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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Four against the war
Wednesday 09 May @ 15:00:51 |
 by ED FELIEN
This issue is dedicated to the memory of two revolutionary women who devoted a large part of their energies to exposing the torture and brutality of the School of the Americas. Mary Swenson was the librarian for the Resource Center of the Americas and she managed to get copies of torture manuals used at the SOA. Sister Rita Steinhagen was arrested a number of times for protesting the institutionalized violence at the SOA. She served six months in prison for her actions.
On April 26 and 27, four of us peace-activist types went down to the School of Americas to learn what the School was like from the inside.
 The trip came about because Don Irish had gone down on the annual pilgrimage in November of last year to participate in the demonstration that attracts thousands from across the country. He wrote a piece for us that repeated the familiar litany of charges against SOA graduates: murder, rape, torture and oppression. Somehow, Lee Rials, the Public Affairs Officer for the SOA (now re-named Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) saw Don’s piece and invited us down to tour the facilities. We decided to take him up on his invitation.
We got up early Thursday morning and, after going to the wrong airport, arrived at Humphrey at 5:30 a.m. It was a three-hour flight to Atlanta. Then we had to rent a car and drive to Columbus, Ga. We arrived bleary-eyed and fatigued at the front of the SOA at about 1:30 p.m. Rials met us at the door and muttered something about expecting us an hour ago. We had driven the car as fast as we could, and we had no control over the speed of the plane, so we were a little unsettled by his comments. Then he took us up to see the Commandant.
Colonel Gilberto Perez was born in Havana, Cuba, and immigrated to the U.S. in 1962. He made a point of telling us that there are democracies in all the countries in Latin America except one. Although we thought he was overstating the case, we didn’t press him.
Rosita Balch passed me a note, “I feel like I’m going to cry.” We were all ragged. No one else seemed like they wanted to talk, so I went into a rant:
“We know that the largest group of SOA students are from Colombia, and we know that they are being trained to cooperate with the U.S. in Plan Colombia. We also know from news reports that the current President of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe, has longstanding connections to the Pablo Escobar Medellin Cocaine Cartel. We know that that much cocaine can’t get into this country without the cooperation of the U.S. government. We know, further, that eight members of Uribe’s political party and his former domestic intelligence chief have recently been jailed for having ties to the right-wing paramilitary death squads. Bush goes down there and says Uribe is his friend. How can the U.S. support death squads bringing cocaine into this country?
“We know the CIA has been involved in the importing of heroin ever since they cooperated with the Mafia in World War II and the invasion of Sicily. We know the CIA took over the French sources for opium and heroin in Southeast Asia in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. We know the reason the U.S. was able to win so quickly in Afghanistan is because the CIA made alliances with the opium warlords. We know that the Taliban almost completely eliminated opium production, and that after the U.S. drove them out, Afghanistan opium warlords produced a record crop. How does that opium find its way to labs to be made into heroin? How does that heroin reach markets in America? Isn’t the CIA and the U.S. government responsible?”
The Commandant looked at me as though I was speaking in tongues. He said, “I don’t know anything about that.”
“What about the Contra War?” I persisted. “We know the Contras were bringing cocaine into the U.S. on CIA planes, getting cash and going over to Iran to buy guns to bring back to the Contras. What role did the SOA have in that?”
The Commandant said he didn’t know anything about that.
I told him, “I’m sure your curriculum is sanitized by now. You wouldn’t have any courses on torture. It would all be pretty standard RA (Regular Army).”
He said, “We are subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice.”
I didn’t want to go into the 120,000 private contractors in Iraq who are definitely not subject to the Uniform Code. But I did tell him that just as the Gestapo destroyed the integrity of the Wehrmacht, so the CIA is going to corrupt and destroy the American Army.
He said someone from the State Department is assigned to the SOA, and any new recruit for training has to be approved by the local ambassador. I reminded him how Negroponte—as Ambassador to Honduras—directed the Contra War for Reagan, Bush and Ollie North.
At this point a secretary came into his office to remind him of another meeting for which he was already late. We were politely ushered out.
We went to a lecture class on tactics that was dealing with how officers get loyalty from subordinates. From the lecture, we learned the most effective strategy is to pretend to be interested in the subordinate’s personal problems.
