How you can resist funding the government →
other forms our opposition can take →
disrupting the military →
counter-recruitment
You gotta look hard to find the silver lining to the cloud over Abu Ghraib, but the Christian Science Monitor
comes up with a good nominee:
If any lesson can be drawn from the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse legal fallout so far, it may be this:
The lowest-level soldier has the highest level of responsibility.
The rank and file must clearly know right from wrong — both in terms of their own actions and orders from superiors.
“What the average soldier is going to take away from Abu Ghraib is a reinforcement of what he learned at boot camp — that he’s responsible for his actions,” says Mary Hall, a former military judge now in private practice.
“These Abu Ghraib courts-martial are a blunt reminder to even the newest private that they have a duty to just say ‘no.’ ”
Raise your hand if you went to boot camp and came away from it with the understanding that when given an order, you have the duty to carefully evaluate its morality and legality and then just say “no” if the order does not meet your standards.
Still, it’s nice to imagine what might happen if an epidemic of questioning authority suddenly broke out in the military.
Groups like Courage To Resist are trying to bring that about:
Objection and resistance by military servicepersons is a healthy and important assertion of Democracy in a country where the decisions to invade Iraq, to maintain an occupation, and engage in widespread human right violations and torture were made undemocratically in violation of international law and based on continuing lies and disinformation.
This is one part of a three-part strategy aimed at shortening the war and preventing future wars by exacerbating staffing problems in the military: encourage deserters and conscientious objectors, interfere with recruitment, and prepare to frustrate the draft if it should come back (the fourth part, removing U.S. soldiers from the field of battle by force, has been outsourced).
I am of the opinion that in a modern war like the one in Iraq, where the ratio of American dollars spent to American soldiers buried is in the million-to-one range, that another way we can strike at the war effort is to try to defund it.
Certainly the military does a fine job of losing money on its own, but I still think they need our help.
Much of the anti-war movement has lately turned away from marching and pleading with legislators and such and has decided to try to make the U.S. less eager to make war by exacerbating its “human resources” shortage.
I think this new focus shows promise.
It has a concrete, measurable goal that can be reached incrementally, results can potentially be seen both on a large scale and on a very human scale, and it is an actual, non-symbolic impediment to militarism, making it more difficult and more expensive.
There is a danger, though, that by focusing on encouraging desertion and conscientious objection within the military, and on discouraging recruiting, the anti-war movement will fall in to the easy habit of regarding its struggle as something that mostly involves other people — members of the military and potential recruits — changing their behavior.
One way to address this is to remind people that conscientious objection is for everyone.
A good example of this is provided by the Church of the Brethren Christian Citizenship Seminar, which was held in New York and Washington, D.C.:
Former conscientious objectors (COs) Enten Pfaltzgraff Eller and Clarence Quay shared the stories of their struggles, as did more more recent COs Andrew Engdahl and Anita Cole.
Eller and Quay each chose not to register and instead did alternative service, although Eller’s service came after a lengthy court case.
Engdahl and Cole arrived at their decisions after entering the military, and they asked for reclassification.
“When Jesus said ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,’ that has to be now, not later,” Eller said.
“You have to struggle with where God is calling you and how you’re going to follow.”…
Several speakers addressed a different form of conscientious objection, war tax resistance.
Phil and Louise Rieman of Indianapolis and Alice and Ron Martin-Adkins of Washington, D.C., explained why they had decided not to pay the portion of their taxes that support military operations — and the consequences that can come with that choice.
Marian Franz of the National Peace Tax Fund provided additional background on this form of witness.
“If we say that war is wrong, and we believe war is wrong, then why would we pay for it?” Louise Rieman said.
“It was more than I expected,” said Chrissy Sollenberger, a youth participant from Annville, Pa.
“I didn’t think there was so much about conscientious objection to talk about.
I just thought it was saying no to being drafted, but it’s so much more than that.…
It feels like we have more power now to make those choices.”
Efforts to impede military recruitment are already having some success.
The recruiters themselves, under increasing pressure to meet their quotas, are increasingly cutting corners.
And this is happening at the same time as muckrakers in the media are turning a spotlight on recruiting techniques:
In , Army Staff Sgt. Thomas Kelt left a voice mail message on the cell phone of Christopher Monarch, 20, of Spring, telling him to show up at the Greenspoint recruiting office by 2 p.m. or a warrant would be issued for his arrest, according to Monarch and an Army official.
