ONLY THE NAME HAS CHANGED TO PROTECT THE GUILTY.
DOCUMENTARY FILMS
SCHOOL OF ASSASSINS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOeaG6-qsVc&fmt=18
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW0k3v1RivA
SO WHAT?
WHO CARES?
Well, the School of the Americas (SOA) is alive and functional under a new name, still on American soil, and the Department of Defense REFUSES to release the names of those attending the "school", causing some alarm among those who fought so hard for it to be abandoned after human rights violations were discovered all over Latin America because of the techniques taught there, and because some of the most violent political figures of our age were trained there...THAT'S WHY!
THE SCHOOL OF THE AMERICAS WAS INVESTIGATED IN 1997 BY REP. JOSEPH KENNEDY II, AND BLAMED THE PENTAGON FOR FAILURE TO STOP DISTRIBUTING TRAINING MANUALS THAT TAUGHT METHODS OF TORTURE, MURDER, AND EXTORTION TO "BATTLE LEFTIST FORCES" IN THE 1980s
MARCH 7, 1997,
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1997-03-07/news/1997066103_1_latin-america-training-materials-training-in-latin
<<.[KENNEDY] accused the Pentagon's inspector general of a "whitewash" and said that last month's Pentagon report "glosses over the true implications of U.S. involvement in teaching torture in Latin America." The Kennedy report was based on an investigation by the congressman's staff.
Kennedy also renewed his call for the Army to shut down the School of the Americas, the training facility for Latin American military officers where the training materials were used until 1991.
Citing the testimony of instructors at the school, the 20-page Kennedy report offers the most complete public account to date of how the U.S. military put together and distributed seven intelligence training materials that violated U.S. laws and Defense Department policies against the use of torture and the execution of suspected subversives.
The revival of aggressive and often abusive intelligence-gathering methods coincided with the coming to power in 1980 of the Reagan administration, which was determined to forcefully resist the threat of communism in Central America. According to the Kennedy report, the Carter administration had halted intelligence training operations because of Latin human rights abuses.
"Top priority"
Two officers, Lt. Col. Victor Tise and Capt. John Zindar, told a Kennedy staffer that in 1982, they understood "that it was a top priority for President Reagan to reinstate intelligence training in Latin America immediately."
One CIA manual, obtained by The Sun in January under the Freedom of Information Act, taught interrogation methods that were strikingly similar to those used in the early 1980s by Battalion 316, a CIA-trained Honduran military unit that kidnapped, tortured and murdered suspected leftists in the 1980s.>>
SOA turned out "students" who were later found guilty of genocide, who were aided by American agencies, as in the CONTRA affair during Ronald Reagan's terms in office.
SOA, now known as The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), is a United States Department of Defense Institute located at Fort Benning near Columbus, Georgia, USA, that provides military training to government personnel of Latin American countries.
The school was founded in 1946 and from 1961, during the Kennedy administration, was assigned the specific goal of teaching anti-communist counterinsurgency training, a role which it would fulfill for the rest of the Cold War. In this period, it educated several Latin American dictators and, during the 1980s, included torture in its curriculum.
[SEE: Editorial (September 28, 1996). "School of the Dictators". The New York Times. Retrieved August 12, 2012. AND Editorial (October 1, 1996). "Teaching Human Rights Violations". The Washington Post. p. A18. Retrieved August 12, 2012.]
In 2000, during the Bush 2 administration, the institute was renamed to WHINSEC.
This "school" has been under fire since 1992 when it was discovered that it apparently taught "skills" like torture, murder, kidnapping, and "instilling fear" in local populations.
The Department of Defense is currently being sued by a watchdog organization for noncompliance of the Freedom of Information Act, failing to release requested documents.
WHEN A U.S. DEPARTMENT WON'T RELEASE RECORDS, NAMES, OR ANY INFORMATION THEN WE MAY ASSUME THAT AGENCY HAS MUCH TO HIDE!
"School of the Americas Watch vs. U.S. Department of Defense
Human rights activists petition court to have DOD release
names of students of infamous U.S. military training school."
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
9:00 AM Court Session with Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton
U.S. Courthouse, Courtroom 3, 1301 Clay Street (at 14th St.)
