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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Judgement Proof.com who wrote (197661)10/30/2001 12:06:40 PM
From: Skywatcher  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 769670
 
More accomplishments to be proud of....

Backyard Terrorism The US Has Been Training Terrorists At a Camp in Georgia for Years - And It's Still At It
by George Monbiot

"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.



To: Judgement Proof.com who wrote (197661)10/30/2001 12:12:23 PM
From: Skywatcher  Respond to of 769670
 
"Carlyle is as deeply wired into the current administration as they can possibly be," Charles Lewis, executive
director of the Center for Public Integrity, told Bushwatch.org. "George Bush is getting money from private
interests that have business before the government, while his son is president. And, in a really peculiar way,
George W. Bush could, some day, benefit financially from his own administration's decisions, through his father's investments. The average American doesn't know that. To me, that's a jaw-dropper."

CC