Priests on trial for Arizona torture protest

Two California priests, Fransiscan Father Louis Vitale and Jesuit Father Steve Kelly, related to the Catholic Worker movement, were arrested in November 2006 for trespassing at Ft. Huachuca military base in Southern Arizona. They knelt in front of the entry gates to the base to pray, with 120 other protesters, and asked to deliver a letter to the former Chief of Military Intelligence in Iraq. Both have served time for Fort Benning "School of the Americas" protests. They were arraigned April 3 and are awaiting trial in June. From the group Pace e Bene and Redwood City Catholic Worker House respectively, the two are seasoned advocates of non-violence. According to the California Catholic Daily:

Vitale and Kelly were among 120 protesters at Ft. Huachuca. They claim U.S. military intelligence teaches torture interrogation techniques at Ft. Huachuca -- the same techniques used at Abu Ghraib and, allegedly, at Guantanamo.

It was at Ft. Huachuca that Vietnam-era manuals advocating torture techniques were translated into Spanish for use at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas at Ft. Benning, Georgia -- a center that, critics have long said, has trained police and military officers who tortured and killed political enemies of repressive Latin American governments.

In November, Vitale and Kelly were arrested for kneeling to pray on the road leading to Ft. Huachuca’s gate. They face federal and state charges for refusing to follow police orders and for trespass. The priests attempted to speak to enlisted soldiers and to deliver a letter to Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast. “Nothing justifies the inhumane treatment of our fellow brothers and sisters,” said the priests’ letter. “Torture is a useless and unreliable tool that leads to an accepted practice of terrorization and the rationalization of wrongdoing.”

Fast had been chief of intelligence in Iraq, responsible for overseeing Abu Ghraib at the time of the tortures there. Exonerated of wrongdoing by military investigators, she was given command of the military intelligence center, located at Ft. Huachuca, in 2005.

Both Vitale and Kelly have been imprisoned before for anti-war and anti-torture civil disobedience. Vitale served time in 2002 and 2006 for protests at Ft. Benning and, in 2003, for obstructing traffic in San Francisco and blocking the entrance to the British Consulate there in protest of the Iraq War. Kelly has served time for attempting to disarm nuclear weapons delivery systems.

“I believe it is a way to raise consciousness,” Vitale told the San Francisco Faith in 2003. “I’m a strong a believer in something Martin Luther King called the ‘theology of stepping off the curb,’ as when he went to Selma and places like that. It’s putting your body there in a non-violent way.”

If convicted in June, Vitale and Kelly could be sentenced to up to ten months in prison.

It is a small victory that the priests will remain free during the pre-trial period. Here is the text of the letter they attempted to deliver to Major General Barbara Fast:

To: Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast -
We are here today as concerned U.S. people, veterans and clergy, to speak with enlisted personnel about the illegality and immorality of torture according to international humanitarian law, including the Geneva Conventions.

We condemn torture as a dehumanization of both prisoners and interrogators, resulting in humiliation, disability and even death. In addition to the hundreds of detainees who have died, we are also concerned about U.S. military personnel. Alyssa Peterson committed suicide after participating in the torture of Iraqi prisoners. Lynndie England and others have been imprisoned for their illegal activities.

We are here today at Ft. Huachuca in solidarity with tens of thousands of people at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation at Ft. Benning, Georgia (formerly known as the School of the Americas) to say that the training of torturers must immediately stop. Nothing justifies the inhumane treatment of our fellow brothers and sisters. Torture by U.S. military personnel has reached alarming proportions and has horrified people around the world.

We are convinced that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 is unconstitutional. We totally reject its conclusions. Torture is a useless and unreliable tool that leads to an accepted practice of terrorization and the rationalization of wrongdoing.

We are here today to repent and clearly state that because of our sense of moral and human decency we condemn torture. NOT IN OUR NAME.

Signed this 19th day of November, 2006 -

Louis Vitale,OFM
Steve Kelly, SJ

Biographical data on Vitale and Kelly:

Fr. Louie Vitale is a member of Pace e Bene, whose mission is "to develop the spirituality and practice of active nonviolence as a way of living and being and as a process for cultural transformation." Fr. Vitale is also a co-founder of the Nevada Desert Experience, a faith-based organization that has opposed nuclear weapons testing for a quarter of a century. Fr. Vitale recently served six months in jail following his arrest at the Ft. Benning vigil in November, 2005, and was ejected from congressional hearings in September after speaking out against the Military Commissions Act.

