U.S. Shouldn't Be True to This School

As federal prisoner 86275-020, the Rev. William Bischel, a 67-year-old Jesuit priest, is back where he started.

Fifty years ago, he entered his order's novitiate in Sheridan, Ore., in the Yamhill Valley 40 miles southwest of Portland. He's back now in Sheridan, but as an inmate in the new prison, serving four months for trespassing on federal property.

The offense occurred at Fort Benning, Ga., site of the U.S. Army's School of the Americas. The alumni include some of Latin America's most heinous assassins and death-squad torturers: attackers of peasants, priests, nuns, professors, journalists, students and others named as enemies of the state by juntas and dictators.

Earlier this year, Bischel was one of 13 demonstrators sentenced to federal prison. On Fort Benning property, they staged a reenactment of the 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests, a housekeeper and her daughter in El Salvador. The Fort Benning street theater was fitting. Of the 27 soldiers fingered by the United Nations Truth Commission for the murders of the Jesuits, 19 were graduates of the School of the Americas. The assassins of Archbishop Oscar Romero were graduates, as were some of the killers of more than 200,000 Mayans in Guatemala.

Calls for closing this sordid operation go back to August 1990, when the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, a Maryknoll priest, encamped outside the Fort Benning gate. For acts of nonviolent protest, he served two prison terms totaling 34 months. He is now in the Atlanta federal prison for six months, after joining the same reenactment event that put away William Bischel.

None of this would be currently noticed beyond the boundaries of the nation's community of peacemakers, where defiance of U.S. war policy is as natural as breathing, except for a startling revelation on Sept. 20. Pentagon officials released the partial findings of an in-house investigation of the School of the Americas.

From 1982 to 1991, U.S. Army teachers were using manuals to train their Latin American students in the arts of violence against their own people. The manuals advocated using "fear, payment of bounties for enemy dead, beatings, false imprisonment, executions and the use of truth serum."

Lessons in making "the Molotov Bomb" were part of the instruction, along with techniques for "neutralizing" opponents. The school, which has about 270 U.S. military instructors, operates on a budget of $18.4 million and trains between 700 and 2,000 soldiers a year.

The Pentagon's findings verify the charges made in the past six years by protesters at Fort Benning. While the truth was being told by Bourgeois, Bischel, and last summer by 450 Catholic nuns who came to demonstrate, Pentagon cosmetologists have consistently beautified the facts, as if powdering a corpse.

On May 19, 1994 -- the day before the House voted down a bill to close the school -- Joe R. Reeder, undersecretary of the Army, said that the school "deserves recognition and support as an invaluable contributor to human rights and democracy." To imply, he said, that the school "teaches or encourages nondemocratic values is unconscionable."

The true affront to conscience is that peacemakers are in prison while peacebreakers continue to be trained. If Pentagon leaders had only a remote sense of moral response to the record of squalor at Fort Benning, they would apologize to the imprisoned protesters and seek reparations for the thousands of surviving families in Latin America whose loved ones were killed or tortured by U.S.-trained monsters.

The main congressional advocate for closing the school is Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II (D-Mass.). On Sept. 25, he praised Bourgeois and the other protesters. He told also of visiting Fort Benning: "I've been to the school, I've seen the courses, I've talked to the instructors, and they are adamant about continuing to be able to teach people how to kill."

At his sentencing, Bischel, who serves homeless men and women in a Catholic Worker community in Tacoma, Wash., told the judge that he and the 12 others are neither saviors nor self-righteous zealots: "We are caught in this debilitating system with everyone else and search for what to do. The policies of our country that support [the school] lead directly to the deaths of poor people in Latin America. . . . We go to jail hoping our actions will help people make this connection."

Upon release from prison in a month, Bischel expects to return to Fort Benning for more protesting. A nationally organized three-day demonstration is planned there for Nov. 13-15.

Free or in jail, the peacemakers are in for the duration.

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.