terrorist training camp

[Doug Millison]

"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 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.

[...] 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.

[...] 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 ere "basically cosmetic". [...]

.... read it all at
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2001-11/01monbiot.cfm