Why Are We in Vieques? (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine October 2001

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Why Are We in Vieques? (Cont.)

BY THE TIME I GOT home, after my release, I was fairly certain that I would be spending a significant portion of my summer in a federal prison. The reaction to this news by my friends and family was generally supportive. My mother counts among her close friends enough admirals to sail the Atlantic Fleet, but she was nevertheless reliably subversive and as proud as if I'd been elected to the Senate. A week after my release, I was at Hickory Hill for a fund-raiser for the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial, hosted by the cast of The West Wing. I smiled when I greeted Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

"Thanks for putting me up in Puerto Rico last weekend," I said.

"I heard you couldn't find a hotel down there, so I thought I'd help you out," he said with a laugh.

Seated beside him during dinner, my mother goaded the Secretary in earnest good humor to abandon Vieques.

In early June, the San Juan federal district court notified Dennis and me that our trial date would be July 6. We were disappointed to learn that Judge Laffitte had chosen to retain our trespassing cases. (Because Eddie had been arrested by a different soldier, his case was assigned to a different judge.) When we asked Laffitte to recuse himself, arguing that our defense in the trespass case arose out of his failure to rule in the Endangered Species Act case, he refused.

My brother-in-law, Andrew Cuomo, was instrumental in persuading his father, former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, to act as co-counsel with our Puerto Rican lawyer, Harry Anduzze. Mario went to work lobbying the Bush White House to end the bombing and to point out the flaws in the Navy's argument that Vieques was a military necessity. On June 14, President Bush announced that the Navy would stop using Vieques as a target area by May 2003—a compromise solution that pleased neither the Navy nor its opponents, who demand that the bombing stop immediately. On August 1, the House Armed Services Committee recommended that the Navy not be required to move by May 2003 if, by then, it hadn't found an equivalent or superior substitute for Vieques.

Mario called Dennis and me three days before the trial and told us that he had worked out a deal to delay our sentencing so that I could be with my wife, Mary, when she had our baby, which was due July 12. The catch was that we had to plead guilty and waive our right to appeal. Judge Laffitte favored the deal, Mario said, and had indicated that our agreement to sign on might incline him toward a more lenient sentence. When I asked Mary, she told me not to take any deal. Dennis agreed.

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