Miscelaney -- 2

• Subject: New Prison Addresses for John & Bill!!
  Date:     Wed, 18 Jul 2001 15:02:39 EDT
  From:     Beth Lerman

Overnight accomodations for Charlie's Coming Out Party:

• Below is an excert of an email from the SOA Watch-NE group in Philadelphia.
              On Monday, July 31, in solidarity with SOA Watch will do a Direct Action in Philadelphia in solidarity with 3 SOA Watch human rights activists who will be reporting to federal prisons to complete 3-12 month sentences for an action they did at Ft. Benning last November SOA Watch will do a Direct Action. This action will speak out on their behalf, and especially on behalf of the thousands of prisoners of conscience throughout Latin America.
  
              On Monday, July 31, Judy Bierbaum, Margaret Knapke, and Charlie Litkey will enter prison for 3 - 12 months for their participation in a funeral procession onto the Ft. Benning base last November. On this same day, SOA Watch will do a Direct Action in support of all prisoners of conscience, and to bring attention to the atrocities perpetrated by graduates of the SOA.

• Subject: Trial of 2 Salvadoran Generals in Florida
  Date:     Mon, 2 Oct 2000 00:23:01 EDT
  From:     Judy Liteky
  SALVADORAN GENERALS FACE JURY IN NUN SLAYINGS
  
  By Susan Spencer-Wendel, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
  Sunday, October 1, 2000
  
  WEST PALM BEACH -- The television images from a field in El Salvador riveted America 20 years ago. Peasants hauling the corpses of three nuns and a missionary out of the dirt with rope. Dragging the four American churchwomen like lassoed cattle across the ground. Laying them neatly, covering with branches to keep the flies away. A grim-faced American ambassador looking on.
  
  Five Salvadoran soldiers would be imprisoned in El Salvador in 1984 for raping Sisters Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel and lay missionary Jean Donovan, then shooting them in the head. But that was no end at all to the sad story.
  
  A new chapter begins in West Palm Beach Oct. 10. Inside a walnut-paneled federal courtroom, relatives of the four murdered women will ask a jury to hold two of El Salvador's highest ranking military officers accountable. Gen. Jose Guillermo Garcia was minister of defense and Gen. Carlos Vides Casanova was director of the national guard in 1980, the year the churchwomen and at least 9,000 other civilians were killed in the murderous rampages of civil war.
  
  The relatives' local lawsuit against the generals is one where money is the only penalty. Court filings say the families will ask for, at the very least, a million dollars.
  
  In this fight, the nuns are the ones with the the small army. Two of Florida's most prominent lawyers have enlisted for free, backed by attorneys from a powerful human rights group in New York that has investigated the murders since 1980. They've spent at least $200,000 to hunt the hemisphere for evidence and witnesses and bring them to West Palm Beach for trial. But why here, why now? Because the Salvadoran generals are here, now, in Florida.
  
  The churchwomen's families found that out a few years ago, while taping a CBS show on the murders in New York. Host Bryant Gumbel surprised them with the news just before they went on the air.
  
  Mike Donovan, a Palm Beach Gardens accountant, was there. He is the older brother of Jean Donovan, the 27-year-old lay missionary murdered with the nuns.
  
  "I couldn't believe it. All the deserving people in the world begging to live in the United States, and they let murderers in," Donovan, 49, said. "That's what eats at me."
  
  The group agreed then and there to sue Garcia and Vides Casanova. Donovan and the other plaintiffs say the case is not about getting money. Donovan hadn't even heard the $1 million figure mentioned in court documents. "Me personally? I'd be satisfied if during the trial, the generals went home, packed their bags and slipped out of the country in the middle of the night," he said.
  
  Garcia a grandpa in Plantation
  
  Home for Garcia is a ranch-style house in a middle-class neighborhood in Plantation. It has all the amenities: a big-screen television, a giant satellite dish and a swing set for any of his 11 grandchildren. On this August afternoon, the general appears at the front door in a pressed blue-striped shirt and navy pants. The 67-year-old has graying hair, wrinkles and a paunch, but a posture built so true it has yet to bend.
  
  He waves bye-bye to his grandchildren before settling in on the sofa's pink satin pillows to talk about his 30-year military career.
  
  This is the man human rights activists call a merciless assassin, presiding over an era in El Salvador where thousands, including peasants, priests and the Archbishop Oscar Romero, were murdered.
  
  He sits in the living room surrounded by silk-flower arrangements, knickknacks, statuettes and pictures of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. A U.S. resident for more than 10 years, Garcia doesn't want to budge.
  