Monarch said he didn’t receive the message until after the designated time.
“I was scared,” he said.
He said he had not made an appointment to meet the recruiter and was not interested in joining the military.
Monarch said he called Kelt the next day to clear up the matter.
Kelt told him threatening to issue an arrest warrant was a “marketing technique,” according to Monarch, a version of the story the Army confirmed.
As a result of stories like this, the Army is going to hold a one-day “values stand down” in which recruiters put their normal recruiting activities on hold for a day for a remedial lesson in whatever passes for ethics in Army recruiting land.
More good news, or, in this case, bad news, which is to say bad news for them which is good news for us.
Bad news for them, or more specifically for those of them that are found in the White House, comes to light, when it comes to light at all, on a Friday.
It’s a news management thing.
You put out the news on Friday after the evening news has already been fixed, and any bad news stories either air on the weekend when nobody’s paying attention and all the top name reporters are relaxing at home, or they air on Monday but are old bad news by then and don’t get much play.
The Pentagon has been releasing its monthly recruitment stats on the first of the month… until .
Now that they’re missing their numbers and the press is starting to pay attention…
“Military recruiting is instrumental to our readiness and merits the earliest release of data.
But at the same time, this information must be reasonably scrutinized and explained to the public, which deserves the fullest insight into military performance in this important area,” Krenke said.
is, of course, a Friday.
The news is clearly going to be bad, which is to say, good.
Earlier this year, without any public notice, the Army reduced its recruiting goal for from 8,050 new recruits to 6,700, the New York Times reports .
But as it turns out, the Army couldn’t even reach the reduced goal: The Army will admit later this week that it lured in only 5,000 new soldiers in — just 75 percent of its new goal and only 62 percent of its previous goal.
As the Times notes, it’s that the Army has failed to meet its recruiting goals.
…the Pentagon has added 1,000 new recruiters , started a new ad campaign, offered starting bonuses of up to $2,000 and begun sending sending Iraq and Afghanistan vets out on rounds with recruiters.
The payoff for all of those efforts: By , the Army was “about 8,300 soldiers behind its projected year-to-date number of enlistees sent to basic training by now,” the Times says.
(Not to mention that the Army has lowered standards for recruits and held on to troops it would have discharged early in fatter times “because of alcohol or drug abuse, unsatisfactory performance, or being overweight, among other reasons.”)
Fickle America’s support for the war has crashed.
A Washington Post/ABC News poll released today has 73% saying that there has been an “unacceptable number of U.S. military casualties in Iraq,” 65% saying “the United States has gotten bogged down in Iraq,” and 58% saying that the war with Iraq was “not worth fighting.”
And then there’s this poll:
In , the No Child Left Behind act was signed into law.
Among its provisions was one that said that any school district that wanted to get its hands on federal dollars would have to reciprocate by turning over its student records to military recruiters.
“Having access to 17- to 24-year-olds is very key to us,” said Maj. Gen. Michael Rochelle, commander of the Army Recruiting Command, said at a news conference Friday at Fort Meade, Maryland.
“We would hope that every high school administrator would provide those lists to us.
They’re terribly important for what we’re trying to do.”
So before last month, the Army abruptly lowered its recruiting goal for by about 15% — to 6,700 new recruits — and they still missed the goal by about 25%.
Oops.
But they weren’t too worried:
Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, spokesman for the Army’s chief of personnel, said in an interview that despite the recent setbacks the Army remains cautiously optimistic that it will make up the lost ground — traditionally the most fruitful period of the year for recruiters — and reach the full-year goal of 80,000 enlistees.
To do that, they’d have to bring in 9,760 recruits a month for the rest of their recruiting year.
Senior Army officials said in interviews earlier in the day that the Army exceeded the quota of 5,650 recruits by about 500 people.
By lowering their target by another 1,000, they managed to beat it by 500. Congratulations!
And keep up the good work!
When we last left the Army recruiting number spin game, the Army had abruptly lowered its monthly target from 8,050 to 6,700, then missed that new target by 25%, then lowered the target again, to 5,650, and finally hit that target with a confetti storm of triumphant press releases.
Yesterday the Army released new figures, and the Dubya Squad propaganda trumpeters at the Drudge Report and Washington Times jumped to their posts with their “hear ye! hear ye!”s:
A closer look at the figures shows that the mark that the Army “exceeded” and has “hit… for ” was that doubly-lowered target number, not the original targets.
