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FIRE DESTROYS THE HOME OF LAWRENCE ROCKWOOD Authorities Suspect a Fire-Bomb

At about 8 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 19, a fierce and sudden fire destroyed the home of Lawrence Rockwood, the U.S. Army captain who was court-martialled last year for acting on his own to protect Haitian human rights.

Florida state investigative agencies believe the blaze was started by a fire bomb, Rockwood told Haiti Progres. Rockwood had just moved to La Belle, a small agricultural town in southwest Florida, at the beginning of January.

A neighbor witnessed a pick-up truck with its lights off speeding away from the area of Rockwood’s home just before the blaze was seen. The speeding truck was particularly suspicious in this quiet rural town, where little happens after dark.

Authorities are conducting tests to confirm their suspicion that some kind of bomb was thrown through Rockwood’s front window to start the blaze.

“We may have been under surveillance, since we had not left the house alone the entire week,” Rockwood explained. He shared the house with an old Army friend, Tina Noel. They had left home at about 5 p.m. that evening to have dinner. “When we returned at about 9:30 p.m., we found almost the entire town was turned out watching the end of the fire,” Rockwood said. “It was a pretty big event in a place like La Belle.”

Rockwood lost everything in the fire, most significantly his papers and computer. He had begun a book on his experiences in Haiti and his court-martial. He was also writing materials to organize a trip on Mar. 16 to My Lai, Vietnam, where Vietnamese civilians were massacred by U.S. troops in 1968. Rockwood planned to mark the anniversary of events at My Lai with Hugh Thompson, the U.S. Army helicopter pilot who ordered his gunner to fire on U.S. troops to stop the massacre. Thompson was also a principal witness for Rockwood’s defense during his court-martial trial.

Rockwood, a counter-intelligence officer with the U.S. Army 10th Mountain Division when he arrived in Haiti on Sept. 24, made an unauthorized inspection of the National Penitentiary in Port-au- Prince on Sept. 30, 1994 after charging his superiors in a formal complaint to the Army’s Inspector General with “criminal negligence” for refusing to occupy Haiti’s prisons and thereby prevent deaths and other harm to Haitian political prisoners. Rockwood was arrested by an officer from the U.S. Embassy, flown from Haiti, and court-martialled at Ft. Drum, NY last May.

Despite his dismissal from the Army, Rockwood, with his lawyer, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, intends to appeal the decision in military and then civilian courts. His case has come to symbolize the chasm between U.S. government rhetoric about “defending human rights” and the reality of U.S. government actions.

The Army high command has surely been dismayed by popular interest in Rockwood’s case. After the court martial last May, the military delayed about 6 months in formalizing the dismissal. Many saw this as an attempt to leave Rockwood in a status limbo that would discourage followers of his case. But Rockwood’s case refuses to go away, and it is certain that some in the military and intelligence circles would like him to get the message to be quiet.

Nonetheless, Rockwood is not quick to attribute the fire to foul play. We will follow the investigation closely in the weeks ahead.

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