articolo del guardian sulla SOA

["Nello Margiotta" <animarg@tin.it>]

Backyard terrorism

The US has been training terrorists at a camp in Georgia for years - and
it's still at it

George Monbiot
Guardian

Tuesday October 30, 2001


"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 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.

www.monbiot.com

Nello

change the world before the world changes you

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