Keep up the good work, counter-recruiters!
The JROTC has been doing its thing in San Francisco’s public schools for now.
“It’s basically a branding program, or a recruiting program for the military,” said Board member Dan Kelly.
Students get school credit for participating in the program, which is funded 50/50 by the school district and the military.
The program prides itself on improving discipline in its students, but it does so by instilling an authoritarian mindset.
Its training materials are full of evil crap of this sort:
“When troops react to command rather than thought, the result is more than just a good-looking ceremony or parade. Drill has been and will continue to be the backbone of military discipline.”
“Respect for authority and discipline go hand in hand, but the first one to be acquired must be discipline. Self-discipline involves voluntary acceptance of authority.”
“Among the traits of a good follower, loyalty is at the top of the list. This means loyalty to those above us on the chain of command, whether or not we agree with them.”
That sort of discipline we don’t need.
JROTC infects children with the uniform-wearing, regimental, rank-worshipping, responsibility-dodging, order-following pathology that has caused (and is causing) so much trouble.
Congratulations to the determined San Francisco activists who finally kicked them out!
Sometimes the truth hides right out in the open and all it needs is someone to point it out.
In this case, the observant one is Matthew Yglesias:
I went to see Fast Food Nation and before the film there was a long ad for for the Army National Guard, detailing not only the sort of benefits you can obtain through volunteering, but also the sort of exciting missions the Guard undertakes.
Except, of course, they didn’t mention anything about Iraq where tens of thousands of Guard soldiers are deployed.
There was, instead, a vague mention of “overseas deployment.”
Nothing unusual about this, of course.
If you watch a lot of male-oriented television programming you’ll see lots of military recruitment ads of various sorts and they never mention that the modal outcome for a member of the US military these days is to be sent to fight in Iraq.
It is however, unusual in historical terms. If you look at recruiting posters from World War Ⅰ or World War Ⅱ [and Yglesias shows some examples] the situation was quite different.
It’s not merely that these posters didn’t obscure the fact that a war was going on.
Rather, the fact of the war was the key selling point of the recruitment drives.
Which makes sense.
Leaving your home and family to go do an arduous job isn’t an obviously appealing thing to do.
You get money, to be sure, but patriotic appeals are a key part of getting people to volunteer.
The war, in these terms, is a reason to sign up — your country needs you to fight its enemies.
We have to assume that the Army’s marketing people know what they’re doing these days.
And their professional judgment is that the Iraq War isn’t like that.
Their view is that “the war in Iraq is a vital and necessary cause that you should do your part for” won’t be compelling to people.
The best way to get them to sign up isn’t quite to try and dupe them (everyone knows there’s a war on) but certainly is to try and keep the war hidden and downplayed.
What’s more, everyone takes this for granted.
Nobody expects the Army to run ads saying “sign up and fight the Islamofascists in Iraq.”
I don’t, however, think we’ve really thought the implications of this through.
Lots of people are still opposed to a rapid withdrawal from Iraq.
But does anyone think Iraq is a cause worth dying for at this point?
Does anyone deny that a straightforward recruiting pitch wouldn’t work?
But staying in Iraq, obviously, means having people die for this mission.
For a mission nobody really believes in anymore.
One of the sneaky ways military recruiters are operating these days is to collect data about high school students by distributing in public schools questionnaires disguised as “career placement” tests, and then to target their recruitment efforts based on the data collected.
With MySpace.com bulletins and a handful of homemade flyers, two teens have struck a blow against the American Warfare State, Lindale, Georgia Division.
On a Friday afternoon , 17-year-old high school seniors Robert Day and Samuel Parker decided to act after Day overheard some teachers at Pepperell High School saying that first thing morning the school’s juniors would be made to take the ASVAB military aptitude test.
As a senior, he would not be made to take the test, but Day confronted the high school principal, Phil Ray, in defense of students younger than himself, and was told that the test was mandated by federal law.
Day says he already believed that to be false, since he remembered the test being given only to the kids actually trying to join the military the year before.
Regardless, the principal dismissed his objections.
The juniors who were to be tested for their military “aptitude” were not to be told before .
…Day and Parker decided they would do what they could to “warn” the juniors themselves.
They talked to a few kids at the end of school , and over sent out more than 20 messages to MySpace bulletin boards discouraging cooperation.
