AMY GOODMAN: Back in the United States, today is Memorial Day, the traditional day to honor all U.S. military veterans. President Bush is in France. It’s the first time in history a sitting president has been out of the country for Memorial Day. He’ll spend the day visiting the D-Day beaches of France’s Normandy coast and the U.S. war cemetery there. Yesterday, Bush met with French President Jacques Chirac after hailing France’s cooperation in the U.S.-led so-called war on terror. Bush compared sacrifices made in the current war to sacrifices made by U.S. soldiers throughout history. He said, “We still fight people who hate civilization.”

Today on Democracy Now!, we’re going to celebrate Memorial Day in a different way. We’re going to hear the words of a life-long peace activist. Philip Berrigan was the first Roman Catholic priest to be imprisoned for political reasons in the United States. Berrigan was first jailed in 1967 for destroying draft files in Baltimore. In 1968, he was arrested for burning draft files in Catonsville, Maryland, in a case that became known as the Catonsville 9.

Philip Berrigan is one of the founders of the Plowshares movement, which organizes nonviolent direct actions against nuclear weapons. Several years ago, he was given a two-year federal sentence for attempting to destroy an Aegis nuclear destroyer in Maine. He was released in 1999, and he then got involved in another action for which he served several years. Berrigan is now 78 years old. He’s served more than 10 years in prison for over 100 antinuclear actions since he began leading nonviolent resistance during the Vietnam War.

Several years ago, when he was at the Petersburg federal penitentiary in West [sic] Virginia, I had a chance to interview him with Jeremy Scahill. We talked to him in March of 1998 and played this interview on St. Patrick’s Day.

AMY GOODMAN: Before we talk about what brought you to this prison for your latest sentence, we wanted to find out about the latest information that we’ve heard. We understand that you’ve just come out of 11 days of solitary confinement and that the warden has told you that you’ve been stripped of all visiting rights, including your immediate family, for the remainder of your prison term, which is about a year. Is that true?

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: Well, 10 days in solitary confinement, and the warden said that visits would be suspended for a year. And, of course, that will cover the remaining time I have here, because I’m slated to be released in November, November 20th. So, that’s what it amounts to. And the thing that I find especially reprehensible about it is that it draws my family and friends into a punishment that I’m willing to take, unjust though it is. I didn’t deter Mairead Maguire from doing a little action here, and that’s what I’m being punished for.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what actually happened? Mairead Maguire won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976 for her peace activities in Northern Ireland. I understand that she nominated you and your brother Dan Berrigan for the Nobel Peace Prize this year, and then came to visit you, and after you were taken out, she refused to leave.

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: That’s substantially it. She was lecturing here in this country and told me that she had considered doing this action for a couple of weeks before she came. And, of course, I had veto power over it. She didn’t want to bring any punishment on me. I somewhat disregarded that, even though I suspected that there would be some punishment connected with it. I told her to follow her conscience. And she did, and was arrested, spent a night in Richmond City Jail and then was released the next day. Then she went about her lecture business, I think, down in Texas, and then Seattle and Chicago.

AMY GOODMAN: So, she stayed here after you left, and eventually was taken away, strip-searched, held for 26 hours, went to a court, where she told the judge that she was protesting your incarceration. The judge said he was not fond of the Berrigan brothers, that you had been in his court before, but that she was free to leave and that he was dropping the charges. And that action is what led to the warden of this penitentiary keeping you here, basically, though not in solitary confinement, in isolation from your family and friends for close to a year.

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: Yeah, not the warden especially, because it’s a matter of delegated power. And a guy came in from region, and he constituted a solitary court, and he told me that there were certain options open to him regarding punishment. And I said, “Well, you know, I’ve paid my dues. I’ve been in solitary for 10 days. And Ms. Maguire spending overnight in jail for this action, what more do you want of us?” “Well,” he said, “it’s not as easy as that. I have to follow certain procedures, and the options open to me would have to do with putting you back in solitary for an indefinite time or taking 27 days’ good time or suspending your privileges, like mail and canteen. So,” he said, “step outside, and I’ll consider what I’m going to do.” So I went outside for about five minutes, and he called me back in, and he said, “Your visits are suspended for a year.”

AMY GOODMAN: Is it true you refused to sign a piece of paper, what, denouncing Maguire’s action?

