TRIAL STATEMENT BY BILL HOUSTON (SOA-26)
MAY 22-23, 2001
Judge Faircloth and other members of the court: I think it’s evident that most of my codefendants are motivated by their deep faith in God. I fully respect their faith and feel genuine and complete solidarity with them. Since I am an atheist it is natural that the basis of my action (or at least the wording of it) would not be identical to theirs. My faith (and my hope and love) is based on the capacity of the world’s people to work together to solve the enormous problems we face. I don’t think it’s the kind of blind faith that says success is inevitable but I do think there are real grounds for hope.
My first eleven years were in the slum section East Macon of Macon, GA. I was about six years old when Gene Talmadge used the National Guard to suppress the Bibb Mill strike. So many strikers were arrested that they overflowed the jail and were interned in a tent city that a lot of folks called a concentration camp. Many of the strikers had voted for Gene because of a campaign promise NOT to use the Guard. None of our immediate neighbors were interned, but some worked at the Bibb, and in later years were desperate at being at the mercy of the company. Their union with which they might have been able to defend themselves had been destroyed by the terrorism of the Guard.
Also in later years I knew some people who were Ku Kluxers or in other paramilitary groups. From before my birth to about 1936 my Dad had steady work (84 hours a week at $35 a week) as a bookkeeper. It was only after he died that my Mother told me of the one period he was laid off. His boss had joined the Ku Klux and put pressure on all his white employees to join too. Though Dad had some race and religious prejudice, he was anti-Klan. When he refused to join he was fired. Fortunately the boss soon ran for Kleagle (or some such job), got beat, got mad at the Klan and rehired my Dad.
I see my country today too much controlled by national and multinational corporations the way Bibb Mills controlled East Macon 65 years ago. The foreign policy weapons of low intensity conflict, structural adjustment and neoliberal "free" trade seem designed not to help most people here or abroad but to maximize corporate profit. Judge, I think you have been in the court in recent years and have heard my predecessors in this chair list some of the atrocities in which SOA graduates have been involved -- El Mozote, the assassinations of Bishops Romero and Gerardi, etc. (and it’s quite a long cetera). Bad as these atrocities are, even worse is their effect in depriving ordinary people of the leaders who are speaking for them and organizing them to speak and act for themselves. Another effect is to intimidate people and make them fearful to organize to solve their problems together.
The program of the SOA (and of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) seems designed to teach the armies and police forces of Latin America to get rid of unions agitating for decent wages and working conditions, indigenous people resisting agribusiness and other extractive industries that wreck their culture and pollute their environment, religious leaders who work among the poor to help them regain their dignity (parts of this sentence are adapted from an article by Ed Kinane, brother of one of my codefendants). In two visits to Haiti and four to Nicaragua I have met some of the grassroots people engaged in such activities or being intimidated from engaging in them, and I know similar folks in the U.S. At the WHISC page of the Fort Benning website I read a charge that those opposed to the WHISC are just using the anti-SOA campaign as an excuse to promote a much larger agenda. In some ways I think that’s true, for SOA Watch is just one part of a much larger struggle for decency, for non-violence and for power to people.