Free Republic

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) _ Three peace activists accused of vandalizing a Minuteman III missile silo site near Garrison have been convicted by a federal jury of destroying government property. Greg Boertje-Obed, 51, and Michael Walli, 57, both of Duluth, Minn., and Carl Kabat, 72, of St. Louis, admitted during the course of a two-day trial to dressing up as clowns, breaking into the missile silo site June 20, spray-painting messages and splattering blood, and pounding on the lid of the underground silo with hammers. The jury deliberated only about 1½ hours Thursday before convicting the men. The three men, members...

On Tuesday morning, a retired Catholic priest and two veterans put on clown suits, busted into a nuclear missile launch facility, and began beating the silo cover with hammers, in an attempt to take the Minuteman III missile off-line. Seriously. The trio -- members of the Luck, Wisconsin group Nukewatch -- said the break-in was part of "a call for national repentance" for the Hiroshima and Nagaski A-bombings in 1945. The activists used bolt-cutters to get into the E-9 Minuteman II facility, located just northwest of the White Shield, North Dakota. "Using a sledgehammer and household hammers, they disabled the...

WASHINGTON: The United States has opted for a Faustian deal to absolve Pakistan of any official complicity in nuclear proliferation because of its crucial role in the war on terrorism. Pieces of the proliferation jigsaw now falling into place indicate that Washington has known about Pakistan’s reckless endangerment of international security for some years now, and certainly since Gen Musharraf came to power. But instead of publicly citing Islamabad for spread of nuclear weapons technology, a step that would have automatically invited sanctions against Pakistan’s defence establishment and disrupted the war on terrorism, the Bush administration chose to tweak Musharraf...