Oakland, California
<<The U.S. Department of Defense has denied Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests by School of the Americas Watch for the names of WHINSEC students and instructors for the years 2004-2010. For the years 1946-2003 the names had always been released when requested. The names are the basis of the SOA Watch database and the means of citizen oversight of the record of SOA/WHINSEC graduates. (See: http://www.soaw.org/about-the-soawhinsec/soawhinsec-grads) >>
http://www.soaw.org/take-action/legislative/articles/110-critique-of-the-western-hemisphere-institute-for-security-cooperation
<<On September 20, 1996, under intense public pressure, the Pentagon was forced to release training manuals that were used at the School of the Americas for years. These manuals advocated torture, extortion, blackmail and the targeting of civilian populations. A Washington Post article by Dana Priest broke the story.
The release of these manuals proved what the SOA Watch organization, thousands of Latin Americans and numerous human rights organizations had been saying for years: that U.S. taxpayer money had been used for the teaching of torture and repression.
[Report to Cheney, APRIL 26, 2001, here: http://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=722239]
Material from CIA and Army manuals written in the 1950's and 1960's was incorporated into seven Spanish-language training guides. More than a thousand of these manuals were distributed for use in countries such as El Salvador, Guatemala, Ecuador and Peru, and at the School of the Americas between 1987 and 1991. An inquiry was triggered in mid-1991 when the US Southern Command evaluated the manuals for use in expanding military support programs in Colombia.
In March 1992, then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney received an investigative report on "Improper Material in Spanish-Language Intelligence Training Manuals." Classified SECRET, the report noted that five of the seven manuals "contained language and statements in violation of legal, regulatory or policy prohibitions" and recommended they be recalled. The memo is stamped: "SECDEF HAS SEEN.">>
Interestingly, contrary to popular belief, Cheney obviously NEVER asked that the manuals be recalled after this: Major Victor Tise, who was responsible for assembling the Latin American manuals at School of the Americas for counterintelligence training in 1982 stated that the manuals had been forwarded to DOD headquarters for clearance "and came back approved but UNCHANGED." (Emphasis in original document)
Tise, who served in 1982 as a counterintelligence instructor at the School of the Americas, has related the history of the "objectionable material" in the manuals and the training courses at SOA. A decade of training between 1966 and 1976 was SUSPENDED after a Congressional panel witnessed the "teaching program" and were shocked and appalled.
The Carter administration then HALTED the counterintelligence training courses "for fear training would contribute to Human Rights violations in other countries," Tise said, but the program was RESTORED BY THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION IN 1982.
Tice then obtained training materials from the archives of the Army's "Project X" program which he described as a "training package to provide counterinsurgency techniques learned in Vietnam to Latin American countries."
The course materials Tice put together, including the manuals that became the subject of the investigations, were sent to Defense Department headquarters "for clearance" in 1982 and "came back approved but UNCHANGED." These manuals were used throughout Latin America over at least the next nine years.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB122/
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 122
<<The two CIA manuals, "Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual-1983" and "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation-July 1963," were originally obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Baltimore Sun in 1997. The KUBARK manual includes a detailed section on "The Coercive Counterintelligence Interrogation of Resistant Sources," with concrete assessments on employing "Threats and Fear," "Pain," and "Debility." After Congress began investigating reports of Central American atrocities in the mid 1980s, particularly in Honduras, the CIA's "Human Resource Exploitation" manual was hand edited to alter passages that appeared to advocate coercion and stress techniques to be used on prisoners. CIA officials attached a new prologue page on the manual stating: "The use of force, mental torture, threats, insults or exposure to inhumane treatment of any kind as an aid to interrogation is prohibited by law, both international and domestic; it is neither authorized nor condoned"-making it clear that authorities were well aware these abusive practices were illegal and immoral, even as they continued then and now.>>
SO EVERYONE KNEW WHO CLAIMED THEY DIDN'T KNOW, AND THE MANUALS WERE USED FOR ALL THOSE YEARS.
http://web.archive.org/web/20070807022545/http://www.soaw.org/newswire_detail.php?id=851
U.S. Instructed Latins on Executions, Torture
Saturday, September 21st 1996
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
<<U.S. Army intelligence manuals used to train Latin American military officers at an Army school from 1982 to 1991 advocated executions, torture, blackmail and other forms of coercion against insurgents, Pentagon documents released yesterday (09/20/1996) show.
