The SOA / WHISC trains Latin American Soldiers to engage in Low Intensity Conflict; it teaches them to wage war against civilians. In other words, through the SOA / WHISC, we train terrorists.Now the United States, too, has become the victim of terrorist acts.
It is our hope that through the horror and tragedy of September 11, we as a nation may become more sensitized to the horror and misery caused by our own, exported brand of terrorism.
SOA activist continued on through grief
Tom Mahedy works to help families of Sept. 11 victims, faces jail for protest act
BY MICK WALSH
Staff WriterFrom the Ledger-Enquirer of Columbus, Georgia 09.09.02
(http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/mld/ledgerenquirer/news/special_packages/attack_on_america/4033256.htm)
Tom Mahedy was home in Wall Township, on the Jersey shore, the day hijacked airliners crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.
His flight attendant wife, Julie, was in Manhattan, attending a training session, and was close enough to Ground Zero to watch the horror unfold.
"I've been haunted by those scenes ever since," said Mahedy, who turns 40 this month.
And, except for the two weeks he spent here in Columbus -- one last November, and one in July, he and his wife have done more than just gnash their teeth in anger over the terrorist acts of last Sept. 11.
As members of a bereavement committee at their church, the Madedys have spent untold hours in grief counseling for families who lost loved ones in the New York tragedy.
"We're a commuter town, about 50 miles south of the city, and a lot of people from our township died on Sept. 11," said Mahedy. "First, we cried for them and grieved with them. Then it was time to help them."
Mahedy, in fact, became a big brother to a young man whose father was killed, not in New York, but in the Pentagon.
Mahedy, however, won't be among those commemorating the anniversary of the day that America's security was rocked.
He'll be busy Wednesday checking into the Federal Correctional Institute at Fort Dix, N.J.
"I once taught prisoners at the Holmesburg Penitentiary," said Mahedy, who once considered the priesthood while a student at LaSalle College in Philadelphia. "Now, I guess, I'm about to see prison life from their perspective."
The New Jersey native, who attended Auburn from 1980-82 and later taught for a year in the mid-'80s at St. Joseph School in Holy Trinity, Ala., was sentenced to three months in federal prison for trespassing onto the Fort Benning reservation during last November's protests against the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.
"It was my first time at Fort Benning," he said via telephone from his home, where he was playing with his daughters Shannon, 7, and Casey, 5. "Unfortunately, I won't be able to come back this year." He followed that with an ironic laugh.
Claiming that social change often requires activists to be prepared to serve prison terms, Mahedy says he's ready to serve his time.
"I was prepared for this," he said, "but the cause of closing down what we know as the School of the Americas is sacred to me. I do appreciate the opportunity the judge (Mallon Faircloth) gave me to speak at my sentencing."
Mahedy spoke passionately for almost an hour before Faircloth handed down his sentence.
The soft-spoken man says he first became aware of certain atrocities in Central America when a group called Mothers of the Disappeared in El Salvador spoke at LaSalle. That was in 1982.
That prompted him to join what was to become the SOA Watch group and to spend a week at the main gate of Fort Benning last November.
"To me, it's no contradiction to mourn the losses of life on Sept. 11 and to protest our government's actions in Central America," he said. "I'll continue to tend to and pray for the families of the Sept. 11 victims... and raise my voice against the SOA."