CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: School of the Dictators  Tue Dec 10, 2019 7:45 pm | |
| See the article in its original context from September 28, 1996, Section 1, Page 22
About the Archive
This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems.
Americans can now read for themselves some of the noxious lessons the United States Army taught to thousands of Latin American military and police officers at the School of the Americas during the 1980's. A training manual recently released by the Pentagon recommended interrogation techniques like torture, execution, blackmail and arresting the relatives of those being questioned.
Such practices, which some of the school's graduates enthusiastically applied once they returned home, violate basic human rights and the Army's own rules of procedure. They also defy the professed goals of American foreign policy and foreign military training programs.
Though the manual was taken out of use in 1991 and the school's curriculum modified to include some instruction in human rights standards, the school does little to advance American interests and should be closed down.
The School of the Americas was established in 1946 with the ostensible aim of improving ties with Latin American militaries and educating them in the virtues of democratic civilian control over the armed forces. If those lessons in democracy were ever actually offered, they could not have made the same impression as the repressive practices fancied by the school and eventually outlined in the manual. A long roster of graduates returned home to become military dictators or armed silencers of democratic debate. Among its roughly 60,000 graduates, the school produced several of Latin America's most notorious strongmen of the 1970's and 1980's, including Panama's drug-dealing dictator, Manuel Noriega, and Roberto D'Aubuisson, who organized many of El Salvador's death squads.
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With the cold war, the school's emphasis shifted to counter-insurgency against leftist guerrillas. By the 1960's, instruction in interrogation techniques and psychological warfare became regular fare. The explicit recommendations of torture and other abusive interrogation methods worked their way into standard lesson plans before being codified in the training manual in 1987.
Graduates of the school while these lessons were taught included 19 Salvadorans linked to the murders of six Jesuit priests, six Peruvian officers involved in the killings of nine students and a college professor in 1992, and Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez of Guatemala, who covered up the murder of an American innkeeper and condoned the killing of a captive guerrilla married to an American lawyer.
The newly released manual recalls a training manual that the Central Intelligence Agency distributed to the Nicaraguan contras in the early 1980's that recommended kidnappings, assassinations, blackmail and the hiring of professional criminals. The Reagan Administration quickly disowned that booklet when its contents were disclosed. Yet the School of the Americas continued to advocate similar methods for another decade. An institution so clearly out of tune with American values and so stubbornly immune to reform should be shut down without further delay.
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/28/opinion/school-of-the-dictators.html
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