SOAW–West News for June, 2004
1) June news & events.
2) New News Articles on LEISA BARNES
3) Spanish Justice; POCs Release in Dublin; Panel: Torture of Prisoners
School of the Americas Watch–West ~ SOAW–W
June 2, 2004San Jose Website - http://teachers.bcp.org/llauro
Los Angeles Website - www.soaw-la.org
National Website - www.soaw.orgFather Roy
SOAW Vigil at Ft. Benning, GA - Nov. 19-21, 2004
Meetings
Prisoners of Conscience
Related EventsFATHER ROY Speaks in Suisun City"From Abu Ghraib to Latin America: Map of U.S. Pattern of Abuse Grows"
Mon. June 28, 7:00 pm
United Church of Christ
701 Suisun Street,
Downtown Suisun City (near Solano College)
Sponsored by the Solano Peace and Justice Coalition
For information, call 707-980-1688
***** MEETINGS
SAN FRANCISCO:
Thurs. June 3, 7:00 pmOAKLAND
Unitarian Universalist Church
1187 Franklin at Geary
Contact Midge Donalds - madamedonalds@yahoo.comWed. June 16, 7:00 pmContact Bob Nixon - robertnixon@mindspring.com ***** PRISONERS OF CONSCIENCE
Cards and Letters are appreciated.
Leisa and Peg expect to complete their 3-month sentences on Friday, July 2
For copies of Leisa's journals, contact Janice Freeman - janice@compudigital.comFPC - Dublin
Leisa Ann Barnes # 92089-020
5675 8th St. Camp Parks
Dublin, CA 94568FPC - Dublin
Margaret Morton #92102-020
5675 8th St. Camp Parks
Dublin, CA 94568***** RELATED EVENTS
CHARLES DERBER, author of Regime Change Begins at Home (Freeing America from Corporate Rule) and professor of sociology at Boston College, will welcome discussion of his theories this month. He is a scholar in the fields of political economy, international relations and society. He believes regime change IS possible. His prior books are People Before Profits, Corporation Nation and The Wilding of America. He will appear
- Mon, June 14 @ 7:30 pm Modern Times Bookstore, 888 Valencia at 20th Street, SF
- Tue, June 15 @ 7pm Black Oak Books, 1491 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley
For more information, call Dolores Priem at 415-387-2287.
- Wed, June 16 @ 7:30 pm Books Inc., 2275 Market at Noe Street, SF
OAKLAND CATHOLIC WORKER
A Cultural Celebration featuring Fuerza de la Raiz with Francisco Herrera
Sat. June 26, 3:00-11:00 pm
St. Elizabeth's Elementary Gymnasium
1500 34th Avenue (off International Blvd.), Oakland
Sliding Scale: $5-50; no one turned away for lack of fundsFor more information, call 510-533-7375
School of the Americas Watch–West ~ SOAW–W
June 4, 2004San Jose Website - http://teachers.bcp.org/llauro
Los Angeles Website - www.soaw-la.org
National Website - www.soaw.org1) "Mom morphs into activist, then inmate,"
SOAW Vigil at Ft. Benning, GA - Nov. 19-21, 2004
2) "Role reversal - Incarcerated Sacramento organizer Leisa Barnes has taken to driving her captors crazy"Mom morphs into activist, then inmate,"
by Blair Anthony Robertson
The Sacramento Bee
June 3, 2004DUBLIN - Unlike most other inmates at the federal prison here, Leisa Barnes is doing time not because her behavior crossed the line but because she simply stepped over a line painted along the ground.
Halfway through an unusual three-month term at the Federal Correctional Institution in Alameda County for misdemeanor trespassing during a protest at Fort Benning, Ga., the 49-year-old Sacramento artist, businesswoman and mother of five has been called a hero by some and a misguided naif by others, including her own mother.
"I'm inspired by her example," said Paul Burke, a sociology professor at California State University, Sacramento, and a campus activist. "It's extremely significant, because she's making a statement."
Family members are perplexed.
"I'm really trying to see where the heck she is coming from," said Billie Morenz, Barnes' mother and a self-described law-and-order Republican from Martinez. "I'm frustrated, but what can I do? She's too old for me to spank."
One way or the other, everything seemed to change for Barnes in November when she stepped out of her otherwise law-abiding life and traveled to Georgia, joining 10,000 demonstrators outside the gate of the nation's largest Army installation. There, she and the others solemnly carried small crosses with the names of victims they say were tortured and assassinated at the hands of graduates of the School of the Americas, where military leaders from throughout the Western Hemisphere have been trained.
