PGHIMC - Pittsburgh Independent Media Center

Activists March on Bechtel-Bettis in West Mifflin
by david Monday, Aug. 07, 2006 at 2:45 PM

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 togas and headbands and carried a dozen white crane puppets. Paper cranes became a symbol of peace when a 12 year-old girl folded 1000 of them before dying of leukemia caused by the Hiroshima bomb. White is the color of mourning in Asian cultures.

Once assembled across from the barricaded entrance to Bettis, 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. Activists note that Bechtel's profit often comes at the expense of indigenous peoples and local residents near these facilities.

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.

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 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.

Throughout the weekend, activists 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 festival rally. "The most recent hostilities in Palestine and Lebanon are just a new chapter in long history of military aggression, which is 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 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.

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

www.august6.org

what?
by Matt Wednesday, Jul. 22, 2009 at 2:36 AM

...the Bettis lab makes power plants. Not bombs. The police were Bettis security, not DoE police. And you "shut down" the Bettis Lab on a SUNDAY. Good job.