We socialize with them. They are our friends. They have often betrayed their own country for us.

The money paid to unsavories is of course available to them to finance their vile purposes. When someone like Qaddafi of Libya does this, its called supporting terrorism .

CIA payments and other support to these unsavories necessarily bring more than information-they bring influence and control. When one looks at the anti-democratic and cruelty levels of the recipients, one has to wonder what the CIAs influence was. And at the same time one has to ask the following question: If the United States must take sides in a foreign civil war, why must it repeatedly be on the same side as the unsavories?

Other unsavory skeletons in Washingtons closet

In the post-World War II period, US foreign policy embraced many other unsavories- former Nazis (including war criminals like Klaus Barbie), Italian fascists, Japanese enemy armed forces, Japanese scientists who had carried out terrible experiments on prisoners, including Americans, and many thousands of others who had collaborated with these individuals during the war. In many parts of Europe and Asia, collaborators with the enemy were publicly disgraced, imprisoned, and/or executed by the post-war governments or citizens groups. But in China, Italy, Greece, the Philippines, Korea, Albania, West Germany, Iran, the Soviet Union, Vietnam and elsewhere, many of the fascists and collaborators who eluded punishment became American allies in setting up new governments, trying to overthrow governments, fighting civil wars, suppressing the left, gathering intelligence and manipulating electoral politics; indeed, many of them eluded punishment because they became American allies.1

As late as 1988, there were a number of genuine pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic types from Eastern and Central Europe in the Republican Partys National Republican Heritage Groups Council. Several of these worthies were leaders of the George Bush presidential cam-paigns ethnic outreach arm, the Coalition of American Nationalities, despite the fact that their checkered past was not a big secret. One of them, Laszlo Pasztor (or Pastor) had served in the pro-Nazi Hungarian governments embassy in Berlin during the war. This had been revealed in a 1971 page-one story in the Washington Post. 2 When this past was again brought up in September 1988, the Republicans were obliged to dump Pasztor and four others of his ilk from Bushs campaign.3

When lying down with unsavories has such a long heritage, for Washington to pretend that its no more than a temporary marriage of convenience to an (unfortunately) unattractive bride, is an exercise that fails to rise above simplistic propaganda. What has attracted the two sides to each other over the years has been a shared class consciousness, manifesting itself in an abhorrence of progressive movements, or something called communism or most anything or anyone seen as a threat to a mutually-desired status quo. The lowly, crude Guatemalan lieutenant relishes hanging around the American stage

door more than gazing upon his countrys Indian peasants. His Yankee drinking buddy is convinced its an act of duty to help him kill them.

CHAPTER 7 : Training New Unsavories

I have seen no evidence in my 24 years in Congress of one instance where because of American military involvement with another military that the Americans have stopped that foreign army from carrying out atrocities against their own people. No evidence, none.

-Senator Tom Harkin (D.-Iowa), 1999 1

School of the Americas

The School of the Americas (SOA), an Army school at Fort Benning, Georgia, has been beleaguered for years by protestors because so many of its graduates have been involved in very serious human-rights abuses in Latin America, often involving torture and murder. SOA insists that it teaches its students to respect human rights and democracy. To examine this claim we must note that wars between nations in Latin America are extremely rare. The question which thus arises is: Who are these military men being trained to fight if not the army of another country? Who but their own citizens?

Over the years, SOA has trained tens of thousands of Latin American military and police in subjects like counter-insurgency, infantry tactics, military intelligence, anti-narcotics operations and commando operations. The students have also been taught to hate and fear something called communism , later something called terrorism , with little, if any, distinction made between the two, thus establishing the ideological justification to suppress their own people, to stifle dissent, to cut off at the knees anything bearing a likeness to a movement for social change which-although the military men might not think in such terms-might interfere with Washingtons global agenda.

Those on the receiving end of anti-communist punishment would have a difficult time recognizing themselves from this piece of philosophy from an SOA class: Democracy and communism clash with the firm determination of the Western countries to conserve their own traditional way of life. 2 This reads as if dissidents came from some faraway land, with alien values and no grievances that could be comprehended as legitimate by the Western mind.

On New Years Day 1994, peasants in Mexicos state of Chiapas staged a bloodless takeover of nearby communities under the banner of the Zapatista National Liberation Army. It was the same day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect, as the Zapatistas were careful to point out. The Mexican military responded

brutally. As the conflict dragged on, to the NAFTA-powers-that-be in Washington the situation threatened to be an embarrassing impediment to the peaceful implementation of the trade agreement.

Whether by coincidence or not, as the Zapatista rebellion has continued to the present day, the Mexican enrollment at SOA has proceeded accordingly. Here are the figures for number of students: 1994 - 15; 1995 - 24; 1996 - 148; 1997 - 333; 1998 - 219. Presumably, by 1998, Mexico had sufficient trained officers to be able to cut back, although their enrollment number was still the highest of any country for that year. These newly-honed SOA professionals have formed an army of occupation , which has militarized Chiapas, setting up camps from which they beat, terrorize, often murder, and dislocate the indigenous population and inhibit free movement with roadblocks.

In September 1996, under continual insistence from religious and grassroots groups, the Pentagon released seven Spanish-language training manuals used at the SOA until 1991. A New York Times editorial declared:

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 1980s. A training manual recently released by the Pentagon recom-mended interrogation techniques like torture, execution, blackmail and arresting the relatives of those being questioned.3

SOA graduates have led a number of military coups-so many that the Washington Post reported in 1968 that the school was known throughout Latin America as the escuela de golpes or coup school 4-and are responsible for the murders of thousands of people, particularly in the 1980s, such as the Uraba massacre in Colombia; the El Mozote massacre, the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the rape and murder of four US churchwomen and the Jesuit massacre in El Salvador; the La Cantuta massacre in Peru; the torture and murder of a UN worker in Chile; and hundreds of other human-rights abuses.

In the village of El Mozote, El Salvador, in December 1981, from 700 to 1,000 persons were reported killed, mostly the elderly, women and children, in extremely cruel and gruesome ways.5 Ten of the twelve soldiers cited for the massacre were SOA graduates. In the slaying of six Jesuit priests and two others in November 1989, the UN Truth Commission revealed that 19 of the 26 Salvadoran officers involved had been trained at

the SOA. 6

The full scope of atrocities committed by SOA graduates will likely never be known because members of Latin American militaries are generally above the law. It has been rare that crimes by members of these militaries have been investigated, and rarer still that the names of those suspected have been released.

The SOA has always claimed that it doesnt teach its students how to torture or how to commit other human-rights abuses. When the truth was revealed by the release of the