In Columbus, carrying big crosses is illegal!

Georgia torture training school sees crosses as sticks.
By Richard Van Slyke. 

Columbus, Georgia is a city of 186,000 people in central Georgia, in a county that borders Alabama. This is as deep inside the Bible Belt as can be, and a place where crosses are usually more than welcome. With at least one exception: when they are used as a sign of protest against torture.

Columbus is not just like any city in the U.S. It is the home of Fort Benning, one of the largest infantry bases in the country, housing approximately 100,000 military personnel, including families and civilian employees.
Fort Benning houses an important infantry school. But it also houses another school which is the source of much controversy: the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, better known by its longest standing name, the School of the Americas.

The School of the Americas has been around for over sixty years. Created in 1946, it was first based in Panama as the Ground School, was renamed School of the Americas in 1963, and in 1984 was relocated to Fort Benning. It was first conceived as a tool for cooperation between the U.S. and Latin American countries, however during the Cold War, as the fear of spreading communist influences prevailed over every foreign policy decision, its mission changed to teaching counterinsurgency methods.

But the School of the Americas had a strange way of preserving democracy. An army manual that was declassified in 1996 gives a good indication of the types of methods that were taught at the school. Methods such as terror, kidnapping and torture were part of the training. Over the course of the years, it is estimated that more than 60,000 Latin American military and security personnel were trained at the school. As a result, School of the Americas graduates were responsible for some of the worst atrocities in modern history.
Bloody coups, death squads and massacres that reverberated in the news all over the world were mostly the result of that training. But the name of the School of the Americas and its association with the events were never mentioned in the mainstream media. One of the reasons for that is the fact that many of the school graduates were regularly used to protect the interests of U.S. corporations in Latin American countries. The atrocities were viewed as the results of local infighting.

But at some point it finally reached home for North Americans. In 1989, six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter were murdered in El Salvador by former School of the Americas graduates.
Father Bourgeois, a catholic priest who lived five years in Bolivia under the dictatorship of a former SOA graduate, was well too aware of the source of these killings and decided to do something about it. On the first anniversary of the murder, in November 1990, he showed-up at the gate of the School of the Americas with twenty other people to protest its activities and ask for its closing.

The SOA protest is a demonstration of what sheer determination can do. Now in its eighteenth year, every November, it has grown to over twenty thousand participants each year. And in the U.S. Congress, the pressure has been steadily growing. In 2007, a bill to close the school failed by only a few votes.
Being in Columbus during the protest is a memorable experience. For three days, the street leading to the base’s main gate fills-up with unrelenting activity. In front of the gate, speakers and performers alternate on a huge stage. Witnesses and survivors from murders and torture tell of their experiences. For several hundred feet leading-up to the stage and the gate, the street is lined with booths of human rights organizations; and in the middle, puppeteers and drummers march back and forth in an effervescent display of solidarity with the people of Latin America.

The events culminate on Sunday with a march of all the attendants, a mix of young and older people, some long-time peace activists and some new to the cause, and also many religious organizations, all moving in unison in a revolving wave, holding white wooden crosses. The sound of the speakers and the drums flows over the thousands that move shoulder to shoulder for about two hours. At the end, the marchers head in small groups to the fort’s gate and lay their crosses against the fence.

The Columbus police usually stand by on the street side during the protest. This is a peaceful event. The only aggressive-looking people are a few undercover agents, who are easy to identify but totally ignored by the crowd. They stand on the side in small groups, and once in a while mingle with the marchers for a short time, and then rejoin their fellow “undercovers”. Also, a police observation mobile crane towering over the marchers reinforces that eery feeling that big brother is watching.

Every year, some protesters cross to the other side of the fence and are arrested by the military police. Part of the crowd stands by the gate and cheers for support when they are arrested. The offense of trespassing is punishable by a fine and up to six months in prison; Father Bourgeois has spent over four years of his life in prison following these arrests. In 2007, eleven people were arrested for trespassing.

