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U.S. Counter-Insurgency School Targeted By Watchdog Group
LONDON, Oct 31 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The United States has been running a "terrorist training camp" for the last 55 years, 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 Guardian newspaper said Tuesday.
Guardian writer, George Monbiot, spoke about the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC), formed in 1946 and based in Fort Benning, Georgia.
It was formally known as the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA), whose graduates include 60,000 Latin American soldiers and policemen. Many of them have been accused of torturing and terrorizing civilians in several Latin American countries, Monbiot explained in his article.
"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," said Monbiot.
In June of 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 helped 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.
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, said Monbiot.
Among them was Roberto D'Aubuisson, the reputed leader of El Salvador's death squads. Also named were the men who allegedly killed Archbishop Oscar Romero, as well as 19 of the 26 soldiers who murdered 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 allegedly helped murder Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffit in Washington D.C. 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.
"All this, the school's defenders insist, is ancient history. But SOA graduates are also involved in the dirty war now being waged, with U.S. support, in Colombia," Monboit said.
In 1999, the U.S. 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 in Colombia and have commissioned kidnappings, disappearances, murders and massacres.
In February of this year, a 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, Monbiot added.
"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," he said.
In his article, Monbiot elaborated on the effect of the school's education on how many of it's alumni are involved with torture practices.
"How can we be sure that their alma mater has had any part in this? In 1996, the U.S. 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," he said.
Several U.S. Congressmen tried to shut the school down last year, says Monbiot, as a result of a campaign organized by School of the Americas Watch (SOA Watch). The bid was defeated by ten votes.
"Instead, the House of Representatives voted to close it and then immediately reopen it under a different name…the School of the Americas washed its hands of the past by renaming itself WHISC."
On its website, WHISC courses says it covers "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."
SOA Watch describes on its websites that despite the name change, the course catalog has had very minimal changes done to it.
"On January 17, 2001, the U.S Army School of the Americas was re-named the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation [the Department of Defense refers to it as WHINSEC].
"The name change is part of an ongoing effort by the Department of Defense [DOD] to alter the school's image, which has been diminished by revelations of its sordid history. As grassroots pressure to close the School has increased, the DOD has responded by re-characterizing the school as a place that teaches democracy and human rights.
"This re-characterization, however, is not the truth. It is still a combat training school," said SOA Watch. "This is not a new school. The same information is being imparted, in the same courses, at the same location, presumably by the same instructors, but under a different name."
In his article, Monbiot questions what should be done - in the light of the current war on terrorism-about the "evil-doers" in Fort Benning, Georgia, alluding to U.S. President George W. Bush's characterization of Osama bin Laden as an "evil-doer".
He suggests that the British government apply full diplomatic pressure and 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 un-elected government and replacing it with a new administration overseen by the U.N.
"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," Monbiot said in concluding his article.
George Monbiot was born in 1963. He's the author of Captive State: the corporate takeover of
Britain, and the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed and
No Man's Land. He writes a weekly column for The Guardian newspaper.
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