Conspiracy America's Support of Dictators, Terrorists and Torturers
Recent Past The Taliban Venezuela Adolph Hitler The Shah of Iran Osama Bin Laden and The Mujahideen Network 11 Companies That Surprisingly Collaborated With the Nazis	Pol Pot Pinochet The Vanished Gallery The Martyrs of El Salvador International Labor Rights Fund The Center for Justice & Accountability PARADE’s Annual List Of...The World’s 10 Worst Dictators
Directory > Society and Culture > Cultures and Groups > Torture Survivors How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power (The Guardian: 9/25/04) - Prescott Bush (wiki)
Uzbekistan Ally with abuse record jails suspects: Some accused of terror in U.S. are in Uzbek prisons, reports say (5/1/05: The Charlotte Observer) The West's Connections to Communist Left Wing Dictatorships
SOFT-MONEY SCANDAL ROBERTSON "OFF THE RADAR SCREEN" IN MIDST OF CHINAGATE	Wedding bells rang for commies ROBERTSON RESIGNS FROM LAURA ASHLEY BOARD
Inside The Clinton Computer Technology Sellout To China And Russia N. Korea Has Already 'Mock Nuked' Alaska - With US Government Help ROBERTSON OPERATING INTERNET PORTAL IN PRC -- A ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE?
The School of Americas - U.S. Trained Terrorists &Torturers
School of Americas Watch	SCHOOL OF ASSASSINS (SOA) - ROBERT RICHTER videos
Protest at School of Americas Exposed Injustice - "I also located these manuals, which the Pentagon was forced to release in September 1996. They were used between 1987 and 1991 for intelligence training courses. Under the section entitled "Handling of Sources," the manual states, "The counterintelligence agent could cause the arrest of the informant's parents, imprison the informant, or give him a beating as part of the placement plan of said informant in the guerrilla organization." It continues, "The informant's value can be increased by means of arrests, executions, or pacifications." The manuals also cite any expression of dissatisfaction toward the government, armed forces or U.S. troops - or any other expression of popular discontent - as a possible indicator of guerrilla activity. For instance, an excerpt from the section entitled "Terrorism and the Urban Guerrilla" states, "Installations that are targets can provide information of significant value. The continued operation of these installations during combat can put in danger the commander's mission. Organizations or groups that are able to be a potential threat to the government must also be identified as targets. Examples of hostile organizations or groups are paramilitary groups, labor unions, and dissident groups." The press release from the Pentagon accompanying a selection of excerpts from the manuals said that "two dozen short passages in six of the manuals, which total 1,169 pages, contained material that either was not or could be interpreted not to be consistent with U.S. policy."" "In light of the present situation with Iraq, I would like to highlight the fact that soldiers trained at this school are no different from Saddam Hussein in their recorded human-rights violations. Take, for instance, two Colombian SOA graduates, Gen. Farouk Yanine Diaz and Capt. Gilberto Ibarra. Yanine is the former commander of the army's Second Division in Bucaramanga. According to the State Department Human Rights Report for 1997, Yanine "was accused of establishing and expanding paramilitary death squads in the Middle Magdalena region, as well as ordering dozens of disappearances, multiple large-scale massacres, and the killing of judges and court personnel sent to investigate previous crimes." Yanine was a guest speaker at the SOA in 1990 and 1991. These appearances occurred after his alleged involvement in the 1988 Uraba massacre of 20 banana workers, the assassination of the mayor of Sabana de Torres, and the massacre of 19 businessmen." "Ibarra, in February 1992, used three peasant children to walk in front of his patrol to detonate mines; two were killed, the other seriously wounded."
