... may have been on a PBS Frontline report, that spoke allot about this one individual who was involved in the torture business over there. I cannot remember what his name was! He was tall (of course), blond or light brown hair and had done this kind of thing in the past, maybe as far back as Vietnam. Does anyone remember the documentary? I will try to find the doc. I hate articles that lead you on with their title and then they don't give you the name of the person.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/torture/

I just found it, haven't watched it.

... Watched it and it's not the one. May have seen it on FreeSpeechTV. Will go over there and review some of those.

He's got a great last name for a killer.

Col James Steele. (And his sidekick, Col James Kaufman.) That's the one!!!! I believe he is the one who is not named in the doc above. Described as "lacks human feeling," and "somehow, their hearts have died." Thanks, Jesus. If there's anyone who hasn't seen this, sit still and watch it.

A long term sadist with friends in VERY high places.

after hearing of some new monstrous actions.

[center][/center]
But he looks like such a nice guy, doesn't he?

oblivious of the blood splashed across the floors and walls of the corridors he passed through during inspections , oblivious of the torture instruments displayed in terrifying arrays by the finest product of the School of the Americas. A "results" man, conscientious to a fault in performing his patriotic duty, say those who promoted him through to the end of his glorious career.

And, of course, this patriot is exonerated by the trauma he experienced after 9/11, says the current President of the USA. So let's move on, let's move forward, it was a one off and will never happen again because, well, just because.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Institute_for_Security_Cooperation

I couldn't remember his name. May he be consigned to the deepest regions of hell for an eternity for each of his victims.

Colonel James Steele is a US veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America, during which he trained counter-insurgency commandos who carried out extreme abuses of human rights.[3] Steele is also a veteran of the Vietnam war. From 1984 to 1986, during the Salvadoran Civil War, Steele operated as a counterinsurgency specialist and was a member of a group of United States special forces advisers to the Salvadoran Army. In 1986 he was implicated in the Iran contra affair. In 2004, early in the Iraq War, Steele was sent by Donald Rumsfeld to serve as a civilian adviser to Iraqi paramilitary Special Police Commandos known as the Wolf Brigade.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Steele_(US_Colonel)

You jogged a memory loose.
Of course it isn't just one guy, one perp. It's an entire military institution with well established infrastructure backed by the most powerful country on the planet. It's been going on for a long time and it isn't even close to being challenged.

Steele -> Rumsfeld -> Bush

That's the documentary that I had in mind when I posted - and got names mixed.

Everyone should watch that documentary.

Thank you.

because that has kept this OP K&R'ed.

Strong stuff. There is no getting around counter insurgency is a messy dirty business.

[center][/center]
Quite the legacy he has built for himself.

Imagine spending your whole career training death squads. You'd have to be one sick mofo.

Sick

I thought about the Chicago Boys and their ilk. We were up to our necks in all of that. Remember W's poppie was the VP. W learned from the master.

relentlessly, some tortured until they were broken, allowed to heal, then re-tortured.

An important bit of information for US Americans who've never heard of the courageous Jennifer Harbury, USA.
I was lucky to learn about her years ago from a great poster at other message boards, as well as D.U.

Jennifer Harbury

Lawyer, Human Rights Activist, Writer : b. 1951

Biography

When Jennifer Harbury entered Harvard Law School she knew that she wanted to study civil rights law. After growing up in Connecticut and graduating from Cornell University, she traveled widely in Asia and Africa witnessing first hand incidents of brutal injustice and repression. After law school, she went to work in a small legal aid bureau on the Texas-Mexico border. In the early 1980s, thousands of Guatemalan Mayans were escaping to Texas from death squads in their home country. US immigration was sending these refugees back. Harbury decided to go to Guatemala to see for herself what was going on. The experience changed her life.

In Guatemala, she met Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, who was known as Commandante Everardo. Comandante Everado was a leader of the Mayan resistance to the Guatemalan oligarchy’s brutal repression of its indigenous people. (Mayan’s make up about 80% of the Guatemalan population.) She and Everardo fell in love and were married. He was subsequently captured, tortured for two-and-a-half years then murdered.

