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"IF ANY government
sponsors outlaws and killers of innocentes", Bush announced the day he began
bombing Afghanistan, "they have become outlaws and murderers".
There is one
Government which, though 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 out number the
people killed by the attack on New York, the embassy bombing and the other
atrocities laid, rightly or wrongly, at Al-Qaeda’s door.
The camp is called
the Western Hemisphere Institute For Security Co-operation, or Whisc. It is
based in Fort Benning, Georgia, and is funded by Bush’s government.
Until January this
year, Whisc. was called the "School of the Americas", or SOA. Since 1946,
SOA has trained more than sixty thousand Latin American soldiers and policemen.
Among its graduates are many of the continent’s most notorious torturers, mass
murderers, dictators and state terrorists.
In June this year,
Col. Byron Lima Estrada, once a student of 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 millitary 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 thousands of their
people.
In 1993, the UN 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 SOA. Among
them were Roberto D’Aubuisson, the leader of El Salvador’s death squads; the man
who killed Archbishop Oscar Romero; and 19 of the 26 soldiers who murdered the
Jesuit Prists in 1989. In Chile, the school’s graduates ran both Augusto
Pinochet’s secret police and three principal concentration camps. One of them
helped to murder Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffit in Washington in 1976.
Argentina’s
dictator’s Roberto Viola and Leopoldo Galtieri, Panama’s Manual Noriega and Omar
Torrijos, Peru’s Juan Velasco Alvardo and Ecuador’s Guillermo Rodriguez all
benifited from the School.
All this, the
school’s defenders insist, its ancient history. But SOA graduates are also
involved in the dirty war being waged, with US support in Colombia.
So, given that the
evidence linking the School to continuing atrocities in Latin America is rather
stronger than the evidence linking the Al-Qaida’s training camps to the attack
on New York, what should one do about the "evil-doers" in Fort Benning?
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