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Kings Bay Plowshare 7 Face Sentencing After Powerful Testimony
In our society nuclear weapons that can destroy all creation are taken as a normal, even an inevitable, part of life. In a dramatic action to break what they call “the crime of silence“ seven Catholic peace activists entered the Kings Bay Trident Submarine Base in Georgia last April to perform an act of symbolic disarmament. They were arrested, tried two weeks ago and quickly convicted on October 24, 2019 in a Georgia court. They face more than 25 years in prison.
Kings Bay is home port to six ballistic missile Trident submarines, each of which deploy 16 Trident missile’s carry in four or more warheads of at least 100 kilotons. The Hiroshima bomb was 14 kilotons. Each submarine thus has the destructive power of at least 500 Hiroshima bombs.
Past interviews with Kings Bay Plowshare 7 Members:
Guest – Attorney Bill Quigley. Bill is the former legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, and is currently a law professor and Director of the Law Clinic and the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center at Loyola University New Orleans. Bill has been an active public interest and human rights lawyer since 1977. Bill has served as counsel with a wide range of public interest organizations on issues including Katrina social justice issues, public housing, voting rights, death penalty, living wage, human rights, civil liberties, educational reform, constitutional rights and civil disobedience. Bill has litigated numerous cases with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.He practices and teachers law in New Orleans.
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Potential Retrial For Imam Jamil Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown)
“His voice had power. His booming delivery was infused with rousing socio-political rhetoric. With a rhythmic cadence, tone, and inflection, his voice kept a beat. It emboldened a generation of black youth, and frightened the white establishment.”
Those words by Obaid Siddiqui for Medium describe a former Minister of Justice for the Black Panther Party, known in the 1960s and 70s as H. Rap Brown. Once the chairperson of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Imam Jamil Al-Amin was one of the original four targets of the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO program. The Bureau called for the “neutralization” of Al-Amin and other prominent black leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr and Stokely Carmichael. The FBI compiled enormous files on Al-Amin and his community.
Now 76 years old, he is serving a life sentence for what many claim was the wrongful conviction in 2002 for shooting two deputy sheriffs in Atlanta, Georgia on the night of March 16, 2000. This, despite a man named Otis Jackson confessing to the shooting. Investigative journalist Hamzah Raza reported on Otis Jackson and his confession that could exonerate Al-Amin.
Al-Amin was transferred from the ADX SuperMax prison in Florence, Colorado to Butner Federal Medical Center in North Carolina after being diagnosed with multiple myeloma. He is currently being held at the United States Penitentiary in Tucson, Arizona. https://www.kundnani.org/jamilalamin/
Guest – Arun Kundnani, Adjunct Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, and teaches terrorism studies at John Jay College. He is the author of The Muslims Are Coming: Islamophobia and He is the author of The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain.
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