Finally, classes were over, and we went to check into our Howard Johnson motel. On the drive down we had seen an eagle circling above us. That night, outside our motel, there was a double rainbow that stretched from both ends of the horizon. It was spectacular, and we thought this was a good omen.
The next day we attended a class that dealt with the evacuation of noncombatants. Student reports. Pretty tame stuff.
Then, Rials took us upstairs to a large classroom where students were playing virtual war games. The large map showed the area over which they were fighting was the border region between Turkey, Russia and Iran. (Was this to condition troops to invade Iran?)
This was one of the yearlong classes. The students were from many different Latin American countries, and they were all majors in their respective armies. There was an attack by the Red team on a Blue team position. It was simulated on computers, complete with the sound effects of machine gun fire. An American woman was heading up the Blue team. She was quite friendly and while we were talking with her one of the control agents handed her a note that said 13 of her civilians had been captured. She said, “I’m going to stay focused on my mission. I’ll pick up the civilians after I accomplish my objective.” She seemed to understand quite well the kind of toughness it took to be a member of the warrior cult. She said she would be going to Iraq next month.
We visited the library. Nice facilities. A handsome portrait of two people who helped lobby the U.S. to bring the SOA to Ft. Benning and a photo of them with Senator Strom Thurmond. The book collection was heavy on Tom Clancy, light on Mark Twain.
Rosita, who is from Colombia, tried to talk to Colombian officers. They were cold and hard as steel. Coming face to face with the warrior cult frustrated her to the point of tears on many occasions. “These are the kind of men who raped two of my friends in Colombia,” she said.
We met the Assistant Dean. His father was head of the SOA when it was in Panama.
We were introduced to the chief translator and interpreter for the school. Walter Santamaria had been with SOA for 55 years. He was Panamanian and he joined in Panama. I asked him what he knew about the coup that Allen Dulles staged from Panama in 1955 to overthrow the elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. He said he didn’t know anything about it. I asked him if he knew Colonel Armas, the leader of the coup. He said he’d never heard of him. I told him that coup unleashed 30 years of the most brutal military dictatorship in Latin American history and began a civil war that attempted to wipe out the indigenous people of Guatemala. I asked him if he knew any of the Chilean military around 1975 and whether the Pinochet coup had been planned from SOA headquarters. He didn’t know anything about it.
We next met Major Tony Raimondo, J. A., Chief of the Human Rights and International Law Division. He teaches many of the human rights classes at the SOA. He assured us that all students get a minimum of eight hours of human rights training and more likely 14 hours. He repeated the mantra that everything taught at the school was open and transparent, and if we have a problem with the implementation of government policy, then we should be talking to the policy makers and not to the soldiers that implement it.
There are a couple of things wrong with this argument. First, he can’t just say he’s following orders. That didn’t work for Adolph Eichmann. Collaborators are responsible. He’s responsible to the Uniform Code of Military Justice and as an American citizen he has responsibility for his government’s policy. Second, there is this thing called the military-industrial-complex, which directs the policy of the federal government. He’s part of it. He’s responsible.
Our last stop was a visit with a madman. He was one of a very few Latino teachers, and he taught human rights classes. We asked to see his curriculum. It was all metaphysical gibberish. He told us there was no future for indigenous peoples. He said Subcommandante Marcos wanted to be President of Mexico, and he said Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain sent 40 prostitutes with Columbus in the hope he wouldn’t come back. After so much tragedy, this farce was a welcome relief.
We left the school and on the drive back to Atlanta, at the spot where we’d seen the eagle the day before, we saw turkey buzzards circling in the sky, and then we saw on the highway in front of us—a dead eagle.
The next morning we talked to a small group at the Friends Meeting House about our experiences. Many people we had talked to before the trip expressed reservations. They were afraid we’d get brainwashed. What happened instead was that we had the opportunity to speak truth to power. The soldiers get only the information that the high brass wants them to know. We were able to tell them the news, some of it 20, 30 and even 50 years old. But to them it was something they’d never heard before. I told the group they should go down to the SOA. Take the tour. Talk to the soldiers. Tell them the truth. ||
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