Cool hand Lil

Kentucky native Lelia, or “Lil,” Mattingly is a Maryknoll sister.
But for six months of this year, Sister Lil was simply prisoner number 92460. So, just like the Westchester, N.Y., world headquarters of the Maryknoll missionaries, she had her very own zip code.
Sister Lil was sentenced to her six-month term at the beginning of 2005 and entered the federal correctional facility for women in Danbury, Conn., two days before St. Patrick’s Day.
Not the best time to be locked up when you are enthusiastic about your Irish roots.
And Sister Lil is just that. A native of Hawesville and a Kelly on her mother’s side, she described herself as “Kentucky Irish.”
She could also be described as being stubborn Irish, especially when it comes to standing up for the primacy of peace over war.
Sister Lil did just that a year ago at Fort Benning in Columbus, Ga.
She was one of 16,000 protestors who made the trip to pray and hold vigils outside a place called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation or WHINSEC.
But she was one of a far smaller number, 15 in total, who stepped across a white line in the road beyond which lay forbidden ground, a court date and for 11 of them, a prison term.
By virtue of her act of civil disobedience, Mattingly was slapped with a Class B Misdemeanor charge of trespass.
Not a big deal in some parts.
But they take their misdemeanors seriously in Georgia, especially when the line crossed is a military one.
Sister Lil’s extra step meant half a year in the slammer. The max. No time off for even angelic behavior.
It was, she said in an interview conducted last week at the Maryknoll campus in Ossining, N.Y., a “very, very unpleasant experience.”
The demonstration outside WHINSEC was directed at what the protestors still call the School of the Americas.
The SOA was founded in 1946, closed in 2001 and replaced that same year by WHINSEC, which is housed in the same building.
“This institute will stand as a living memorial to the service of thousands of soldiers and civilians from across the Americas, who sacrifice so much to defend the countries that they love, to deliver the people of this region to a more promising era of freedom and democracy and justice,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Rudy de Leon said at the WHINSEC “activation ceremony” in January of that year.
Critics say that it will take far more than a mere name change to erase the reputation of what they allege was, and remains, an academy for teaching the techniques of assassination and murder to some of Latin America’s worst dictators and bully boys.
Certainly the former SOA had a spotty alumni roll.
Its detractors point to the 1980 killers of El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero, and Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, who had to be forced from office by the U.S. military’s “Operation Just Cause” in December 1989.
“Romero was killed by SOA graduates,” Mattingly said.
And other graduates had gone back to their native countries “to commit atrocities,” she added.
Another graduate was Hugo Banzer, the former dictator and later president of Bolivia and a man accused of widespread human rights abuses during his almost 30-year rule over what is one of South America’s poorest nations.
Bolivia is Mattingly’s adopted country. She first went there to work as a missionary in 1971, though she’d been with the Maryknolls since 1960.
It was the death of her mother, Catherine Jane Kelly, that literally freed up Mattingly to be locked up.
She had been planning long-term care for her mother until her passing in August of last year.
Three months later, Mattingly crossed the line at Fort Benning.
She is less enthusiastic about describing her prison experience than she is about the work that she has to do in the days ahead.
But prison, she is quick to point out, was not an experience to be taken lightly.
“The main prison in Danbury had 1,300 women in it surrounded by wire. We were in another smaller building with 200 women in it,” she said.
Mattingly’s prison companions were inside for mostly drug and fraud offenses.
“It was a little freer, but there were still a lot of restrictions,” she said.
She slept either in a room that housed six women or in a cubicle in a larger dormitory.
Mattingly, though she is used to living in an orderly kind of place when she is based at Maryknoll, was not impressed by what she saw as overcrowding and a lack of proper health care in the prison. Four women died in the time she was in Danbury.
“The healthcare was atrocious,” Mattingly said.
Mattingly helped in any way she could and tried to abide by all the rules. On one occasion she was given extra duty for a minor infraction. During her time she was treated much the same as all the other inmates.
“The staff treated us like numbers,” she said.
The reaction of other prisoners to Mattingly’s incarceration was one of disbelief.
“They said they couldn’t believe I was in prison for what I did,” she said “But some took comfort. They figured that if a nun was in jail they couldn’t have been all that bad themselves,” she added with a laugh.
Mattingly will be traveling to Fort Benning in the next few days for this year’s demonstration.
The campaign to close WHINSEC/SOA is led by Fr. Roy Bourgeois, a former U.S. Navy officer and Vietnam veteran.
But though last year’s demonstration was widely recognized as the largest of its kind since the Vietnam War, Mattingly expresses dismay at what she says is the “stunning lack of coverage” of the Fort Benning demonstration in the mainstream media.
For a number of years the protest – which attracts large numbers of family groups – was not especially restricted. Protestors could enter the base and hand out literature and petitions. Buses were provided to a rally in a nearby park.
This rather accommodating reaction on the part of the police and military authorities ended five years ago.
“November 2000 was the first year they started making arrests,” Mattingly said.
Before crossing the line last year Mattingly had to clear her planned action with her fellow Maryknolls.
“I consulted with my community. There was immense support,” she said.
Not surprisingly, Mattingly, who has a nephew currently serving in the Iraq war’s notorious Sunni Triangle, harbors grave doubts over the history, nature and application of U.S. foreign policy in certain parts of the world, not least in Latin America.
Her greatest frustration is that not enough Americans either know or care about how their taxpayer dollars are being spent.
“If they only knew,” she said referring to WHINSEC/SOA in particular.
Some do of course. There is a bill before Congress, authored by Rep. James McGovern of Massachusetts, that aims to draw down the curtain on the Fort Benning facility, which does now carry a human rights course, but one that is seen as just window dressing by Mattingly and other opponents.
The McGovern bill, HR 1217, is entitled the Latin American Military Training Review Act of 2005 and it calls for the suspension of operations at WHINSEC/SOA.
The bill has 122 cosponsors and is currently before the House Armed Services Committee.
The upcoming Fort Benning rally will be held over three days, Nov. 18-20. Sister Lil is planning to be there.
She will not, however, cross the line this time. Rather, like the Johnny Cash song, she will simply walk it.
“I have no plans to cross the line. I can do more good spreading the message and I don’t want to attract attention to myself,” she said.
Like it or, she already has – the hard time way.