Sister Megan RiceDemocracy Now
Sister Megan Rice, the 85-year-old activist nun who two years ago humiliated government officials by penetrating and vandalizing a supposedly ultra-high-security uranium storage facility, has finally been released from prison. A federal appeals court on Friday overturned the 2013 sabotage convictions of Rice and two fellow anti-nuclear activists, Michael Walli, 66, and Greg Boertje-Obed, 59, ruling that that their actions—breaking into Tennessee’s Y-12 National Security Complex and spreading blood on a uranium storage bunker—did not harm national security.
Rice’s case has become the subject of intense media scrutiny, including a recent New Yorker profile by Eric Schlosser, whose latest book exposed gaping flaws in America’s nuclear weapons program. The activists now await re-sentencing on a lesser charge of damaging federal property. The punishment is expected to be less than the two years they’ve already spent in federal prison.
Speaking with Rice over the phone this afternoon, I asked her how it feels to be free. “Not that much different, because none of us is free,” she said, “and it looks like we are going to go on being un-free for as long as there is a nuclear weapon waiting.”
Asked on Democracy Now this morning about her experience in federal prison, Rice gave a response worthy of Sister Jane Ingalls, a character from the Netflix prison drama Orange Is the New Black, who was clearly inspired by Rice. “They are the ones who are the wisest in this country,” she said of her fellow inmates. “They know what is really happening. They are the fallout of nuclear weapons production.”
Skip to the 33-minute mark to watch the interview:
