‘Seditious’ colonel shackled by US army

international | anti-war / imperialism | other press Saturday May 27, 2006 10:55 by JIM DEE Daily Ireland USA correspondent - Daily Ireland May 26 2006

Retired US army colonel Ann Wright handcuffed for engaging in “seditious” activity - recommending a documentary

Have you ever been so impressed by a documentary that you’ve recommended it to others? Retired US army colonel Ann Wright did just that on Monday – and was promptly handcuffed for engaging in “seditious” activity.

Wright’s trouble began when she set out to attend the court martial of a soldier accused in the Abu Ghraib prison abused scandal. The 29-year army veteran arrived at Fort McNair in Washington, DC, only to learn that the court martial was being held at Fort Meade in Maryland.

As she was leaving for Fort Meade, she happened upon some anti-war friends at the Fort McNair’s gate who had some postcards advertising a film called “Yes Sir, No Sir!”, which is about American soldiers’ resistance to the Vietnam War. She’d seen the movie and was very impressed, and she felt others in the military might benefit from catching it during its limited engagement in Washington this week.

So Wright went back inside Fort McNair and placed some postcards advertising the movie in the fort's headquarters,before turning around and again preparing to leave for Maryland. “I just placed the postcards down,” Colonel Wright told Daily Ireland during a telephone interview. “If anyone wanted to pick them up, they could pick them up. If they didn’t want to, they didn’t have to. They could throw them in the trash if they wanted to,” she said.

A military police sergeant spied the postcards, and Wright leaving the building. He quickly put two-and-two together, and walked up to her and said: “Ma’am, were you the one putting this seditious material out on this base?’”
Wright said that she had indeed put out some postcards for a documentary: “And he said: ‘Well, I’m going to have to detain you.’ And I said ‘Why?’ And he said: ‘It’s seditious material.’”

She protested that, while he may not agree with the content, the film was a perfectly legal documentary.
The military cop then asked to search her handbag, which she let him do. When he discovered more of the movie advertisements that Wright was intending to leave at other places in Washington, he told her that he was going to have to handcuff her.

The 59-year-old colonel with arthritic knees was shocked, and asked the sergeant if that was really necessary, as she wasn’t a flight risk.

He told her that handcuffing was “standard operating procedure” when anyone was arrested on base.
“So he proceeded to handcuff me behind my back,” she said.

Fort McNair has two police cars. The sergeant called for both of them, and they promptly arrived to take Wright to the base jail – which was all of 75 feet away. Once inside the jail, she said to the officers: “Well, you’ve got me in a secure facility, so I request that you uncuff me.” No luck.

However, eventually the sergeant’s superior officer arrived and she again asked to be uncuffed. Clearly concerned about his nation’s security in the face of such blatant “sedition”, the higher ranking sergeant mulled over his options and came up with a comprise of Solomon-like proportions. He had the arresting officer uncuff one hand, but secure the other still-cuffed hand to the chair she was sitting in.

About 15 minutes later a master sergeant and military lawyer arrived and ordered her to be uncuffed.
America was deemed safe enough from Wright’s seditious threat. She was then released but told that if she wanted to post any more notices on the base, she had to get approval from the post commander. There are no plans to prosecute her.
Wright told Daily Ireland that she thinks the whole incident illustrated that there are a lot of young people in the US military who are concerned that there are others in the military who don’t support the Iraq war.

“And this young military police officer saw that the film was about GI resistance. And his opinion was that it was seditious material because it would encourage other soldiers to not like the [Iraq] war,” she said.

To be clear, Ann Wright is no serial foe of US foreign policy. In fact, she is quite the contrary. Over the course of 35 years, she served in either a US military or diplomatic capacity in countries such as Grenada, Nicaragua, Somalia Uzbekistan, and Sierra Leone.

“I helped re-open the US embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan in December of 2001. I’ve been in most of the hot-spots over the last 30 years.

“So, for me to resign was quite a big deal,” she said.

Daily Ireland May 26 2006