Fr. Steve Kelly is a member of the Redwood City Catholic Worker community and has served time in federal prison for the nonviolent direct disarmament of nuclear weapon delivery systems. In December, 2005, Kelly served as chaplain for Witness to Torture, a delegation of over two dozen U.S. anti-torture activists who defied the U.S. embargo of Cuba with a peaceful march through that nation to the gates of the Guantanamo Bay navel base and prison camp.

The Prisoner or: How I Planned To Kill Tony Blair

The film had a "limited release" in the US in March after debuting at the SWSX Festival in Austin. I would like to see this in a theater and not on DVD!

Rory Kennedy's documentary "The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib," which debuted at Sundance Film Festival in January, will be airing on HBO in North America next week starting February 22.

Sundance produced a promo piece, with interviews with Kennedy. The film features ex-military intel Sgt. Sam Provance, who has been ostracized for speaking out to the media after reading the Taguba Report.

For schedules, please follow this link to the HBO website.

"Haunted by Fallujah"

Today the Dallas Morning News published an amazing op-ed (originally published in the Washington Post), by a former Army interrogator, which I will include here in full. The amazement is at first because the author "Fair" which seems to be a pseudonym seems so repentant for the torture he committed.

But a different kind of amazement follows when a certain diligent blogger uncovered evidence that suggests this "Eric Fair" (which reeks of irony and strangely reminds of Eric Blair, George Orwell's real name) was in fact a contractor for CACI. Blogger kilabe reveals that "Eric Fair" is mentioned in a class action suit by ex-detainees against employees of contractors CACI and Titan. Meaning his stays in Iraq were in fact "voluntary" in that he could have resigned at any time, whereas members of the Armed Forces would have had a harder time not following orders, or leaving their posts.

Haunted by Fallujah

I cannot escape the depths I sunk to as an interrogator in Iraq, says ERIC FAIR. Nor can I keep them to myself any longer.

12:00 AM CST on Thursday, February 15, 2007

Aman with no face stares at me from the corner of a room. He pleads for help, but I'm afraid to move. He begins to cry. It is a pitiful sound, and it sickens me. He screams, but as I awaken, I realize the screams are mine.

That dream, along with a host of other nightmares, has plagued me since my return from Iraq in summer 2004. Though the man in this particular nightmare has no face, I know who he is. I assisted in his interrogation at a detention facility in Fallujah. I was one of two civilian interrogators assigned to the division interrogation facility of the 82nd Airborne Division. The man was suspected to be an associate of Khamis Sirhan al-Muhammad, the Baath Party leader in Anbar province who had been captured two months earlier.

The lead interrogator had given me specific instructions: I was to deprive the detainee of sleep during my 12-hour shift by opening his cell every hour, forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his clothes. Three years later, the tables have turned. It is rare that I sleep through the night without a visit from this man. His memory harasses me as I once harassed him.

I cannot ignore the mistakes I made at the interrogation facility in Fallujah. I failed to disobey a meritless order, I failed to protect a prisoner in my custody, and I failed to uphold the standards of human decency. Instead, I intimidated, degraded and humiliated a man who could not defend himself. I compromised my values. I will never forgive myself.

American authorities continue to insist that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib was an isolated incident in an otherwise well-run detention system. That insistence, however, stands in sharp contrast to my experiences as an interrogator in Iraq.

I watched as detainees were forced to stand naked all night, shivering in their cold cells and pleading with their captors for help. Others were subjected to long periods of isolation in pitch-black rooms. Food and sleep deprivation were common, along with a variety of physical abuse, including punching and kicking.

Aggressive, and in many ways abusive, techniques were used daily in Iraq, all in the name of acquiring the intelligence necessary to bring an end to the insurgency. The violence raging there today is evidence that those tactics never worked. My memories are evidence that those tactics were terribly wrong.

While I was appalled by the conduct of my friends and colleagues, I lacked the courage to challenge the status quo. That was a failure of character and in many ways made me complicit in what went on. I'm ashamed of that failure, but as time passes, and as the memories of what I saw in Iraq continue to infect my every thought, I'm becoming more ashamed of my silence.

Some may suggest there is no reason to revive the story of abuse in Iraq. But history suggests we should examine such missteps carefully. Oppressive prison environments have created some of the most determined opponents. The British learned that lesson from Napoleon, the French from Ho Chi Minh. The world is learning that lesson again from Ayman al-Zawahiri. What will be the legacy of abusive prisons in Iraq?