Arriving early morning, Day and Parker picked out spots soon to be populated with kids waiting for the bell to ring, and with the help of some others who quickly volunteered, rapidly distributed their 200 homemade fliers to some and also spoke to many others, encouraging all to refuse to report to the cafeteria or to sabotage the test — either by ripping it up or filling in false information.
…Parker says that he, Day and their volunteers made sure every junior who may not have wanted to take the test had a chance to hear them explain its purpose and to understand that it was not mandatory.
They estimate that about half of the school’s juniors refused to even leave their regular classes to report to the testing site in the school’s cafeteria.
Some of the teachers, apparently learning about this at the last minute like most everyone else, and confused as to the nature of the proceedings, insisted that their students at least go to the cafeteria even if they did not mean to cooperate with the military.
Once they were there, the kids were informed that anyone who showed up in the cafeteria would be made to take the test.
The old lunch room Catch-22.
Some of the students decided to deliberately fill in faulty information.… ¶ The soldiers told the students that if anyone ripped up their test, then all the tests, including those belonging to the one-third or so of the kids who actually wanted to take it and receive their scores, would be thrown out.
This bit of blackmail apparently worked on the kids who had reluctantly taken it, as no one physically destroyed their tests.
Day and Parker estimate that less than a third of Pepperell’s juniors went along with their government’s scheme.
All in all, Parker and Day said they were pleasantly surprised by the help and encouragement of kids who they thought would not have cared at all.
This article examines the current legal structure allowing rewards for
informants who provide information to assist the
IRS
in the enforcement of the tax laws.
IRS
data suggest that informants are a cost-effective means of enhancing tax
enforcement. The Tax Relief and Health Care Act of
introduced a separate whistleblower
award program that provides even higher rewards (up to 30 percent of the
amount collected) and greater certainty in the payment of such rewards,
including a process for enforcing reward claims against the government
through litigation in the Tax Court. Although the whistleblower
provisions may enhance tax enforcement, they also raise significant
issues concerning taxpayer privacy and
IRS
secrecy in the context of lawsuits to enforce reward claims. Moreover,
prospects for large financial rewards without comprehensive attention to
eligibility constraint may effectively induce prospective whistleblowers
to breach other legal or ethical responsibilities. The article argues
that these important issues deserve more careful attention from
Congress, and should not be relegated to administrative or judicial
development.
Remember that Army recruiter who called up a high school student and left
a message on his answering machine threatening him with arrest if
he didn’t come in to get recruited? And remember how when this scandal hit
the press, the Army shut down their recruiting stations nationwide for a
day to retrain recruiters in appropriate methods?
What happened
next? “just two months later… instead of punishing
Sgt. Kelt, the Army had
promoted him to the role of station commander at a neighboring recruiting
station. That meant he would supervise and train other recruiters on how
to do the job.” And recruiters continue to lie to potential recruits — telling them that they’ve signed binding contracts to join the Army when
they’ve done no such thing, and threatening them with arrest if they
decide against joining up.
is , who drafted the Vyborg Manifesto in which the exiled Russian Duma urged Russians to refuse to pay any more taxes to the Czar.
“All the world is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer.”
Today we’ll dive into the archives and take a look at an episode from the life of “one man revolution” Ammon Hennacy, as filtered through the press.
From the Eugene Register-Guard, which clearly put a lot of stock in eye-catching headlines:
Ammon Hennacy Visits; About as We Expected
Some readers may remember that we wrote a report on a book which found its way to the desk — “The Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist,” by Ammon Hennacy.
Now we have been visited by the Hennacy himself.
He has been speaking to Quakers and others in this vicinity on his way back from a Canadian tour where he called on the radical Dukhobors.
Mr. Hennacy is just about as we expected he would be — a slender, wiry, gray
haired little man with the merry blue eye of the Irish to brighten the fervor
of the zealot. Maybe it requires a sense of humor to be a successful zealot.
He told us a little bit about his techniques:
“I’m going to New York pretty soon to participate in a retreat.
After that I shall fast for nine days, and after that I shall meet some speaking engagements with various pacifist groups.
After the fasting I won’t be so loud, but fasting comes easy once you get the hang of it.
“Before I leave Phoenix, I always send a little note to the tax collectors
and tell them just what money I have received and where I can be found, but
that I’m not going to pay a penny of tax on it. I always tell them that the
worst people in the world are the hangmen, and the taxpayers come next.”
Hennacy is full of little anecdotes about his amusing adventures with vigilante squads and ordinary police:
“When a cop asks me, please not to sell The Catholic Worker on his corner, I just grin and move on and so we get along.”
