Michael Walli is being held at the Federal Correctional Institution, McKean, a medium-security facility in north-west Pennsylvania. I wasn’t allowed to visit him, either, for reasons that were never specified. We were, however, permitted to speak on the phone. And I got a strong sense of Walli’s personality, without having to be in the same room. His recall of dates and numbers is extraordinary, and, despite being a high-school dropout, he readily quotes passages of the Bible and lines from Martin Luther King’s speeches. Walli believes that King is literally a saint, despite having been a Baptist, and considers Sister Megan to be a prophet of God. When I asked about the sabotage charge, Walli let loose. ‘Well, the US Government has trespassed against its own constitutional, legal obligations by its torture policies, its assassination campaigns, its illegal wars, a whole bunch of illegal weapons besides the nuclear weapons,’ he said. ‘The US Government is a failed, rogue, terrorist nation.’

As for the Y-12 break-in, Walli thinks it would have received more media coverage if they’d been shot. And he was prepared for that to happen. ‘I’m ready to go into the afterlife,’ Walli said. ‘My citizenship is in heaven. When I go off into the judgement seat before Jesus Christ, the just judge, I’m not going to wave a US flag in Jesus’s face, that’s for sure.’ He will be sixty-nine years old when he’s released.

at any moment

I’ve visited dozens of prisons over the past twenty years, and Leavenworth Penitentiary remains the most unsettling. It was the first prison I’d ever been to, and I went there to see a hippie biker who’d been given a life sentence, without parole, for a non-violent marijuana crime. The federal prosecutor in the case hadn’t really wanted to seek a life sentence. But when the hippie biker refused to testify against others, that’s what he got. At the time, Leavenworth was not only the oldest prison in the federal system but also one of the most dangerous. It was a maximum-security facility built in 1903 and crammed with bank robbers, killers, even terrorists. The hippie biker seemed out of place. And the architecture of the prison appeared just as surreal to me as the punishment for that relatively minor pot crime. Leavenworth was designed to look like the US Capitol building in Washington DC. Imagine the Capitol, flattened, stretched, and surrounded by forty-foot-high walls made of red brick and topped with gun towers. As I headed up the steep concrete steps again, this time to see Gregory Boertje-Obed, I thought about the thousands of violent inmates who’d been locked away there. Many had reached the top of the stairs, walked into the place, and never walked out.