...protest!
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/21/national/21benning.html
...Though tired, they were energized at the prospect of demonstrating outside of the gates of Fort Benning, calling for the base to close its training school for Latin American officers.
Some, including four middle schoolers from Chicago, were not yet born when massacres occurred across Central America in the 1980's, many of them carried out under the orders of people who had trained at the school.
Even so, the estimated 15,000 protesters were eager to keep alive the annual demonstration, which began in 1990 when a Roman Catholic priest of the Maryknoll order, the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, and a few of his friends staged a hunger strike outside the school to protest the murders in 1989 of six Jesuit priests and two workers in El Salvador, murders that involved 19 soldiers who had graduated from the academy.
...While the protest is largely peaceful, the locals say they have come to see it as a slap of disrespect to the soldiers from the base who are fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. To many residents, there is no distinction between being antimilitary, calling for an end to the war or calling for the closing of the military school, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, once called the School of the Americas.
I saw where the annual protest against the School of the Americas in Ft Benning, Ga generated a counter-protest against it by the nearby residents. I am sorry to hear of it. Folks who protest around a military base must make clear that their protest is NOT against the members of the military. A protest against a military school, e.g., that is thought to foster the worst of non-Democratic actions committed by this country (state-sponsored terrorism, installation of puppets, death-squads, etc.) is NOT a slap in the face to members of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines or Coast Guard. Because one thinks our government shouldn't train folks in anti-Democratic, para-military actions for the benefit of the corporate interests who have always demanded and supported said actions, it does not follow that they intend to insult the PFC's, SGT's, LT's, COL's and even the BGEN's (above that, I think, things get suspect). Sergeant Somebody from Middle-of-anywhere, Wyoming shouldn't feel insulted by such a protest; he should feel praised and supported in that folks seek to prevent his use in illegal and immoral ways.
On the other hand, the first time I heard a protester call any military member a 'baby-killer' would be the time I got physically involved; that protester would have to be shut down, shouted down or beat down. That protester's actions must be considered mis-directed, at best. He might as well accuse the finger of being bloodthirsty for pulling a trigger when the mind had the thought; it would be the thought that is wrong and the mind which should be accused.
The so-called 'spread democracy' actions that involve funding parties and individuals in Latin American countries who support American corporate interests at the expense of the residents of that country would appear to be both illegal and immoral, particularly when they are taken in conjunction with the para-military actions of those trained in places like the school in Ft. Benning. Also, the occupation of a country with neither internationally accepted justification nor effective domestic support would probably be the incorrect thing to do nine times out of ten. I somehow don't think Iraq would be the tenth.
Defense is rarely illegal and seldom immoral. Puppet installation (Iran, S. Korea, S Vietnam, the various banana republics, etc.) and occupation (Iraq) are usually both.
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