The US has been training terrorists at a camp in Georgia for
years - and it's still at it
Backyard terrorism::
The US has been training terrorists at a camp in Georgia for years - and it's still at it
By George Monbiot
Tuesday October 30, 2001
The Guardian, Manchester, UK
"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
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The above article was on the SOA website. |
