WHICH PARADE WAS THAT?

When 16,000 demonstrators marched in Columbus, Ga., earlier this month to protest U.S. military involvement in torture, they received less national attention than the Thanksgiving Day parade accident in which a giant helium balloon damaged a New York City lamppost and slightly injured two girls. How's that for media priorities?

Local press offered the best, most extensive, coverage of the protesters, who demanded that the Army shutter its Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (formerly the School of the Americas), which trains Latin American military officers at Fort Benning. The (Columbus) Ledger-Enquirer not only ran three separate, well-written and -reported stories (on Nov. 20, "Record number of protesters"; on Nov. 21, "Orderly protest"; and on Nov. 22, "[Arrested] protesters get first day in court"), it put together a slide show series with audio on its Web site that easily matches the best media packages that major dailies and news sites on the Internet have to offer. Take a look at this.

The protest was not completely ignored by the national media. The Associated Press sent its own reporter, and the AP story was used by, among others, The Boston Globe.

The New York Times also covered the march, but chose to highlight the town's and the military's opposition to it with a Nov. 21 feature that ran under the headline "Annual Protest Draws Ire of Those Supporting Troops." While it's true the march has become an annual event, to call these demonstrations "as much a staple of fall as the Alabama-Auburn game," to quote The Times, is to trivialize what it's all about. Some critics might call the feature a whitewash.

The protest marches began 16 years ago, timed to coincide with the murders of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter in November 1989 in El Salvador by a death squad that included, according to a congressional investigation, 19 soldiers who had graduated from the School of the Americas. (SOA once even published a torture handbook among its training manuals.)

The military insists that the successor to SOA, which was shut down in 2001, has changed its practices and policies. But as the Just the Facts Web site notes, "WHINSEC is located in the same building and offers many of the same courses," as the school it replaced. Doug Ireland, who calls himself "an old fan of SOA" wrote about it in the past and made the obvious connection to the torture at Abu Ghraib.

There's also a notable feature-length documentary out there, "Hidden in Plain Sight," released in 2003, about the school and U.S. policy in Latin America. Times reviewer Dave Kehr described it as "a sort of anthology of atrocity," but also called it "a sober, focused piece that asks Americans [unlike the Nov. 21 Times feature] to take another look at what is going on in their own backyard."

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands