[From the Dayton Daily News: 03.23.2001]

Army protesters face charges

Trespassed at Fort Benning school

By Margo Rutledge Kissell
Greene County Bureau

Three Dayton area residents — including a Yellow Springs couple in their 70s — will be prosecuted for their involvement in a Nov. 21 protest outside the controversial U.S. Army School of Americas.

Hazel Tulecke and Bill Houston of Yellow Springs and John Ewers of Dayton are among 26 people who will be prosecuted for trespassing at the school in Fort Benning, Ga.

Pamela Lightsey, public information officer for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Georgia, said they were charged Friday with re-entry into a federal installation after being ordered not to re-enter, a misdemeanor punishable up to six months in prison and $5,000 fine.

Magistrate Judge G. Mallon Faircloth has set a May 22 trial date.

The 26 were among 65 people from across the country arrested who had been banned from the base for five years after participating in unlawful activity there during previous protests.

Lightsey would not say how the 26 were chosen. She said Tulecke, Houston and Ewers are the only Ohio residents charged.

“This is not unexpected,” said Tulecke, 76, who was a French teacher and a counselor in the Southeastern Local School District in Clark County in the 1970s.

“We did this to bring attention to the kind of things that are going on in Latin America,” said Houston, 71, who retired as a math instructor at Antioch College in 1991. “Even if we go to jail, we have it pretty easy compared to the people in Latin America. . . .the people who have been killed or intimated to such an extent they don’t feel they can speak up for their rights.”

Critics believe SOA graduates are responsible for hundreds of rapes, murders and other violent acts committed throughout Central and Latin America. Twelve years ago, six Jesuit priests in El Salvador were killed. Nineteen of the 26 military officers charged with that offense were SOA graduates.

The school, which closed in December, reopened a month later under the name Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Critics believe the name was changed in part to throw off the public.

Tulecke and Houston — Quakers strongly opposed to any form of killing — have each done time behind bars for taking stands on issues they feel passionately about.

In the early 1980s she was one of several women arrested at a nuclear weapons protest at the Pentagon. She served one month in a West Virginia federal prison for women, which she said was “more educational than a whole semester in college.”

A few years ago, the couple served a few days in the Greene County Jail for trespassing after participating in a protest outside a Greene County cement company they said was using hazardous waste to fuel its process.

Ewers, 66, a retired NCR manager, said he has never been in jail or prison for his beliefs. He said he is ready to follow in the footsteps of Margaret Knapke, 47, of Dayton, who last year served three months in federal prison for trespassing at the school.

“I am willing, ready and able,” he said.

He said a trial will present the opportunity to “put the government on trial for its crimes against humanity” because of training done at the school.

During the protests Ewers and others wore white masks and black death shrouds and hauled coffins into an off-limits area at SOA.

He said the protests are part of an effort to raise the level of consciousness within the legislative branch and nation. Next week he will join about 10 people from the Dayton area’s Pledge of Resistance who will go to Washington to lobby local legislators to support de-funding the school.

Jeff Winder, program director for the Washington D.C.-based SOA Watch, believes the efforts by military officials and prosecutors “only make this movement stronger” because American protesters end up going to prison while school graduates who commit crimes may never see a courtroom or prison cell.

“I really applaud the courage and commitment of the people who have been willing to take these actions,” he said.

Contact Margo Rutledge Kissell at 372-9996
or e-mail her at margo_kissell@coxohio.com

© 2001 by Dayton Daily News