Harbury conducted hunger strikes in Guatemala and in front of the White House in Washington, DC to try to force officials to tell her the truth about what had happened to her husband. The US denied any knowledge of the situation. Finally an official in the US State Department leaked the truth that the US had known all along what had happened to Everardo, and that men on the CIA payroll had participated in his torture and murder. Harbury’s book Searching for Everardo: A Story of Love, War, and the CIA in Guatemala ( 1997), a classic work of courage and truth telling, uncovers the US complicity in right wing torture and violent, anti-democratic suppression of poor people’s rights.

In 2005, Harbury published another book, Truth, Torture, and the American Way, which documents the CIA´s historical use of torture. This book shows that the use of torture by American interrogators at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo was nothing new. In the book, she stresses that torture is counter-productive, and does not elicit accurate information from its victims. By using torture, writes Harbury, “We are reacting out of fear instead of thinking our way through the difficult process of conflict resolution. In the end, our use of violence and repression can only sow seeds of hatred and trauma, which in the end will produce only greater violence against us.” And, she writes, “We must accept the fact that we are indeed our brothers’ and sisters’ collective keepers. If we are indifferent to the basic human needs of others, then peace will always elude us. Suffering, when too long ignored, inevitably leads to conflagration.”
Jennifer Harbury vs. the US government

In 1995, US policy toward Guatemala was driven by the unprecedented public attention to the plight of US citizen Jennifer Harbury, the wife of disappeared guerrilla leader Efrain Bamaca. In 1992, Bamaca was captured and murdered. His wife, American attorney Jennifer Harbury, waged an impassioned campaign to find her husband and bring his killers to justice. Her hunger strikes first in Guatemala City and then in front of the White House, touched a chord among Americans. Representative Robert Toricelli of the House Intelligence Committee revealed that both Michael DeVine and Efrain Bamaca had been executed on the orders of Colonel Julio Roberto Alpirez, who had been on the CIA payroll for years, and had been trained at the School of the Americas.

Harbury's struggle against the lies, intimidation, and cover-up mounted by the Guatemalan authorities brought to US public attention a reality all too familiar to Guatemalans. In addition, her pressure for answers from the US government prompted the unraveling of a series of revelations about the CIA's secret assistance to abusive military institutions and officers in Guatemala. The scandal revealed a secret policy that for many years had made all but irrelevant Washington's public postures on human rights in Guatemala. In the cascade of revelations, it became clear the CIA had secretly provided millions of dollars in assistance to Guatemala's G-2 unit, even after the US government cut-off of overt military aid and sales in 1990.

In March 1995, the Clinton Administration, as a result of Jennifer Harbury's hunger strike in front of the White House, suspended military training for Guatemalan Army officers. Shortly thereafter, Clinton ordered most of the CIA's assistance to the Guatemalan military suspended, except for anti-narcotics funding. The Intelligence Oversight Board (it had never before been convened) was convened at the end of 1995, but its report was a whitewash, concluding that "No evidence has been found that any employee of the CIA in any way directed, participated in or condoned the murder of Michael DeVine." Perhaps, Alpirez was not considered an "employee" even though he was on the CIA payroll. It seems certain that there will be a similar finding in the Bamaca execution as well.

Several millions of dollars in military aid cut off in 1990 by the Bush administration, was channeled by Clinton into a peace fund to support the work of the MINUGUA human rights verification mission.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/US_ThirdWorld/US_Guat.html

[center]





Sister Dianna Ortiz, tortured in Guatemala. Co-author with Jennifer Harbury.

[/center]
Nun links American to attack on her
March 31, 1995|By Richard O'Mara | Richard O'Mara,Sun Staff Writer

Long before the White House ordered an investigation into alleged CIA involvement in violence in Guatemala, Sister Diana Ortiz began an investigation of her own.

Sister Diana, an Ursuline nun from Grants, N.M., says she was kidnapped, tortured and raped in 1989 by three uniformed Guatemalan security men. She says they took orders from an American.

She has filed a civil suit in the U.S. District Court in Boston against Gen. Hector Gramajo, Guatemala's defense minister at the time, under a law that applies to human rights abuses of American citizens abroad.

