The imprisonment conditions and intimidation techniques, and harassment, and bodily harm inflicted by own own government troops teaching the elite troops of Central and South American militaries, is well documented. All of this far, far outstrips what folks like me have coming in our own American prisons. We can never even begin to repay, with our relatively comfortable jail inconveniences to their losses of lives, limbs and human dignity, not to mention the losses to their families, and the disappearances of their loved ones. No humiliations, no slow, painful deaths, no disappearances. This could happen, however, and has happened and does still haoppen, with American citizens - nuns, priests, religious workers, in places such as El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
All human beings deserve to be treated as human beings.
This is just one reason we do what we do, your honor, to nonviolently protest and risk jail, why we embrace jail, to help end all these injustices and call on our government to start behaving in a truly humane way. The prosecutor at my trial, Mr. William Henderson, in his wrap-up statements to the jury, said that there were a thousand other ways for me to make my grievances known to the government in reference to the School of the Americas. I have come up with about ten or twelve over the years, and have done them all. Marching, carrying banners, distributing leaflets, signing petitions, fasting, writing Congress, talking to people - to name just a few. Instead, Mr. Henderson told the jury, I chose to vandalize the Pentagon.