Ann Wright: Torture, the Geneva Conventions and the School of the Americas....

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Torture, the Geneva Conventions and the School of the Americas
By Ann Wright, US Army Reserve Colonel
t r u t h o u t | Columnist

Wednesday 29 November 2006

I spoke for the first time at the School of the Americas Watch protest at Fort Benning, Georgia, on Saturday, November 17, 2006. As a US Army veteran with 29 years of active and reserve duty who retired as a colonel, I felt tremendous emotions while addressing over 20,000 protesters from a stage in front of the gates of a major US military installation. We were there as witnesses to a history of involvement in torture by graduates of the US military's School of the Americas (SOA), now known by its less-notorious name, the Western Hemispheric Institute for Security Cooperation.

Standing with me were seven members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, including two war resisters: Darrell Anderson, who returned from Canada in October 2006 and was discharged from the US Army, and Kyle Snyder, who also returned from Canada and attempted to turn himself in to the US Army.

School of the Americas and Torture

I had served three years in the middle 1980s with the US military's Southern Command in Panama while the School of the Americas was still located there. People in Central and South America were tortured by members of their militaries throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Terrible periods of torture in Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras were conducted by members of militaries from those countries. Some of the known torturers attended the School of the Americas.

When I was in the military, I never heard from other US military personnel that SOA was training students in torture techniques. But there were rumors from non-military organizations of SOA involvement. I thought that if the rumors were true, surely we would hear about it through the informal communications network that operates very effectively in the US military. Techniques for harming others are not hard to figure out and would not need to be taught by the US military. Why would the US military train members of other militaries in torture techniques and thereby expose the US military to charges of international and domestic criminal activity?

In 1996, seven Spanish-language military manuals prepared by SOA surfaced that advocated such tactics as executions of guerrillas, extortion, physical abuse and paying bounties for enemies. These documents came to light because of an investigation into the involvement of the CIA in Guatemala. But I still thought that it wouldn't be the US military teaching such methods, but maybe the Central Intelligence Agency, using a US military installation and dressing in US military uniforms.

Torture in Iraq and Afghanistan: Who Are the Teachers and What Is Taught?

But then the US military went to war in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. Photos of the abusive treatment of prisoners in Bagram Air Base and Kandahar, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib made me question the professionalism of the US military and what was being taught in military schools. Perhaps there was a program of instruction that taught torture techniques to military intelligence, CIA and contractor interrogators. The Bush administration's "torture memos" certainly provided the environment for the military to "take off the gloves," a statement attributed to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's counsel, according to a June 12, 2002, Justice Department document. We now know the sordid history of abuses and torture that occurred from 2001 through 2005 and that are probably still happening.

The rest of the piece is at: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/112906D.shtml