blackwaterwatch.net PhotoMark Colville got a stiffer punishment for simulating Blackwater USA's slaughter of innocent Iraqi civilians than the mercenaries who actually committed the crime.
Colville, a peace activist with the Amistad Catholic Worker house in New Haven, was given a 45-day suspended jail term and ordered to pay a $450 fine for taking part in the Oct. 20 die-in at Blackwater (recently rebranded Blackwater Worldwide) headquarters in Moyock, N.C. Colville and six others drove a Subaru riddled with fake bullet holes and fake blood into Blackwater's sprawling compound to dramatize the Sept. 16 incident at Nisour Square in Baghdad, when 17 Iraqi civilians were gunned down by Blackwater guards. None of the guards has been prosecuted, though the Associated Press reported last week that investigators are zeroing in on the culprits.
Colville and his cohorts were arrested for trespassing, resisting an officer and damage to real property ("I guess some of the blood dripped down on the shrubs— or some of the paint, that is," he says.)
Colville and Co. were tried last week before a kangaroo court in Currituck County, N.C., where the judge ordered the public, the press and the defense witnesses out the courtroom without explanation, then proceeded to pronounce the demonstrators' guilty as charged.
Colville doesn't claim to be innocent and isn't trying to skirt jail time or a trial. Quite the opposite. Colville wanted a public trial to highlight Blackwater's atrocities. But the judge essentially shut him down.
"There was no court reporter, no public," Colville says in a phone interview. "When it came to us doing testimony, we were allowed to address the charge of trespass, and if you strayed from that at all [the judge] would shut you down and [you] wouldn't get another chance at testimony."
Colville's no stranger to jail time for civil disobedience. He did a year in federal prison for a Plowshares active disarmament demonstration at a battleship in Maine that carried Tomahawk cruise missiles. He also did time in state prison for trespassing at Sikorsky Aircraft in Stratford, protesting the U.S.-backed war against innocent Colombians.
Colville's appealing his conviction in the hope of getting a public jury trial where the demonstrators can testify on Blackwater's atrocities. As for the fine, Colville, who as a Catholic Worker lives in voluntary poverty, says he doesn't have the money and wouldn't pay even if he did.
Property is only justified in natural law to the extent that it defends the public good, public morals, and what little grasp is claimed of eternal justice. These things can only be tried in a courtroom, and a courtroom is only a place "where men may stand equally before the law," otherwise it is but a musty room with the smell of Pledge wood polish. Protection of property is only Just when it protects liberty. It doesn't work the other way around.
If a people scorn the notion of natural law, they cannot make claims to justice when imposing their decrees without being hypocrites. If we must resort to might as right, then we have no cause to disguise it.
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