Two Presbyterian ministers get jail time for trespassing

Presbyweb -- The Rev. Chuck Booker-Hirsch of Ann Arbor, MI, was sentenced July 12 to three months in prison and fined $500. The Rev. Erik Johnson of Maryville, TN, received a six-month sentence and was fined $1,000.

They were arrested for trespassing during the annual demonstration of peace activists in Ft. Benning, Georgia, November 16-18, 2001, against what was called until recently the US Army School of the Americas (USARSA or SOA) and now is the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC).

The activists say that the school, which offers training to Latin American military officers, offers instruction in such techniques as extortion and torture. The School has always denied that.

Peace activists claim that training manuals proved the allegation. The "Frequently Asked Questions" page on the now defunct USARSA's web site stated, "An analysis of the manuals concluded that there were no indications, or even suggestions, that ‘torture' was acceptable. When ‘torture' is mentioned, it is to warn the reader not to use it under any circumstances. The manual titled ‘Interrogation' has an entire chapter devoted to the 1949 Geneva Conventions. The Department of Defense has acknowledged that approximately two dozen short passages (out of over 1100 pages of text) contained material that was either inconsistent, or could be interpreted to be inconsistent, with U. S. policy."

The "Frequently Asked Questions" page continued, "The manuals themselves were neither created nor approved by the U. S. Army School of the Americas. An individual instructor, who mistakenly believed the manuals were consistent with U. S. and Department of Defense policy, brought four of the manuals to the School in 1989 (when he was assigned there) from Panama. Although these manuals may have been issued as supplemental reading material in a few courses at the School from 1989 through 1991, they were never used in the classroom."

In the 50+ years of its existence USARSA graduated more than 60,000 students from 21 Latin American countries. The school says that less than one percent of those students have ever been linked to human rights violations, and fewer still have had allegations substantiated against them.

The web site of WHINSEC states, "We believe that our human rights instruction is among the best offered by military educational institutions anywhere in the hemisphere. Depending on the length of the course each student at the WHINSEC receives from eight to 40 hours on topics such as:
Ethics • Due Process • Rule of Law • Civilian Control of the Military • Role of the Military in a Democratic Society • Law of Land Warfare • Geneva and The Hague Conventions • International Humanitarian Law."

The SOA Watch web site says about the name change of the school: "The new military training school is the continuation of the SOA under a new
name. It is a new name, but the same shame."