Bu-lat-lat (boo-lat-lat) verb: to search, probe, investigate, inquire; to unearth facts Issue No. 39 November 11 - 17, 2001 Quezon City, Philippines |
Backyard
Terrorism: BY
GEORGE MONBIOT Back to Bulatlat.com Alternative Reader Index "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-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. 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. Back to Bulatlat.com Alternative Reader Index We want to know what you think of this article.
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