Books of Note

The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence [ISBN#0-932863-33-7, $14.95 from Clarity Press Inc., 1-800-729-6423, www.claritypress.com] is International Law Professor Francis Boyle's latest work. It lays out the intellectual and legal foundation for an indictment of U.S. nuclear policy and its architects, should any court aspire to assert jurisdiction on this issue. In the meantime, Boyle's damning post-9/11 legal analysis of U.S. nuclear war policy and the so-called "war on terrorism" is the best single book for nuclear resisters to study if they intend to defend their own direct action under international law.

From Warriors to Resisters - U.S. Veterans on Terrorism [$7 + $3 S&H from SOA Watch, P.O. Box 4566, Washington DC 20017] Margaret Knapke, a former School of the Americas (SOA) Watch prisoner of conscience, edited this collection of personal narratives by eleven U.S. veterans active in SOA Watch. They explain how they awoke to the reality of U.S. foreign policy and why they have become resisters. Also available from SOA Watch is an 18 minute video, The New Patriots [$12 + $3 S&H from address above]. Five U.S. military veterans discuss why their opposition to terrorism must include opposition to the SOA/Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

Two Canadian writers with deep roots in resistance have recently published contrasting books.

In Direct Action - Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla [ISBN #1-902593-48-0, $19.95 + S&H from AK Press, 674-A 23rd St., Oakland, CA 94612; www.akpress.org], Ann Hansen has produced a very candid and readable telling of her experience with clandestine groups that carried out the 1982 bombing of a Litton cruise missile factory near Toronto and other political bombings in British Columbia. While self-critical of the isolation from the community demanded by the cell's criminal activity - burglary, larceny, explosives, and weapons - Hansen concludes that all violence is not the same, and that sabotage of destructive property is worth the risk of inevitable mistakes, such as the seven people seriously injured in the Litton bombing.

Toronto pacifist Len Desroches, who is featured in Hansen's book as one of the organizers of nonviolent civil disobedience at Litton, has penned a meditation on the essence of Christian nonviolent resistance, Love of Enemy - The Cross and Sword Trial [ISBN 0-9680828-2-3; $14.95 + s&h from the Catholic Worker Bookstore, POB 3087, Washington, DC 20010]. The trial resulted from a Good Friday, 1999 action when the author and two clergy, after a period of public fasting and a call for the Church to renounce war, took to removing a sword that desecrated the cross at one church's memorial to fallen soldiers.

Prophets Without Honor: A Requiem for Moral Patriotism [Algora, ISBN 1-892941-98-8, $28.50 paper] by William Strabala and Michael Palacek tells the story of American priests - Carl Kabat, Darrell Rupiper, Roy Bourgeois, Frank Cordaro, Larry Rosebaugh and Charlie Liteky - whose service to humanity in the streets led them to prison as they witnessed against war.

They Stole Our Country: We're Taking Her Back! by Walter Pietsch tells the author's experience of confronting in court and in person the illicit warmaking of U.S. leaders, from Vietnam to Iraq. Self-published, $5+$1.50 postage from ARISE, POB 10057, Westbury, NY 11590.