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 |  http://ideology.lege.net/backyard_terrorism/
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 |
 |  Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Backyard terrorism
 |  http://www.guardian.co.uk/waronterror/story/0,1361,583254,00.html
 |  http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4287795-108952,00.html
 |
 |
 |  Backyard terrorism
 |
 |  The US has been training terrorists at a camp in Georgia for
 |  years - and it's still at it
 |
 |  George Monbiot
 |  Tuesday October 30, 2001
 |  The Guardian
 |
 |  "If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of
 |  innocents," George Bush announced on the day he began
 |  bombing Afghanistan, "they have become outlaws and murderers
 |  themselves. And they will take that lonely path at their own
 |  peril." I'm glad he said "any government", as there's one
 |  which, though it has yet to be identified as a sponsor of
 |  terrorism, requires his urgent attention.
 |
 |  For the past 55 years it has been running a terrorist
 |  training camp, whose victims massively outnumber the people
 |  killed by the attack on New York, the embassy bombings and
 |  the other atrocities laid, rightly or wrongly, at al-Qaida's
 |  door. The camp is called the Western Hemisphere Institute
 |  for Security Cooperation, or Whisc. It is based in Fort
 |  Benning, Georgia, and it is funded by Mr Bush's government.
 |
 |  Until January this year, Whisc was called the "School of the
 |  Americas", or SOA. Since 1946, SOA has trained more than
 |  60,000 Latin American soldiers and policemen. Among its
 |  graduates are many of the continent's most notorious
 |  torturers, mass murderers, dictators and state terrorists.
 |  As hundreds of pages of documentation compiled by the
 |  pressure group SOA Watch show, Latin America has been ripped
 |  apart by its alumni.
 |
 |  In June this year, Colonel Byron Lima Estrada, once a
 |  student at the school, was convicted in Guatemala City of
 |  murdering Bishop Juan Gerardi in 1998. Gerardi was killed
 |  because he had helped to write a report on the atrocities
 |  committed by Guatemala's D-2, the military intelligence
 |  agency run by Lima Estrada with the help of two other SOA
 |  graduates. D-2 coordinated the "anti-insurgency" campaign
 |  which obliterated 448 Mayan Indian villages, and murdered
 |  tens of thousands of their people. Forty per cent of the
 |  cabinet ministers who served the genocidal regimes of Lucas
 |  Garcia, Rios Montt and Mejia Victores studied at the School
 |  of the Americas.
 |
 |  In 1993, the United Nations truth commission on El Salvador
 |  named the army officers who had committed the worst
 |  atrocities of the civil war. Two-thirds of them had been
 |  trained at the School of the Americas. Among them were
 |  Roberto D'Aubuisson, the leader of El Salvador's death
 |  squads; the men who killed Archbishop Oscar Romero; and 19
 |  of the 26 soldiers who murdered the Jesuit priests in 1989.
 |  In Chile, the school's graduates ran both Augusto Pinochet's
 |  secret police and his three principal concentration camps.
 |  One of them helped to murder Orlando Letelier and Ronni
 |  Moffit in Washington DC in 1976.
 |
 |  Argentina's dictators Roberto Viola and Leopoldo Galtieri,
 |  Panama's Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos, Peru's Juan
 |  Velasco Alvarado and Ecuador's Guillermo Rodriguez all
 |  benefited from the school's instruction. So did the leader
 |  of the Grupo Colina death squad in Fujimori's Peru; four of
 |  the five officers who ran the infamous Battalion 3-16 in
 |  Honduras (which controlled the death squads there in the
 |  1980s) and the commander responsible for the 1994 Ocosingo
 |  massacre in Mexico.
 |
 |  All this, the school's defenders insist, is ancient history.
 |  But SOA graduates are also involved in the dirty war now
 |  being waged, with US support, in Colombia. In 1999 the US
 |  State Department's report on human rights named two SOA
 |  graduates as the murderers of the peace commissioner, Alex
 |  Lopera. Last year, Human Rights Watch revealed that seven
 |  former pupils are running paramilitary groups there and have
 |  commissioned kidnappings, disappearances, murders and
 |  massacres. In February this year an SOA graduate in Colombia
 |  was convicted of complicity in the torture and killing of 30
 |  peasants by paramilitaries. The school is now drawing more
 |  of its students from Colombia than from any other country.
