Grim future for global foreign policies
By Piyush Mathur

The US media are likely to spend the next few weeks analyzing the findings of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States - and projecting them through Richard Clarke's damning criticism of the Bush administration's counter-terrorism priorities. The so-called 9-11 Commission's verdict can be summarized thus: Both the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W Bush relied too heavily on diplomacy instead of military action to curb al-Qaeda before the terror attacks of September 11, 2001.

Non-governmental observers following this new drama would notice that the shortsightedness of the commission's position - its reactionary, retroactive stress on military solution - has allowed the top luminaries of the US administration to look savvy and even painfully dovish in their public depositions. In justifying their supposedly cautionary approach - blamed on inadequate information and a concern for civilian casualties - the administrators have actually let across an understated apology for not being aggressive enough in their "wars on terrorism".

As a shortage of military action against terrorism is made to preoccupy the American mind, there is another development that may just be ignored by the media. The latest findings by SOA Watch - a reform movement launched by Father Roy Bourgeois in 1990 - indicate that, in its new avatar as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC), the US Army School of the Americas (SOA) "continues to spend US tax dollars to train known human-rights abusers".

A synopsis of the findings of SOA Watch was posted on its website last month. The charge-sheet includes the names of Colonel Francisco del Cid Diaz (from El Salvador) and Major Urzagaste Rodriguez (from Bolivia) as those admitted to the WHISC despite the notoriety they had received for serious human-rights abuses in their home countries. Also mentioned are three Colombian police officers who received training at the institute and who have been under investigation for "personal use of counter-narcotics funds".

Included in SOA Watch's update are the findings of a focused piece of empirical research conducted by Katherine E McCoy and titled "Trained to Torture: A Statistical Analysis of Human Rights Violations Committed by Graduates of the US Army School of the Americas, 1960-2000".

Based on a sample of about 12,000 SOA graduates from Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru and Panama, McCoy's research directly refutes the Department of Defense's (DOD's) central claim that professional US military training to Latin Americans has been good for the rule of law and maintenance of human rights in Latin America.

McCoy notes that "soldiers who took two or more courses [at the SOA/WHISC] were almost four times more likely to have committed human-rights violations than soldiers who took one course". Furthermore, "the absence of any indicator that SOA graduates improved over time with respect to human rights raises the possibility that recent reforms have not managed to curb existing patterns of human-rights violations".

McCoy's findings and the work of SOA Watch cast afresh a negative light on the DOD's standing claim that the WHISC's curricula - under scrutiny within the US since the late 1980s - are sensitive to human-rights concerns. The findings also strengthen SOA Watch's long-standing argument to close the WHISC.

SOA Watch now aims to revitalize its lobbying with the US Congress to support the Latin America Military Training Review Act (House Resolution 1258) - which calls for suspending the SOA/WHISC and installing a joint congressional task force to probe the appropriateness and effectiveness of US military training in Latin America. The act is sponsored by Representative James McGovern, D-Massachusetts, and co-sponsored by 111 members of Congress from both main parties. A vote on it is due in Congress this summer.

Wider Implications
The case of the SOA/WHISC, however, has much wider implications for a global future presumably to be dominated by the nation-states' militaristic solutions to terrorism. US foreign policy has already taken a giant leap forward in that respect - even though its failures have been manifest for a long time, particularly in its Latin American policy (in which the SOA/WHISC has played an important role).

The SOA, being primarily a training institute, also invites attention to the sheer US militaristic involvement in the foreign lands. That involvement goes way beyond providing mere military hardware to foreign governments: to exporting targeted expert training, a mentality, status, and economic riches to select (armed) individuals - military, paramilitary, and police forces - in conspicuously poor countries that are also challenged in terms of democracy.

The flash-point cases of post-September 11 US engagement with the foreign forces include Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Yemen and post-Saddam Iraq. Less publicized, however, was the launch of the "Combined Joint Task Force - Horn of Africa" at Camp Lemonier in the Republic of Djibouti. Since last May, about 1,800 marines and special-operations soldiers there have been giving instructions in anti-terrorism to East African forces.

