Arrested at the Pentagon on Good Friday

Mary Beth and I took the train from Maine to Washington DC to attend a non-violent civil resistance action at the Pentagon on March 27. We were joined by Maine friends Lisa Savage and Mark Roman for the trip. We stayed at the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House in DC and were up early to get to the Pentagon as the military and civilian employees began to arrive for work.

This protest was organized by my long-time friend Patrick O'Neill who I met in Orlando, Florida in 1984 when he and seven others entered the Martin Marietta (since merged to Lockheed Martin) weapons production plant and hammered on the intermediate-range Pershing II nuclear missile which was deployed in Mutlangen, Germany by then President Ronald Reagan. (The missiles were aimed at Russia.) The Pershing Plowshares went to jail for three years. After getting out of jail Patrick came back to Orlando and lived at my house for some time to continue to help organize.

As it turned out March 27 was Patrick's birthday so he invited people from around the country to join him at the Pentagon for the action. The night before 100 people attended a birthday party for Patrick at a local church and the next morning a good sized crowd of around 60 people made our way thru a Pentagon parking lot to an entrance where the Pentagon subway stop has people pouring out of it as well a long line of people waiting to go thru security before entering the 'war department'. So we had a captive audience.

Catholic Worker Art Laffin led our group of 27 who risked arrest in singing while we held signs and banners. It took awhile but eventually about 50 Pentagon police and riot squad personnel showed up and began to give us warnings to leave or be arrested. Those who didn't intend to get arrested backed away but the rest of us continued singing.

One by one we were taken and handcuffed along a fence line and put on a bus and driven to the far side of a vast Pentagon parking lot to a building which appeared to be a training center for security dogs. 27 chairs were set up and we sat with our tight handcuffs on for several hours before the very disorganized authorities began to process us. Each of us were finger printed on a 'high-tech' machine that kept failing to get our prints and just one computer was available to record our vital statistics. Photos were taken of each of us as well.

We arrived at this place just before 10am and I got released at around 2pm. Others in our group didn't get released til after 4pm. 

Of course there was no media coverage other than what supporters created.

We were all given court dates in April and June.

MB and I are still at the Catholic Worker house where I will speak this coming Friday night on the subject of An organizer's view of endless war$ & rule by chaos theory.

Bruce