America's double standard?: Beginning with the Cold War, some critics say, the United States has a history of supporting repressive regimes and corrupt opposition forces when it has been in our interest to do so - "Beginning with the Truman administration and the onset of the Cold War, the United States has been involved, usually through the CIA, with surrogates in Third World countries that have imposed harsh and corrupt rule on generations of people across several continents. Critics say this has resulted in shattered dreams, heart-wrenching despair, bone-crushing poverty and untold deaths." "Many Americans got their first glimpse into the government's secret activities from three mid-1970s congressional investigations - commonly referred to as the Church Committee, the Rockefeller Commission and the Pike Committee. They were held shortly after the Watergate scandal and revelations about CIA domestic spying to examine and help rebuild public trust in U.S. intelligence agencies. Among the shadowy methods unearthed: coups d'etat, destabilization of governments and political assassinations. One of the most notorious examples was the 1973 coup in Chile. The date - Sept. 11. The Nixon administration - with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as its point man - first helped shake up the Chilean economy, and then gave backing to the military to topple the democratically elected government of socialist Salvador Allende. Afterward, people were herded into the National Stadium in Santiago to be tortured and killed. An estimated 3,000 people eventually died or "disappeared" following the coup - nearly the same number as the 2,900 killed in the World Trade Center attack. It brought into power for most of the next two decades a military dictatorship headed by Augusto Pinochet, an admirer of Adolf Hitler. "I don't see why we should have to stand by and let a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people," Kissinger said afterward. He is being pursued by prosecutors in four countries to testify about his role in the coup. Michael Mandelbaum, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of "The Ideas That Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy and Free Markets in the 21st Century," calls U.S. interventions like these the "friendly tyrant dilemma." "We supported governments during the Cold War that were anti-communist and anti-Soviet in their foreign policies and undemocratic in their domestic policies," Mandelbaum said. "The list is very long. But this wasn't unique to the Cold War or to the U.S. Part of the logic was, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend.' "" ""There's no doubt that the U.S. government has overthrown governments and instituted reigns of terror," Gitlin said, before rattling off some examples. "The coup in Iran in 1953, in Guatemala in 1954 and in Chile in 1973. Those were just some of the "successful' ventures. There was support for right-wing death squads in El Salvador and the contra terrorists in Nicaragua in the '80s."" ""The South African government called Nelson Mandela a terrorist and created anti-terrorist legislation aimed at people, like him, who simply wanted a democratic society. And the U.S. - including Dick Cheney, when he was in the Congress - supported them. It is for reasons like these that there is so much skepticism about the U.S. around the world." Schechter says there is also a selfish reason why supporting tyrants isn't in the country's best interests: Such actions can eventually come back to haunt us. He points to Iran, where the CIA ousted the Mohammed Mossadegh government in 1953 and installed Reza Pahlavi - the Shah of Iran - who maintained control until 1979. He did so through a secret police force, SAVAK, which Amnesty International named in 1976 as the world's worst human rights abuser. U.S. payback came in the form of radical fundamentalists, who drove the shah from power in 1979, says Schechter. For nearly a quarter century, the U.S. has had to deal with a country that despises it and promotes terrorism." "Salvadoran death squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson attended the School of the Americas. So did Honduran death squad founder Gen. Luis Alonso Discua. Guatemalan Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, who came to power in a coup and razed an estimated 400 Indianvillages, was there. Dozens of Colombian officers cited for war crimes attended. And so did 10 of 12 soldiers named in the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador in 1981. It was there that an estimated 800 unarmed Salvadoran civilians accused of being sympathetic to leftist guerrillas were rounded up and killed." ""If you bring soldiers from El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia - countries with atrocious human rights records - and give them M16s, teach commando operations and psychological warfare and they go back and kill, torture and rape, and it happens year after year, there is an issue of complicity that cannot be washed away," said Bourgeois." ""As much screaming about chemical weapons that has gone on, the Reagan-Bush administration sent that stuff over there in the first place," said Jim Wittebols, professor of communication studies at Niagara University. "It's disingenuous for the administration to go on and on about Iraq "gassing it's own people' when we made that very thing possible."" "In Nicaragua, the contras were organized by the CIA during the Carter administration to destabilize the democratically elected leftist Sandinista government, which had thumbed its nose at the United States. To the American left, the Sandinistas offered hope to a poor country that had been tyrannized by dictator Anastasio Somoza and his elite, U.S.-trained National Guard." ""We've allied ourselves very cynically with repressive, dictatorial regimes to achieve what we believed was a foreign policy goal," Steel said. "In my mind, it was during the Reagan administration when this was most evident." ""We are justifiably hated more and more, and American people are put in mortal danger by the violence and injustice of our government," said DiFranco."
