Fox 4 TV & World Can’t Wait & Kansas City Star – 2012-09-15 00:54:11
http://fox4kc.com/2012/09/10/anti-drone-protesters-found-guilty-of-trespassing/
Drone Protesters Convicted in Missouri
Fox 4 TV
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (September 10, 2012) — A Federal Judge found two anti-war protestors charged with trespassing at Whiteman Air Force Base near Knob Knoster, Missouri guilty.
Defendants Ron Faust of Gladstone, Missouri and Brian Terrell of Maloy, Iowa, were among a group of anti-drone peace activist demonstrating at Whiteman Air Force Base last April. The men were arrested when they approached the front gates of the base and tried to deliver a document outlining their concerns with the use of unmanned drones in the nation’s war on terror.
The aircraft, known as Predators, don’t fly from Whiteman Air Force Base but they are remotely operated by pilots based at Whiteman, some 90 miles southeast of Kansas City.
Shortly before his trial began at Federal Court in Jefferson City, defendant Ron Faust told FOX 4 drones have “about 98 percent failure rate in terms of innocent lives that are lost. Not everybody that’s killed is a terrorist.” His figure comes from the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalists.
Defense witness Bill Quigley, a professor at Loyola University in New Orleans, says the two defendants weren’t trespassing, they were exercising their first Amendment Right of Free Speech. “They were peaceful, they didn’t intimidate anybody. They were outnumbered 20 to 1 by military police there,” Quigley said.
Prosecutors say the two anti-drone activists refused to leave the base when they were told to go. Judge Magistrate Matt J. Whitworth heard testimony on Monday.
Correspondence from Drone Protester Brian Terrell
World Can’t Wait
(September 12, 2012) — Yesterday’s trial and all the events surrounding it were amazing. Some truth was told in the courtroom, a rare event in a venue more conducive to obfuscation and evasion. The local Fox affiliate got some of the salient points, including interviews with expert witnesses Bill Quigley and Ann Wright.
Below is the AP coverage. About 25 of us went from the courtroom back to the scene of the crime, Whiteman AFB, where we stood vigil with signs and banners into the night.
Sentencing for me and Ron should be in a week or two. The judge refused my request for immediate sentencing. I wonder if he did not want to send me off to prison from a packed court room?
Our efforts have been and continue to effectively spread questions, doubts and even outrage over remote control murder at long distance by drones from Whiteman and other bases. Their willingness to kill from long distance must be exceeded by our commitment to love from a distance.
I am exhausted, looking forward to getting home, overwhelmed with gratitude for all the friendship, love, solidarity and prayers getting us through these days.
Sumoud,
Brian
Drone Protesters Found Guilty of Trespassing at Whiteman AFB
Alan Scher Zagier / The Associated Press & Kansas City Star
(September 130, 2012) — Two anti-war activists were convicted in federal court Monday of trespassing at central Missouri’s Whiteman Air Force Base to protest the use of unmanned military drones. A four-hour US District Court hearing in Jefferson City ended with Magistrate Judge Matt Whitworth finding the pair guilty. Sentencing will occur at a later date.
Retired minister Ron Faust of suburban Kansas City and Brian Terrell, a member of the Catholic Worker Movement from Maloy, Iowa, were among a group of 40 protesters who demonstrated at the air base in mid-April. They were arrested after entering a restricted area without permission.
The misdemeanor violation carries a maximum six-month prison sentence. A third protester, Mark Kenney of Omaha, Neb., is serving a four-month sentence after pleading guilty in June to trespassing.
Faust and Terrell — who served as his own attorney — wanted to use the hearing as a platform to criticize the government’s use of unmanned aerial vehicles, which has escalated rapidly under President Barack Obama’s administration while also being used for covert CIA operations. The small planes can transmit live video and fire missiles, and are operated by remote control thousands of miles away at Whiteman and other military bases.
The defendants’ prospective expert witnesses included Ramsey Clark, a former US attorney general under President Lyndon Johnson who has since represented dictators Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic in court; Loyola University of New Orleans professor Bill Quigley, a constitutional law expert; and Ann Wright, a former US Army colonel who resigned from the US State Department in 2003 to protest the war in Iraq.
Whitworth rejected the request for Clark to testify about potential US violations of international law, but allowed both Quigley and Wright to address the court on narrower legal issues related to the trespassing charge.
Both Faust and Terrell argued a moral imperative that their First Amendment rights of free speech and peaceful assembly trumped the Air Force base’s trespassing rules.
“We were there not to commit a crime, but to prevent one,” Terrell said, describing seeing in person a 9-year-old girl in an Afghani refugee camp missing an arm from what he said was a wayward drone strike. “This is not a hypothetical situation,” he said. “It is real. It is imminent.”
After the hearing, the 56-year-old Terrell said that he has been arrested for protesting governmental policy more than 100 times and, as a result, has a lengthy rap sheet. Terrell asked Whitworth to sentence him immediately after the verdict, but the judge declined.
Faust, a 69-year-old retired Disciples of Christ minister, compared drone strikes to “premeditated murder” that cheapen the value of human life by allowing shooters to be as detached from their targets as video game players.
More than 50 peace activists from Indiana, New York, South Dakota and other states attended the hearing in support of the two men. Several wore folded cardboard hats designed to resemble the triangular-shaped drones.
Some of the Kansas City-based activists said they planned to stop by Whiteman on their way home Monday night to renew their previous protests.
Posted in accordance with Title 17, Section 107, US Code, for noncommercial, educational purposes.