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: Yes. I think if I had agreed to something like that, they would have shoved something toward me to sign. But as it was, I said, “No, she’ll make up her mind herself. She’ll follow her conscience again. And I won’t suggest anything to her. Let her handle her own situation.”

JEREMY SCAHILL: Phil, beyond your having been in solitary confinement for 10 days and your being isolated from your family and friends right now, there is a new trend of action on the part of the government that is facing Plowshares activists as they are coming out of prison, and that is that they’re not being allowed to return home. Michele Naar-Obed, a Plowshares activist from the Jonah House community, is banned from returning to Jonah House, as is Steve Baggarly of the Norfolk Catholic Worker. Could you talk about this latest string of actions on the part of the government against Plowshares activists?

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: Yeah. What the government is trying to do, because every other answer they’ve had regarding Plowshares has been frustrated — let me spend a moment on those measures taken by the government. They have attempted to infiltrate us. They have practiced intensive dirty tricks against us. They have kept us under off-and-on surveillance. It’s like the ’60s all over again. All of those measures have failed, and Plowshares continues, not only abroad, but here in the United States. There have been about 56 or 57 of these disarmament actions.

So, what they’re trying now is to break up our communities, you know? And they’re taking it upon themselves to add to the sentences of these activists coming out of jail, who not only nonviolently stood by for arrest, but also went to court nonviolently and did their best to battle with these disasters that we call courts, because they’re all perfectly identified and aligned with the military and with the government. So, now they’re trying these measures. And the first case, that of Michele, she suffered very deeply in jail because of the separation from their little daughter and from her husband and from the community. And she didn’t feel herself capable of taking on this immediately after release from jail.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Now, we read court documents — actually, they were from the probation department, stating that the reason that Michele Naar-Obed is not allowed to return to Jonah House, which is also your home, is because there’s, quote, “ongoing criminal activity there and a convicted felon living there” — namely, your wife, Liz McAlister.

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: Yeah. Oh, that is true, from their standpoint. Sure, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Why is your wife a convicted felon?

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: She was convicted for a Plowshares action against B-52 bombers that were being deployed to Europe during the whole Euro missile scare in the mid-’80s. She disarmed a bomber that was being resystemized with air-launch cruise missiles, and got three years for that from the federal government.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, this is really quite something. I mean, it might be shocking for people to understand that the two people Jeremy just mentioned, Michele Naar-Obed and Steve Baggarly, will not be allowed to return to their homes, which means that either they cannot reunite with their husbands, wives and children, or the — in the case of Michele, for example, her husband and child have to leave Jonah House in Baltimore and live elsewhere. So, they’re — it sounds like, and according to Senator Barbara Mikulski in a letter she wrote, they’re trying to destroy Jonah House. They’re trying to end this community that has lived there for more than 20 years.

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: That’s pretty much it, Amy. Greg and Michele, of course Rachel, all were members of our community. When Michele came out of jail in early November, they had to be uprooted. She couldn’t come back to Baltimore at all, had to head directly for Norfolk, Virginia, where they had to find an apartment. They weren’t allowed to live at the Catholic Worker in Norfolk, which was half a mile away. All of these things were imposed by the government. Otherwise, the threat of being violated and sent back to jail was, of course, very, very clear and present.

AMY GOODMAN: Seems amazing that they can do this after you serve your sentence.

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Philip Berrigan on this St. Patrick’s Day. Unfortunately, we’re talking to him in jail at the federal penitentiary in Petersburg, Virginia.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Now, Phil, we’ve been talking about some of the treatment that you’ve received in the prison here and some of what may face you as you get out, and some of what has been facing Plowshares activists as they’ve gotten out of prison. But I’d like for you to take us back to February of 1997 and tell us what it is that you did that got you into prison down here in Petersburg, Virginia.

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: Well, people ask, very, very commonly, “Why did you go to Maine, you know, of all places, up near the Canadian border, what have you?” And we said, “Because of what they build there.” And there are only two places in the country where they build these fearful ships, which the Navy boasts, at large, they’re the most powerful ships afloat because of their armaments, which are dual capable. They can be either nuclear or conventional. And they have already been used against Iraq. So, we found them to be a highly political target. And a great deal of consideration in a Plowshares community goes on about what is a relevant and a political target, because the scene shifts with these hellish weapons all the time, you know? And diplomacy is hitched to the weapons, the technology. So we finally decided to go to Maine.

