Why Do Elderly Nuns Have To Keep Going To Prison?
Ed Kinane

In Central America an archbishop, a bishop, several U.S. nuns and twice as many priests have been killed by the men with guns trained at the US Army’s School of the Americas.
Among the nearly 70 SOA Watchers who have gone to prison in recent years, are priests and ministers and at least six Roman Catholic nuns over 65 years of age. One, Sister Dorothy Hennessy, a Franciscan from Dubuque, is 88 years old. As I write, Sr. Dorothy, her own sister, Gwen (also a nun), and 20 other SOA Watch prisoners of conscience are beginning to serve six month sentences in federal prisons throughout the U.S.

What’s going on here?
The SOA, located at Ft. Benning, GA, claims it teaches Latin AmericaN soldiers and officers about democracy and human rights. Why then does it mock its own pretensions by sending so many people — so many religious people — to prison merely for exercising their First Amendment right of assembly, petition and free speech? And why do so many of these receive maximum sentences for what, after all, is a trivial violation — one for which other courts often give a tsk tsk or slap on the wrist?
Every parochial school student knows that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” The SOA has had ample opportunity to learn that when it sends US citizens to prison, the anti-SOA campaign burgeons. You would think, then, that the SOA would wise up. You would think that, out of sheer pragmatism, it would instruct the Georgia prosecutors and judges who do its bidding to go easy on these defendants.
But that is to misunderstand what the SOA is all about.
The SOA is in its death throes. It operates with an arm tied behind its back. Three years ago it had to retire its commandant, a Cold War troglodyte. It also had to retire some of its more explicit course manuals. Since then, in a harbinger of its own fate, it had to close its cherished Hall of Fame — a portrait gallery of some of its most prominent and bloody graduates. To buy time and to slither out from under its stigma, last January the SOA reinvented itself as the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.”
Now, this doesn’t mean the SOA’s mission isn’t getting accomplished. Besides the many other training installations in the U.S., Army Special Forces and Pentagon-hired mercenaries now do military training in Colombia and other hot spots.
And the “new” SOA/WHISC itself is as shameless as ever. It still provides anti-insurgency training. But that is just code for anti-civilian training. One of the tragedies of our era is that when the U.S. goes to war (whether in Viet Nam, Panama, Iraq or via proxy in Central America and Colombia), most of the casualties are civilians. Thus, Latin American soldiers indoctrinated in U.S.-style warfare learn that civilians are either a) expendable or b) the enemy.
In Latin America often it’s the professional religious — the nuns and priests who minister to the poor — who are especially the enemy. They are the ones who teach other civilians that they are children of God. This means all workers and campesinos are entitled to human dignity and a living wage — a notion that’s anathema to the corporate interests, local and multinational, here and in those countries.

It’s pretty hard to have the civilians-as-enemy mind set overseas and not carry it over to civilians here at home. Especially those who oppose your will. If the SOA is to have any credibility in the eyes of its clients and trainees, it can’t have a double standard: it can’t encourage the killing of nuns and priests in Latin America and neglect to persecute these same kinds of people here in the U.S.
Ed Kinane, based in Syracuse, is a member of the SOA Watch Advisory Group. He has spent 14 months in prison for opposing the SOA. On July 17 his brother Richard John, one of the recently convicted “SOA 26,” began a six month sentence in federal prison.

To learn more, check www.soaw.org.

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