I looked up \"SOA Watch\" referred to in Monbiot's article. There website \r\nis
\r\nHere Click
\r\nA good article linked at the site can be
\r\nFound Here<\/p>
\r\n\r\nIf you have time please visit my nonprofit website exposing the cancer \r\nracket.\r\nPlease Click \r\nHere
Thank you. Gavin.<\/p>
\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nWhat's the difference between Al\r\n Qaeda and Fort Benning?
\r\n By George Monbiot. Published in
\r\n the Guardian 30th October 2001 <\/p>
\r\n\r\n \"If any government sponsors the\r\n outlaws and killers of innocents,\" George Bush announced on the \r\nday he began bombing\r\n Afghanistan, \"they have become outlaws and murderers themselves. \r\nAnd they will take that\r\n lonely path at their own peril.\" I'm glad he said \"any \r\ngovernment\", as there's one which, though it\r\n has yet to be identified as a sponsor of terrorism, requires his \r\nurgent attention. <\/p>
\r\n\r\n For the past 55 years it has been running a terrorist training \r\ncamp, whose victims massively\r\n outnumber the people killed by the attack on New York, the \r\nembassy bombings and the other\r\n atrocities laid, rightly or wrongly, at Al-Qaeda's door. The \r\ncamp is called the Western\r\n Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or WHISC. It is \r\nbased in Fort Benning, Georgia,\r\n and it is funded by Mr Bush's government. <\/p>
\r\n\r\n Until January this year, WHISC was called \"the School of the \r\nAmericas\", or SOA. Since 1946\r\n SOA has trained over 60,000 Latin American soldiers and \r\npolicemen. Among its graduates are\r\n many of the continent's most notorious torturers, mass \r\nmurderers, dictators and state terrorists.\r\n As hundreds of pages of documentation compiled by the pressure \r\ngroup SOA Watch shows,\r\n Latin America has been ripped apart by its alumni. <\/p>
\r\n\r\n In June this year, Colonel Byron Lima Estrada, once a student at \r\nthe school, was convicted in\r\n Guatemala City of murdering Bishop Juan Gerardi in 1998. Gerardi \r\nwas killed because he had\r\n helped to write a report on the atrocities committed by \r\nGuatemala's \"D-2\", the military intelligence\r\n agency run by Lima Estrada with the help of two other SOA \r\ngraduates. D-2 coordinated the\r\n \"anti-insurgency\" campaign which obliterated 448 Mayan Indian \r\nvillages, and murdered tens of\r\n thousands of their people. Forty per cent of the cabinet \r\nministers who served the genocidal\r\n regimes of Lucas Garcia, Rios Montt, and Mejia Victores studied \r\nat SOA. <\/p>
\r\n\r\n In 1993, the United Nations Truth Commission on El Salvador \r\nnamed the army officers who had\r\n committed the worst atrocities of the civil war. Two-thirds of \r\nthem had been trained at the\r\n School of the Americas. Among them were Roberto D'Aubuisson, the \r\nleader of El Salvador's\r\n death squads; the men who killed Archbishop Oscar Romero; and 19 \r\nof the 26 soldiers who\r\n murdered the Jesuit priests in 1989. In Chile, the school's \r\ngraduates ran both Augusto Pinochet's\r\n secret police and his three principal concentration camps. One \r\nof them helped to murder Orlando\r\n Letelier and Ronni Moffit in Washington DC in 1976. <\/p>
\r\n\r\n Argentina's dictators Roberto Viola and Leopoldo Galtieri, \r\nPanama's Manuel Noriega and Omar\r\n Torrijos, Peru's Juan Velasco Alvarado and Ecuador's Guillermo \r\nRodriguez all benefitted from the\r\n school's instruction. So did the leader of the Grupo Colina \r\ndeath squad in Fujimori's Peru; four of\r\n the five officers who ran the infamous Battalion 3-16 in \r\nHonduras (which controlled the death\r\n squads there in the 1980s) and the commander responsible for the \r\n1994 Ocosingo massacre in\r\n Mexico. <\/p>
\r\n\r\n All this, the school's defenders insist, is ancient history. But \r\nSOA's graduates are also involved\r\n in the dirty war now being waged, with US support, in Colombia. \r\nIn 1999 the US State\r\n Department's report on human rights named two SOA graduates as \r\nthe murderers of the peace\r\n commissioner Alex Lopera. Last year, Human Rights Watch revealed \r\nthat seven ex-pupils are\r\n running paramilitary groups there and have commissioned \r\nkidnappings, disappearances,\r\n murders and massacres. In February this year a SOA graduate in \r\nColombia was convicted of\r\n complicity in the torture and killing of 30 peasants by \r\nparamilitaries. The school is now drawing\r\n more of its graduates from Colombia than from any other country. \r\n<\/p>