AMY GOODMAN: Philip Berrigan, talking to us from prison at Petersburg, West [sic] Virginia. We spoke to him two [sic] years ago. He is now out of prison. When we come back, we’ll find out a little more about the action he was involved with, hammering on a nuclear destroyer in Maine, and about this form of resistance that Phil Berrigan as well as his family have been engaging in for decades. Back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to a Memorial Day special here on Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, as we go back to a conversation that reporter Jeremey Scahill and I had two years ago — or, four years ago, actually, with Philip Berrigan around St. Patrick’s Day, when he was in prison, Petersburg prison, in West [sic] Virginia.

JEREMY SCAHILL: That morning of Ash Wednesday in the predawn hours, you were actually able to board an Aegis destroyer, which is NBC, as they call it — nuclear, biological and chemical — capable. Could you tell our listeners what it is that the six of you did to that Aegis destroyer?

AMY GOODMAN: And how you got on the ship?

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: Well, they had a catwalk going right up to the stern. And that was our experience with the Gettysburg, too. Actually, when we went aboard the Gettysburg about two years previously, we could have done — we could have gone into an orgy of destruction, because there was nobody aboard the ship. And it’s a billion-dollar ship, just as this Aegis destroyer was.

In any event, they had a catwalk going up to the stern, and there was a security shack right on the stern, near the helicopter pad. And there were some young sailors, including a warrant officer. And three of us were pretty well immobilized immediately, you know, because the young sailors — the ship was fully occupied by about 230 sailors, and they were all over the stern of the ship. So I was stripped of my hammer and blood. And two of our number got through to the missile hatches up on an elevated floor deck and began to belabor them. And Steve Kelly, a Jesuit priest, worked his way down into the superstructure of the ship itself and finally ended up on the bridge. And there, you have a lot of sophisticated cybernetic technology, and he began to disarm that.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean by “disarm”?

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: Well, he put it out of commission. Yeah, he disarmed. He disarmed the ship, because the ship could not be operated the way it was.

AMY GOODMAN: By hammering on it?

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: Oh, yes, and by pouring blood. And, you know, you’re dealing with sensitive circuits and what have you, and blood has salt. And yeah, he disarmed the ship. And then they damaged the missile covers of the Tomahawk cruise missiles, which, of course, are flush with the deck. And the sailors went berserk because the general alarm was sounded. And they were running around with guns and shotguns, and threatening us with it and threatening us with the butts of the shotguns. And that was pretty much the action. And then the Bath police came around and arrested us and took us to their station.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Now, originally, when you were arrested, you were charged with state charges. And the judge that you went before on your arraignment called you the “conscience of a generation.” And shortly thereafter, those charges were dropped, and the feds picked up the charges. And you were tried before U.S. federal Judge Gene Carter, in a trial that you referred to as a kangaroo trial. Could you explain to our listeners why you referred to it as a kangaroo trial?

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: Well, unabashedly and shamelessly, in federal court, anything that has to do with putting the government or the military on trial, or any attempt to bring them to accountability, is suppressed. And here, I’m speaking about constitutional law, because international law is protected by our Constitution, Article 6, also the Geneva Conventions, also the United Nations Charter — all suppressed. So we weren’t allowed to deal with these aspects of the law, and we weren’t allowed to tell, because of that, why we did it. The only thing we were being charged with was having done it, something that we admitted to. So, all sorts of ironies and paradoxes operating here. We did the best we could, and then we pulled off an old IRA trick, which is fairly common: viewing the court as illegitimate and turning your back on it, after reading a statement of explanation to the audience in the courtroom. So that’s how we terminated the trial.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re speaking to our listeners on St. Patrick’s Day. They’ll appreciate it. And this was where in Maine?

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: At the Bath Iron Works, the shipyard there at Bath, Maine.

AMY GOODMAN: I just wanted to take you back through the trip we took today from Washington, D.C., to visit you in this Petersburg prison. After we left Washington, D.C., we went down 95 South. We passed the Pentagon, the Lorton prison of Washington, D.C., Quantico Naval Base, where the Marine Corps is based. We went to Garrisonville. We also saw the Norfolk Naval Shipyard on our way down to visit you, which is one of the places you had a Plowshares action. The Richmond National Battlefield Park was next, as was the Petersburg Battlefield. This really was a kind of map of events and places that you have fought against for more than two decades.