But Barnes had more in mind than being a mere face in the crowd, even though she only recently had learned about the school, long a target of peace activists' protests.
She knew that stepping over the line onto federal property could land her in prison and away from her sons, Caleb, a high school senior, and Luke, 13, who has Down syndrome. Her other sons - two college students and a missionary - live on their own.
Especially since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks - when Fort Benning became a closed post - dozens of people who've protested there have served time in prison, including SOA Watch's founder, the Rev. Roy Bourgeois.
Inspired by a speech that Bourgeois gave last year in Elk Grove, Barnes decided almost immediately that she would cross the line. She was the first protester that day to take the fateful step.
Elizabeth Bradley, a 49-year-old Sacramento paralegal, also trespassed that day but avoided prison time by agreeing to a "ban and bar" letter, essentially a promise not to cross the line again. Barnes refused to sign the letter.
"Frankly, I'm really glad I got probation," said Bradley, who enjoys long walks downtown and a weekly game of hearts with her four grown children. "After talking to Leisa, I'm not sure I could have handled prison."
In a visiting area at the East Bay-area prison, the upbeat and expressive Barnes recently spent two hours answering the question that even her incarcerated "sisters" have been asking: "What's a woman like you doing in a place like this?"
"What pushed me from having a social conscience to the brink of dedicating my life to peace and justice issues was really the outbreak of the Iraq war," she said. "And the repercussions that came out of 9/11 - the Patriot Act - scared me."
Dressed in a light-blue prison uniform that matches her eyes, Barnes is slim and healthy, a vegetarian who refuses to eat most of the prison's food. She subscribes to the New York Times and shares it with her fellow inmates. She asked the prison to supply carrot sticks to help inmates quit smoking. She started a library of classic books by soliciting her many supporters on the outside.
Barnes pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charge of trespassing, paid a $500 fine and had expectations of quiet and solitude and plenty of time for deep thinking during her incarceration. But since entering the federal facility April 6, she has barely had time to read one book. Her prison job is landscaping from 7 a.m. to 3:20 p.m., work she describes as exhausting.
"I thought I could come here and read and write," she said with a laugh. "I'm working harder than I have ever worked before. I barely have time to sleep each day. It's a very, very physically demanding job."
Barnes' early years provided few signs of a dissident in the making. She grew up in the Bay Area, one of five children of a bus driver and homemaker. One of her brothers, Oakland Police Officer Michael Faulkner, was killed in 1981 during a domestic disturbance call.
Barnes says she was politically active even in high school, though her mother says she never mentioned anything about such activities. Barnes was heavily involved in social work at her Mormon church in Cameron Park, but it never extended to political activism.
She raised her sons and, among other things, designed A&W restaurants and opened a pet store.
She says the difference between her reactions and those of her husband to the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and the buildup to war in Iraq eventually created tension in her marriage.
They separated and Barnes moved to Sacramento, where she enrolled at CSUS to study photography. She found her way to a meeting of a fledgling campus peace group. She befriended other activists during weekly anti-war demonstrations on 16th Street.
Burke, the CSUS professor who helped organize the campus peace group, remembers Barnes at one of the first gatherings. "She came off as this homemaker mother-of-five who hadn't been involved in politics," he said, "and within a couple of weeks we realized she was a great organizer and gifted speaker."
Burke, who has never been to the Fort Benning demonstrations, took Barnes to see Bourgeois' speech last year.
"The next thing I know, she is at the (Georgia) protest and she is the first person crossing the line," he said. "I go visit her every weekend, partly because ... I feel responsible for getting her involved in this stuff."
Morenz has little patience for those who fired up her daughter and then stepped back when she got arrested. "If you're going to lead, lead her by the hand and go with her," she said. "Talk is cheap."
Morenz admits that if Barnes were not involved, she would have applauded the prison sentence for protesters.
For her part, Barnes says the difficult days in prison have given her a platform to continue speaking out. She has been writing a prison journal. A friend, Janice Freeman, types it up and puts it on the SOA Watch Web site, www.soaw.org.
Freeman, founder of Sacramento's SOA Watch chapter, says she chose not to cross the line at Fort Benning because of the likely prison sentence.
"Prisoners of conscience energize the movement," said Bourgeois, who remembers meeting Barnes in Elk Grove, "What they are doing is trying to be a voice for people of Latin America whose voices have been taken away."
