Seventeen Sentenced to Prison as Trials Continue for Human Rights Advocates
Scoop.co.nz (press release), New Zealand Wednesday, 1 February 2006, 3:14 pm Press Release: School of the Americas Watch Seventeen Sentenced to Prison as Trials Continue for Human Rights Advocates
81-year-old WWII Veteran among 32 Charged in Columbus, Georgia
COLUMBUS, GA – The week after a military jury in Colorado decided not to jail an Army interrogator even after they found him guilty of negligent homicide in the torture and killing of an Iraqi detainee, a federal judge in Columbus, Georgia is sentencing nonviolent activists to months in federal prison. The 32 defendants, ranging in age from 19 to 81, are charged with trespass after peacefully walking onto the Fort Benning military base in protest of a controversial Army training school located there.
Yesterday, Judge G. Mallon Faircloth sentenced 17 human rights advocates, including Delmar Schwaller, an 81-year-old retired World War II Veteran, to between one and six months in prison; thirteen of those individuals were also fined between $500 and $1,000. Trials are expected to continue at least throughout today. Each person faces a maximum sentence of six months in prison and a $5,000 fine.
Those arrested were among 19,000 who gathered in November outside the gates of Fort Benning to demand a dramatic shift in U.S. foreign policy and the closure of the controversial U.S. Army’s School of the Americas, now called the Western Hemisphere Institute of Security Cooperation (SOA/WHINSEC). [more]