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: Yeah. It’s too bad that the soil couldn’t cry out with the bloodshed upon it, because, as you know, Virginia was heavily, heavily the site of many fierce Civil War battles, you know, and have given, of course, a large percentage of their young males to the nation’s wars all the way through, including the Desert Storm in 1991. So, this is kind of select territory here.

AMY GOODMAN: Can we go back to your first action, the first nonviolent action that you engaged in that meant that you would spend time in jail? It was actually before, and I know we’re coming up on the 30th anniversary of, the Catonsville 9 case, when you burned draft cards in Catonsville. The Baltimore 4 case, what was that? And why did you choose to begin this path?

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: Well, I had attended an SDS meeting in Chicago called by Sidney Lens, who was the old labor organizer and author, and who did such marvelous work against what he called the Doomsday race, which was the nuclear arms buildup, Soviet Union. So I went out to Chicago and sat down with Hayden and Greg Calvert and others. And they were concentrating on Selective Service. And that made sense to me. They were stopping Selective Service buses. They were chaining wheels. They were regaling young draftees about refusing to go, on and on and on.

AMY GOODMAN: This, of course, during the Vietnam War.

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: That was during the Vietnam War. This would be 1966, roundabout in there. So, I came back, and we had tried a whole variety of things against the war, legal measures for the most part, though we had committed civil disobedience down in Fort Myer, Virginia, which is where the Joint Chiefs of Staff live, many of them, right next to Arlington Cemetery. So, we had tried a variety of things, and they were all fruitless. So we thought that we ought to move from dissent to resistance, and we ought to focus on Selective Service.

So, we consulted a very fine criminal lawyer down in Alexandria, Virginia, and told him about our plans in confidence. And he was aghast. He says, “God, don’t do that!” He said, “These guards are armed now.” And we knew that, because we were constantly casing out the customs office in Baltimore, where there were 18 local draft boards housed. We knew all of that. The guards were armed. He says, “If you stay in the building overnight, then they have the option of shooting you. What’s more, they’ll throw the book at you in court.” So, he said, “Why don’t you pour blood or something like that?” He says, “It’s already been tried. There was one case up in Boston.” And so, we finally decided on doing it.

AMY GOODMAN: On this St. Patrick’s Day, we’re talking to an Irishman, Philip Berrigan. Unfortunately, we’re with him at the federal penitentiary in Petersburg, Virginia, where he is incarcerated for a term of two years for attempting to destroy an Aegis destroyer at the Bath Iron Works in Maine two Ash Wednesdays ago.

JEREMY SCAHILL: I’d like to jump ahead to the Catonsville 9 action. One of the defendants in your most recent case, most recent Plowshares case, was Tom Lewis-Borbely, who was also a member of the Baltimore 4 and also a member of the Catonsville 9. And your action took place on the 30th anniversary of the Baltimore 4 in 1997. But could you talk about the significance of the Catonsville 9 and how that was organized?

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: Well, a variety — without going into any details, a variety of us worked on it, and Tom certainly was one. He and I understood that we were — while we were awaiting sentencing for the Baltimore 4 thing, to do another action would mean very heavy penalties. And the judge doubled up whatever he gave to other members of the Catonsville 9. Lewis and I got six years apiece. But Lewis is a very, very stalwart character, you know? And he has been paying his dues for 30 years now, yeah.

George Mische was living with a group of people, furthermore, who were back from Central America, and three of them were Maryknollers who had been kicked out of Guatemala — Tom Melville and his wife, who was a Maryknoll nun, and then John Hogan, a Maryknoll brother. And they were all ripe for the action. Mische worked on them and got them to join the group. Well, we did a lot of recruiting and finally ended up with nine people. The ninth one was a teaching Christian brother from St. Louis called David Darst, a wonderful guy. Wonderful. So, that was the composition of the group.

We had only very, very limited meetings with one another. There wasn’t a kind of intensity of planning that we go through today. You know something about that, Jeremy. Yeah, it was all very ad hoc, you know, which is to say, you get ready to do something, and you go ahead and do it. That was the real — we didn’t know any better in those days. And we didn’t know anything about preparing for consequences, you know? When the heat comes down, how are you going to survive, like when you’re in prison?

