The six were charged with trespass, and disorderly conduct, and five who went limp were additionally charged with resisting arrest. They were released on their own recognizance pending pretrial in Lawrence district court July 15.
From their open letter:
“Just before he was killed, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. warned that the United States was becoming ‘the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.’ His words have proven frighteningly prophetic as our government, with the help of companies like Raytheon, kills civilians in Yugoslavia and Iraq while waging an equally deadly war against the poor and the working class at home.
We went to Raytheon to end the system of organized violence.
We went to end the hypocrisy of a President who tells high school students to ‘use words not weapons’ while he refuses to negotiate an end to the war in Yugoslavia...
We went to end corporate raises paid for by laying off workers... We went to fulfill the vision of the mill workers who organized the Bread and Roses strike in 1912, a vision of a society where human life is valued more than property or profits...
We will not allow this violence to continue in our names! We went to Raytheon because the weapons industry is the linchpin of the system of violence. This is where mass murder becomes mechanized, slips from being an appalling crime to being a sterile and routine occurrence. Dr. King warned us that the bombs we drop on distant lands explode in our own cities. Our communities have become battlefields in the global war against the poor. Resistance has become the only human way to live. Persuasion has failed. Warnings have failed. Our government is helpless to disarm, and so we have to disarm it ourselves. We have started by disarming the Merrimack Valley by taking nonviolent direct action to shut down Raytheon, cutting off the weapons at their source...”
For more information, contact Bread & Roses, c/o New Hampshire Peace
Action, POB 771, Concord, NH 03302, (603)228-0559, email: nhpeaceact@igc.org