She has also petitioned the Interamerican Commission of Human Rights, and she has appeared three times before Guatemala's criminal court to testify about the men -- so far unidentified -- who abused her.

(Last week, Rep. Robert G. Torricelli, a New Jersey Democrat, charged that a Guatemalan army colonel on the CIA payroll as an informant had been involved in the 1990 death of an American innkeeper, Michael Devine, and in the torture and death of a guerrilla leader, Efrain Bamaca, two years later. Mr. Bamaca was the husband of American attorney Jennifer Harbury.)

Sister Diana's story is full of drama, if not certainty about who was involved.

She lived in Guatemala from 1987 until 1989. With two other nuns, she taught children to read and write. And she received numerous anonymous threats.

It is not clear why anyone considered her a menace, but there is evidence that she was under surveillance from the beginning of her stay in Guatemala and that authorities mistakenly believed she was not a U.S. citizen.

More:
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1995-03-31/news/1995090016_1_guatemala-jennifer-harbury-diana

[center]~ ~ ~[/center]
Sister Dianna Ortiz Details Her Abduction and Torture by U.S.-Backed Guatemalan Military
Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Video, transcript Sister Diana Ortiz, and Amy Goodman at Democracy Now:

http://www.democracynow.org/2005/10/12/sister_dianna_ortiz_details_her_abduction

[center]~ ~ ~[/center]
The Nun Who Knew Too Much: Dianna Ortiz Links This North American Man to Her Rape and Torture in Guatemala

By Frank Smyth, May 12, 1996, The Washington Post

THEY MET last month on the set of NBC's "Today" show. Jeanne Boylan, the forensic artist who drew the Unabomber suspect, is the expert the FBI most often hires for top-priority crimes. Dianna Ortiz is a Roman Catholic nun who says that in November 1989 in Guatemala she was kidnapped, raped and tortured in a clandestine prison. The two women worked together to compose sketches of four men who were present. But unlike most of those Boylan has drawn, one of these men, according to Ortiz, may have been working for the U.S. government.

Only 5-foot-3 with delicate features making her look much younger than 37, Ortiz, over the past six weeks, has managed to reopen wounds in this country first incurred in the 1980s over Central America. She has gained ground in her search for her assailants, which even White House officials admit may yet implicate the U.S. intelligence community.

"We're going to let the chips fall were they may," says Nancy Soderberg, the Clinton administration's deputy national security advisor. "Our premise is that none of this happened on our watch. We just want to get to the facts."

The Ortiz case once again draws America's attention to Guatemala, where a succession of military governments have compiled the hemisphere's worst record for brutality. Human rights organizations estimate that as many as 100,000 Guatemalans have been killed by their own government over the last four decades; torture, disappearances and massacres have been routine. Whatever one makes of Ortiz's story, her bid for U.S. government documents on her ordeal puts to the test CIA Director John Deutch's assertions that he will clean up the agency and tests the White House's ability to get the answers about the relationship between U.S. intelligence officials and the D-2, Guatemala's military intelligence service.

The Bush administration doubted Ortiz's credibility. Last week the Clinton administration released documents about Ortiz's case from that period. In one cable to Washington, then-ambassador Thomas F. Stroock. a newly arrived political appointee of George Bush, wrote that he did not believe her account He rejected her claim that one of her abusers, "Alejandro," was a North American man who spoke Spanish poorly and cursed in English. Stroock questioned “the motives and timing behind the story," writing that it may have been a “hoax” designed to influence an upcoming vote in Congress on Guatemala over U.S. military aid.

More:
http://www.franksmyth.com/the-washington-post/the-nun-who-knew-too-much/

[center]

[font size=1]Jennifer Harbury and Carol DeVine, the widows of Efrain Velasquez and Michael DeVine
respectively, testify in Congress about the CIA's involvement in the murders of their husbands.[/font]

THE CIA IN GUATEMALA: THE LESSER KNOWN HOLOCAUST

"We have no scorched earth policy. We have a scorched Communist policy."
Guatemalan President RIOS MONTT

"The military guys who do this are like serial killers. If Jeffrey Dahmer
had been in Guatemala, he would be a general by now."
- CLYDE SNOW, forensic anthropologist[/center]
Compared to the struggles against state tyranny in other Central American countries, very little is heard of Guatemala in the Western media. This is because the level of repression is extremely high; Guatemala has suffered the worst record of human rights abuses in Latin America. During three decades, hundreds of thousands of people have been massacred during their struggle against a government that has been armed and trained by the U.S.