  The former minister of defense turns the blank white pages of his military discipline record like pages in a hymnal.
  
  "Blanco, blanco, blanco," he says dramatically after each one. He does not speak English, he says.
  
  Then Garcia turns to honors awarded him by the U.S. Department of Defense -- including the presidential Legion of Merit for "exceptionally meritorious conduct" and "outstanding services" from October 1979 to April 1983 -- one of the bloodiest eras in the history of the hemisphere.
  
  Garcia often met American military advisors, dealing for millions of dollars to fight his government's war against a Communist takeover. Garcia says it's absurd that he would have had anything to do with the deaths of four American churchwomen. He says he didn't order it or try to cover it up.
  
  "It hurt me personally, the vulgar assassination of these women," Garcia says. "I was as sorry as anyone else."
  
  According to the lawsuit, though, Garcia said at a Salvadoran Cabinet meeting a month before the nuns' murders that the churchworkers in their region, called Chalaltenango, were collaborating with leftist guerillas and something should be done about them.
  
  The families also claim the national guard director, Vides Casanova, said that he would kill 200,000 to 300,000 people if that's what it took to stop a Communist takeover. Vides Casanova, who lives in Palm Coast, just north of Daytona Beach, declined to comment for this article.
  
  Garcia, Vides Casanova's superior officer, says the armed forces were divided. Officers and enlisted men were deserting to join left-wing rebel groups and right-wing death squads. He could not control the heinous things they did -- like shooting Romero at the pulpit and machine-gunning the masses at his funeral, Garcia says.
  
  El Salvador's civil war ended in 1992, after 12 years during which more than 75,000 people killed. The generals retired long before its end. Garcia says death threats against him from both left- and right-wing groups forced him to come to the States in 1989. He received political asylum. "No problem," he says.
  
  A picture of Pope John Paul II shaking his hand when he was minister of defense hangs in the living room. "He (the Pope) told me then I was in a very delicate situation," Garcia says, "I certainly was."
  
  Victim's brother won't give up
  
  Bill Ford sat in Garcia's living room, heard the same story, and decided it was all lies.
  
  He said Garcia is a hard person, "hard in the sense of rigid, determined, a man who would do whatever he felt had to be done."
  
  Ford, 64, is the older brother of murdered Maryknoll Sister Ita Ford. He's the lawsuit's lead plaintiff, its driving force. Ford's also the founder of a Wall Street law firm, a well-connected citizen who has hounded reluctant U.S. government leaders to investigate the deaths.
  
  Ford is the only relative who has met the generals. He went to their homes, talked to them and walked away more committed to suing.
  
  "People reasonably ask 'Hey, it's 20 years later . . . why don't you just give up?' " Ford says.
  
  His answers are many. The families have always been seen by the U.S. government as a "problem," having interrupted national support for the murder machine in El Salvador, Ford says. The court case is a chance to fully tell their story. It's also to "let the American people know that butchers are allowed to retire in the United States."
  
  A victory over the generals wouldn't require they leave. It would give the families ammo, though, to ask the Immigration and Naturalization Service to kick them out. A large monetary award also could force them to flee, Ford says.
  
  "That would be a satisfactory ending too," he says.
  
  Anti-tobacco lawyers sign on
  
  Trying to get that judgment will be two of the lawyers who represented Florida in its $13 billion victory against tobacco companies in 1997. Bob Montgomery of West Palm Beach and Bob Kerrigan of Pensacola won tens of millions in the tobacco lawsuit and are paying the bill in the nuns' case. Montgomery said that when Kerrigan asked him to help on the case, he had to go to a map to see where El Salvador was. He and Kerrigan each committed $100,000, but it will likely be much more, Montgomery said. The generals' Miami attorney is Kurt R. Klaus Jr. Vides Casanova's daughter went to college with Klaus' wife.
  
  Klaus says the generals are easy targets, with little money to travel, search for witnesses, or do research. They're paying him bit by bit, he said. "I understand that the relatives want to avenge the deaths, but they're going after the wrong people," Klaus says. "The idea that these guys could control every single member of the military during a time of complete anarchy is absurd."
  
  Klaus made a solid stream of pretrial requests that the case be dismissed -- including that the time limit to sue the generals is up or that the claim should have been made in El Salvador. U.S. District Judge Daniel T.K. Hurley rejected nearly all of those, leaving Klaus scrambling.
  
