Dear George:

Today I attended the sentencing of twelve protesters who declined to leave the Seattle offices of Sen. Murray and Sen. Cantwell when the Federal Building closed at 5:30pm on September 25, 2002.

To these people the abdication of Congressional responsibility for the declaration of war on Iraq had seemed imminent on that date. And they refused to leave these senator's offices until the senators had declared their intentions concerning a Congressional resolution to grant President Bush authority under the War Powers Act. Although that resolution, which gave President Bush authority to use the arm forces at his discretion with reference to Iraq, was not passed until October 11, 2002 and ultimately they were unsuccessful in enlisting Sen. Cantwell's support, they feel that their refusal to leave and their communications with Sen. Murray were pivotal in enlisting her aid to oppose adoption of that resolution.

I had also attend the protesters' trial last Friday. Unfortunately, however, their efforts to mount an affirmative defense had been thwarted Judge John Weinberg's rulings on various pretrial motions.

One of their proposed defenses was defense by necessity. This is the defense one might employ against the charge of breaking and entering if one broke into a house in order to save someone from a fire. According to the Seattle Times reporter I talked with today, it is a frequent and, mostly unsuccessful defense, in cases of civil disobedience. According to Judge Weinberg, there are two elements which must be present for this defense. You must establish that a danger is imminent and that there are no lawful measures readily available to avert the danger. According to the defendants, they had tried every lawful method they could think of to get a response from their legislative representatives. They had spoken in public places, emailed, called, and marched. Yet their senators remained coy and the defendant's perceived a very real possibility that those senators were about to cede their Constitutional responsibilities to the President without previously informing their constituents of their decision. The only way that they could impress these senators with the seriousness of this situation, seemed to them to be a refusal to leave until they got a response. The judge disagreed.

The other defense proposed was that they were trying to prevent actions which are prohibited under international law. Preemptive war against Iraq, they maintained, was a violation of the United Nations Charter and other international agreements, and the Nuremberg Statutes established their obligation to act against this violation. (I hope I am characterizing their position correctly here.) The judge ruled that they had failed to show that they would be in violation of International Law, if they had not acted in the manner that they did. Thus the trial was confined to the issue of whether or not the defendants failed to obey the lawful orders of the Federal Protective Services.

Today, as I indicated above, the defendants were sentenced. They were found guilty and the penalties and conditions imposed were not trivial. Two of the defendants were sentenced to jail time, 7 days for one and 20 days for the other. The rest were sentenced to 6 months of unsupervised probation with the condition that they not violated city, state or US law during that period. This will be a difficult condition for these defendants, given the impending war and the passion of their opposition to it. Before sentencing, however, the judge allowed each defendant to talk for ten minutes about who they were and why they did what they did.

Tomorrow I hope to write to you about what they said.

Best wishes,

Craig Anderson (electronic mail, March 18, 2003)