Another is the Pan-Sahel Initiative, a US$7 million State Department program that started last year, under which US soldiers from the 10th Special Forces Group have been training the military forces of Mali, Mauritania, Chad and Niger in counter-terrorism operations and intelligence gathering.

All that, of course, pales in comparison with similar post-September 11 US pursuits in the Middle East (other than Iraq and Yemen) and Eastern Europe.

How did the things get to this point?
US military involvement in Latin America has long been a matter of public controversy and conflict - in Latin America. On US soil, on the other hand, the discourse about that involvement has been generally confined to special-interest politics and kept out of electoral scrutiny and short of genuine democratic mandate. SOA Watch has been trying to change precisely that, even as the DOD has so far managed to exploit the misguided foreign-policy priorities and tactics of the US government as well as the political ignorance and indifference of much of its populace.

The history of the WHISC, based at Fort Benning, in the state of Georgia, dates back to 1946. Because of its notoriety, it is a history that the DOD has been trying hard both to discredit and disown - primarily by pretending that the WHISC is an entirely new entity with no connection to its predecessor, SOA. (This is despite the fact that the WHISC follows about the same curriculum as did SOA, and is located in the exact same building.)

The SOA - which had trained more than 57,000 Latin American soldiers in counter-insurgency techniques, sniper activity, military intelligence, interrogation tactics, commando operations, and psychological warfare - was "officially" closed in 2000 and replaced with the WHISC. Since then, the official history of the SOA has been put on a website by the DOD ostensibly as a favor to the curious public and as a matter of historical record - but also as a public relations exercise aimed at counteracting the real, bloodied history of the SOA and at distancing itself and the school from its subsequent and current form.

The SOA, the official history tells us, was: established by the United States in 1946 at Fort Amador, Panama, as the Latin American Training Center - Ground Division; renamed the US Army Caribbean School and relocated to Fort Gulick in 1950; renamed the US Army School of the Americas in 1963; relocated to Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1984 and designated an official US Army Training and Doctrine Command School. Notably, the DOD accepts all these previous incarnations of the SOA as efforts dedicated to supporting democracy and stability in the Americas and to keeping out socialism - but refuses to accept the WHISC as only the latest in line.

In addition, the official history does not mention how those various incarnations turned into a self-serving, rather groundless US pretext to keep communism out of Latin America. The official history also does not mention how the regional militias were trained and used by the United States to protect the vital interests of its chosen elites and to curb popular, democratic sentiment. There is also no acknowledgement that the "closure" of the SOA and the cosmetic change of its name to WHISC had come in response to a 1999 decision by the US House of Representatives, voted 230-197, to prohibit use of Foreign Operations funding for the institute.

Previous exposes
The 1999 congressional move, eventually lost by a single vote in a House-Senate Conference Committee, followed highly credible allegations of serious human-rights abuses committed by SOA alumni, and high-profile revelations in 1996 of torture manuals used by the SOA in its training.

Those details had surfaced in the wake of Congressman Joseph Moakley's investigation into the November 16,1989, murder by the Atlacatl Battalion of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter at the University of Central America, San Salvador.

The Moakley Commission investigation exposed the involvement of several high-ranking Salvadoran military officials who had received training at the SOA and had strong ties to it.

The Moakley Commission's findings were confirmed and magnified by the United Nations' "Report of the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador" issued on March 15, 1993 (S/25500). It then turned out that 19 of 26 officers cited by the UN in the 1989 murders had been trained at the SOA. (Several other reports, such as the Archdiocese of Guatemala's "Guatemala: Nunca Mas", 1998, and US State Department's "Report on Human Rights in Colombia", 1998, had also by default named several SOA graduates as serious human-rights violators.)

The UN report "From Madness to Hope: The 12-year War in El Salvador" was based upon 22,000 registered cases of "serious acts of violence that occurred in El Salvador between January 1980 and July 1991". The acts included extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearance, and torture - with 85 percent of the victims or complainants blaming these incidents "on agents of the state, paramilitary groups allied to them, and the death squads".

According to the UN report, "this violence originated in a political mindset that viewed political opponents as subversive and enemies". Critics of the SOA/WHISC have since argued and shown that the US military training of Latin American soldiers systematically breeds precisely that sort of mindset and equips its bearers with lethal weaponry, funds and efficient organization - thus allowing and even encouraging them to control their own populations repressively.

The critics have also convincingly illustrated how US corporate and political elites have used that training for the economic and political exploitation of Latin America - and at the expense, especially, of progressive labor unions, democracy and human-rights activists, peasants, liberation theologians, and indigenous peoples.

As an indicator, these critics have pointed to such notorious SOA graduates as death-squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson of El Salvador and military dictators such as Hugo Banzer of Bolivia and General Hector Gramajo of Guatemala. (SOA Watch has posted on its website a detailed list of less-known names of other such SOA graduates from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Paraguay, Guatemala, Panama, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.)

Intervention by Amnesty International
The critics of the SOA/WHISC got a major boost when Amnesty International's US chapter fully endorsed and vastly substantiated SOA Watch's findings in its 2002 report titled "Unmatched Power, Unmet Principles: The Human Rights Dimensions of US Training of Foreign Military and Police Forces". The report used SOA Watch's Latin American research as part of its detailed accounting and indictment of US training of foreign forces and its vetting standards.

In the report, Amnesty pointed out that, apart from the WHISC, the US had "approximately 275 military schools and installations" that trained "tens of thousands of [foreign] students" (p viii). "Far more [students]," it said, "receive some US training in their own nations through a variety of programs, including military exercises" (p viii).

The report also directed attention to the US training of foreign police forces, and to training of both foreign militaries and police forces by US commercial contractors. It provided details related to the above, included a partial list of US institutes that train foreign soldiers, and contained three case studies focusing on the gross human-rights violations committed by US-trained, -armed and/or -funded soldiers in Rwanda, Indonesia and Colombia.

"US forces continued to provide lethal training to Indonesian soldiers after the 1991 killings of unarmed demonstrators in East Timor - and in spite of a ban from the US Congress on military training of Indonesian forces," the report said. "In Colombia, US forces continue to provide military training, despite widespread human rights abuses by both the Colombian military forces and the paramilitary forces linked to them," it added (p x).

Implications for the future
Although Amnesty International said it could not account for the fast military developments that had been taking place after the September 11 attacks, those developments clearly offered a highly compelling context for the production and release of the report. As such, the significance of the agency's intervention lay in its de facto delimiting of the criticism of SOA/WHISC to a full-fledged human-rights-based scrutiny of US training of foreign militaries.

Such scrutiny, while a clear necessity already, has enormous implications for a global future riddled with US militaristic expansion - sometimes in collusion and at others in collision with "old" Europe, but also in the backdrop of the aspirations of such emergent powers as India and China.

For instance, South Asians have yet to learn anything significant in the media about the recent Indo-Bhutanese militaristic solution to the Assamese militants who had been camping inside Bhutanese territory: There is no audit whatsoever of that entire episode in any visible press. Of course Asians at large also need to learn about the human-rights dimensions of India's newly opened military base in Central Asia.

So, as another vote against the SOA/WHISC comes up in the US Congress this summer, the citizens of the world need to be told that Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan of Pakistan was not the only one unscrupulously selling potential death. The unscrupulous export of military training and know-how by the United States through the past century may have caused more deaths and destruction altogether than its atomic bombings of two Japanese cities.

On that count, the global civil society needs to ask itself and the national governments whether following the militaristic ways of the United States or other so-called superpowers has any merit against the common struggle against terror or terrorism.

Piyush Mathur, PhD, an alumnus of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), is an independent observer of world affairs, the environment, science and technology policy, and literature.

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