Backyard terrorism

George Monbiot
Tuesday October 30, 2001
The Guardian

"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.

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