But not everyone wants to hear the message.
"It's kind of like time has passed the protesters by and they are whipping a dead horse," said Frank Martin, former mayor of Columbus, Ga.
The U.S. Army, which admitted in 1996 that torture manuals had been used at the School of the Americas, closed the school in December 2000. It reopened one month later as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation under the Department of Defense.
Martin said the school revamped its curriculum and now emphasizes human rights.
Many of the protesters, he said, "come here with the express intent of going to jail. They think that's the last leg of their journey - to do 90 days in prison."
Barnes' eyes tear up when she is asked how she is coping apart from her sons, who are with their father. She knew that by refusing to sign the "ban and bar" letter she would be sentenced to prison. But she believes she is passing along important lessons to her children.
"One is to love your children unconditionally," she said. "The second one is to teach them by example. It doesn't matter what you say; it's what you do."
Barnes won't rule out another arrest after her July 2 release - and, as tough as it is, another stint in prison - "but I want to space them out a bit."
As for Billie Morenz, she remains puzzled. Asked what's in store for her daughter in the months ahead, she replied sharply, "That's a scary thing."
"Role reversal - Incarcerated Sacramento organizer Leisa Barnes has taken to driving her captors crazy
by Bill Forman
Sacramento News & Review
June 3, 2004Sending political organizers to prisons may not be such a great idea, after all. Consider the beleaguered administrators at the 1,500-woman Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, Calif., where Leisa Barnes is causing all sorts of problems. The Sacramento mother of five is serving a three-month sentence for protesting the former School of the Americas, a controversial Fort Benning, Ga.-based training school for soldiers whose notorious graduates include Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega.
"I think that they feel sorry every time they send an organizer to prison," mused Sacramento School of the Americas Watch organizer Janice Freeman, who's been acting as Barnes' liaison with the outside world during her incarceration. "In the case of the prisoners of conscience for the School of the Americas, almost every time, wherever they're sent, they tend to organize while they're in prison. They see the injustices that are happening in prison, and they get the word out."
Barnes' journals (available online at soaw.org/*article.php*) describe a prison culture in which guards routinely make physical threats, often with sexual overtones. When not bonding with fellow inmates--including an environmental activist who currently is serving five years, and two female convicts whose newly born babies have just been taken away--she's come up with all sorts of ideas that never seem to find their way into prison training manuals. In just a few weeks, Barnes has offered to organize a prison library of classic literature, to dig a dirt path around the paved one so that inmates can go running, and even to serve celery and carrot sticks to inmates who want to wean themselves off cigarettes.
Prison authorities are not amused. "My personal take on this is that they have a mindset that if you're in prison, you're really a bad person, and so they tend to treat everyone without much respect," said Freeman, explaining how authorities since have prohibited Barnes from receiving any further books in the mail and no longer will allow her to receive The New York Times.
Then again, Barnes doesn't need to view the recent wave of front-page photos to understand that human-rights abuses run rampant and sometimes begin at home. The object of her protest--which was taken over from the Army by the Pentagon and rechristened the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation--remains, in Freeman's words, "a military combat school that trains soldiers in combat skills, commando tactics and torture techniques all at U.S. taxpayer expense." And though the facility's legacy is tied to controversies in Latin America, you don't have to be an Iran-contra player like Noriega to see connections between what's gone on there and in the Middle East.
Barnes has another month in her original sentence to serve before reuniting with family and friends back home in Sacramento. In the meantime, Freeman said, her spirits are good: "There have been times there when she has been sad, probably a little depressed, but she feels very strongly what she is doing is right, and she has absolutely not one regret."
School of the Americas Watch–West ~ SOAW–W
June 22, 2004San Jose Website - http://teachers.bcp.org/llauro
Los Angeles Website - www.soaw-la.org
National Website - www.soaw.orgNote: Items for SOAWW emails should be sent to Dolores Perez Priem
Three new events:
SOAW Vigil at Ft. Benning, GA - Nov. 19-21, 2004
1) Spain: International Justice and The War on Terrorism
2) PsOC Leisa Faulkner Barnes and Peg Morton will be released from the Federal Prison
3) "From Latin America to Iraq: Torture and the Treatment of Political Prisoners" Panel DiscussionFr. Roy speaks (NOTE: change of venue)
SOA Watch meets Thursday, July 1
Coming in August: Maryknoll lay missioner Lisa Sullivan
Spain: International Justice and The War on Terrorism
Tuesday, June 29
Check-in: 5:30 pm/Program: 6:00 pm
World Affairs Council
312 Sutter St, 2nd Floor Conference Room, San FranciscoSOAWW folks met Prof. Castresana in February at the USF luncheon before the SOAWatch - US Army Panel Discussion.