But, while not trespassing, three students from Kennesaw State University were also arrested for not complying with one of the rules from the Columbus Police Department.

We all tend to view the world only in terms of what we know and practice every day. Most of us, when we see a cross, will think of it as a symbol of faith and peace. But around a school of torture, a cross is viewed first as a piece of wood, and as such, a potential weapon.
Just a few feet away from a military base housing tens of thousands of soldiers with the most sophisticated weapons in the world, protesters harboring crosses seem to have the torturers shivering in fear. For full effect, maybe garlic should be added to the panoply of evil-fighting weapons. So the Columbus Police Department set a limit to the size of the crosses that could be carried during the march. This is called a stick law. The police department affirms that it’s an agreement between them and the protest organizers. But according to SOA Watch’s Joao Da Silva, this is a rule that was imposed by the police, and that the organizers had no choice but to accept. Moreover, this rule is not well posted by the police department and any participant at the protest could easily spend three days on the grounds without seeing any sign of it.

Every year, some protesters who are not aware of the rule are asked to discard their crosses before they can enter the protest area. Obviously, the rejected crosses are not illegal any other day or in any other place than the SOA Watch protest. And the decision made on location is purely subjective. There is no official measurement; just a quick look by the police decides what is allowed and what isn’t.

Despite a lack of legal ground for the ordinance, it had never been contested. Up to now.

On November 18th, three members of the KSU Greens, Matthew Boynton age 20, Eric Pierce age 26, and Ashley DiBelardino age 19, decided to stand for freedom of speech. They came on that day with crosses slightly above the limits allowed by the ordinance. According to Eric Pierce, his cross was too wide, Ashley’s was too thick, and Matt’s was too tall.
“We purposely chose crosses that were too big in different ways to emphasize how ludicrous the entire thing is”.

They were on their way to the fence of shame when they were blocked from entering the area by a group of uniformed police. The crosses they were carrying were nothing close in size to the ones you can see in some religious processions; the largest one, carried by Boynton, went from his waist to slightly above his chin. Not really a weapon designed to attack an army base or even a local police force.
The irony of it is that Kennesaw, Georgia, where KSU is located, is the only city in the U.S. where gun ownership is mandatory (serioulsy!). And these students picked the cross. That probably makes them guilty of double-non-compliance.

The officers obviously found themselves in a touchy situation. Conflict doesn’t usually happen at the protest. This is as peaceful a gathering as you can ever find. Behind the students, a small group stood in support. In police mentality, this calls for crowd control. There isn’t much to control, though, when you are dealing with a small number of motionless peace activists. But in a police state, peace activism is an offense. The offense, of course, is never “peace activism” or “standing for freedom of speech”. In this case, it’s called “obstructing an officer”. And the students were handcuffed and arrested.

They spent five hours in jail before being bailed out by the SOA Watch. The penalty for the offense is still unknown. It is also unclear if it’s a local offense or a state offense. The scheduled court date has been canceled, and right now the case is being reviewed by the Solicitor General. It appears that justifying a punishment for the three young students will demand some creativity from the “justice” system. But judging from experience dating back to the Roman Empire, we know that disturbing the established order is always a risky endeavor.

Two cities in the same state. In one, gun ownership is mandatory. In the other, the size of crosses is limited. This is a state where the name of Jesus is called upon to justify every man-made action. But if he were living in Georgia right now, he would probably be sitting in jail for “trespassing” or “obstructing an officer”.

For additional information on the School of the Americas and the SOA Watch, visit:
http://www.soaw.org
Take the time to click on some of the tabs or links for more information.
On the main page is a link to a video of the arrest of the three KSU students.

Here is also the direct link to the video, by Artemis Productions. (But don’t forget to visit the SOAW site afterwards). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9HoDyrY8a0&watch_response

In Wikipedia: the El Mozote massacre. One of the worst examples of the legacy of the SOA. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mozote_massacre