Word: berrigans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Daniel Berrigan...
...scenario read like an Ian Fleming doodle, a picaresque fantasy. The cast: a ragtag band of radical pacifists, many of them Roman Catholics, some priests and nuns, a physics professor and a Moslem from Pakistan. The leading actors: two hotly controversial priests ?Philip Berrigan, 47, a Josephite, and his Jesuit brother Daniel, 49, both now in the Danbury, Conn., federal prison serving sentences for burning draft records with napalm in May 1968. The plot: a seemingly irrational conspiracy to blow up the heating systems at some five Government sites on Washington's Birthday, 1971, then next day kidnap Henry...
Though one largely Catholic antiwar group readily admitted to being the East Coast Conspiracy, Anderson denounced Hoover for attacking the Berrigans. If the Justice Department had evidence against them, he said, it should be put before a grand jury. Hoover made no reply, but Attorney General Mitchell needed no advice from Anderson. The case was already on its way to court. Last week a federal grand jury in Harrisburg, Pa., issued indictments naming six defendants and seven co-conspirators?the Berrigan brothers among them?as plotters who had planned to do exactly what Hoover described...
...Americans could agree with Cornell Economist Douglas Dowd, a Berrigan ally: "It would be quite amusing if it weren't so serious." Is it possible that the Berrigans?who, though lawbreakers and rebels, have always preached non-violence?have now turned to violent and bizarre methods? Or is it possible that the Government has drawn monstrous conclusions from flimsy evidence, perhaps taking protesters' idle speculations with total solemnity? The first could help rekindle the fires of protest that have seemed dimmer lately and also revive lingering fear and hate of radicals. The second could again put in question the Government...
...indictment gave only the bare bones of the Government's case, leaving a host of questions unanswered; it did not even explain why Philip Berrigan was named as a defendant to be prosecuted, and Daniel only as a co-conspirator who would not be tried under this indictment. The grand jury was quite specific about one intriguing point ?that the conspirators had aimed to enter an underground tunnel system in Washington that carries heating pipes and blow them up, using "destructive devices consisting of dynamite, 'plastic explosive,' primer cord and detonating devices which had not been registered to them...