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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (9331)	5/21/1999 7:14:00 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

Sorry to be answering these so late, but I wouldn't even try to keep up with the pace on this thread. But there is simply no way that you can state that all students who have attended American military schools are torturers or murderers. I didn't say that. I said that a good number of them were. A large part of this is a function of the type of individuals selected by authoritarian regimes to receive advanced training. They send the most loyal, who in turn are the most likely to put ends before means. I do recall reading an article by a former instructor at a military school for Latin American officers, who reported that classes involving human rights, etc. had a very real sense of non-seriousness about them, on the part of both instructors and students. The attiude was reportedly "Congress makes us do this stuff, but it doesn't mean we have to take it seriously". What you should be arguing is why certain leaders in the US permitted these abusive acts to go unpunished. Not trying to say that it was official US policy that we would train forces to willingly carry out torture. There was obviously no written or formal policy; public opinion would make that impossible. But the abusive acts occurred so consistently, over such an extended period of time in so many different countries, and with so little formal response from us (despite our having very considerable control over the military budgets of many of the countries in question), that it is hard to believe that there was not a tacit agreement to look the other way. The attitude seemed to be that if our guys couldn't be as cruel as the bad guys, the bad guys would have some form of advantage. This was a massive miscalculation; the cruelty we permitted in these countries, which were publicly idetified as our clients, did our cause no good and a great deal of harm. The first thing that is emphasized is that information extracted through the use of torture is unreliable and not to be trusted. Reams of evidence, mainly testimony by survivors of torture, suggest that the collection of information was secondary to intimidation and humiliation. Many of those tortured possessed no information of any value. Others, pressed to name names they didn't know, broke and named any names available, who were in turn pulled in for their own sessions. It should not be forgotten that in every country there are individuals who enjoy torturing, and that they tend to gravitate toward jobs which provide them these pleasures.