~snip~
Anyone attempting to organise a union or simply suspected of being in support of the resistance was a target. Armed men broke into their homes and dragged them away. The abducted were tortured, mutilated or burned; their bodies were found buried in mass graves or floating in plastic bags in lakes or rivers, or lying beside the road. Bodies were dropped into the Pacific from airplanes. In the Gualan area, it was said, no one fished any more because too many corpses were caught in the nets. In Guatemala City, right wing terrorists machine-gunned people and houses in daylight. Journalists, lawyers, students, teachers, trade unionists, members of opposition parties, anyone who helped or expressed sympathy for the rebel cause, anyone with a vaguely leftist political association or a moderate criticism of government policy and relatives of the victims were all targets for attack.

"It is hard to find the words to express the state of putrefaction that exists in
Guatemala, and the permanent terror in which the inhabitants live. Every day
bodies are pulled out of the Motagua River, riddled with bullets and partially
eaten by fish. Every day men are kidnapped right in the street by unidentified
people in cars, armed to the teeth, with no intervention by the police patrols."
- from the notebook of MICHELE KIRK, a young French woman who shot
herself in Guatemala City as the police came to her room to make "inquiries."

The U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) contributed to a programme to greatly expand the size of Guatemala's national police force and to develop it into a professional body skilled at counteracting urban disorder. Additionally, the police force was completely supplied with radio patrol cars and a radio communications network and funds to build a national police academy and pay for salaries, uniforms, weapons and equipment.

More:
http://www.american-buddha.com/cia.guatemala.htm

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 32

Versión en Español

The Guatemalan Military:
What the U.S. Files Reveal
Volume II
Documents



[font size=1]
Photo still from U.S. Army film shot in 1965. U.S. military
advisors confer as Col. Carlos Arana Osorio and an aide
look on.

From left to right: Sgt. Casper González, U.S. infantry
advisor; U.S. Army intelligence advisor Major Vernon Justice;
unidentified Guatemalan soldier; and Col. Carlos Arana Osorio.
[/font]

~snip~
Document 45

November 24, 1994
The Rising Impact of the Bámaca Case on the Guatemalan Military Establishment
Defense Intelligence Agency, secret message

A source within the Guatemalan military describes the army’s response to increasing U.S. pressure to clarify the fate of captured rebel leader Efraín Bámaca Velásquez – husband of U.S. lawyer Jennifer Harbury. The army high command, the source states, has ordered military personnel to destroy any “incriminating evidence . . . which could compromise the security or status of any member of the Guatemalan military.” The destruction of documents, holding pens and interrogation facilities has already been accomplished at the Retalhuleu air base, and the army has designed a strategy to block future “United Nations investigating commissions” from entering bases to examine army files. The author of the cable asserts that, “All written records concerning this case and probably a thousand others like it have, by now, been destroyed.”

More:
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB32/vol2.html

DU must be a learning place for our youngers, i.e. for younger people who are trying to figure out where in the heck they belong on the political spectrum. Knowledge is power!

Most of those killer/torturers in Central America in the 80s under Reagan were trained at the School of the Americas, weren't they?

time after time, and I am so glad if it is useful to a person of conscience.

Just found this by an excellent source:

A Timeline of CIA Atrocities
By Steve Kangas

The following timeline describes just a few of the hundreds of atrocities and crimes committed by the CIA. (1)

