from Sierra Vista Herald 061120

On November 19 a contingent of Grant County Peace Coalition participated in a demonstration at the gates of Fort Huachuca to protest Bush's medieval policy of torture and lawlessness.  GCPC joined the the Father Louis Vitale, Rev Steve Kelly, the Raging Grannies, Walking Mary, and over 100 supporters from Tucson and vicinity and across the border in this 3rd annual event.

The Fort Huachuca demonstration was organized by the Tucson based support group for School of the Americas Watch.  Their local website is at www.consensus.net/end_us_torture.html and the School of the Americas Watch site is www.soaw.org.

This demonstration was in support of the much larger 17th annual SOA watch demonstration at Fort Benning, GA that took place on the same day and was estimated to draw more than 20,000 protesters.

The Fort Huachuca demonstarion was marked by counter demonstrators, most of whom kept within civil boundaries but included many that continuously tried to disrupt the anti-torture speakers with screaming, ridiculous or simply incoherent accusations, or blaring martial music played on walkmans and piped through bullhorns.

The Sierra Vista police were present in sufficient but not overbearing numbers and are to be commended for their calm, professional and even-handed manner of crowd control which consisted mostly of keeping people on the curb and out of the streets and keeping counter protesters from elbowing for position, provocative yelling, and thrusting flags in the faces of the anti-torture group.

While there were no violent confrontations or arrests in the demonstration, Father Louis Vitale and Rev Steve Kelly were arrested when they crossed the line and entered the base to deliver a letter of protest to Maj Gen Barbara Fast, a member of the Abu Ghraib rogues gallery and now in charge of the US Army's main interrogation training facility, located at Fort Huachuca.  They were later released.

On Monday 20 November, the lead story on the front page of the Sierra Vista Herald covered the demonstration with the headline, "Dueling Protests."  The coverage has an obvious slant to the "home team."

Interestingly, though some from each side staked out their own turf, there was lots of face to face interaction and some attempts at dialog.  Unfortunately, as we have seen here in Grant County, few from the pro-torture side could offer any real arguments in support of their positions other than to invoke long since discredited accusations about Saddam/Iraq ties to 911 (even Bush himself has given up beating that dead horse) and fanciful accusations about the "liberal media" hiding the news that Iraq had WMDs. 

While their dogged denials were somewhat discouraging, they were few in number, particularly since Sierra Vista is an obviously military town.  Sadly, many were veterans with family members still in the military that have seen duty in Iraq or are preparing to go.  But even the deaths of their own family members could not shake them from their delusional insistence on supporting, "The Troops, The President, The Mission."