Промышленный лизинг Промышленный лизинг  Методички 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 [ 21 ] 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

training manuals, the SOA claimed that it had changed. But only one of 42 courses in the 1996 course catalogue- Democratic Sustainment -centers on issues of democracy and human rights. In 1997, only 13 students took this course, compared with 118 who took Military Intelligence . The mandatory human-rights component of other courses comprises only a very small portion of the total course hours. Former SOA human-rights instructor Charles Call has reported that human-rights training is not taken seriously at the school, comprising an insignifi-cant amount of students overall training.7

Access

Why, in the face of decades of terrible publicity, increasingly more militant protests, thousands of arrests, and sharply decreasing Congressional support, has the Pentagon clung to the School of the Americas? What is it thats so vital to the military brass? The answer may lie in this: the school and its students, along with a never-ending supply of US military equipment to countries around the world, are part of a package that serves the US foreign policy agenda in a special way. The package is called access . Along with the equipment come American technicians, instructors, replacement parts and more. Here is the testimony before Congress of General Norman Schwarzkopf, Commander in Chief,

US Central Command (CENTCOM), in 1990.

Security assistance leads directly to access, and without access afforded by our friends we cannot project U.S. military forces into [an] area and stay there for any appreciable length of time...[If] our military assistance programs diminish, our influence will erode and we will come to the point where we will have little or no ability to control the use of the weapons or the escalation of hostilities...The second pillar of our strategy is presence. It is the symbol of Americas continued interest in and commitment to stability in the region...The third pillar of CENTCOMs strategy is combined [military] exercises. They demonstrate our resolve and commitment to the region. They foster increased cooperation, and they enhance our ability to work with our friends in a coalition environment. 8

Thus it is that military aid, military exercises, naval port visits, etc.-like the School of the Americas-means repeated opportunities to foster close ties, even camaraderie, between American officers and foreign military personnel; and, at the same time, the opportunity to build up files of information on many thousands of these foreigners, as well as acquiring language skills, maps and photos of the area. In sum total: personal connections, personal information, country data bases-indispensable assets in time of coup, counter-coup, revolution, counter-revolution or invasion.

US military presence has, in effect, served the purpose of casing the joint ; it also facilitates selecting candidates, not just Latin Americans for SOA, but thousands of military and police personnel from other continents who come to the US for training at scores of other military schools; the process of access replenishes itself. It is not unusual for the military-to-military contacts to thrive even while diplomatic relations between Washington and the students government are rather cool (in recent years, e.g., Algeria, Syria and Lebanon)-another indication of the priority given to the contacts. 9



Historically, as shown in this chapter and others, strong military to-military ties have tended to undermine civilian institutions and fuel human-rights abuses, particularly in Latin America, where fledgling democracies are now trying to keep their militaries in the barracks.

The equipment $ale$ that access leads to aint bad either. The New Improved School of the Americas

When Congress came close to ending funding for the school in fall 1999, the Defense Department finally saw the writing on the wall. It announced in November that it was planning on making major changes by spring 2000-making the focus less strictly military and more academic; admitting civilian students as well as military; teaching democratic principles, etc.; changing the name to the Center for Inter-American Security Cooperation.

The question remains: Why keep the school at all? Are there not enough academic schools here and in Latin America that fill the bill? Americans dont have free university education. Why should we provide it for foreigners?

The answer appears to be the factor that the changes wouldnt affect-access; perhaps new, improved access, inasmuch as in addition to military students, there will be access to present and future political and civilian leaders as students.10

In any event, there will still be the numerous other military training facilities for foreigners in the US, in addition to the extensive training the Pentagon carries out abroad.

Office of Public Safety schools

From the early 1960s until the mid 1970s, the US Office of Public Safety (part of AID), operated The International Police Academy, at first in Panama, then in Washington. It did for foreign police officers what the SOA did for the military. OPS provided training abroad for more than a million policemen in the Third World, ten thousand of whom were selected to come to Washington for advanced training. There may well have been more serious human-rights abusers amongst the OPS police students than amongst the SOA military graduates because of the formers closer and more frequent contact with the populace. Moreover, most of the classes were held abroad, where the instructors could feel less constrained than in Washington or Georgia about lecturing in a very militant manner on the communist menace and the use of any means necessary to combat it. Amongst the means sometimes taught was torture. (See Torture chapter.)

OPS provided the police with weapons, ammunition, radios, patrol cars, tear gas, gas masks, batons and other crowd control devices; a class on Assassination Weapons- A discussion of various weapons which may be used by the assassin is how OPS put it; and instruction on the design, manufacture and employment of bombs and incendiary



devices, taught at the bomb school in Los Fresnos, Texas. The official OPS explanation for the bomb courses was that policemen needed such training in order to deal with bombs placed by terrorists. There was, however, no instruction in destroying bombs, only in making them.11

When Congress abolished the Public Safety Program in 1975 in response to rising criticism of this dark side of American foreign policy, the Drug Enforcement Administration, with help from the FBI and the Defense Department, quietly stepped in and continued the program. 12 In various reincarnations, the program continues, just as the School of the Americas made it to the 21st century. 13

Brazil

The Escola Superior de Guerra (Higher War College), founded in Rio de Janeiro in 1949, allowed the United States to foster relationships with Brazilian officers similar to those with SOA students, while passing on a similar political mentality. Latin America historian Thomas E. Skidmore has observed:

Under the U.S.-Brazilian military agreements of the early 1950s, the U.S. Army received exclusive rights to render assistance in the organization and operation of the college, which had been modeled on the National War College in Washington. In view of the fact that the Brazilian War College became a rallying point for leading military opponents of civilian populist politicians, it would be worth examining the extent to which the strongly anti-Communist ideology-bordering on an anti-political attitude-was reinforced (or moderated?) by their frequent contacts with United States officers. 14

There was, moreover, the ongoing US Military Assistance Program, which US Ambassador Lincoln Gordon described in a March 1964 cable to the State Department as a major vehicle for establishing close relationships with personnel of the armed forces and a highly important factor in influencing [the Brazilian] military to be pro-US. 15

Just weeks after this cable was sent, the Brazilian military overthrew a populist government which was on Washingtons hate/hit list.

CHAPTER 8 : War Criminals: Theirs and Ours

On December 3, 1996, the US Justice Department issued a list of 16 Japanese citizens who would be barred from entering the United States because of war crimes committed during the Second World War. Among those denied entry were some who were alleged to have been members of the infamous Unit 731, which, said the Justice Department, conducted inhumane and frequently lethal pseudo-medical experiments-on thousands of...prisoners and civilians, including mass dissections of living humans.1 Oddly enough, after the war the man in charge of the Unit 731 program-whose test subjects



1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 [ 21 ] 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81