A truly turbulent priest

Not all Americans believe in a military solution. Andrew Gumbel talks to Father Bill O'Donnell as he prepares to go to prison following his arrest at a US military training camp

On 18 November last year, 10,000 protesters thronged outside the School of the Americas, the US military training camp at Fort Benning, Georgia, where, notoriously, Latin American soldiers and policemen have been schooled since 1984 in the dark arts of counter-revolutionary warfare. The demonstration is an annual event marking the deaths of six Jesuits and two housekeepers at the hands of paramilitary death squads in El Salvador in November 1989 – one of the more egregious crimes found to have been committed by School of the Americas (SOA) graduates. The demonstration has become something of a ritual, in which the protesters walk on to the base, reel off a catalogue of horrors perpetrated by school alumni from Central America to Argentina, hang up signs to denounce it as a school for terrorists, and promptly get arrested.

Last year's demo was a little different. First, it was the biggest gathering ever, a remarkable achievement in itself given the draconian treatment protesters have consistently received from the local federal court in Columbus, Georgia, which has a habit of putting even octogenarian nuns away for months of hard time on simple trespassing charges.

Secondly, the protest took place barely two months after the 11 September attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre, at a time when popular sentiment in the United States seemed to militate against anti-government protest of any kind. The commander at Fort Benning lobbied hard to keep the protesters away, arguing that their presence would be somehow distasteful. When that didn't work, he had a 10ft barbed-wire fence constructed around the base's entrance.

As the protesters gathered – to stage a mock funeral for the innocent civilians abducted, tortured and killed across Latin America by US-trained soldiers over the past two decades – most of them seemed resigned to the idea that they would, for once, have to stay off the base. But one man had a different idea. Bill O'Donnell, a 72-year-old radical Catholic priest from Berkeley, California, persisted in leading a sizeable group of followers along the perimeter of the fence. Less than a hundred yards from the main gate, the fence stopped. He and his followers – around 90 of them, at this point – simply walked around it and, to the evident fury of the base commanders, made their way across the grounds, smiling richly from ear to ear.

It was a vintage moment for Father O'Donnell, whose insatiable appetite for civil disobedience and blank refusal to buckle under the voice of authority have made him something of a folk hero in left-wing protest circles over the past two decades. Since last November, they have also made for some of the most astonishing, outrageous and irreverent political theatre seen in the US since the days of the Yippies and the trial of the Chicago Eight.

O'Donnell and his friends were arrested – of course – and given a talking-to by the army chaplain, another Irish-American Catholic called Father O'Malley. O'Malley tried to explain that the protesters had it wrong, that the school no longer taught what is euphemistically known as "low-intensity conflict", that it wasn't the wellspring of evil they imagined it to be. But O'Donnell wasn't having any of it. As he recounted recently, chortling impishly at the memory: "I told him he was a disgrace to the priesthood, a betrayer of the Gospel, that he was in it for the money, and that he was a sell-out, not only to Christianity but to humanity as well."

O'Donnell knows the routine. This was arrest number 224 in an astonishingly tenacious and colourful career that spans the civil rights movement in Alabama, Cesar Chavez's campaigns to unionise California's farm labourers, various protests against nuclear weapons and, of course, the iniquities of American foreign policy, particularly in Latin America. He's been to Fort Benning four years running, and four years running he has been arrested. Each time he's received a "ban and bar" letter formally warning him not to come near the base for another five years, and each time he has completely ignored what he has been told.

This is the first time, though, that he has got into serious trouble with the courts. Starting sometime in the next few weeks, he will begin a six-month sentence in a federal prison for last November's activities. "Federal prison, eh? I've finally made the big time," he joked when we met recently. He is not a man to be easily daunted. He is someone who loves confrontation – yearns for it, even. In his private apartment attached to the church of St Joseph the Worker in Berkeley, he keeps dozens of pairs of handcuffs as souvenirs of his run-ins with the law. He comes across as a great benevolent teddy bear of a man, but he'll also jump on any social cause he finds worthy and fight for it as though it were more precious to him than life itself. One of the many testimonials adorning his office walls praises him "for raising hell to create heaven on earth". He'll tell absolutely anyone what he thinks of them, in clear, unalloyed language, without regard for power, or status, or danger. As his friend and frequent fellow campaigner, the Hollywood actor Martin Sheen, put it recently: "Bill is one of the scariest people I know because he makes us tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, all the time. He takes the cup as it is offered, not altered."

Thanks to O'Donnell, the trial at which he and 35 of his co-defendants were convicted in Georgia last month – just one person was acquitted – was itself a glorious exercise in defiant anti-authoritarianism. Right from the start, Father Bill made clear he had no respect for the judge, a temporary appointee to the bench named Mallon Faircloth. O'Donnell referred to him variously as Your Dishonour, or Misjudge Dirtyrag. As far as he was concerned, the judge was in cahoots with the army base and was determined from the start to show how tough he could be so he could live up to the fearsome reputation of his predecessor, Robert Elliott, who retired two years ago. Elliott was a one-time segregationist known to the School of the Americas protesters as "Maximum Bob" because of his proclivity for draconian sentences. Faircloth has shown a little more patience in his courtroom manner, but his sentencing record looks much the same.