\r\n\r\n The FBI defines terrorism as \"violent acts ...intended to \r\nintimidate or coerce a civilian population,\r\n influence the policy of a government, or affect the conduct of a \r\ngovernment\", which is a precise\r\n description of the activities of SOA's graduates But how can we \r\nbe sure that their alma mater\r\n has had any part in this? Well, in 1996, the US government was \r\nforced to release seven of the\r\n school's training manuals. Among other top tips for terrorists, \r\nthey recommended blackmail,\r\n torture, execution and the arrest of witnesses' relatives. <\/p>
\r\n\r\n Last year, partly as a result of the campaign run by SOA Watch, \r\nseveral US congressmen tried\r\n to shut the school down. They were defeated by 10 votes. \r\nInstead, the House of\r\n Representatives voted to close it then immediately reopen it \r\nunder a different name. So, just as\r\n Windscale turned into Sellafield in the hope of parrying public \r\nmemory, the School of the\r\n Americas washed its hands of the past by renaming itself WHISC. \r\nAs the school's Colonel Mark\r\n Morgan informed the Department of Defense just before the vote \r\nin Congress, \"Some of your\r\n bosses have told us that they can't support anything with the \r\nname 'School of the Americas' on\r\n it. Our proposal addresses this concern. It changes the name.\" \r\nPaul Coverdell, the Georgia\r\n senator who had fought to save the school, told the papers that \r\nthe changes were \"basically\r\n cosmetic.\" <\/p>
\r\n\r\n But visit WHISC's website and you'll see that the School of the \r\nAmericas has been all but\r\n excised from the record. Even the page marked \"History\" fails to \r\nmention it. WHISC's courses, it\r\n tells us, \"cover a broad spectrum of relevant areas, such as \r\noperational planning for peace\r\n operations; disaster relief; civil-military operations; tactical \r\nplanning and execution of counter\r\n drug operations.\" Several pages describe its human rights \r\ninitiatives. But, though they account\r\n for almost the entire training programme, combat and commando \r\ntechniques, counter-insurgency\r\n and interrogation aren't mentioned. Nor is the fact that WHISC's \r\n\"peace\" and \"human rights\"\r\n options were also offered by SOA in the hope of appeasing \r\nCongress and preserving its\r\n budget: but hardly any of the students chose to take them. <\/p>
\r\n\r\n We can't expect this terrorist training camp to reform itself: \r\nafter all it refuses even to\r\n acknowledge that it has a past, let alone to learn from it. So, \r\ngiven that the evidence linking the\r\n school to continuing atrocities in Latin America is rather \r\nstronger than the evidence linking the\r\n Al-Qaeda training camps to the attack on New York, what should \r\nwe do about the \"evil-doers\" in\r\n Fort Benning, Georgia? <\/p>
\r\n\r\n Well, we could urge our governments to apply full diplomatic \r\npressure, and to seek the\r\n extradition of the school's commanders for trial on charges of \r\ncomplicity in crimes against\r\n humanity. Alternatively, we could demand that our governments \r\nattack the United States,\r\n bombing its military installations, cities and airports in the \r\nhope of overthrowing its unelected\r\n government and replacing it with a new administration overseen \r\nby the UN. In case this proposal\r\n proves unpopular with the American people, we could win their \r\nhearts and minds by dropping\r\n naan bread and dried curry in plastic bags stamped with the \r\nAfghan flag.\r\n\r\n You object that this prescription is ridiculous, and I agree. \r\nBut, try as I might, I cannot see the\r\n moral difference between this course of action and the war now \r\nbeing waged in Afghanistan.\r\n<\/p>
\r\n 30th October \r\n2001\r\n\r\n<\/p>\n","contact":"","link":"http:\/\/www.monbiot.com\/dsp_article.cfm?article_id=465","address":"","phone":"","parent_id":0,"mime_type":"text\/html","summary":"Monbiot's story is about the U.S. terrorist training facility, innocuously called \"Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation,\" or WHISC. It is based in Fort Benning, Georgia.","numcomment":0,"fileurl":"\/uploads\/2001\/11\/america\\_s.html","filesize":"8.4 kibibytes","article_url":"\/news\/2001\/11\/12800.php"},"attachments":[],"comments":[]}