Crusading is a way of life with some people.
Hennacy displays pictures of his two beautiful, musician daughters like any other “proud pappa.” He boasts of the friends he has found in his rambles through all parts of the United States.
He seems to have found something which conformists often fail to find — happiness.
We fumbled for the old Quaker saying, but Mr.
Hennacy finished it:
“All the world is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer.”
One of my vices is a thing called Fail Blog, which highlights pictures and videos of people doing it wrong, whatever it is, in amusing or cringe-inducing ways.
The videos now often come with several seconds of advertising in front of them, and the most regular of these, lately, is an ad for the U.S. Marine Corps.
There’s not much to it.
It starts with text that says “our title is earned, never given,” then shows short clips of young men exerting themselves to the utmost, presumably in basic training, then “and what’s earned is yours forever,” followed by some stern men in Marine Corps dress uniforms standing in rows doing fancy drum major style baton twirling moves with their rifles.
Seeing this, I’m surprised at how much of the Marine Corps sale involves the look: the white gloves of a waiter in an exclusive club, the brass buttons of an elevator operator in a nice hotel, and the well-creased cap of a chauffeur; then standing quietly waiting for orders like a good servant, and looking proud of yourself about it all like an idiot.
All of these emblems of servility and somehow they sell it as “pride” — goes to show, I suppose.
But there are budget cuts expected at the IRS.
Douglas H. Shulman, commissioner of the IRS, says that these cuts will
“lead to noticeable degradation of both service and enforcement and would have a serious detrimental impact on voluntary compliance for years to come” and will cause “a measurable decrease of approximately $4 billion in revenue annually…
In other words, these budget cuts will result in a direct increase to the nation’s deficit.
We currently estimate that IRS examinations of individuals and businesses, and collection actions taken to recover known unpaid taxes would be down 5–8 percent.”
Has the U.S. Defense Department killed a million Americans since 2001? asks John Quiggin at Crooked Timber.
For some definitions of “killed,” maybe.
Apparently the government attempts to justify many of its policies by using a cost/benefit analysis wherein a policy that saves one human life can thereby justify $5 million in expenses; a policy that leads to one human death can only be justified if it saves at least $5 million.
This analysis, allegedly, governs decisions made by the Environmental Protection Administration and the Department of Transportation, for instance (not the Department of Defense, though).
Quiggin’s argument is that if you took the money the government has been spending on its “various wars of choice” and spent it instead on those policies that would have saved the lives (or prevented the deaths) of those people who fell on the wrong side of this five million dollar boundary, that would amount to 1.5 million people who would be alive today who are dead instead.
Just another reminder that in addition to those directly killed by the military’s actions, there are also real opportunity cost harms from how we could have been directing the resources that have been funding them.
I spent some time today scanning through the Google News archives for more mentions of Ammon Hennacy.
Here is some of what I found:
Columbus, O., —
A gigantic propaganda plot with national headquarters in this city organized to induce young men of military age all over the United States to refrain from registering for conscription has been uncovered by state and government secret service agents, according to announcement today by Gov. Cox.
The article explains that U.S. marshals raided a print shop where the propaganda was being produced and distributed, arresting the proprietor, Harry E. Townsley.
(The Evening Independent of Massillon, Ohio has a more in-depth article on the raid and arrests, which made their front page-spanning headline for the day.)
The New York Times adds that “A great stock of brilliant posters, each four feet wide and ten feet long, was confiscated at Hennacy’s home.
It was reported that the posters were printed in Washington, D.C., and sent to Hennacy by express.”
Police also arrested Albert Valnisper (other accounts say this was Olb Wulnestro), Cecil W. Bailey, John Lewis Hammond, and Ammon Hennacy for distributing the literature.
Hennacy, Townsley, and Bailey were charged with treason.
The Times again: “None of the three charged with treason winced when reminded at arraignment that conviction on the charge of treason may mean death.”
Hennacy and Townsley were convicted on other charges and sentenced to about three years behind bars.
The next news I find about Hennacy is in 1930, when the government brought up his conviction and anti-draft agitation to try to deny him a job as a social worker.
Violation of the draft act during the World war has been ruled by the state’s attorney general as not affecting a man’s qualifications for civil service in Wisconsin.
¶ …it was held that Ammon Hennacy, Waukesha, could not be disqualified for a position of field and case worker for the juvenile court of Milwaukee county, although he was sentenced in 1917 to nine months in jail and two years in Atlanta penitentiary on two counts of violating the federal statutes pertaining to army drafts.
