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03-May-2006

Activists jailed for action at School of the Americas

by: PN

North America: Early in February, the week after a military jury in Colorado decided not to jail a US Army interrogator who had been found guilty of negligent homicide in the death of an Iraqi prisoner, a US magistrate sentenced dozens of human rights activists to prison, including Nukewatch staffer John LaForge and volunteer Jane Hosking.

Jane and John were sentenced by Magistrate Mallon Faircloth for the maximum penalty of 6 months. They were both ordered to pay a US$1000 fine.

Jane and John were among a group of 37 human rights activists who were sentenced to federal prison for trespassing at Fort Benning, home to the US Army’s notorious School of the Americas (SOA), recently renamed the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.” Critics have dubbed WHISC the “School of Assassins.”

“Torturing prisoners is a barbaric crime that free people should interfere with,” LaForge said. “At trial, I reminded the Magistrate that he wouldn’t allow our ‘defense of necessity’ –- that our trespass was done to prevent torture. “The irony is,” LaForge said, “that, Jay S. Bybee of the U.S. Attorney General’s office advised President Bush 1 August 2002, that torturing prisoners overseas ‘may be justified,’ and that the doctrine of ‘necessity could provide justification that would eliminate any criminal liability.’ The government wants us to believe that torture is legal but interfering with torture is not.”

The 37 who were convicted, ranging in age from 19 to 81, were charged with trespass after peacefully entering the base 20 November during a protest that involved a record 19,000 people. Federal trespass is a petty misdemeanour with a maximum penalty of 6 months in prison and a US$5000 fine. Five others were also sentenced to 6 months.

The U.S. Army-run SOA trains soldiers and police forces from Latin America. In the 1990s, activists with SOA Watch unearthed nine of the SOA’s training manuals, which included barbaric and illegal interrogation methods. The manuals confirmed the SOA Watch allegations that the school was teaching torture.

Graduates of the SOA have gone on to commit the Western hemisphere’s worst human rights atrocities of the last 50 years. As Naomi Klein reported in The Nation, SOA graduates assassinated Archbishop Oscar Romero and six Jesuit Priests in El Salvador, their housekeeper and her daughter; they undertook the systematic theft of babies from Argentina’s “disappeared” prisoners, and carried out the massacre of 900 civilians at El Mozote in El Salvador.

According to investigations begun after the April 2004 disclosure of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, these same torture techniques are known to have “migrated” to military prisons in Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, Iraq and as many as 20 secret prisons around the world run by the CIA.

In March, two South American countries sent a strong message of support for human rights and military accountability by ending all military training of their troops at the controversial school. Argentina and Uruguay become the second and third countries to announce a cessation of training at the SOA/ WHINSEC. In January of 2004, Venezuela announced that it would no longer send troops to train at the school.

SOA Watch, founded in 1990, is a national, grassroots organization committed to nonviolence. SOA Watch has held a demonstration at the main entrance to Ft. Benning each November since 1990 calling for the closure of the training facility.

Sentences for Jane and John will begin 11 April 2006 and end around 9 October.

PN subscribers can read John’s personal account of the trial in the WebExtras section of the website. More information can be found at SOA Watch’s web page http://www.soaw.org.