"This court for years has been pimping for the Pentagon and, as a pimp does, it covers up for the crimes of its prostitutes," O'Donnell said in the opening statement of his testimony. And that was just his warm-up routine. By the end of the week-long trial, he was suggesting that a sign be put up above the entrance to the courtroom quoting Dante's inscription on the gates of hell: "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."

The founder of the anti-SOA protest movement, another Catholic priest called Roy Bourgeois, had brought the defendants and their 100-odd supporters together in Georgia four days before the trial started and, as a result, they developed a formidable spirit of collusion. In court, they whispered irreverent remarks, fought to ward off attacks of the sniggers and sang quietly under their breath. Judge Faircloth did his best to eliminate the courtroom disturbances, but found it hard to react to any but the most flagrant of insults hurled against him. In their testimony, the protesters cited everyone from Jesus to Gandhi and Martin Luther King. For their closing statements, one of them sang the hymn "Peace Like a River" and another burst into a rendition of Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind". At least two of the defendants had their sentences doubled as punishment for their irreverence. By the time the last of them had been sentenced, at 10.35pm on a Friday night, the entire company spontaneously burst into song and poured out into the Georgia night singing and dancing. "People looking at us must have thought we had won some great victory, and, in a sense, we had," O'Donnell said. "I think prison is a small price to pay for getting into the face of the system and laughing at the silly judge like that. I actually thanked him in the end, because, as I told him, next year there will be 10 people to contend with in my place. Our message was: you can do anything you want to us, we'll be back. In other words, you have failed."

The School of the Americas dissidents are a remarkable group – many of them Catholic, many members of the priesthood, all united by a singular determination and sense of purpose. Arguably O'Donnell's closest brother-in-protest is Louis Vitale, a Franciscan, who was once arrested 12 times in a single day at the US government's nuclear test site in Nevada. Sentenced to three months in federal prison for last November's Fort Benning action, Vitale gave the judge in Columbus a spirited lecture on the moral limitations of blind obedience, based on his experience as a fighter pilot during the Korean War. O'Donnell and Vitale joke around so much they are like a comedy team, an Abbott and Costello of moral indignation – one (O'Donnell) as paunchy as the other is rake thin, one (O'Donnell, again) as directly confrontational as the other is conciliatory and quietly persuasive. "He [Vitale] is so good at reasoning with people," Father Bill marvelled with only a hint of malicious humour. "I just don't know how he does that."

Another close friend is a former priest from San Francisco called Charlie Liteky, who served as a chaplain in the Vietnam War and received the Congressional Medal of Honour, one of the highest military accolades, for his bravery in pulling 19 comrades to safety under heavy fire. Liteky abandoned the priesthood in 1975 to marry a former nun, and a decade later took the unprecedented step of returning his Medal of Honour in protest at the Reagan administration's policies in Central America. He spent nine months in prison during the Eighties because of his opposition to the School of the Americas, and another year following the 1999 protest at Fort Benning.

Experience of war is something that binds many of the protest leaders, and lends credence to their campaign. Roy Bourgeois, who started the umbrella protest group, School of the Americas Watch, and has served a total of four years in prison for his activities, is also a Vietnam veteran whose eyes, he says, were opened to the reality of US foreign policy when he went to Latin America as a Catholic missionary. Many of the Fort Benning veterans once believed in the military, as many Americans now do, as an instrument for promoting peace. Now that President Bush has declared war on terrorism, it seems apposite to point out that the School of the Americas, too, is a training camp for men many would call terrorists. The current instability of the world may not make the message broadly popular, but it does make it more urgent. In many ways, the protesters are reminiscent of the activists who opposed the Vietnam War, not least because people like Father O'Donnell are a bridge from that earlier generation to this.

The cross-generational mood was on fine display one recent Saturday night at a rally in Berkeley to wish Father O'Donnell and his fellow convicts well before they head off to prison. Martin Sheen sent a message saying he regretted not being able to share O'Donnell's cell with him. One young activist, Leone Reinbold, roused the 400-strong audience inside St Joseph's church into a defiant series of chants rejecting the justice of the Columbus court. A Salvadorean professor tortured in the early Eighties, Carlos Mauricio, exulted in a recent court victory in Florida in which two retired generals, both SOA graduates, were found responsible for his treatment and ordered to pay $54.6m in damages. Such developments, he said, gave renewed hope to a people made desperate by more than a decade of war.

And then there was Father O'Donnell himself, giving a speech replete with characteristic anti-authoritarianism and sparkling Irish wit. The trespass charges, he said, were "a hair above jaywalking", and the harsh sentences particularly galling considering that the Salvadorean death squads were amnestied at the end of the civil war and have never been prosecuted for anything, much less punished. Still, he said, he would gladly do it all over again, and probably would as soon as his time inside is done. "I can't wait to get back to Fort Benning," he declared, and the audience erupted in spontaneous cheers and applause.