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PAS : KE ARAH PEMERINTAHAN ISLAM YANG ADIL
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Backyard terrorism
The US has been training terrorists at a camp in
Georgia for years - and it's still at it
"If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of
innocents," George Bush
announced on the day he began bombing Afghanistan,
"they have become
outlaws and murderers themselves. And they will take
that lonely path at their
own peril." I'm glad he said "any government", as
there's one which, though it
has 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 massively outnumber the people killed by the
attack on New York, the
embassy bombings and the other atrocities laid,
rightly or wrongly, at al-Qaida's
door. The camp is called the Western Hemisphere
Institute for Security
Cooperation, or Whisc. It is based in Fort Benning,
Georgia, and it is funded by
Mr Bush's government.
Until January this year, Whisc was called the "School
of the Americas", or SOA.
Since 1946, SOA has trained more than 60,000 Latin
American soldiers and
policemen. Among its graduates are many of the
continent's most notorious
torturers, mass murderers, dictators and state
terrorists. As hundreds of pages
of documentation compiled by the pressure group SOA
Watch show, Latin
America has been ripped apart by its alumni.
In June this year, Colonel Byron Lima Estrada, once a
student at 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 military 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 tens of
thousands of their people. Forty per cent of the
cabinet ministers who served the
genocidal regimes of Lucas Garcia, Rios Montt and
Mejia Victores studied at the
School of the Americas.
In 1993, the United Nations 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 the School of the Americas.
Among them were Roberto
D'Aubuisson, the leader of El Salvador's death squads;
the men who killed
Archbishop Oscar Romero; and 19 of the 26 soldiers who
murdered the Jesuit
priests in 1989. In Chile, the school's graduates ran
both Augusto Pinochet's
secret police and his three principal concentration
camps. One of them helped to
murder Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffit in Washington
DC in 1976.
Argentina's dictators Roberto Viola and Leopoldo
Galtieri, Panama's Manuel
Noriega and Omar Torrijos, Peru's Juan Velasco
Alvarado and Ecuador's
Guillermo Rodriguez all benefited from the school's
instruction. So did the leader
of the Grupo Colina death squad in Fujimori's Peru;
four of the five officers who
ran the infamous Battalion 3-16 in Honduras (which
controlled the death squads
there in the 1980s) and the commander responsible for
the 1994 Ocosingo
massacre in Mexico.
All this, the school's defenders insist, is ancient
history. But SOA graduates are
also involved in the dirty war now being waged, with
US support, in Colombia. In
1999 the US State Department's report on human rights
named two SOA
graduates as the murderers of the peace commissioner,
Alex Lopera. Last year,
Human Rights Watch revealed that seven former pupils
are running paramilitary
groups there and have commissioned kidnappings,
disappearances, murders
and massacres. In February this year an SOA graduate
in Colombia was
convicted of complicity in the torture and killing of
30 peasants by paramilitaries.
The school is now drawing more of its students from
Colombia than from any
other country.
The FBI defines terrorism as "violent acts... intended
to intimidate or coerce a
civilian population, influence the policy of a
government, or affect the conduct of a
government", which is a precise description of the
activities of SOA's graduates.
But how can we be sure that their alma mater has had
any part in this? Well, in
1996, the US government was forced to release seven of
the school's training
manuals. Among other top tips for terrorists, they
recommended blackmail,
torture, execution and the arrest of witnesses'
relatives.
Last year, partly as a result of the campaign run by
SOA Watch, several US congressmen tried to shut the
school down. They were defeated by 10 votes. Instead,
the House of Representatives voted to close it and
then immediately reopen it under a different name. So,
just as Windscale turned into Sellafield in the hope
of parrying public memory, the School of the Americas
washed its hands of the past by renaming itself Whisc.
As the school's Colonel Mark Morgan informed the
Department of Defense just before the vote in
Congress: "Some of your bosses have told us that they
can't support anything with the name 'School of the
Americas' on it. Our proposal addresses this concern.
It changes the name." Paul Coverdell, the Georgia
senator who had fought to save the school, told the
papers that the changes were "basically cosmetic".
But visit Whisc's website and you'll see that the
School of the Americas has been all but excised from
the record. Even the page marked "History" fails to
mention it. Whisc's courses, it tells us, "cover a
broad spectrum of relevant areas, such as operational
planning for peace operations; disaster relief;
civil-military operations; tactical planning and
execution of counter drug operations".
Several pages describe its human rights initiatives.
But, though they account for almost the entire
training programme, combat and commando techniques,
counter-insurgency and interrogation aren't mentioned.
Nor is the fact that Whisc's "peace" and "human
rights" options were also offered by SOA in the hope
of appeasing Congress and preserving its budget: but
hardly any of the students chose to take them.
We can't expect this terrorist training camp to reform
itself: after all, it refuses even to acknowledge that
it has a past, let alone to learn from it. So, given
that the evidence linking the school to continuing
atrocities in Latin America is rather stronger than
the evidence linking the al-Qaida training camps to
the attack on
New York, what should we do about the "evil-doers" in
Fort Benning, Georgia?
Well, we could urge our governments to apply full
diplomatic pressure, and to seek the extradition of
the school's commanders for trial on charges of
complicity in crimes against humanity. Alternatively,
we could demand that our governments attack the United
States, bombing its military installations, cities and
airports in the hope of overthrowing its unelected
government and replacing it with a new administration
overseen by the UN. In case this proposal proves
unpopular with the American people, we could win their
hearts and minds by dropping naan bread and dried
curry in plastic bags stamped with the Afghan flag.
You object that this prescription is ridiculous, and I
agree. But try as I might, I cannot see the moral
ifference between this course of action and the war
now being waged in Afghanistan.
Source: The Guardian
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