AMY GOODMAN: Before we talk about the first Plowshares action that took place in 1980 in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, I wanted to ask you about the founding of Jonah House. Jonah House was founded when? In 19—

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: 1973.

AMY GOODMAN: In 1973 in Baltimore. What is it?

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: It’s a nonviolent — very simply, a nonviolent resistance community. We don’t say one of our priorities is serving the poor, though we do an awful lot of work in behalf of the poor. For something like 23 years, we begged sizable amounts of fruits and vegetables and fish from wholesalers outside of Baltimore and then shared it with quite a desperately poor African American neighborhood. So, we did do that. And we did it twice a week, you know, for 23 years. And anyway, we hold all things in common. We practice voluntary poverty. We work with our hands to earn what we need for our living and our work. And that means supporting any effort towards our resistance and peace. And it’s been that way now for — since 1973.

And the community has paid quite a sizable price, not only in actions, but also in jail time. We speak of a revolving door between prison and what we call minimum security, which is living in this society. As you know, the prisons have this term “minimal security.” That’s a camp right over there. That’s Petersburg Camp. And that’s a minimum-security institution. This is an FCI, a federal correctional institute, another level up.

AMY GOODMAN: So, this, where you’re incarcerated, is not minimum security. It’s higher than that. Now, you’re clearly a nonviolent offender, well known by the courts and judges of this country. Why aren’t you in the camp, in minimum security?

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: Because of, for some aspect or another, I’m a security risk. Security risk, yeah. And because my chances for influencing others to the detriment of the government would be greater over there than here. Furthermore, I have refused to pay fines and restitution, and that’s one of the things that would qualify to go — qualify you to go across the street.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Phil Berrigan, I’ve heard you say before that an act of resistance does not end with your arrest, but that the resistance continues in the prison. Could you explain what you mean by that?

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: We try to thrash out what we call prison witness. You draw a lot of lessons from what we experienced during the Vietnam War, and you wonder at how a movement was built up outside, outside the walls, with all these young guys imprisoned, who had refused to fight in Vietnam and who were not interested in running to Canada or Sweden or any of those places. But the fact of the matter is that they were doing a hearts and minds and spirits thing. You know, they were influencing their own constituencies outside, which is to say their campuses, their churches, their neighborhoods, their relatives. So, they were doing very, very valuable work, and very often unaware of that. And meanwhile, the so-called movement outside ran into perhaps 50 or 60 million who at least dissented from the war, and a large portion of it, too, resisted the war, you know? And that, of course, brought about the downfall of President Johnson.

So, this prison witness, an American tradition, nonviolent tradition, has always been a very, very valuable and even central increment in the whole thing. People are not willing to forget that you’re in prison and you have voluntarily sacrificed your physical freedom. I do perhaps much more good here than I do outside, and I work fairly solidly, as all of us do, against war and all of its pomps and circumstances. So, Dorothy Day, for that reason, said, you know, “We have to fill up the jails. And you have to have the faith, and you have to have the sense of justice and the decency to do that.”

AMY GOODMAN: Philip Berrigan, longtime peace activist, on this Memorial Day. We’ll come back to our conversation with him, that we had four years ago when he was in prison at Petersburg in West [sic] Virginia. You’re listening to Democracy Now! Back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Phil Ochs, here on Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman. Four years ago, Jeremy Scahill and I interviewed longtime peace activist Philip Berrigan in prison, in prison for another Plowshares action, this one hammering on a Aegis destroyer in Maine. We talked to him about his actions and his life.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s move up from Jonah House in 1973 to the action you took in 1980, which was really the founding action of the Plowshares movement that you and your brother, Dan Berrigan, and others founded. And this was the King of Prussia Plowshares action that took place at the General Electric plant in Pennsylvania. Tell us what you did then.

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: Well, to begin with, we had something like three or four cursory meetings, but the caliber of people in that group was very, very high. And three of us came from Jonah House itself. And both John Schuchardt and Carl Kabat — Carl Kabat is still in federal penitentiary out in Colorado — were tried and true resisters. John Schuchardt is an ex-lawyer. So, in a sense, we needed maybe minimal preparation. In any event, we had friends up in Media, PA, that had been demonstrating at plant number nine, General Electric, for about two years, and who were pretty expert in judging what was being done there and how it was being shipped to the Pantex plant in Amarillo, Texas. So, they suggested that the prophecy of Isaiah might be implemented there, and that was a completely new idea to us, that we would be expected to take the initiative when the government wasn’t willing to do that, and beat swords into plowshares, beat nuclear weapons into scrap, you know? Completely new idea. But, you know, you’re dealing with some rather intrepid people, and we decided we’d do our best to do it.

