America's Terrorist Training Camp

I looked up "SOA Watch" referred to in Monbiot's article. There website
is<br>
Here Click<br>
A good article linked at the site can be<br>
Found Here<P>

If you have time, please visit my nonprofit website
exposing the cancer racket. Thanks. Gavin.<br>
Please Click Here<P>



What's the difference between Al
Qaeda and Fort Benning?<br>
By George Monbiot. Published in<br>
the Guardian 30th October 2001 <P>

"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. <P>

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-Qaeda'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. <P>

Until January this year, WHISC was called "the School of the
Americas", or SOA. Since 1946
SOA has trained over 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 shows,
Latin America has been ripped apart by its alumni. <P>

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 SOA. <P>

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. <P>

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 benefitted 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. <P>

All this, the school's defenders insist, is ancient history. But
SOA's 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 ex-pupils are
running paramilitary groups there and have commissioned
kidnappings, disappearances,
murders and massacres. In February 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 graduates from Colombia than from any other country.
<P>

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. <P>

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 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." <P>

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. <P>

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-Qaeda training camps to the attack on New York, what should
we do about the "evil-doers" in
Fort Benning, Georgia? <P>

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.
<P>
30th October
2001