We have failed to properly address the abuse of Iraqi detainees. Men like me have refused to tell our stories, and our leaders have refused to own up to myriad mistakes. Regardless of how many young Americans we send to war, or how many militia members we kill, or how many Iraqis we train, or how much money we spend on reconstruction, we will not escape the damage we have done to the people of Iraq in our prisons.

I am desperate to get on with my life and erase the memories of my experiences in Iraq. But those memories and experiences do not belong to me. They belong to history. If we're doomed to repeat the history we forget, what will be the consequences of the history we never knew? The citizens and the leadership of this country have an obligation to revisit what took place in the interrogation booths of Iraq. The story of Abu Ghraib isn't over. In many ways, we have yet to open the book.

Eric Fair served in the Army from 1995 to 2000 as an Arabic linguist and worked in Iraq as a contract interrogator in early 2004. His e-mail address is erictfair@ comcast.net.

Witch-hunt against Army whisteblowers?

The 26-yr old officer of the Army's 82nd airborne who denounced ongoing abuses against detainees in Forward Operating Base Mercury in Iraq, Capt. Ian Fishback, says he now feels under attack.

The Sunday Times reports that instead of launching a wide-ranging, thorough investigation of the allegations (that prisoners were used as punching bags for entertainment), the military has threatened to force Capt. Fishback to reveal his anonymous sources, two sergeants in the 1st battalion, 504.

Capt. Fishback promised secrecy to his sources, and could be prosecuted first for protecting their identities.

While it does seem Fishback's cooperation is key to the Army's investigation, if the allegations are at all true, it seems plenty of other men in uniform could be subpoened to testify about the alleged abuses.

Bush administration vs. World, even Congressional Republicans

The Bush Administration took two very obstinate positions last week against developments in the detainee scandal of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

Firstly, the Department of Defense refused to comply with a Federal court order requiring the release of all of the videos and photos depicting abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. Only some of the photos and none of the videos brought to military investigators by whistleblower Joseph Darby in 2004 have been released to the public. House Republicans, as well as sources from within the administration, say that the photos are extremely disturbing, depicting scenes of "rape and murder." Despite eleventh hour moves by the Administration to block their release, the public can expect to see them, probably with some degree of censoring, on newsstands sometime soon.

Secondly, and perhaps equally damaging for the Bush administration, is its threat to veto military spending legislation over a provision added by Congressional Republicans calling for the prohibition of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees" and the practice of holding "ghost detainees" inaccessible from the Red Cross. After hearings on Abu Ghraib and Guatanamo, there is enough Republican support in both houses of Congress to include this language in the $442 billion defense spending bill. Yet Vice President Dick Cheney called Republican Senators John McCain (AZ), Lindsey Graham (SC), John Warner (VA) to the Whitehouse over the weekend for a 30m minute meeting to warn them that this provision would dangerously limit the President's powers in the "War on Terror."

The Whitehouse, it seems, is digging in its heels on the issue of detention and justice, even when world opinion, the Federal Courts, US opinion and even their own party, agree with that things must change.

Abu Ghraib whistleblower still lives in hiding

A little over a year ago, Sargeant Joseph Darby, then Spec. Darby, secretly delivered the CD full of photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison to Army Criminal investigators. After CBS News showed the photos to the world, the biggest scandal in the US Armed Forces since Mai Lai broke.

Darby's family in Pennsylvania began to receive death threats almost immediately after his name was released as the heroic whistleblower. Friends and neighbors turned on them, claims his wife in August 2004 interviews. The Army placed Darby and his wife in protective custody after the windows of their house were smashed.

One year later, they are still in hiding. NPR produced a 7-minute report putting the last year into perspective.

Darby will be honored with the JFK "Profile in Courage" Award this year. Quoting Caroline Kennedy:

"Individuals who are willing to take personal risk to further the national interest and uphold the values of American democracy should be recognized and encouraged in all parts of government. Our nation is indebted to U.S. Army Specialist Joseph Darby for standing up for the rule of law that we embrace as a nation."

Abu Ghraib whistleblower recognized by ABC

ABC News has picked Joseph Darby, a reservist military police officer from western Pennsylvania, as one of its "People of the Year." The profile of Darby gives us little insight into his motives, or the actual consequences of his anonymous note.

Darby, 25, slid an anonymous note under the door of his commanding officer, describing the terrible acts committed by his fellow soldiers. Soon the story was everywhere. Photo after photo made its way into public view, documenting humiliating and abusive treatment of prisoners by American forces.