Court Testimony of Margaret Knapke

March 10, 2000 before Judge Hugh Lawson
in US District Court, Columbus, GA

 

United States of America vs. Margaret Knapke

 

Your Honor, like my fellow defendants, I have tried to carefully discern the proper way to express my urgent conviction that the US Army School of the Americas must be closed.  I have included my parents in that discernment process, because I realize that -- unfortunately -- any penalty to me will be borne more painfully by them.

 

My father continues to be saddened that I broke the law prohibiting political discourse on the base.  He, like many US citizens, would like to think that our laws exist as a logically coherent whole, protecting the legitimate interests of all equally, and that it is possible for a citizen to comply with all of them.  But I have to disagree with him there.  Rather it is obvious to me that some laws contradict others, and so no one can comply with all of them, because it is logically impossible to do so.  So I believe that a conscientious citizen has to carefully discern which laws have priority -- moral if not legal priority.

 

I have considered this carefully, Your Honor, and I must say that I don't consider myself to have been disobedient in any meaningful way by taking political discourse onto the base.  Rather I see myself and my codefendants as being essentially obedient to the Nuremberg Principles which, as you know, require of citizens that they not be complicit with government policies that produce crimes against peace and humanity.  Indeed I believe that I would be grievously disobedient if I failed to speak for the people of Latin America -- particularly those currently under fire in Colombia and Chiapas -- as clearly and directly as I have by taking our message onto the base.

 

I have also heard another kind of objection, this one from some friends and clients who have suggested that it might be irresponsible of me to put myself at risk for prison time, knowing that going to prison would require me to effectively abandon my therapeutic practice for some time.  And admittedly the thought of leaving some particular clients who are at very difficult stages of illness has given me pause.  But, Your Honor,  I just cannot see healing work and political work as such a dichotomy.  Rather  this effort to close the SOA -- and to confront the corporate and political interests served by the SOA -- is itself an act of healing offered to both the privileged and the oppressed.

 

For instance, every time we in the US look more honestly at what our foreign policy, and the military implementation of it, does to people -- to regular people just like us in this courtroom, and to so many, many children -- then we become more integrated and whole, even as our hearts break.  Similarly when we are willing to squarely confront the fact that US citizens constitute only 5% of the world's population, yet use at least a quarter of its resources, then we can further heal by refusing to cooperate with that obscenely unjust distribution of resources.  But perhaps most obviously, Your Honor, closing the SOA and other schools like it will prevent further trauma, suffering and death throughout Latin America, and finally will render so many rehab centers for torture victims obsolete.

    
Your Honor, you are hearing our words in English today, but if you listen very carefully you can also hear undertones in Spanish and in numerous indigenous tongues such as Nahuatl and Quiche, because  in a very real way the people of Latin America are here with us today.  They are truly our co-defendants, not because they have been charged with criminal trespassing, but because they are prosecuted daily by policy-makers who deem them and their children expendable, and because they are forced to defend themselves against policies implemented in large part by the School of the Americas.  For these reasons the people of Latin America need to be heard between the lines of our testimony today.  If we US citizens can allow ourselves to enter into their words and into their experience of oppression, then we can heal through some very difficult truths and finally begin to enter into real community.

 

Your Honor, the good news is that everyone is invited into this healing process; no one, but no one, is excluded.