[Organize] report from pittsburgh

[david meieran]

[here's a longish pseudo-press release that i just posted to  
august6.org. if others have report backs, please upload them  
directly, or email the list...i for one would like to read them!]

Activists march on Bechtel-Bettis in West Mifflin to Demand "No  
Nukes, No Wars, No Profiteers" on Hiroshima Day

August 6, 2006 – On the anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of  
Hiroshima, about 120 activists marched on the Bettis Atomic Power  
Laboratory in West Mifflin leading to the facility being shut down  
for the day. The first-ever march to Bettis was part of three days of  
education and action to expose U.S. nuclear hypocrisy and confront  
Bechtel Corporation, the region's largest war profiteer, which has a  
$4.2 billion dollar contract to operate Bettis.

The day began with a peace and justice festival in West Mifflin Park  
that featured music, speakers, a puppet show and a peace circle.  
Activists then climbed one mile uphill despite severe heat and  
humidity to the main entrance of Bettis, which Department of Energy  
(DoE) police had earlier blockaded with layers of cement barricades.

According to a local resident who attended the festival, Bechtel had  
warned employees that "5,000 violent protesters were planning on  
storming the gates." DoE police had also posted yellow "do not cross"  
tape along huge portions of the facility. Organizers did not seek a  
permit for the march but just before it got underway West Mifflin  
police agreed to shut down a lane on Bettis Rd.

Led behind a banner that read, "From Hiroshima to the Middle East:  
Stop Bechtel," a dozen activists wore white tunics and headbands and  
carried a dozen white crane puppets. Cranes became a symbol of peace  
when a 12 year-old girl folded 1000 paper cranes before dying of  
leukemia caused by the Hiroshima bomb. White is the color of mourning  
in Asian cultures.

Once assembled in front of the barricaded entrance to Bettis on  
Luscombe Lane, activists held a symbolic "die-in" while Edith Bell, a  
survivor of the Nazi holocaust and one of the event's organizers,  
read a personal statement drafted for the Bettis protesters by Keiji  
Tshuchiya, a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing and one of the  
speakers at a simultaneous protest held at the Lawrence Livermore  
National Laboratory in California.

In addition to Bettis and Livermore, protests took place at other DoE  
National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) sites where Bechtel  
has received contracts, including the Nevada Test Site, the Pantex  
Plant, the Y-12 National Security Complex and the Los Alamos National  
Laboratory, where the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was developed.

Sunday's events were preceded by a well-attended discussion and book  
signing on Friday night with author Antonia Juhasz, and a Saturday  
teach-in on Bechtel, nukes and war that was itself followed by a  
civil disobedience training. A non-violent civil disobedience action  
had been planned for Sunday but was rendered moot when the West  
Mifflin and McKeesport police decided to open up the road for  
protesters to assemble.

Earlier in the week activists engaged in direct education and  
outreach by leafletting in West Mifflin and Dravosberg, including  
about 120 homes that bordered the expansive Bettis campus.

The regional convergence was organized by an ad hoc coalition that  
included local chapters of Abolition 2000 Campaign to Abolish Nuclear  
Weapons, American Friends Service Committee, CodePink, Physicians for  
Social Responsibility, School of the Americas Watch, Women's  
International League for Peace and Freedom, as well as Duncan and  
Porter House of Hospitality, Roots of Promise, Rosenberg Institute  
for Peace and Justice and the Thomas Merton Center Anti-War  
Committee. United for Peace and Justice and an ad hoc coalition of  
local/regional groups that organized actions worked to coordinate the  
events nationally.

Throughout the weekend, activists in Pittsburgh, Livermore, Oak  
Ridge, Nevada and elsewhere sought to connect war profiteering and  
corporate globalization to the escalating violence throughout the  
Middle East as well as the continuing exploitation of indigenous  
peoples, the environment and local economies.

"The presence of U.S. troops is not a factor of stabilization but  
rather a factor de-stabilization," said Paul Abernathy, an army  
veteran of the Iraq war and member of the Palestine Solidarity  
Committee who spoke at both the teach-in and the West Mifflin  
festival rally. "The most recent hostilities in Palestine and Lebanon  
are just a new chapter in long history of military aggression, which  
is in interest of war profiteers and not the American people."

"We cannot allow corporations to determine the fate of our planet,"  
said Courtney Smith, a University of Pittsburgh student and one of  
the Pittsburgh convergence organizers. "Before the tinderbox of the  
Middle East ignites a regional war, the potential exists in the anti- 
war movement to ignite a tinderbox of resistance to halt this  
inhumane madness."

"From Hiroshima to Yucca Mountain to the Middle East, Bechtel  
illustrates the connections between profiteering and war, between  
nuclear power and nuclear weapons proliferation, between "free trade"  
and the exploitation of indigenous peoples, and between corporate  
power-brokers and decision-makers at the highest levels of  
government." said David Meieran, member of both the local and  
national coalitions organizing against Bechtel this week.

"Bechtel's nearly $3 billion Iraqi gain has come at great loss to the  
Iraqi public and the American taxpayer as basic services for water,  
electricity and sewage remain below pre-war levels, said Antonia  
Juhasz, a Bechtel scholar and author of "The Bush Agenda: Invading  
the World, One Economy at a Time," who was the keynote speaker at the  
Saturday teach-in. "The recent cancellation of Bechtel's contract to  
rebuild a Basra hospital shows Bechtel's failure in Iraq."

Local organizers say that they plan to continue organizing against  
Bechtel, which also has Navy contracts to build submarine components  
in a plant in Wilkins Township. Organizers at other facilities  
express similar sentiments.

More info about local and national actions: http://www.august6.org.