My First Prison Writing

My First Prison Writing & My First Visit to Scotland
(personal political thoughts of an inmate)

On March 28th twenty five activists from Germany blocked the road with lock-on’s to Faslane’s nuclear weapons Trident base, protesting against the illegally planned modernization of the British nuclear weapons system. All of us decided to take the risk of 36 hours in Scotland’s prisons.

I spent my first night in prison in solitary confinement:
Somehow in all the actions I have been on they never wanted to keep me in prison before. And also this time it doesn’t feel like real prison, since I intended to make an action where the consequence was clear before hand. So it was more like a little adventure I took time for, to see how I will deal with it. The action on its own went pretty well: 25 people went with metal tubes to block the main road to the south gate of the Trident nuclear NATO-base. Four Tridents carry more than 200 nuclear warheads, each 8 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. The costs of this illegal modernization (the UK has an obligation for abolition under NPT) of these nukes are 117 billion Euro of British (Scottish) taxpayers money decided by Blair & Co. No wonder there is no money to have the rubbish cleaned from the sides on the highway we passed by on our way here; or having a clean toilet in this prison cell (or is it the missing respect for people, who are arrested?). My first time in Scotland already gives me a slight impression of the poor living conditions in this country.

But first back to the action:
I am very happy that our bus from Germany with about 30 people, who only partly know each other from before, were able to organize this united safe action together in this short period of time (1 ½ days). I know the people well, who stopped the traffic for our blockade, which was personally my biggest concern. Some “freedom drivers” are just “crazy idiots”! My boyfriend Carsten and I chose a very heavy metal metal tube. I was curious how the police wanted to open this one; or would they just carry us- when we are separated from the others- onto the side of the road, or maybe even allow us to go with the tube into the police cell, so we would not have this gender separation. Actually we were the last ones the police worked on with all their heavy equipment of electric chain saws and drills- having sparks all around us. Felt like surgery covered behind a blanket that we couldn’t watch their work. After about an hour the worker next to me, who seemed to be one of the experts, looked very concerned how to go on without taking the possibility of injuring us. Another policeman, who wanted to have it done fast, was less concerned, which made me feel strongly about not taking the risk of having this heavy machine slipping into one of our hands or arms (Carsten’s hand was on top just next to the metal). The workers also must have been very tired already after 3 ½ hours of this hard work through 18 tubes. A pity but our proposal to let us go with the tube was dismissed. One side of the road was operating again, so I was very glad that also Carsten felt it wasn’t necessary to go on- we had already reached our goal to block the main traffic of the workers to the base in the morning. Besides this it was a good experience with Carsten -- he had not tried to be “hard core”, to have to go all the way through to the bitter end. We also got bored and uncomfortable after this long time.

Prison thoughts about food:
So here I am now in Gatwick prison, asking for organic food and an extra blanket because of my allergies and low blood pressure. The police laughed, mentioning that I am not in a hotel, but wrote it down. So now I even got three blankets- or let’s call them “synthetic thin curtain-like sheets”. The term “organic” confused the female guards, so I ended up with the official choice of microwaved conventional options of meat, vegetarian & vegan - I chose vegan. It is only one night, so my body won’t get too depleted through the missing nutrients.
After trying to catch up with sleep, my first thoughts went around the young black US prisoner George Jackson, who was killed in prison; and the US Native Indian prisoner Lennard Peltier -- and also my little victory hiding my watch in my underwear. Was my request for organic food seriously something extravagant?! I argued with my health, because the police were asking for my health situation. But thinking about Lennard Peltier, it feels also more like an issue of “Freedom of Religion”. Exceptions are made for Muslims to not be served pork. Indigenous religions believe in living in balance/harmony with the Earth: not taking more from it than needed, trying to be a caretaker, keeping nature in balance and not to poison it. I feel close to these beliefs (even though knowing that this is only one aspect of their religion. Anyway, my spirit, my soul only can feel well, when I know that people who grow food for me are getting a fair payment and don’t have to use chemicals and pesticides, which endanger their health and lives as well. Also wild animals are not harmed by organic fields. Just some days ago the media reported that the bees are dying, I guess mainly through radiation (the so called normal background radiation increased three fold in the last 60 years through human made radioactive fission products ) and genetically modified fields. Cornelia Hesse from Switzerland showed in her paintings the mutations in insects after the Chernobyl accident, that these tiny animals are most sensitive to low level radiation. Einstein mentioned that without bees the human race would have only four years left to survive.
I guess I would be on hungerstrike if I would have to be in prison for longer to take up the issue “health food as a human right for religious freedom”. It is amazing too that food, which grows in real soil binds CO² out of the air, so if we all would eat organic, we would not have a CO² problem. To be for example just a vegetarian or vegan eating often vegetable grown on styrofoam from greenhouses (without nutrients) cannot be enough for a change anymore- expecially for peace and environmental activists. We cannot blame others for being greedy (big car, etc.), but not be willing to pay more for our own healty food, because we are not willing to make further adjustments in our ways of consuming. It is not an issue of money, it is an issue of conciousness. Or like some in our bus, who brought a whole box of cheap alu tins of beer from Belgium to Scotland.

