I was surprised to see a comment on my July 6 posting, “Let's close the WHINSEC/SOA,” from their public relations officer, Lee Rials, and my first thought was, “Wow! What a prestigious title that will be in my FBI file!” (I was so impressed, I took the Gazette reporter who recommended me for a blogging position, Steve Williams, out for coffee.)
It is Mr. Rials' job to troll the Internet for articles like mine and put the government's spin on them.
Mr. Rials attributes to me quite an imagination and I do so wish it were true. If I could make up the stuff I wrote about I could make quite a nice living writing fiction instead of doing this blog for free (I'm not complaining mind you – I really love doing this!).
I can assure my readers (which now apparently include Mr. Rials) that I saw the actual film footage of the murdered Jesuit priests and I did not imagine their brains being on the ground, outside of their skulls.
There is also a counter comment that refutes Mr. Rials that is interesting and straightens out a fact I got wrong. The Maryknoll Sisters were raped and murdered, not with three lay women, but with Cleveland (Ohio) Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel and lay missioner Jean Donovan. I got the gist of it right though, women whose only crime was ministering to the poor and sick were raped and murdered by people trained by the then SOA, now WHINSEC.
Mr. Rials may have a point in insinuating that I am outside my scope of expertise in writing about WHINSEC/SOA, so I have sent the blog and his comment to the School of the Americas Watch folks and asked them to comment on it along with local peace witness John Amidon, who asked me to feature the information in my blog. John has spent a great deal of his time in the last several years trying to get this “educational institution” closed – not just getting their name changed. I have also put in a call to Fr. Roy Bourgeois, who founded the SOAW after witnessing first hand their carnage, and will ask him to write a rebuttal. Look for it in a future blog.
Mr. Rials also graciously invited me down to WHINSEC, and I just may take him up on his kind offer.
One other MAJOR mistake in the entry was the wWeb address for the School of the Americas Watch. The address I had listed (www.soawatch.org) takes you to a site extolling the virtues of the military – the correct address for the School Of the Americas Watch organization: is www.soaw.org. Which goes to prove that we're getting our tax dollars worth from the public pelations office at WHINSEC.
Speaking of government files, I got a real perverted chuckle out of Saturday's July 11 Gazette headline, “Surveillance was widespread." My first thought was, “Duh!”
Many of us in the peace movement (translation: those who oppose the government) have had a jump on this revelation for at least four years, and some longer.
In 2005 a group of about a dozen of us Christians were arrested at the annual Good Friday witness at the Intrepid (a recruitment center masquerading as a museum). When we showed up in court for the appearance date, the violation (not a crime – no finger prints taken) we had been initially charged with had been upgraded to a third degree misdemeanor (a crime – fingerprints taken). The court wanted our fingerprints and we would have to return for another court date. One of the people who did not show up for the initial court date was Sister Liz, an 80-year-old Catholic nun. She had a re-occurrence of her cancer, and since the charges for this action had been dismissed so many times in years past, she took it upon herself to not show up. At the second court, the presiding judge gave us an ACOD (Adjournment in Contemplation of Dismissal – meaning if we did not get arrested again for a similar crime in the same state, the charges against us would be dismissed). Sister Liz was about to have surgery and did not make it to the second hearing either. The judge made it clear to our attorney, Joseph Cosgrove, that he wanted this 80-year-old, ill nun's fingerprints and worked out that it takes about six weeks to recover from surgery, and he gave Joe a date to have Sister Liz in court for a charge that he was going to dismiss anyway.
By the way, for some odd reason the judge who had been hearing this action for years was not on the bench for us this particular year.
The Quakers had irrefutable evidence that government agents had infiltrated their peace groups at least two years before the news broke that the telecom companies had been illegally spying on U.S. citizens at the behest of their government.
And the U.S. government has been spying on the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) since 1916! AFSC is a humanitarian organization that won the Nobel Prize for Peace after WWII because in the spirit of the Beatitudes (Mat. 5: 3-11) they fed the hungry and clothed the naked without asking what side the hungry and/or naked person had been on.
So in spite of The Gazette's banner headline, it was not news.
