Father Louie Vitale

Father Louie Vitale

Sources tell CityLife Louis “Father Louie” Vitale, the pioneering, 77-year-old Franciscan prisoner of conscience serving six months in jail for trespassing onto a U.S. Army base in Georgia last November, has been moved to a medium-security prison in Atlanta.

Officials with the U.S. Bureau of Prisons were ultimately unavailable for comment, but friends and longtime colleagues of Vitale said, based on their own experience as domestic political prisoners, federal officials will likely transfer Vitale at least once more, probably to a federal prison on or near the West Coast, from which his jailers will ultimately release him from custody about July 24.

CityLife readers will remember Vitale as the trailblazing social activist who was jailed in late January for trespassing onto Ft. Benning ["Prisoner of Conscience," Feb. 11], site of the U.S. Army’s Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

Formerly known as the School of the Americas, U.S. military instructors have for decades used the school — graduates include former Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega and officers who served under former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet — to train more than 60,000 Latin American military troops in a variety of counter-intelligence and counter-insurgency techniques.

Scandal has surrounded the school in earnest since 1996, when a series of Washington Post articles revealed that the school’s training manuals included grisly lessons in how to torture enemies and how to carry out professional assassinations.

Vitale, who makes the annual trek to Fort Benning each year alongside thousands of other Americans to protest the school’s existence, was arrested last November when he and three other activists refused to leave the post grounds.

According to his last letter, sent in mid-February, Vitale was doing fine before his transfer. “It goes well here … Ours is an all right cell. We get along okay,” wrote Vitale to colleagues at the Nevada Desert Experience, co-founded by him and one of the nation’s most successful anti-nuclear groups.

To learn more, including how you can write Vitale while he’s still in federal prison, visit the Nevada Desert Experience website. To learn more about the School of the Americas and its current replacement, visit School of the Americas Watch.