How do I justify breaking the law of a foreign country:
Thought about what I should do if the Scotish court wants me to come here again for a trial. The easiest would be not to come and to get a one year limited arrest warranty for Great Britain or maybe only for Scotland. I cannot imagine that the British government will enforce this new law for a big international protest group, since this might stir the pot too much -- and too much media attention and more protest is not what the nuclear industry and its government puppets are looking for. It was great that nobody from our group got scared away through this new law, which is its main intention. Anyway, since I haven’t been in Scotland before and don’t plan on coming so soon again, this threat wasn’t a big deal. But on the other hand I feel I have to explain what shocks me so much, to bring myself all the way from Germany by bus over to Scotland, leaving my 16 year old daughter alone at home, just for this action. There is plenty of work waiting at home, but I also would take the time to explain my fear and urgent worries to a Scotish court if needed.
Who makes the connection today between the health condition of the people world wide and the nuclear industrial military complex?! For example: also in Scotland I saw quite a few heavily overweight people and feel sorry for them knowing about their discrimination. People believe in general that these fat people are stuffing everything they can find into themselves. These people have their rights for their well being being taken, their rights to look somehow attractive and to be able to move and enjoy live without pain. Only few doctors make the link between organ failures and other kinds of malfunction and metabolic disorder in our very complex body system through our poisoned food chain and the air we are breathing.
The production of nuclear weapons is one of the major causes of today’s health problems. Besides this it is already responsible for more than 100 million deaths, and many more will follow. Nuclear weapons and their waste products already kill before they are even in use. Where does the so-called free media talk about the fact that the so-called civil nuclear use for energy (nuclear power) was needed for the production of nuclear weapons: their fuel (the used fuel rods) changes while operating into different uranium isotopes and nuclear fission products (strontium, caesium, iodine, cobalt, etc.) and transuranics like plutonium and americium, which can be extracted afterwards for nuclear bombs in the so called reprocessing plant (which is a plutonium separation and recovery plant). And also that the so called civil nuclear power plants give the argument for the need of uranium enrichment plants, in which the fuel rods for the NPPs get produced. This enrichment plant is also at any time able to produce such high enriched uranium that can be used in an uranium bomb (for example the Hiroshima bomb was a uranium bomb). So a separation between the civil and military nuclear use is impossible, which is also pointed out by the head of the UN -- Mr. Mohamed El Baradei. Finacially it is also an idiotic idea to produce nuclear energy, which is only possible through huge governmental subsidies (taxpayers’ money, and cut from social securities and services…) and a big burden on the coming generations- hidden in an undemocratic way in the name of national security. This means the whole nuclear industry has its link to the bomb and for this the danger of human made radiation has to stay secret in its depth, when it comes to low level radiation of nuclear particles. So the nuclear weapons are responsible for the world’s radioactivity in the environment through nuclear waste, testing, accidents, so called normal radioactive emissions of all nuclear facilities, uranium mining, depleted uranium weapons, etc. The Nobel Prize winning scientist who developed the Soviet nuclear bomb, Andrej Sacharow calculated 4 to 8 million deaths only through the Soviet nuclear tests from 1961 to 1962. Like I said before, in only 60 years the so-called normal background radiation increased more than 3 times. But former background radiation came mostly from the atmosphere. It is gamma radiation, which is highly penetrading, but affects human bodies externally, because it doesn´t involve particles. A higher gamma radiation dose is necessary to affect the same way than alpha and beta radiation from parrticles. The increase of the background radiation happened through human made fission products, mostly alpha and beta particle radiation. These particles are much more powerful in short distance to living tissues than gamma radiation. Particles enter our body through the air and our food chain, often lodge in our bones and organs, where they replace minerals and irradiate the surounding cells and also our DNA, causing all kinds of diseases, which were mostly unknown in history. Cancer and diabetes epidemics are just two examples. The World Health Organization (WHO) warned in 1997 that one out of three Germans develop cancer today and in only 25 years this rate will double. Half of the death rate is already caused by chronic deseases and it all multiplies with our chemically polluted environment with nutrition deleted food from industrial monoculture… BUT we should understand that radiation is the most harmful cause. Its long radioactive half lifes for many thousand years (depends on the typ of radioactive isotope) makes it so important for our future generations to stop this nuclear madness as soon as possible and to provide food for everybody as healty as possible.

