While attending the demonstration to close the SOA at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia the week-end before Thanksgiving, after a year of prayer and discernment, I joined ten other activists and "crossed the line".
We were arrested and charged with federal criminal trespass on a military reservation in connection with an act of nonviolent civil disobedience. Since 1990, 226 activists have spent 95 years in prison as a result of nonviolent direct action to close the SOA/WHINSEC. They have put their bodies and freedom at risk in an act of solidarity toward victims and survivors of human rights abuses and those who are forced to live under SOA/WHINSEC sponsored violence on a day to day basis.
My trial will be on Jan. 28, 2008 in Columbus, Georgia. I will be sentenced to federal prison time. I ask for your prayers.
You can read about the School of the America's/WHINSEC in detail on the SOAW website. Their link is on this blogsite. They are a school the Pentagon funds with taxes we pay. They train soldiers from Latin American countries to torture, kill, and victimize their own people in an attempt to keep their countries unstable, allowing the U.S. and their corporate partners to control valuable resources such as the oil rich areas of South America.
Ugly? You bet. The government likes to keep the program as quiet as possible, and that's why you have probably never heard of it. But the word is getting around. There have been thousands of demonstrators at Fort Benning since 1990 demanding the school's closure, and one of these days, it will happen. If I can help make that happen, it will be well worth the fact that I'm soon to become a "prisoner of conscience".
Pax Tecum
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