Judge Baltazar Garzón, National Court, Spain's highest criminal tribunal.Carlos Castresana Fernandez, Spain's top anti-corruption prosecutor and Visiting Professor of Law at the University of San Francisco. Camilo Barcia Garcia-Villamil, Spain's Consul General in San Francisco.Almudena Bernabeu, International Attorney, Center for Justice & Accountability (CJA) Prof. Carlos Castresana filed the initial complaint that eventually led to the arrest of Gen. Pinochet. He was also involved in launching cases against Argentine and other Chilean military officers. He has spent years fighting organized crime as Spain's leading anti-corruption prosecutor, and has been an expert for many United Nations and Council of Europe commissions.
For advanced tickets, call 415.293.4600 or visit itsyourworld.org/program.php*
Prisoners of Conscience Leisa Faulkner Barnes and Peg Morton will be released from the Federal Prison Camp in Dublin on Friday, July 2, 2004 around 8:15 am. Those who would like to support them will be entering the base (Camp Parks, across the street from the Dublin BART Station) and going to the parking lot across the street from the Federal Prison Camp at 5675 8th Street, Dublin, CA. For info, go to mapquest.com and type in the 8th St address. We will then proceed off the base. Leisa and possibly Peg will be holding a press conference outside the gate. Peg would like a prayer circle, vigil for a short time in the BART parking lot, then go to a restaurant for breakfast, possibly iHop. All are invited.For more info contact: Laura Slattery 510-986-0168; for info on day of release July 2, call Cile Beatty on cell 510-684-6444.
"From Latin America to Iraq: Torture and the Treatment of Political Prisoners" Panel Discussion
Thursday, July 8, Beverages and light food 6:30 pm/Program starts 7:00 pm
New College of California
777 Valencia St, 1st Floor Theatre
San FranciscoPanel consisting of Carlos Mauricio, Salvadoran Torture Survivor, Executive Dir of the Stop Impunity Project; Shawn Roberts, Human rights attorney; Rachel Montgomery, SOA Watch and POC; Tato Torres, Inst. for the Study of Psychosocial Trauma; and a representative from the Council on American-Islamic Relations. This panel will explore the parallels between the torture and mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq with earlier US interventions in Latin America, including the role of the SOA in training Latin American militaries in the tactics of torture and terror.
For info, contact Chris McKenna, Center for Justice & Accountability 415-544-0444, ext 302
The following events noted previously - NOTE Change of Venue for #4, Sacramento event:Fr. Roy will speak about his experiences as the Founder of the School of the Americas Watch.
Sunday, June 27, 2:00 pm
Westminster Presbyterian Church
1300 N Street, Club Room
Sacramento - andFr. Bourgeois speaks at all the Masses at St. Ignatius Loyola Parish in Sacramento
3245 Arden Way, Sacramento
Sat. June 26 at 5:30 pm, and
Sun. June 27, 7:30 am, 9:30 am, 11:30 am, 5:30 pm
For information, contact Denise Sewart, (916) 300-0482
FATHER ROY speaks on What is the School of the Americas (SOA) -- Why should we be concerned about it?
Monday, June 28, 7:00 pm
United Church of Christ
701 Suisun Street
Downtown Suisun City (near Solano College)
Sponsored by the Solano Peace and Justice Coalition
For information, call 707-980-1688Hear Fr. Roy intereviewed in KVMR-FM Nevada City 89.5 FM
Friday, June 25 at 8:10 am & Monday, June 28 at 8:35 am
Coming in August:Lisa Sullivan, a Maryknoll lay missioner, will talk about her experiences in Venezuela.
Thursday, August 19, 2004 at 7:00 pm
St. Agnes Catholic Church, Spiritual Life Center
1025 Masonic Avenue (corner Oak St.)
San Francisco
Sponsored by the Marin Interfaith Task Force on the Americas,
SOA Watch West and St. Agnes Faith to Justice Committee
Contact: Dale Sorensen/Geo. Friemuth 510-527-2522For more information, contact Dolores Perez Priem, (415) 387-2287
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