Teaching Torture - Congress quietly keeps School of the Americas alive

[mom cat]

Teaching Torture
Congress quietly keeps School of the Americas alive
by Doug Ireland



Remember how congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle deplored the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib as “un-American”? Last Thursday, however, the House quietly passed a renewed appropriation that keeps open the U.S.’s most infamous torture-teaching institution, known as the School of the Americas (SOA), where the illegal physical and psychological abuse of prisoners of the kind the world condemned at Abu Ghraib and worse has been routinely taught for years.

A relic of the Cold War, the SOA was originally set up to train military, police and intelligence officers of U.S. allies south of the border in the fight against insurgencies Washington labeled “Communist.” In reality, the SOA’s graduates have been the shock troops of political repression, propping up a string of dictatorial and repressive regimes favored by the Pentagon.

The interrogation manuals long used at the SOA were made public in May by the National Security Archive, an independent research group, and posted on its Web site after they were declassified following Freedom of Information Act requests by, among others, the Baltimore Sun. In releasing the manuals, the NSA noted that they “describe ‘coercive techniques’ such as those used to mistreat the detainees at Abu Ghraib.”

The Abu Ghraib torture techniques have been field-tested by SOA graduates — seven of the U.S. Army interrogation manuals that were translated into Spanish, used at the SOA’s trainings and distributed to our allies, offered instruction on torture, beatings and assassination. As Dr. Miles Schuman, a physician with the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture who has documented torture cases and counseled their victims, graphically wrote in the May 14 Toronto Globe and Mail under the headline “Abu Ghraib: The Rule, Not the Exception”:


http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/35/news-ireland.php

[Sven77]

1. SOA Watchers

SOA Watchers
http://www.soaw.org/new/

the name changed. SOA/WHISC

[mom cat]

2. Thanks for sharing the link.

:dem:

[BayCityProgressive]

4. SO DISGUSTING

Issues like this make it sooo hard for me to remain a Democrat...One of our most "liberal" senators Boxer has been advocating the death penalty and now wont make a peep about the SOA? Give me Wellstone back.

[bloom]

3. another chance

"The last chance for killing the school?s money this year now rests with the Senate ? but when we called Senators Boxer and Feinstein, past SOA critics, to ask them what they planned to do, the response was a deafening silence from their offices. In light of SOA Watch?s extensive lobbying, our elected representatives can?t claim they don?t know of the school?s record on torture. So this episode calls to mind Mark Twain?s observation that ?there is no distinct, native American criminal class ? except Congress.?

[Judi Lynn]

5. This is unbearable. That place should have been closed long ago.

From the article:

“The black hood covering the faces of naked prisoners in Abu Ghraib was known as la capuchi in Guatemalan and Salvadoran torture chambers. The metal bed frame to which the naked and hooded detainee was bound in a crucifix position in Abu Ghraib was la cama, named for a former Chilean prisoner who survived the U.S.-installed regime of General Augusto Pinochet. In her case, electrodes were attached to her arms, legs and genitalia, just as they were attached to the Iraqi detainee poised on a box, threatened with electrocution if he fell off. The Iraqi man bound naked on the ground with a leash attached to his neck, held by a smiling young American recruit, reminds me of the son of peasant organizers who recounted his agonizing torture at the hands of the Tonton Macoutes, U.S.-backed dictator John-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier’s right-hand thugs, in Port-au-Prince in 1984. The very act of photographing those tortured in Abu Ghraib to humiliate and silence parallels the experience of an American missionary, Sister Diana Ortiz,” who was tortured and gang-raped repeatedly under supervision by an American in 1989, according to her testimony before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus.
(snip)

Representative Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) has spearheaded opposition in the House to SOA-WHINSEC, but his amendment to the Foreign Operations appropriation killing money for the school (which had 128 co-sponsors) was withdrawn at the eleventh hour last week after a bipartisan agreement limited the number of amendments that could come to the House floor. The last chance for killing the school’s money this year now rests with the Senate — but when we called Senators Boxer and Feinstein, past SOA critics, to ask them what they planned to do, the response was a deafening silence from their offices. In light of SOA Watch’s extensive lobbying, our elected representatives can’t claim they don’t know of the school’s record on torture. So this episode calls to mind Mark Twain’s observation that “there is no distinct, native American criminal class — except Congress.”
(snip/...)

Thanks, soulsick in jp. Very helpful. Hope a lot of DU'ers see the article.

[mom cat]

8. I just cry at what the so called good democrats are doing.

[Trillo]

6. Listen to what they say?

Or watch what they do?

[JohnOneillsMemory]

7. 'Freedom is Not Free'....>sarcasm off< School of the Americas sums up

the values of the American power structure, torture, mutilation, and murder when just lying and stealing aren't enough.

I challenge any thinking person in the US military to look at the track record of the US gov't supposedly using them to 'defend freedom.' What are you really doing? Following orders isn't an answer.

[Imperialism Inc.]

9. This should tell us all exactly how serious

everyone in Washinton is about the "War on Terror". They aren't serious about it at all. Sickening.