For giving evidence in court I would have wanted the following experts, who recognized the danger of low level radiation through human made nuclear particles in the environment already in the 1960s and continue working on this issue till today:
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Prof. Ernest Sternglass from the US, who worked for 15 years for Westinghouse (the company which built most of the US nuclear reactors). Ernest Sternglass is director, cofounder, and chief technical officer of the Radiation and Public Health Project. In 1963, Dr. Sternglass was invited to testify before the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, as to how the exponential increase in strontium-90 in baby teeth caused by bomb-test fallout was associated with increased childhood leukemia. His research and testimony played a role in President Kennedy's decision to sign the Partial International Test Ban Treaty on Above Ground Nuclear Testing in 1963. As Professor Emeritus of Radiological Physics at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, Dr. Sternglass has written numerous articles on the health effects of low-level radiation. His 1981 book Secret Fallout: Low-level Radiation from Hiroshima to Three Mile Island established him as a pioneer in the study of the health effects of low-level radiation. Prof. Sternglass can clearly explain that the nobel gas Krypton, which gets released in huge amounts by “civil” nuclear power plants, decays in only 3 ½ hours into the well known dangerous radioactive strontium 90, a piece of information you also do not find in the so called independent media.
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The epidemiologist and Grey Nun Dr. Rosalie Bertell, who received the alternative Nobel Peace Prize together with Dr. Alice Miller on low level radiation research -- maintains the nuclear industry and military policy makers are the world's main polluters. Rosalie Bertell is founding member of the International Institute of Concern for Public Health in Canada and scientific adviser of Canadian and US governmental committees.
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The chemist Dr. Chris Busby from Wales is a great expert on low level radiation. He can give evidence that the calculation method used by international protection agencies for determining radiation dose is incorrect, and is currently set about 1000 times too low (all three scientist are able to give evidence on this). Dr. Busby can point out that the sheep in Wales and Scotland received a higher dose of radiation through the rainfall from the Chernobyl accident. Also Northern Sweden received a higher dose admitting that their reindeer are so radioactively contaminated that even today imported hay has to be given to the animals for a period of time until their radioactivity will be lowered to a permitted level- before they are allowed to be slaughtered and to be eaten by humans. Northern Sweden is far less populated: indigenous people, the “Sami”, and winter tourists are often reindeer eaters. It actually makes me wonder why so many sheep were slaughtered for foot and mouth disease (a disease harmless and easy to treat for humans and animals, which also existed in history). Here in Britain the radioactive fallout through Chernobyl is covered up like the recent accident from April 2005, where 160 kg of Plutonium leaked on the floor in THORP (reprocessing plant at Sellafield in Wales), which is so dangerous that it cannot get cleaned up. This accident is recorded in Facts and figures about nuclear power by the well known non-governmental organizations: Nuclear Information Resource Servise-NIRS and World Information Servise on Energy-WISE.

Also the world reknown conservative US National Academy of Sciences officially admitted and published in June of 2005 that there is no safe limit for radiation to cause damage.
Actually our human repair system gets triggered only from a certain level of radiation. Below this level the effects are equally as bad as observed with higher levels. This is also known since the 1970s as the Petkau Effect. This makes long living low level radioactive isotopes in our environment so dangerous.

Nuclear weapons are already invisible weapons of mass destruction through their existence!

This issue is important for the survival of the human race, which needs to get picked up by all of us.

117 billion Euros for the Trident modernization could be put to much better use for cancer patients in hospitals and also for health food in hospitals. The food in the last German hospital I visited wasn’t better than the food I received in the Scottish prison in Gatwick.

Marion Küpker, Hamburg – Germany, 28. March.2007