Some of century's worst terrorists trained in Ga. - "From 1976 to 1983, Argentina suffered its "Dirty War," a period of dictatorship, political upheavals, military coups and unprecedented human rights violations. The two most prominent military dictators and human rights violators of the time were, you guessed it, SOA graduates Roberto Viola and Leopoldo Galtieri. Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Esquivel, imprisoned and tortured in Argentina for 14 months, blamed "the world's so-called leader in democracy, the United States" for the bloodshed and abuse. Chile, 1973: Pinochet's bloody political coup. We all remember Pinochet and his terrifying human rights violations. No, he wasn't an SOA graduate, but he was certainly supported by the SOA. The heads of his secret police, his officers who tortured and murdered a U.N. official, and men in charge of operating three of his most heinous concentration camps for political prisoners were all SOA graduates, and many were also instructors at the SOA. In fact, in 1991, visitors to the School of the Americas (remember that's in Georgia and run by the U.S. Department of Defense) could view a letter from Pinochet and a ceremonial saber he donated to the school." "Now, however, SOA graduates are being funded by "Plan Colombia," a .3 billion pledge by the United States in the form of military equipment and chemicals to "protect U.S. interests and investments." Supposedly, it is part of an anti-drug program to dispense chemicals on the coca plant to cripple the drug cartel. The problem is that the indiscriminate use of the herbicide also destroyed food and medicinal crops and contaminated drinking water. Ironically, the coca fields flourished and drastically expanded. Our support of the Colombian military has allowed the United States to maintain control of gold, silver, and oil industries in Colombia." "At the same time, over 300,000 Colombians are being forced to emigrate from their homes. The Colombian military, funded by the U.S. and trained by the School of the Americas, has increased its violence against the poor peasant farmers who make up the majority of the population. Under the auspices of the "drug war," SOA graduates have formed paramilitary death squads and engaged in kidnapping, murdering and torturing human rights workers, union organizers and any one else who questions the authority of the dictatorial Colombian government. We wouldn't want democracy, self-determination or human rights to get in the way of America's "interests and investments," now would we?"
Solid reasons to protest at Fort Benning - 'Maj. Joseph Blair (Ret.), political military officer at the School of the Americas in the late 1980s, tells of serving with a U.S. Army officer "who developed the curriculum to teach torture techniques, physical abuse, false imprisonment, infiltration of unions." "Time to topple the 'School of the Assassins' - "A fraction of each dollar Americans earn is dedicated to training militants to overthrow democracies and silence the opposition. The goal of operations is to protect U.S. invested interests by influencing and dominating political Latin American powers."
Florida jury convicts 2 Salvadoran generals of atrocities; $54.6 million awarded to three torture victims - "Tuesday's ruling was strange justice for Mauricio, because his torturers were supported by the same U.S. government that now has given him redress." "The generals each held top posts, including minister of defense, in the rightist Salvadoran government's brutal war against Marxist guerrillas. Tens of thousands of civilians were killed by army-linked death squads and counterinsurgency sweeps. The Reagan administration saw the war as a crusade against communism and sent more than $1 billion in aid to the Salvadoran government despite loud criticism from many members of Congress. Both generals were trained at the U.S. Army's School of the Americas, and both received U.S. Legion of Merit awards from the State Department." "The jury found that the generals had known their troops were torturing and murdering civilians but failed to try to stop it or punish those responsible." ""I've been getting calls all day from people who are happy about the outcome," said Ramon Cardona, executive director of the Central American Resources Center, a San Francisco social services agency. "There's a sense of relief and justice for people who suffered so much persecution." Among these war-scarred Salvadorans, Cardona said, "there's a lingering effect that has not brought healthy closure to the emotional damage on the Salvadoran psyche. This is a major step." Cardona speaks from personal history. Three of his cousins were captured and killed by marauding Salvadoran troops in the 1980s. He said, "My entire family in El Salvador, right now I know they're celebrating today's decision, and there are so many thousands of others." "El Salvador: The Fight for Justice in 1989 Killings of Priests - "In a decision that human rights groups described as inexplicable, the court that convicted Benavides and Mendoza acquitted the soldiers who had originally confessed to actually pulling the triggers -- members of the Atlacatl infantry battalion, a notorious death squad armed and trained by the U.S." "The vice rector of the UCA, Rodolfo Cardenal, concurred with Carrillo: "There is no political possibility that the amnesty law will be overturned, because those who are in power today are the same ones who backed the atrocities of the past."" "Most Latin American officers accused of rights offenses in the past have been trained at the school." "Roughly 50,000 people -- mainly civilians -- were killed during the 12-year civil war, including archbishop Romero -- an outspoken human rights advocate and archbishop of San Salvador ! as well as military vicar Joaqu n Ramos, 17 priests, five nuns, and thousands of lay church workers." "On Nov. 1, the Roman Catholic Church in El Salvador completed the process for the canonisation of Romero, the victim of a death squad headed by Roberto D'Aubuisson, later founder of the extreme rightist ARENA party and a future president of the national assembly. ARENA politicians continue to rule the country, enjoying strong U.S. support." U.S. should close its 'school for assassins' - "What most Americans don't understand about the training of Latin American soldiers in counterinsurgency warfare is that most Latin American countries have suffered under several authoritarian military dictatorships and remain only one step away from succumbing to military rule. Latin America does not have a history of the subordination of the military to civilian rule. And Latin American militaries don't only fight foreign wars; they often become embroiled in wars against their own citizens."