Used in courses at the U.S. Army's School of the Americas, the manual says that to recruit and control informants, counterintelligence agents could use fear, payment of bounties for enemy dead, beatings, false imprisonment, executions and the use of truth serum, according to a secret Defense Department summary of the manuals compiled during a 1992 investigation of the instructional material and also released yesterday.
The Army School of the Americas, long located in Panama, moved in 1984 to Fort Benning, Ga., has trained nearly 60,000 military and police officers from Latin America and the United States since 1946.
Its graduates have included some of the region's most notorious human rights abusers, among them Roberto D'Aubuisson, the leader of El Salvador's right-wing death squads; 19 Salvadoran soldiers linked to the 1989 assassination of six Jesuit priests; Gen. Manuel Noriega, the deposed Panamanian strongman; six Peruvian officers linked to killings of students and a professor; and Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, a Guatemalan officer implicated in the death of an American innkeeper living in Guatemala and in the death of a leftist guerrilla married to an American lawyer.
When reports of the 1992 investigation surfaced this year during a congressional inquiry into the CIA's activities in Guatemala, spokesmen for the school denied the manuals advocated such extreme methods of operation, which were in violation of Army policy and law at the time they were in use.
The manuals were compiled by Army intelligence officials.
The material was based, in part, on training instructions used in the 1960s by the Army's Foreign Intelligence Assistance Program, entitled "Project X." The 1992 investigation also found the manual was distributed to thousands of military officers from 11 South and Central American countries ...where the U.S. military was heavily involved in counterinsurgency.
One manual, entitled "Handling of Sources," also "discloses classified [informant] methodology that could compromise Army clandestine intelligence modus operandi," the 1992 investigation found. Another manual, entitled "Counterintelligence," contained ?sensitive Army counterintelligence tactics, techniques and procedures."
...the manual entitled, "Handling of Sources" says, "The CI [counterintelligence] agent could cause the" arrest of the employees [informants] parents, imprison the employee or give him a beating" to coerce cooperation.
On several occasions it uses the words "neutralization" or "neutralizing," which was commonly used at the time as a euphemism for execution or destruction, a Pentagon official said.
The manual on "Terrorism and the Urban Guerrilla" says that "another function of the CI agents is recommending CI targets for neutralizing. Some examples of these targets are governmental officials, political leaders, and members of the infrastructure."
Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II (D-Mass.), an advocate of closing the school, said in a statement last night that the manuals "show what we have suspected all along, that taxpayers' money has been used for physical abuse." Kennedy said, "The School of the Americas, a Cold War relic, should be shut down." >>
THE UNITED STATES HAS INTERFERED IN LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS, FUNDED COUP ATTEMPTS, BACKED DICTATORS TO REPLACE OTHER DICTATORS FOR OVER 100 YEARS.
The book, Predatory States: Operation Condor And Covert War In Latin America
by J. Patrice McSherry lists other "operations" and "projects" that show the progression of America's torture methods. It especially addresses America's part in the early 1970's in "Operation Condor", a campaign of political repression involving assassination and intelligence operations officially implemented in 1971=1975 by the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America WITH AMERICA'S HELP.
You may read excerpts here: http://tinyurl.com/cujxt3q
The Phoenix Program, Operation Condor, the Northwoods Project (Operation Northwoods), The Polk Conspiracy, The Gladio Conspiracy, Project Camelot are but a very few of covert operations undertaken by the U.S. across the globe since before World War II.
ONCE UPON A TIME, PEOPLE SAID ALL THESE WERE JUST "CONSPIRACY THEORIES, BUT TODAY, ALL HAVE BEEN PROVEN TO BE FACT.
ALL governments seem to engage in such tactics as murder, torture, coercion, and spying, but some such torture "programs" have gone to extremes... as at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
America's "PROJECT X" for Vietnam may have been a nod toward an older training school, one which the OSS and later CIA trained at in Canada.
"Camp X in Thunder Bay Canada, ANOTHER School of Assassins"
'Camp X' was the unofficial name of a Second World War paramilitary and commando training installation on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario between Whitby and Oshawa in Ontario, Canada. The area is known today as Intrepid Park, after the code name for Sir William Stephenson of the British Security Coordination.