We knew nothing about the guts of the plant, what the layout was. John Schuchardt went into the lobby, to the front of the plant once and investigated a phone book, an in-house phone book that was there. And he ripped out what was, at least several years before, a tentative floor plan. And that was the only guidance we had. In any event, we tried to go in with the workers at about 7 a.m. Two of our number distracted the guard in the vestibule of the plant. And then others filed into the plant proper. And I think faith has a great deal to do with always finding the weapons and always doing what you intend to do to them, because they’re so anti-human and because the god we try to be faithful to is all about the human. He’s all — we say God is a god of compassion and justice. So, we always find the weapons. And a group that is determined to find the weapons, to do it nonviolently and to reduce them, always find them. And it took us about 10 seconds. John Schuchardt went into a nondestructable testing room there, and there they were. And we were going in like blind mice, you know?

So, we began to work on them immediately, and then it broadened out a bit, and we were pouring blood on classified blueprints, and we were destroying tools that had been specially made to work on the Mark 12A. This was the final testing room where they were judged functional before being packed and shipped to Amarillo, Texas. So, anyway, we disarmed two of them before security and some of the workers burst in on us. And at that point, we dropped the hammers and stood for arrest.

AMY GOODMAN: How many Mark 12A nuclear warheads did you destroy?

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: Two, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And then there was the famed courtroom scene. In fact, Emile de Antonio made a film of this, and you all played yourselves. Only the judge was not played by himself, but by Martin Sheen.

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: Yes. We shot that in two days in a church in Manhattan, New York City. Yeah, in fierce August weather, I remember Martin Sheen sweating under judge’s robes in about 110 degrees of heat, actually.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Now, Phil, tell us how it was that you came to be kicked out of prison after your arrest at the King of Prussia.

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: Well, we determined to stay in, in order to work out this business of prison witness. That was one factor. And then, because we realized that you only — middle-class folk, like ourselves, only identify with the poor when you’re in prison. That’s it. Not outside. You know, we can always go to a clean bed and to decent food and so on, as the poor can’t. So, we were working all of that out, and one of our number, John Schuchardt, was a lawyer, and he began to work with one of the jailhouse lawyers. And they began to pry prisoners in that jail away from the clutches of the courts across the street, because the jail was right across the street from the courthouse, the Montgomery County Courthouse. And these prisoners resolved to fight their cases, which meant trials. And the clones across the street did not want to go to trial — too much work, too much paperwork, too much expense, blah blah blah blah. Too many lawyers had to be called in. So, it got to the point where we became intolerable just by taking measures like that.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Initially, following your arrest, the authorities hadn’t set any bail on your head. And then, as this trouble started to go on in the prison with you guys working with the other inmates and with a jailhouse lawyer, magically, a dollar amount appeared on your head, and then slowly that was reduced and reduced and reduced, until, finally, the authorities came to you and said, “You don’t have to pay anything. You don’t have to sign anything. You don’t have to agree to anything. I just want you out of my prison.”

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: It amounted to that. They refused to set bail on Dan and myself, because I guess we were recidivist, and the others, $250,000 apiece.

AMY GOODMAN: And there’s a famous picture of the four of you sitting by the side of the road with all of your belongings, mainly legal papers, your boxes, waiting somehow to be picked up.

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: Yeah, Elmer Maas had 10 boxes.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, Phil, back to a more serious subject. As President Clinton very nearly took us to the brink of war not too long ago, a lot of resistance was going on around the country. And I’ve heard you talk about what we need in this country is the moral equivalent of war. Phil Berrigan, would you explain what you mean by that?

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: Well, the philosopher — I guess it was William James, the American philosopher, wrote this brilliant essay, where he said, you know, we’ll end war when there’s a moral equivalent of war, which is to say all of the energy and genius and money and everything somehow has to be matched on the other side of the ledger with moral investment. And just to give a simple example, when a young guy goes into military service, he can be sent to far-off lands, he can be sent into war, he can risk his life, he can lose his life, and what have you. The risks for peace are — they’re negligible here in this country. Americans have a terrible fear of losing their physical liberty, a fear of jail, you know? And there’s a whole rhetoric, a whole volume of purple language passed on about what a horrible place jail is and so on, as though good, solid, middle-class, well-educated folk could not put up with jail as well as poor people do. In any event, some thought has to be given to this moral equivalent of war, because so much of what is wrong in the world is traceable back to us, you know? And we have to be responsible for it. And we have to find out what James’s moral equivalent really is, and then implement that.

