While the nation's attention was focused on the far side of the world, a federal jury in Denver, Colorado provided some of the first conclusive evidence last week that anti-government protesters are facing increasing danger from John Ashcroft's War On Terror.

On Monday, the jury convicted three elderly Roman Catholic nuns--Sister Carol Gilbert, 55, of Baltimore; Sister Ardeth Platte, 66, of Saginaw, Mich.; and Sister Jackie Marie Hudson, 68, of Bremerton--of "obstructing national defense" and of damaging government property in an anti-nuclear protest last October 6. The obstruction conviction could net the women 30 years in federal prison; sentencing in scheduled for July 25.

So how, exactly, did these three unimposing women manage to derail the entire trillion-dollar American military machine? By traveling to a remote Minuteman III nuclear missile silo in Weld County, Colorado; cutting through two gate chains and an unguarded fence; symbolically tapping hammers on the rusted railroad tracks used to transport the missile; spray-painting six crosses on the concrete silo dome in their own blood; and then singing and praying while they waited an hour for military riflemen to arrive, crashing through the fence in their humvee to arrest the non-resisting nuns.

During the trial, an Air Force officer even testified that the women had in no way actually obstructed the nation's defense. The protest was about as purely a symbolic witness as can be, part of a 20-year campaign of over 100 sporadic "Plowshares" direct actions, mostly by radical Catholic activists, often targeting the nation's nuclear weapons infrastructure. Over the years, Plowshares actions have caused far more damage than this one, and yet only once--when four activists used a jackhammer and an air compressor to substantially damage a missile silo lid in Missouri in 1984--have defendants received sentences of more than three or four years. In that case, the sentence was 8-10 years; that is roughly what Hudson, Gilbert, and Platte--a former councilwoman and mayor pro-tem in Saginaw--are expected by prosecutors to receive for what was essentially an act of trespass and minor vandalism.

Supporters of the trio have charged the judge in the trial, US District Judge Robert Blackburn, with being overtly hostile to the nuns and their supporters, and fret that the trial, publicized heavily in Colorado and held in the midst of an invasion of Iraq, could not have been more badly timed. But the novel charge and the harsh prospective sentences are part of a much larger trend. For several years, progressive activists have charged that the post-Oklahoma City "domestic anti-terrorism" agenda being pursued by federal authorities--including a series of new laws and penalties and joint federal-local task forces in dozens of cities across the United States--was likely to be used not against new Timothy McVeighs, but mostly against progressive activists. The heavily militarized response to 1999's anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle compounded those concerns.

The War On Terror, with its removal of federal and local constraints against investigating even law-abiding individuals or groups because of their religious or political beliefs, has fueled those concerns even further. Oftentimes, such fears are overblown--born of distrust, paranoia, and/or an activist community's inflated sense of its own importance. But last month, Vandenberg Air Force Base (Calif.) officials, after a series of protests actions against Star Wars tests being conducted there, announced that they reserved the right to shoot trespassers on sight. Combined with the Colorado verdict, law enforcement officials seem to be the ones attaching too much importance to what are virtually without exception symbolic protests.

As it happens, a lot of people here know Jackie Hudson--including me. She's active with the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, a small, ongoing nonviolent anti-nuclear group that holds regular vigils and protests at Bangor Naval Sub Base, where the country's Pacific fleet of Trident nuclear submarines is housed. I've known her, and her partner, for over a decade, since they first moved here from Grand Rapids, Michigan. They're both stalwarts of local and regional anti-nuclear and anti-war activism. A small, quiet, cheerful woman, Jackie is about as far from the mental picture of a terrorist--or a menace to national security--as I can imagine.

Odds are, at this point, reasonably high that among Jackie and her two colleagues, at least one will now die behind bars for their act of peaceful witness.