Camp X was established December 6, 1941 by the chief of British Security Coordination (BSC), Sir William Stephenson, a Canadian from Winnipeg, Manitoba, and a close confidante of Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Before the attack on Pearl Harbor and America's entry into the war, Camp X opened for the purpose of training Allied agents from the Special Operations Executive, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) intended to be dropped behind enemy lines as saboteurs and spies. However, even before the United States entered the war on December 7, 1941, agents from America's intelligence services expressed an interest in sending personnel for training at the soon to be opened Camp X. Agents from the FBI and the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA) secretly attended Camp X. Most notable was Colonel William "Wild Bill" Donovan, war-time head of the OSS, who credited Sir William Stephenson with teaching Americans about foreign intelligence gathering. The CIA even named their recruit training facility "The Farm", a nod to the original farm that existed at the Camp X site.
You may read considerably more about this at : http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB122/
WHILE AT THAT SITE, PLEASE READ "National Security Archive Briefing Book No. 418
Posted – March 19, 2013" [ http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB418/ ]
The Iraq War Ten Years After.
Declassified Documents Show Failed Intelligence, Policy Ad Hockery, Propaganda-Driven Decision-Making.
<<Washington, DC, March 19, 2013 – The U.S. invasion of Iraq turned out to be a textbook case of flawed assumptions, wrong-headed intelligence, propaganda manipulation, and administrative ad hockery, according to the National Security Archive's briefing book of declassified documents posted today to mark the 10th anniversary of the war.
The Archive's documentary primer includes the famous Downing Street memo ("intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy"), the POLO STEP PowerPoint invasion plans (assuming out of existence any possible insurgency), an FBI interview with Saddam Hussein in captivity (he said he lied about weapons of mass destruction to keep Iran guessing and deterred).
The PUBLIC RELATIONS blitz (READ AS MEDIA PROPAGANDA) won enthusiastic support from many in the right wing and from liberal hawks supporting military intervention on human rights grounds. Perhaps most aggressive was the famous neoconservative Iraq lobby, whose Project for a New American Century had begun campaigning for U.S. direct military action against Iraq in the 1990s.>>
PLEASE NOTE: I AM OF THE OPINION THAT "PROJECT FOR A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY" CAN BE CONSIDERED MORE TOXIC AND DANGEROUS THAN THE BITE OF A COBRA, MORE SINISTER THAN THE ATOMIC BOMB, MORE EVIL THAN WORDS CAN EXPRESS, AND ARE DETERMINED TO ABSOLUTELY RULE AMERICAN POLICY AND PRESIDENTS.
WATCH THIS GROUP CLOSELY!
IF THESE DOCUMENTS, COMBINED WITH RECENTLY UNCOVERED EVIDENCE THAT BUSH2 AND COMRADES MADE PLANS TO INVADE IRAQ EVEN BEFORE HE WAS ELECTED, DON'T CONVINCE YOU WHAT A LIE THE ROAD TO "WAR" IN IRAQ WAS, THERE IS NO HOPE FOR YOU TO EVER ACCEPT TRUTH.
THERE IS MORE THAN AMPLE PROOF AS WELL THAT BUSH/CHENEY APPROVED THE TACTICS USED AT ABU GHRAIB AND GUANTANAMO AND THAT THE WHITE HOUSE INCESSANTLY MADE REQUESTS FOR VIDEO TAPES OF THE ACTUAL TORTURE EVENTS FROM BOTH PRISONS.
MANY SOUTH AMERICAN DICTATORS TRAINED AT THE SCHOOL OF THE AMERICAS, MEN WHO WERE WELL-USED BY THE CIA AND OTHER AMERICAN AGENCIES.
OPERATION CONDOR, SOUTH AMERICA, THE U.S. TWIN TO OPERATION GLADIO IN EUROPE.
Operation Condor was the name given to a secret union of intelligence services of SIX US-supported, South American military governments- Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay, which operated during the 1970s into the early 1980s.
Under Operation Condor the intelligence agencies were to use their joint resources to round up thousands of people who were suspected of involvement with leftist groups and imprison them in camps or secret detention centers. Many were tortured, interrogated, then executed and secretly buried, becoming known as the disappeared. Those that escaped their own dictatorship’s security services were often captured and tortured in other Condor countries and eventually returned from where they fled to be executed. Condor agents also located and killed dissidents in operations outside Latin America, in several European nations and the USA.
“Operation Condor … involved the intelligence agencies…in a joint effort to eliminate perceived enemies of those regimes throughout the world.” – Daniel Brandt, Public Information Research, USA.
