Atlanta Journal-Constitution
November 19, 2007
10,000 Protest At Army Site
Fort Benning facility: Democratic presidential candidate vows he would close School of the Americas.
By Harry R. Weber, Associated Press
Columbus--Democratic presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich said Sunday the thinking that went into producing an Army school blamed for human rights abuses in Latin America was the same that led the U.S. to war in Iraq and could cause it to attack Iran.
Kucinich, speaking at the 18th annual protest of the school at Fort Benning that trains Latin American soldiers, police and government officials, said one of his first acts as president if elected would be to close the school.
He also used the opportunity to reinforce his opposition to the Bush administration's war policies.
"We reject war as an instrument of foreign policy," the Ohio congressman and former Cleveland mayor told the crowd, estimated by local police to number roughly 10,000.
"The type of thinking that produced this school is the same type of thinking that produced the war in Iraq and is producing a war against Iran," he said.
The Army's School of the Americas moved to Fort Benning from Panama in 1984 and was replaced in 2001 by the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, under the Defense Department.
The protests outside the gate to the military installation in Georgia are timed to commemorate six Jesuit priests who were killed along with their housekeeper and her daughter in El Salvador on Nov. 19, 1989. Some of the killers had attended the School of the Americas.
The military has acknowledged that some graduates committed crimes after attending the School of the Americas, but has said in the past that no cause-and-effect relationship has ever been established.
The new Western Hemisphere Institute has mandatory human rights courses, but the
demonstrators contend changes at the school are only cosmetic.
Fort Benning spokeswoman Monica Manganaro called the protesters "spectacularly
misinformed."
She said the school teaches the same courses taught to American soldiers. The only difference is that the school serves mostly people from Latin America and, as a result, the courses are in Spanish, she said.
By late Sunday, 11 people had been arrested for trespassing on federal property, Manganaro said. Ten had sneaked through a hole in a fence, while another had climbed a fence, she said. All were released on bond.
The Rev. Roy Bourgeois, a Catholic priest who spent five years as a missionary in Bolivia and founded the group SOA Watch in 1990 in the effort to close the school, said that while organizers preach nonviolence, taking action that leads to arrest is not frowned upon.
"When they send us to prison, it energizes the movement," Bourgeois, a naval officer during the Vietnam War, said.
White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe declined to comment on the protest.
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