Hennacy took examinations for the position, passed them, but stated that at Columbus, O., he had opposed the war on the theory that it was a capitalistic conflict.
Hennacy’s anti-conscription activism got him in trouble with his boss again in 1940:
Oliver L. O’Boyle, county corporation counsel, said that no charges would be preferred against Ammon Hennacy, relief department investigator, for distributing pamphlets on conscientious objection to the draft.
Some county employes, members of the American Legion, had complained to O’Boyle about the activities of Hennacy and urged that charges be preferred against him before the civil service commission.
Hennacy, who is now above draft age and calls himself a “Christian anarchist,” has told O’Boyle that he does not believe in the draft or war.
He was sentenced as a draft dodger during the World war.
He assured O’Boyle that he would not voice his views on county time or when making relief investigation calls.
The Calgary Herald in printed a picture of Hennacy picketing.
His picket sign read “Hiroshima was atom bombed just six years ago.
I am fasting these six days as a penance,” and the front of his sandwich board read “Why pay for war when you want peace?
I owe eight years back income taxes!”
The newspaper’s caption put it this way:
Ammon A. Hennacy believes in publicizing not only his virtues but his faults as is evidenced by placards he carries through streets of Phoenix, Ariz. Income tax officials probably will not consider his six-day fasting spree as even partial repayment for eight years back income tax he owes.
, the Associated Press sent out a more detailed article on Hennacy’s picket:
Phoenix (AP) —
A work-hardened, wiry man of 59 began a picketing vigil before the U.S. Postoffice Building in which is housed the office of the Internal Revenue Bureau.
Ammon A. Hennacy, who earns his living by hard manual labor on farms in Phoenix and vicinity, is also fasting during his days of picketing.
Hennacy carries a placard on one side of which are the words:
“Voting is UNFAIR to Voters — Read Leaflet.”
On the other side he has printed:
“Lest We Forget — Hiroshima A-Bombed Just 7 Years Ago.”
To those who ask for it, Hennacy gives a four-page leaflet, multigraphing of which was completed in the early hours of this morning.
Hennacy and a friend spent most of the night doing that job.
“I had only two hours sleep ,” Hennacy said before starting his picketing this morning, “and I feel tired.”
As he will do daily during , Hennacy, who describes himself as a “Christian anarchist,” attended mass in a local Roman Catholic Church before taking up his picket-line duty.
He plans to picket daily except Saturday and Sunday when the Internal Revenue Bureau office is closed.
The only nourishment he will take is distilled water.
When he started picketing this morning he weighed 140 pounds.
He expects to lose about 20 pounds.
, on a six-day fast and picket period in commemoration of the sixth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, he lost 17 pounds.
He said he gained it back in a few days following his fast.
At income-tax paying time Hennacy also pickets the bureau.
He refuses to pay an income tax and states he has not paid one for .
He explains his picketing and fasting is “in accordance with the Gandhian principle of open opposition to the state and its war-making functions.”
The AP also covered a fast and picket of Hennacy’s in :
Las Vegas, Nev. (AP) —
A New York editor, picketing the Atomic Energy Commission’s headquarters, has begun a fast in protest against continued American testing of nuclear weapons.
Ammon Hennacy, associate editor of the Catholic Worker in New York, said he will not eat , .
Hennacy said that he has fasted Aug. 6, anniversary of the drop of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Wikipedia has an article on the Operation Plumbbob tests that Hennacy was protesting, including the detail that the radioactive iodine released into the atmosphere by the tests could statistically be expected to cause “between 11,000 and 212,000 excess cases of thyroid cancer, leading to between 1,000 and 20,000 deaths.”
Well, you’ve got to break some thyroids to make a fiery holocaust of your enemy’s cities, as the saying goes.
Cape Canaveral, Fla. (INS)
Seven “peace pickets[”] planned a seven-mile walk from Cocoa Beach, Fla., to Patrick Air Force Base in their protest over rocket launchings.
The sign-carrying group paraded outside the gates of the Cape Canaveral missile test center Monday but were ignored by base personnel.
Ammon Hennacy, 65, of New York, who heads the group, said he and his followers are refusing to pay federal income taxes.
is the final day to file returns.
Sometimes the truth hides right out in the open and all it needs is someone to point it out.
In this case, the observant one is 