  In August, Klaus asked Hurley to delay the case one year. He wrote that he may have "mis-thought" his ability to win on pretrial motions and needed the time to get State and Defense Department records. "The plaintiffs have had 19 years to build their case, the generals just more than a year," he wrote.
  
  The judge denied that request too, saying he had already granted one delay. On Friday, Hurley set it to begin Oct. 10 and cleared four weeks of his calendar to hear it.
  
  The plaintiffs got special permission to set-up multimedia equipment for their arsenal of evidence, machines to play the videos and tapes, computer projectors to display declassified State Department cables and documents on a big wall.
  
  The witnesses for the churchwomen's families are expected to testify about death squads, torture chambers and massacres which they say the generals knew about, but did nothing to stop. They include Latin American military experts, United Nations officials and Robert White, the grim-faced American ambassador who stood at the churchwomen's grave. White, who now works at a Washington think tank, may testify that Garcia acknowledged to him that his soldiers were engaged in death squad activities and that the generals had prior knowledge of atrocities but did nothing to stop them.
  
  The plaintiffs tried at one point to get former Secretary of State Alexander Haig to testify. But Montgomery said he later decided just to show jurors video of Haig's testimony before Congress shortly after the nuns' murder.
  
  In it, Haig says that he's been told the nuns' mini-bus ran a roadblock and that an exchange of gunfire could have taken place -- a statement later proven completely false. Montgomery hopes that will show the generals' desire to cover-up the crime by giving false information to the State Department.
  
  The United Nations officials may testify about a 1993 U.N. investigation that found fault in the actions of both men. The report concluded that Vides Casanova knew his national guardsmen had committed the murders and covered up facts during the Salvadoran judicial investigation. And it concluded that Garcia made no serious effort to thoroughly investigate those guilty of the executions.
  
  Then, Dr. Cyril Wecht, a renowned forensic pathologist, will piece together evidence to describe the nuns' last moments as they were raped and shot in the head.
  
  After that heavy lineup will come the defense. Klaus declined to say who his defense witnesses are.
  
  "Nothing compared to them," Garcia says.
  
  'A final nail in the coffin'
  
  The churchworkers' families are able to sue the generals under the Torture Victim Protection Act, a 1992 federal law. It allows victims of war crimes or their families to sue in U. S. courts high-ranking officers who maybe didn't pull the trigger or tie the noose, but ordered it done.
  
  It was used this year to sue former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic.
  
  In one of the law's first tests in 1992, thousands of Filipinos filed a class-action lawsuit in Hawaii against their ex-president, Ferdinand Marcos, saying they were victims of torture, murder and imprisonment during his 14-year term. That jury awarded $22 billion to all the victims, a record verdict later overturned.
  
  In 1995, a Boston court ordered an ex-defense minister of Guatemala to pay $47.5 million to an American nun who was tortured and to eight Guatemalans who were terrorized by the Guatemalan military.
  
  It's often impossible to recover the money in such victories, said Ken Hurwitz, an attorney with the Lawyer's Committee for Human Rights, the powerful New York group backing the churchwomen's case.
  
  But it's still necessary to pursue them, he says. Hurwitz has worked on the case for nearly two years, traveling to El Salvador to interview witnesses and amass evidence.
  
  "Money is not the driving force here," Hurwitz says. "It's about getting some sort of objective validation for what these families felt. It's also for the educational value, so people know these criminals are able to come and live in the United States."
  
  Sensing that jurors might need a primer on El Salvador -- a country the size of Massachusetts with about the same population, 6.1 million -- Judge Hurley asked for expert testimony on "a country so far away we know so little about." In fact, it's a little confusing even for the people involved. The first draft of a questionnaire mailed to potential jurors referred once to the country as "Honduras."
  
  The trial will be a long haul for jurors, lawyers and family members alike. All the women's relatives say they'll attend, but not all with the same enthusiasm.
  
  Donovan, the Palm Beach Gardens accountant, is a district governor for Rotary International who travels a lot because of his position. He said he'll come as much as his schedule allows, but is not eager to do so. It means dredging up bad memories, particularly if they play that video again of his sister, Jean, and the three nuns being dragged out of the dirt.
  
  The older brother of Sister Dorothy Kazel has different expectations. Plaintiff Jim Kazel, who lives near Cleveland, said the case may finally be the end to the sad story of the murder of three nuns and a missionary in El Salvador 20 years ago.
  
  "It's hard to say but, it might close things once and for all," Kazel says. "A final nail in the coffin, if I can put it that way."
  
  susan_spencer_wendel@pbpost.com

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