Targeted By Watchdog Group
LONDON, Oct 31 (IslamOnline & News Agencies)
The United States has been running a
"terrorist training camp" for the last 55 years,
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-Qaeda's door, The Guardian
newspaper said Tuesday.
Guardian writer, George Monbiot, spoke about
the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security
Cooperation (WHISC), formed in 1946 and based
in Fort Benning, Georgia.
It was formally known as the U.S. Army School
of the Americas (SOA), whose graduates include
60,000 Latin American soldiers and policemen.
Many of them have been accused of torturing
and terrorizing civilians in several Latin American
countries, Monbiot explained in his article.
"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,"
said Monbiot.
In June of 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 helped 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.
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, said Monbiot.
Among them was Roberto D'Aubuisson, the
reputed leader of El Salvador's death squads.
Also named were the men who allegedly killed
Archbishop Oscar Romero, as well as 19 of the
26 soldiers who murdered 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 allegedly helped murder Orlando
Letelier and Ronni Moffit in Washington D.C. 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.
"All this, the school's defenders insist, is ancient
history. But SOA graduates are also involved in
the dirty war now being waged, with U.S.
support, in Colombia," Monboit said.
In 1999, the U.S. 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 in Colombia and have commissioned
kidnappings, disappearances, murders and
massacres.
In February of this year, a 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, Monbiot added.
"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," he said.
In his article, Monbiot elaborated on the effect
of the school's education on how many of it's
alumni are involved with torture practices.
"How can we be sure that their alma mater has
had any part in this? In 1996, the U.S.
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," he said.
Several U.S. Congressmen tried to shut the
school down last year, says Monbiot, as a result
of a campaign organized by School of the
Americas Watch (SOA Watch). The bid was
defeated by ten votes.
"Instead, the House of Representatives voted to
close it and then immediately reopen it under a
different name…the School of the Americas
washed its hands of the past by renaming itself
WHISC."
On its website, WHISC courses says it covers "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."
SOA Watch describes on its websites that
despite the name change, the course catalog
has had very minimal changes done to it.
"On January 17, 2001, the U.S Army School of
the Americas was re-named the Western
Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation
[the Department of Defense refers to it as
WHINSEC].
"The name change is part of an ongoing effort
by the Department of Defense [DOD] to alter
the school's image, which has been diminished
by revelations of its sordid history. As grassroots
pressure to close the School has increased, the
DOD has responded by re-characterizing the
school as a place that teaches democracy and
human rights.
"This re-characterization, however, is not the
truth. It is still a combat training school," said
SOA Watch. "This is not a new school. The same
information is being imparted, in the same
courses, at the same location, presumably by
the same instructors, but under a different
name."
In his article, Monbiot questions what should be
done - in the light of the current war on
terrorism-about the "evil-doers" in Fort Benning,
Georgia, alluding to U.S. President George W.
Bush's characterization of Osama bin Laden as
an "evil-doer".
He suggests that the British government apply
full diplomatic pressure and 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 un-elected government
and replacing it with a new administration
overseen by the U.N.
"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,"
Monbiot said in concluding his article.
George Monbiot was born in 1963. He's the
author of Captive State: the corporate takeover
of Britain, and the investigative travel books
Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed and No
Man's Land. He writes a weekly column for The
Guardian newspaper.
