendment to the Constitution women in this country finally secured the right to vote but only after many of them engaged in civil disobedience protesting the injustice of suffrage denied by chaining themselves to the fence in front of the White House among other principled and impassioned actions. Throughout the l950's and 60's Martin Luther King, Jr. led many justice seeking people to violate the laws which protected and enforced segregation and effectively relegated African-Americans to the status of second class citizens. These few examples could be amplified considerably to show that civil disobedience has helped to change unjust laws and practices in our country and has played a significant role in the realization of a more just and equitable society.

Many of those who have advocated and practiced civil disobedience have been arrested and incarcerated including Henry David Thoreau who had this to say on the subject: “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly (And I submit that the United States government has done and is doing exactly that even as we speak, not only imprisons people unjustly but barbarically tortures as well) the true place for a just person is also a prison. The proper place to-day, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles.”

I look forward to the day when President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell and their associates stand trial and are held accountable for the crime of the genocidal war on Iraq, a war begun by the current president's father and prosecuted further by the Clinton administration with its sanctions and its bombings. The war on Iraq is THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY, and both President Bush, President Clinton and those who have aided and abetted them have gotten away with murder.

Every war carries with it the seeds of the war that inevitably follows it. Jesus tells us that those who choose to live by the sword will themselves die by the sword. Through this war our country invites its own destruction. Through our country's use of weapons of mass destruction we are assuring and finalizing our own demise and our own doom. Thousands of tons of depleted uranium munitions have been used to prosecute the war on Iraq and have resulted in the contamination not only of the air, soil and water of that region but also of our own service personnel. These young people return home with a host of medical problems, some of them procreating severely deformed and handicappped offspring as a result of their exposure to depleted uranium. Meanwhile the cancer rates among the Iraqi population greatly exceed those considered normal for that area.

The fact that our government has wantonly and blatantly contaminated and irradiated the Iraqi landscape with highly toxic carcinogens should shock and alarm each and every one of us. I know first hand (as do probably many people in this courtroom) from having lost my father and my sister Mary to cancer and from having two brothers who currently battle some of the worst kinds of cancer how devastating this illness can be, and yet the war spreads and promotes cancer on a massive scale. What greater possible crime against humanity?

Danny, Clare, Teresa and I took our action, not from a place of arrogance, but from a place of humility. Humility comes from the Latin word humus meaning earth or soil. Humility implies a recognition of one's status as a creature and of one's connection to and inter-relatedness with the web of life, with other human beings and with the earth. We identify with the victims of war making and we attempt, admittedly with clumsy grace, to speak on their behalf.

The law should promote life and the well being of everyone and should preserve and protect the earth and its creatures. In a democracy we need to be vigilant in insuring that our leaders not abuse the law. It is the responsibility of each and every one of us to nonviolently confront those who break the law with impunity which is what our leaders have done through their use of lies and deceptions and forgeries to promote and prosecute this war. It is Uncle Sam who puts himself above international law by consistently and systematically violating it whenever and wherever so doing helps achieve his purposes.

As I stand here awaiting sentencing I want to express my remorse. I feel a deep and profound remorse for having participated in the war in Vietnam. Some fifty-eight thousand Americans died in that war. Some TWO MILLION Vietnamese!! For what?
I feel remorse for not having obeyed Christ's command to love your enemies, to love one another.

I would like to close my remarks by reading a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “There is nothing wrong with a traffic law which says you have to stop for a red light. But when a fire is raging, the fire truck goes right through the red light......Or, when a person is bleeding to death, the ambulance goes through those red lights at top speed...... Disinherited people all over the world are bleeding to death from deep social and economic wounds. They need brigades of ambulance drivers who will have to ignore the red lights of the present system until the emergency is solved.......Massive civil disobedience is a strategy for social change which is at least as forceful as an ambulance with its sirens on full.”