World moves on, and so does SOA Watch protest

For 25 years now it has been a dependable, if steadily diminishing, rite of fall: the pilgrimage of protesters to Columbus and Fort Benning to stage the annual School of the Americas Watch protest. From a high-water mark of some 20,000 demonstrators to this year's tally of fewer than a tenth that many, people from all over the country have assembled here to protest what they believe are U.S. taxpayer-funded human rights abuses committed by graduates of the former U.S. Army School of the Americas.

It is a matter of long-established record that this news organization has never been in editorial agreement with the SOA Watch position. Though we have always respected the protesters' freedom of speech and admired what we believe to be, for the most part, their sincere moral convictions, we believe those convictions to be misguided and the protest misplaced.

(Despite our fundamental disagreements with SOA Watch, we remain profoundly unimpressed with many of the tired taunts of its most vocal critics. Public disagreement with government policy -- regardless of whether one shares that disagreement -- is not disloyalty, the persistence of such neo-McCarthyite fallacy notwithstanding.)

It is documented fact that a few of the more notorious "alumni" of the program have been guilty of the vilest and bloodiest of atrocities in their home countries. One former commander of the school acknowledged to the Ledger-Enquirer that in years past, applicants to the school should have been screened more carefully.

But we have never been convinced that either SOA or the institute that succeeded it has ever been in the business of teaching terror and torture. On the contrary, we believe the program's mission serves an important U.S. foreign policy purpose.

Over the years, as the protest movement has diminished in size, it has grown more diffuse in purpose and focus. It has gone from a movement directed at one institution to a kind of omnibus protest of U.S. foreign policy in general. Such criticism, again, is every citizen's right. But it makes even more pertinent a question that was legitimate already: Was Fort Benning the best venue for challenging policy that is made hundreds of miles away in the nation's capital?

The announcement that the annual protest will be moving from here to the U.S.-Mexico border changes the specifics of the question, but not its relevance.

Shortly before this year's event, the FBI confirmed that federal, state and local counterterrorism surveillance of the protest has been carried out since 2000. It's worth noting, from the FBI's own report in 2005, that the government feared no trouble from the SOA Watch protesters themselves: "The peaceful intentions of the SOA Watch leaders has been demonstrated over the years The concern has always been that a militant group would infiltrate the protesters and use the cover of the crowd to create problems."

Sadly, that's the world we live in.

This story was originally published November 23, 2015 at 3:28 PM with the headline "World moves on, and so does SOA Watch protest."