Grandmothers for Peace Get Federal Prison Instead
    By Bill Quigley
    t r u t h o u t | Report

    Thursday 01 February 2007

    Cathy Webster, a grandmother living in Chico, California, organized "A Thousand Grandmothers for Peace" to protest in November 2006 against the torture-training School of the Americas (SOA) (now called the Western Hemisphere Institute of Security Cooperation or WHINSEC) at Fort Benning, Georgia.

    SOA-WHINSEC has been the subject of international criticism since it was disclosed that torture manuals were used in training Latin American military personnel. Amnesty International USA called for the closing of the school, an investigation into the human rights atrocities committed by its graduates, and reparations and an apology to its victims.

    This week a federal judge in Columbus, Georgia, sentenced Ms. Webster to two months in federal prison for stepping through a hole in the fence onto the grounds of Fort Benning to carry her protest to the doors of SOA-WHINSEC.

    Two other Grandmothers for Peace were also sentenced to federal prison for the nonviolent protest - Julienne Oldfield of Syracuse NY and Val Fillenwarth of Indianapolis IN. The three grandmothers were among sixteen human rights activists, ages 17 to 71, who were on trial in federal court in Georgia this week. Fifteen were given federal prison sentences of one to six months.

    Alongside the grandmothers were five inspiring college students: Melissa Helman of Ashland, Wisconsin; Martina Leforce and Nathan Slater from Berea, Kentucky; Graymon Ward of Raleigh, North Carolina; and Whitney Ray of Grinnel, Iowa. All had been arrested and prosecuted for trespass. Four were sentenced to prison.

    Ms. Webster told the judge, "You will notice that increasingly it is the elders who are speaking out and acting boldly and authoritatively to bring understanding of what justice, kindness, generosity and compassion mean in a world weary of the endless conquest and dominance mind-set of nations."

    Ms. Webster estimated that over 1,000 grandmothers participated in the November protest organized by School of Americas Watch which was attended by nearly 20,000 people. The annual protest commemorates the thousands who have died at the hands of the graduates of the SOA-WHINSEC, which used and taught from publicly disclosed torture manuals in its training of Latin American military personnel.

    The grandmothers and the rest of the 16 protestors will join more than 250 other activists who have spent a collective 92 years in prison and dozens of years on federal probation for prior nonviolent civil disobedience at the gates to Fort Benning and SOA-WHINSEC.

    For more on the human rights activists going to federal prison and more on the campaign to close SOA-WHINSEC, see www.soaw.org.

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    Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and a professor of law at Loyola University New Orleans. Bill was part of the legal collective representing these human rights protestors in federal court in Georgia. His email is Quigley@loyno.edu.