The most active period of this multinational secret police and army cooperation against leftwing and other opposition was between 1975 to 1978. The overall result of this massive political repression and terrorist dirty war, was that an estimated 35,000 people were murdered, many disappearing without a trace. Hundreds of thousands of others were imprisoned and tortured.
By August 1974, the bodies of foreign, especially Bolivian, refugees began to appear on various Buenos Aires rubbish tips. On September 30, a bombing in Buenos Aires carried out by a Chilean military unit led by a CIA agent [Michael Townley] killed Chilean General Carlos Prats, [who had been the commander-in-chief of the Chilean army, until the coup of September 1973] who was a leader of the opposition to the dictatorship of General Pinochet.That same year the most well known action of Condor was carried out in Washington DC. Orlando Letelier, the minister of defence and foreign affairs in the elected government of Allende of Chile, had escaped to the US, and was carrying out a campaign to isolate the Pinochet dictatorship. On September 21, Letelier and his American aide Ronni Moffet were killed when a bomb ripped the car they were traveling in apart.
This was a major Condor blunder.
Such actions and the scale of repression made the existence of Condor difficult to continue to hide.
The trail led eventually to Michael Vernon Townley, a US citizen and former CIA agent, with ties to the fascist Chilean group Patria y Libertad, who organised the murders. Townley left the US and returned to Chile after the 1973, CIA-backed coup. With his skills as an electronics and bugging expert he joined the Chilean secret police, DINA.
The Chilean regime was forced to extradite him to the US in 1978.
In return for informing on his Cuban exile accomplices and naming DINA commander Colonel Manuel Contreras as the man who ordered the killings, Townley was given a reduced sentence. Later Townley was given a new identity by the US government under its Witness Protection Program.
A number of countries have since expressed an interest in speaking to Townley, but the US has resisted these overtures.
With US agencies unwilling to reject security doctrines that rationalize violations of human rights as a legitimate means to an end and security in the Americas so important to the US, the USA’s public espousal of rights and freedoms does not mean democracy and human rights have priority.
It would not take much for another form of Operation Condor to rise again if the interests of the USA and its allies were challenged.
And so the continental scale covert extermination campaign that was Condor vanished from Latin America leaving an estimated toll of 35,000 people dead (more than 10,000 of them in Argentina) and leaving their grieving families still trying to learn what had happened to their disappeared love ones.>>
IN MARCH OF THIS YEAR A NEW TRIAL OPENED IN ARGENTINA TO CONSIDER THE TOTALITY OF CRIMES CARRIED OUT DURING OPERATION CONDOR.
<<Those who organized Operation Condor included the military regimes in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay. Peru and Ecuador also participated in some of the operation’s crimes. The US government, and in particular former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, provided crucial support for the bloody repression carried out under the mantle of Condor.
One of the documents declassified by Washington over the past decade was a transcript of a June 1976 discussion in Santiago, Chile between Kissinger and the foreign minister of the Argentine dictatorship, Admiral Cesar Augusto Guzzetti.
Another document, declassified in 2010, establishes that Kissinger intervened in September 1976 to stop the issuance of diplomatic warnings to the US-backed dictators in Latin America not to organize “a series of international murders.”
Kissinger’s September 16, 1976 cable to his assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs, Harry Shlaudeman, ordered that “no further action be taken on this matter.” Five days later, a car bomb killed Chile’s former foreign minister, Orlando Letelier, a prominent opponent of the Pinochet dictatorship, and his American colleague, Ronni Karpen Moffitt, as they were riding past Washington, DC’s Embassy Row.
Kissinger’s order amounted to a green light for Letelier’s killing.>>
http://www.globalresearch.ca/operation-condor-campaign-by-us-backed-latin-american-dictators-to-hunt-down-torture-and-murder-tens-of-thousands-of-opponents/5325695
MAY JUSTICE BE SERVED, AND MAY THE FIRST COURSE OF THAT SERVING BE HENRY KISSINGER.
FOR THE LATEST ON GUANTANAMO, OBAMA'S "COUNTER-TERRORISM" AND DRONE POLICY, ETC, SEE THIS SITE FOR UPDATES:
http://news.linktv.org/videos/inside-story-americas-time-to-close-us-school-of-the-assassins
War On Democracy...A HISTORY OF AMERICA'S PRESENCE IN LATIN AMERICA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXTnVsy32bE
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