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 percent 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 program, 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 took 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 may 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.

Source: The Guardian

Note: SOA Watch will hold a demonstration against WHISC/SOA on Nov. 16-18. For more information, www.soaw.org or 828-281-1061.

MEDIA WATCH

Little space for editorial dissent to the military line

Statement of FAIR: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

During the weeks following September’s terrorist attacks, two leading dailies used their op-ed pages as an echo chamber for the government’s official policy of military response, mostly ignoring dissenters and policy critics.

A FAIR survey of the New York Times and the Washington Post op-ed pages for the three weeks following the attacks (9/12/01 - 10/2/01) found that columns calling for or assuming a military response to the attacks were given a great deal of space, while opinions urging diplomatic and international law approaches as an alternative to military action were nearly non-existent.

We counted a total of 44 columns in the Times and Post that clearly stressed a military response, against only two columns stressing non-military solutions. (Though virtually every op-ed in both papers dealt in some way with September 11, most did not deal specifically with how to respond to the attacks, with many focusing on economics, rebuilding, New York’s Rudolph Giuliani, etc. During the period surveyed, the Post ran a total of 105 op-ed columns, the Times ran 79.)

Overall, the Post was more militaristic, running at least 32 columns favoring military action, compared to 12 in the Times. But the Post also provided the only two columns we could find in the first three weeks after September 11 that argued for non-military responses; the Times had no such columns. Both dissenting columns were written by guest writers.

The Times’ and Post’s in-house columnists provided the bulk of the pro-war commentary. Two-thirds of the Times columns urging military action were written in-house, as were more than half of the Post’s pro-war columns. This may say something about which journalists are singled out for promotion to the prestigious position of columnist.

In addition, both op-ed pages showed a striking gender imbalance. Of the 107 op-ed writers at the Post, only seven were women. Proportionally, the Times did slightly better, with eight female writers out of 79.

When critics argue that US news media have a duty to provide a broad debate on war, a common response is to ask why— after all, isn’t there a political and popular consensus in favor of war?

Perhaps, but there’s reason to believe that the extent and nature of that consensus has been overstated and distorted.

In polls that offered a choice between a military response or nothing, it’s true that overwhelming majorities chose war. But given the choice between either a military assault or pressing for the extradition and trial of those responsible (Christian Science Monitor, 9/27/01), a substantial minority either chose extradition (30 percent) or were undecided (16 percent). These people had next to no representation in the op-ed debate; in fact, it’s likely that many people asked to choose whether or not to go to war had never seen an alternative to war articulated in a mainstream outlet.

There is also a little-acknowledged gender gap in poll responses about military action, a fact that lends new significance to the gender imbalance in Washington Post and New York Times op-eds. In the final two paragraphs of a 1,395-word story titled “Public Unyielding in War Against Terror “ (9/29/01), the Washington Post pointed out that women “were significantly less likely to support a long and costly war.” According to the Post, while 44 percent of women would support a broad military effort, “48 percent said they want a limited strike or no military action at all.”

Similarly, a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll (Gallup.com, 10/5/01) showed that 64 percent of men think the US “should mount a long-term war,” while 24 percent favored limiting retaliation to punishing the specific groups responsible for the attacks. In contrast, “women are evenly divided— with 42 percent favoring each option.” Noting that “women’s support for war is much more conditional than that of men,” Gallup reports that though 88 percent of women favored taking retaliatory military action, that number dropped to 55 percent if 1,000 American troops would be killed (76 percent of men would support a war under these circumstances).

Of course, gender equity on the op-ed pages would not guarantee proportional representation for dissenters— some of the most virulently pro-war and anti-Muslim columns have been written by female commentators (e.g., Mona Charen, who called for mass expulsions based on ethnicity—Washington Times, 10/18/01). But given the gender differences suggested by polling, more women on the op-ed pages might well give the lie to the conventional wisdom that all Americans have no-holds-barred enthusiasm for an open-ended war.

Even, however, if one accepts the idea that the public overwhelmingly favors war, the task of journalism is to remain independent and to ask tough questions of policy makers. After all, American history includes many official policies that were popular in their time, but which today are viewed as disasters. Wouldn’t the country have been better off if journalists had provided a stronger, more abiding challenge to the consensus that supported Vietnam, or the internment of Japanese-Americans?

More than any other newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post— with their unmatched influence in the nation’s capitol and in US newsrooms— have a duty to provide readers with a wide range of views on how to deal with terrorism, its causes and solutions. If the purpose of the op-ed page is to provide a vigorous debate including critical opinions, both papers failed their readers at a crucial time.