AMY GOODMAN: Philip Berrigan, the prison authorities have just come over and said that we have to wrap this interview up. You’re 74 years old. You’ve served more than 10 years in prison for different actions at different times.

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: Yeah, a little bit less than that, Amy. It’ll be about nine years when I finish this one.

AMY GOODMAN: Nine years. Some might say, “Well, what has it accomplished?” And especially that image of using a household hammer to pound a nuclear warhead. In the end, isn’t this really just symbolic?

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: Well, it’s also real, you know? And some of our friends, of course, get charged with enormous volumes of damage simply because they’re dealing with highly technical stuff, very sensitive stuff. It’s also real. But we have to avoid maximum destruction, because you have to preserve the symbol and what it can say to folks, if their listening is caught, if they’re hearing. And the symbol of the hammer or the symbol of blood, because they’re both universal elements, says very, very simply, we all have a responsibility to do this. We disarm, see, or we die. We die. Gandhi used to make that clear. Martin Luther King did. We’ve been saying it repeatedly — my brother, myself and other friends — for 30 years now. We disarm, or we die. We can’t coexist with these weapons much longer. That’s fairly predictable, you know? So, that symbol, which says that, has to be preserved. And you can’t get into an orgy of destruction because the destruction becomes the issue, and not the symbol of disarmament. So, we’re very scrupulous about that, very scrupulous about that.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Phil Berrigan, as we approach the 30th anniversary of the Catonsville 9, that fire that you and your brother Daniel and seven others burned in that parking lot with homemade napalm in 1968 still burns today with you as you continue your nonviolent nuclear resistance. How far have we come since the Vietnam War? And where do we go from here?

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: Well, as they say, military-wise and, well, even domestically, regarding the shape of the country, things are going from bad to worse, you know? Life in this country is becoming more and more ugly, to begin with. Outside of the recent uprising against Iraqi — the threat to Iraq, you know, people were pretty dormant. They’re pretty dormant. They were hiding behind the woodwork. And a great deal of confusion is present about whether anything could be done at all. And that’s a product of the way we live here in this country. It’s a product of lifestyle. It’s a product of disinformation coming from the government. It’s a product of moral confusion, because the churches and the synagogues, see, and the media and the campus are not doing their work. And so, Americans are more and more helpless, are more and more helpless. I don’t know. To anyone thoughtful and, I think, with their eyes open, things are rather dire, very, very serious. The economy is booming. The Dow Jones is up. But that does not disguise what is really happening in our slums, and so on.

AMY GOODMAN: What are your plans after this, Phil Berrigan, after you’ve served your time? Perhaps you’ll get out in November of 1998.

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: Well, it’s not too productive to plan, Amy, you know? What you do, I guess, is hit the bricks, as they used to say, and start to listen to people who have been living with this mess for quite a long time while you were locked up, and then to plan with them, do real communitarian work, you know? In the Catholic Church, we come from a tradition of community, a lot of it fraught with defects and bad philosophical approaches, what have you, you know? But it’s still there, and we need to build on it, because that’s what Christ did as a first public act. He built a community. And for us, this means a nonviolent resistance community.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you say to the authorities in this country who have repeatedly labeled Jonah House, your home, your community, of your wife, your three children and other activists who live together in Baltimore — who have called it a hub of criminal activity?

FATHER PHILIP BERRIGAN: Well, of course, that’s nonsense. That’s nonsense. That’s strictly their definition. And more than anything, it just shows their ignorance of what today’s world is and any measures taken to heal it.

AMY GOODMAN: Longtime peace activist Phil Berrigan. We interviewed him in jail, Jeremy Scahill and I, four years ago. He’s out now in Jonah House. He’s 78 years old.

And that does it for the program. Democracy Now! is produced by Kris Abrams, Miranda Kennedy, Lizzy Ratner. Kris Abrams engineered today’s show. You can go to our website, democracynow.org. That’s democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for listening.