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Two Catholic priests will spend the next five months behind bars for trespassing at the U.S. Army's Fort Huachuca last year.

A federal judge in Tucson sentenced the priests — the Rev. Louis J. Vitale, 74, and the Rev. Steve Kelly, 58 — Wednesday after they pleaded no contest to the trespassing charges.

A no-contest plea means the defendant does not admit or deny the charges, but it has the same effect in the legal system as a guilty plea.

The San Francisco Bay Area clerics, who had faced up to 10 months in lockup, were arrested last Nov. 19 while protesting military-intelligence training at Fort Huachuca, about 75 miles southeast of Tucson.

The pair wanted to deliver a letter to the post's top commander at the time, Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, stating that the fort trains personnel in torture methods, something the Army denies.

U.S. Magistrate Héctor C. Estrada said he was reluctantly sending the priests to prison. He said he would have preferred that they do community-service work and remain under court supervision while living in their communities.

But Vitale and Kelly had previously said they would not comply with any kind of court supervision because it would mean giving up their social-justice work.

One of the conditions of probation would be to no longer associate with groups that have been known to push the envelope of the law in their non-violent protests, such as the School of The Americas Watch, which seeks to close a U.S. military training facility in Georgia, and Nevada Desert Experience, which protests nuclear-weapons testing.

Both Vitale and Kelly have been locked up previously for acts of civil disobedience.

"That you are not willing to abide to being supervised disturbs me because it seems you could do more good out there than you could incarcerated," Estrada said. "I think there's a question of ego. . . . I get the impression it's somehow or other you are going to be martyrs for your cause."

Prosecutors say the priests were repeatedly warned they were trespassing before they were arrested.

Vitale, a Franciscan priest, and Kelly, a Jesuit priest, say they are compelled by God to work against any use of nuclear arms, and also to work against any form of torture.

In a statement to the court, Vitale confirmed he would not be able to comply with probation if it would mean disaffiliating himself from such protests.

"It's like telling me I can't associate with Paul or the other apostles," he said.

Had Vitale and Kelly been delivering pizza rather than a letter questioning torture methods to Fort Huachuca, they would never have been arrested, said William Quigley, a prominent New Orleans human-rights attorney who represented both priests.

Quigley acknowledged the priests had broken the law and said they were at peace about serving the time.

"The real crime here has always been the issue of torture," Quigley said.

Vitale and Kelly's supporters made a circle around their personal effects — watches, identification and Vitale's Franciscan robes — after Wednesday's sentencing.

At least a dozen of the supporters planned to hold a peaceful protest outside the military base Wednesday afternoon.

Since Fort Huachuca trains all of the U.S. Army's intelligence personnel, the protesters say its training methods played a crucial role in the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib in Iraq.

A spokeswoman for Fort Huachuca said its U.S. Army Intelligence Center trains human intelligence collectors in accordance with the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005. That law says no one in the custody or effective control of the U.S. Department of Defense can be subjected to any treatment or interrogation technique not authorized by and listed in the U.S. Army Field Manual on intelligence interrogation.

"Human intelligence being conducted in theaters of operation under this lawful policy is critical to saving American, coalition, and innocent lives and to enabling success in our military mission," a Fort Huachuca news release states.

Some of the field manual is classified. But military officials say their training also adheres to the Geneva Convention, which prohibits "cruel treatment and torture."