Terrorist training camp in US’s own backyard
George Monbiot (GNS)
(Washington, October 30)
"If any government sponsors outlaws and killers of innocents," Bush announced the day he began bombing Afghanistan, "they have become outlaws and murderers."
There is one government which, though 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 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 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.
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 thousands of their people.
In 1993, the UN 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 SOA. 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 Ecu-ador's Guillermo Rodr-iguez all benefited from the school.
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.
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 one do about the "evil-doers" in Fort Benning? Well, urge governments to apply diplomatic pressure, and seek the extradition of the school's commanders on charges of complicity in crimes against humanity. |