 |
 |  The FBI defines terrorism as "violent acts... intended to
 |  intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the
 |  policy of a government, or affect the conduct of a
 |  government", which is a precise description of the
 |  activities of SOA's graduates. But how can we be sure that
 |  their alma mater has had any part in this? Well, in 1996,
 |  the US government was forced to release seven of the
 |  school's training manuals. Among other top tips for
 |  terrorists, they recommended blackmail, torture, execution
 |  and the arrest of witnesses' relatives.
 |
 |  Last year, partly as a result of the campaign run by SOA
 |  Watch, several US congressmen tried to shut the school down.
 |  They were defeated by 10 votes. Instead, the House of
 |  Representatives voted to close it and then immediately
 |  reopen it under a different name. So, just as Windscale
 |  turned into Sellafield in the hope of parrying public
 |  memory, the School of the Americas washed its hands of the
 |  past by renaming itself Whisc. As the school's Colonel Mark
 |  Morgan informed the Department of Defense just before the
 |  vote in Congress: "Some of your bosses have told us that
 |  they can't support anything with the name 'School of the
 |  Americas' on it. Our proposal addresses this concern. It
 |  changes the name." Paul Coverdell, the Georgia senator who
 |  had fought to save the school, told the papers that the
 |  changes were "basically cosmetic".
 |
 |  But visit Whisc's website and you'll see that the School of
 |  the Americas has been all but excised from the record. Even
 |  the page marked "History" fails to mention it. Whisc's
 |  courses, it tells us, "cover a broad spectrum of relevant
 |  areas, such as operational planning for peace operations;
 |  disaster relief; civil-military operations; tactical
 |  planning and execution of counter drug operations".
 |
 |  Several pages describe its human rights initiatives. But,
 |  though they account for almost the entire training
 |  programme, combat and commando techniques,
 |  counter-insurgency and interrogation aren't mentioned. Nor
 |  is the fact that Whisc's "peace" and "human rights" options
 |  were also offered by SOA in the hope of appeasing Congress
 |  and preserving its budget: but hardly any of the students
 |  chose to take them.
 |
 |  We can't expect this terrorist training camp to reform
 |  itself: after all, it refuses even to acknowledge that it
 |  has a past, let alone to learn from it. So, given that the
 |  evidence linking the school to continuing atrocities in
 |  Latin America is rather stronger than the evidence linking
 |  the al-Qaida training camps to the attack on New York, what
 |  should we do about the "evil-doers" in Fort Benning,
 |  Georgia?
 |
 |  Well, we could urge our governments to apply full diplomatic
 |  pressure, and to seek the extradition of the school's
 |  commanders for trial on charges of complicity in crimes
 |  against humanity. Alternatively, we could demand that our
 |  governments attack the United States, bombing its military
 |  installations, cities and airports in the hope of
 |  overthrowing its unelected government and replacing it with
 |  a new administration overseen by the UN. In case this
 |  proposal proves unpopular with the American people, we could
 |  win their hearts and minds by dropping naan bread and dried
 |  curry in plastic bags stamped with the Afghan flag.
 |
 |  You object that this prescription is ridiculous, and I
 |  agree. But try as I might, I cannot see the moral difference
 |  between this course of action and the war now being waged in
 |  Afghanistan.
 |
 |
 |  www.monbiot.com [ http://www.monbiot.com/ ]
 |
 |
 |  Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003
 |
 |
 |  (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this
 |  material is distributed without profit to those who have
 |  expressed a prior interest in receiving the included
 |  information for research and educational purposes.)
 |
 |
 |  Additional reading:
 |
 |  School of the Americas Watch:
 |  http://soaw.org/new/
 |
 |  If we hate terrorism, why does the U.S. keep arming
 |  and training terrorists?:
 |  http://www.lp.org/press/archive.php?function=view&record=246
 |
 |  CIA support of Death Squads:
 |  http://ideology.lege.net/backyard_terrorism/cia_support_of_death_squads.txt
 |
 |  Resources
 |  http://ideology.lege.net/resources/
 |
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