School of Torture - "Over 600 soldiers who graduated from the school have been linked to severe human rights violations including the massacre of 200,000 civilians in Guatemala." Despite deterrents, a strong North Carolina contingent marches in the nation's largest anti-war gathering Former School of Americas criticized: The Rev. Roy Bourgeois says the Army facility trains terrorists - "Large American-based companies benefit from U.S.-trained dictators and soldiers, who maintain an economic system that exploits Latin American workers and provides huge profits, Bourgeois said."
Death Is Legacy of Much of U.S. Foreign Policy (by Rev. Frederick Trost) - "There are few governments on earth as expert in the use of terror as the United States of America. This is one of the reasons we are so feared ... and so hated. One only has to recall the secret "manual" of terror tactics that shaped the curriculum at the infamous "School of the Americas" at Fort Benning, Ga. The result? The deaths of thousands upon thousands of innocent people. But we got our way." Trial Provides U.S. Chance to Say 'No' to Torture - "Since guerrillas said they were fighting for better conditions for campesinos, the poor themselves came to be viewed as the enemy. So those who fed or clothed the poor, or gave them medical care, as Romagoza did, came to be seen as leftist revolutionaries. That obscene logic, backed with American dollars, created an atmosphere in which torture was seen as just another tool in the arsenal of democracy."
Judge offers penalty options: Protesters may spend six months in Fort Benning school or prison - "Blair testified Thursday during the trial of Peter A. Gelderloos of Harrisonburg, Va., that torture was taught at the School of the Americas when he was an instructor (1986-89), in direct violation of an executive order issued by President Jimmy Carter. Instructors taught interrogation techniques from an outlawed "Project X" manual and from the "Project Phoenix" program used in South Vietnam, he said. "Capt. (Victor) Tice taught it was U.S. military policy that it would be appropriate in a military setting to use physical abuse, false imprisonment, infiltration of unions and infiltrations of organizations in their country," Blair said." U.S. fights terrorists while training its own - "She and others from the Illinois SOAWatch went to Fort Benning with the intention of being arrested so the reason for our protest would be publicized, so American citizens would learn that the U.S. Army trains Latin American military leaders in disappearance, kidnappings, torture and assassinations. In other words, for decades (ever since the end of World War II), the United States has been training terrorists, first in Panama and more recently at Fort Benning. Their tactics have been used against their own people in Central America, Mexico and Colombia."
2 PC(USA) Pastors Indicted - "The name change came after the Pentagon released manuals in 1996 substantiating activists' claims that techniques taught at the school included torture, assassination and extortion." THE CIA AND TORTURE ON THE RECORD, PART 2 - speaks of Project X, the long history of U.S. support of counter-insurgency torture and how the manuals for this torture was used to develop the torture manuals for the SOA. U.S. Anti-Terrorism Tactic of Training Foreign Militaries Is Questioned Pentagon Trained Troops Led by Officer Accused In Colombian Massacre Rogues Gallery: Article on the lives of dictators and SOA Graduates in exile. Locals join a protest against the former School of the Americas (Ithaca Times)
The Risks of U.S. Aid Bishop Oscar Romero Analysis: The Business of Torture Man may pay price for life of activism Some information on the School of Americas Institute: U.S. not involved in Venezuelan crisis	Institute's Board of Visitors a 'smokescreen' Terrorist Training, American Style (10/28/02) A Combustive Mix – Blood, Drugs, Oil, and God Local activists will serve time in prison for SOA protest Bogotá's link to far-right militias (Christian Science Monitor) Over 100 arrested at Ft. Benning, GA as thousands demonstrate

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