Camden 28 Trial Opening Statement
Father Mike Doyle represented himself at trial. Statement excerpted below from www.camden28.org. This piece ran as a sidebar to a review of the movie, "The Trial of the Camden 28."
Full Article:
The terrible question that we will try to put before you, that lies before all of us... is simply this. The question is: Who went too far? Did the military go too far by entering Vietnam and continuing in the war there for twelve years or more? Did the Camden 28 go too far in trying to stop it? Or did the FBI go too far in giving help to the defendants to make it possible in August of '71? And what does too far mean when killing is started, and you want to stop it?
If we are going to be wrong or judged to be wrong, then I say it is surely more honorable to go too far to stop killing, than to go too far to continue it....
We will attempt, if we can, to bring before this courtroom... the very painful agony of human conscience as it struggles between loyalty to the government and the security of that position and the basic human decency of people which is horrified by acts of real violence in My Lai, by acts of napalm against children, or the reality of bombs exploding in flesh that's tender, or old people's bones.
