12/07/05: Facing prison, activist, 79, has no regrets
Facing prison, activist, 79, has no regrets
By Rob Zaleski
December 7, 2005
OK, truth be known, being handcuffed and shackled for two hours and spending a night in the Muscogee County Jail in Columbus, Ga. - as he did on Nov. 20, after being arrested at the facility formerly known as the School of the Americas at Fort Benning - wasn't a whole lot of fun.
He is, after all, just nine months shy of his 80th birthday, Madison resident Fred Brancel noted with a wry smile during an interview this week.
And no, he's not thrilled by the possibility of spending anywhere from three to six months in a federal penitentiary, says Brancel, who was among 41 people - including five others from Wisconsin - charged with civil disobedience during the protest and who will return to Georgia on Jan. 30 to stand trial.
But if people want to know if he regrets crawling under three 10-foot high barbed-wire fences to gain access to the base, Brancel says, "Not for a moment."
This was, he points out, the third time he's participated in protests calling for closure of the facility - now known as Western Hemisphere Institute for Security - which has been a training ground for Latin American assassins and military thugs, including former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and Roberto D'Aubuisson, architect of El Salvador's right-wing death squads.
And, after clearing the idea with his wife, Mary Ann, he decided it was time to do something dramatic to draw attention to: A. the U.S. military's longtime involvement in torture; and B. the impact of the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower had warned about in the 1950s - which Brancel describes as "growing deficit, growing disparity, growing distrust and growing discord and animosity."
What's more, Brancel says he's disturbed about the rampant materialism in this country, and the fact that the United States has just 5 percent of the world's population but consumes 25 percent of the world's oil.
(For what it's worth, he says he was not protesting the decision of Madison Bishop Robert Morlino to serve on the institute's advisory board. While he's troubled by it, Brancel says he's willing to give Morlino the benefit of the doubt - for now anyway - and believes he could have a positive effect on the school's policies.)
"I'm not predicting Armageddon," emphasizes Brancel, who calls himself "a realist, not a pessimist." But he says he fears that Americans "aren't going to wake up until we're bankrupt and go the way of other empires. I don't know if it will happen in our lifetime, but I think it will come more quickly than we anticipate."
Taking a stand isn't anything new for Brancel, who grew up on a farm in Marquette County and is a 1951 graduate of UW-Madison. He spent 20 years in Africa (1951-1971) as an agriculture missionary for the Methodist Church and was imprisoned for nearly three months in Portugal in 1961 for being an "instigator" in the Angola independence movement.
Just last year he spent two weeks in Baghdad with a Christian Peacemaker delegation trying to get a true assessment of the Iraq war.
What he found, he says, is that almost all Iraqis, regardless of their background, are overjoyed that Saddam Hussein is no longer in power. At the same time, the vast majority of those he talked to were not happy about the U.S. occupation.
"I'd say the Iraqis distrust our motives for being there," he says. "They feel that their oil reserves are a big part of it. And I think they're not likely to give in, because they are a people with a long, proud history."
One of their biggest fears, Brancel says, is that Baghdad International Airport is being converted into a permanent U.S. military base serving the entire Mideast region - a story, he notes, that hasn't gotten much play in the U.S. media.
As troubling as all that is, Brancel says his focus right now is on his upcoming court date and how it might affect his future.
"I mean, I'm 79. My time's running out."
But he says he isn't scared and, like any good activist, even believes some good may come of it. Especially if he's allowed to serve his time at the Oxford Federal Correctional Institute in Adams County, which is just 10 miles from his family's farm.
He notes that he's been reading the new book, "God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It," by Jim Wallis, and finds it incredibly inspiring.
No, nobody actually looks forward to prison, Brancel says.
"But, as Wallis points out, some of the best conversations occur behind bars."
Correction: In my Monday column, I wrote that the AR-15 was one of the many assault weapons that were illegal in this country until last year, when the Republican-controlled Congress allowed a 10-year ban to expire. In fact, as dozens of my gun pals have pointed out, the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban prohibited the manufacture of the Colt AR-15 and 18 other assault weapons but not the possession of such weapons.