CIA operations follow the same recurring script. First, American business interests abroad are threatened by a popular or democratically elected leader. The people support their leader because he intends to conduct land reform, strengthen unions, redistribute wealth, nationalize foreign-owned industry, and regulate business to protect workers, consumers and the environment. So, on behalf of American business, and often with their help, the CIA mobilizes the opposition. First it identifies right-wing groups within the country (usually the military), and offers them a deal: "We'll put you in power if you maintain a favorable business climate for us." The Agency then hires, trains and works with them to overthrow the existing government (usually a democracy). It uses every trick in the book: propaganda, stuffed ballot boxes, purchased elections, extortion, blackmail, sexual intrigue, false stories about opponents in the local media, infiltration and disruption of opposing political parties, kidnapping, beating, torture, intimidation, economic sabotage, death squads and even assassination. These efforts culminate in a military coup, which installs a right-wing dictator. The CIA trains the dictator’s security apparatus to crack down on the traditional enemies of big business, using interrogation, torture and murder. The victims are said to be "communists," but almost always they are just peasants, liberals, moderates, labor union leaders, political opponents and advocates of free speech and democracy. Widespread human rights abuses follow.

This scenario has been repeated so many times that the CIA actually teaches it in a special school, the notorious "School of the Americas." (It opened in Panama but later moved to Fort Benning, Georgia.) Critics have nicknamed it the "School of the Dictators" and "School of the Assassins." Here, the CIA trains Latin American military officers how to conduct coups, including the use of interrogation, torture and murder.

The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that by 1987, 6 million people had died as a result of CIA covert operations. (2) Former State Department official William Blum correctly calls this an "American Holocaust."

The CIA justifies these actions as part of its war against communism. But most coups do not involve a communist threat. Unlucky nations are targeted for a wide variety of reasons: not only threats to American business interests abroad, but also liberal or even moderate social reforms, political instability, the unwillingness of a leader to carry out Washington’s dictates, and declarations of neutrality in the Cold War. Indeed, nothing has infuriated CIA Directors quite like a nation’s desire to stay out of the Cold War.

The ironic thing about all this intervention is that it frequently fails to achieve American objectives. Often the newly installed dictator grows comfortable with the security apparatus the CIA has built for him. He becomes an expert at running a police state. And because the dictator knows he cannot be overthrown, he becomes independent and defiant of Washington's will. The CIA then finds it cannot overthrow him, because the police and military are under the dictator's control, afraid to cooperate with American spies for fear of torture and execution. The only two options for the U.S at this point are impotence or war. Examples of this "boomerang effect" include the Shah of Iran, General Noriega and Saddam Hussein. The boomerang effect also explains why the CIA has proven highly successful at overthrowing democracies, but a wretched failure at overthrowing dictatorships.

The following timeline should confirm that the CIA as we know it should be abolished and replaced by a true information-gathering and analysis organization. The CIA cannot be reformed — it is institutionally and culturally corrupt.

More:
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/CIAtimeline.html

[center]~ ~ ~[/center]
Here's a very worthwhile bit of information regarding Jennifer Harbury, US dissident:

The School of the Americas, the CIA and the US-Condoned Cancer of Torture Continue to Spread in Latin America, Including Mexico
Sunday, 10 June 2012 07:46
By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Report

Jennifer Harbury Married an Armed Populist Leader, Who Was Tortured and Executed in Guatemala With CIA Involvement

By academic pedigree and personal background, Jennifer Harbury should be among the ruling elite in the US. She is a graduate of Cornell and Harvard Law School, in fact receiving her law degree from Harvard just a few years before Barack Obama. Instead of following the path of most of her classmates to money and power, she became a legal aid attorney in Texas.

As part of her interest in human rights, she traveled to Guatemala in the early '90s to write a book, "Bridge to Courage: Life Stories of Guatemalan Compañeros & Compañeras." It was at that time she met, fell in love with and married Everardo (Efraín Bámaca Velásquez), who was a commandante in the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity Front. He was fighting against the US-backed military and government, which was committing genocide against the indigenous population and the poor (ending in more than 200,000 dead - and countless more tortured, but released).

In 1992, Everardo was captured by the Guatemalan military. Harbury demanded to know the whereabouts of her husband and held a hunger strike in front of the Clinton White House, which was covered by the media and made into a national story by "60 Minutes." Harbury's request was simple: she wanted the State Department or CIA to tell her what had happened to her husband. But both agencies didn't acknowledge they knew of his whereabouts.

In an interview with Truthout, Harbury recounted:

After a year of trying to find out what had really happened to him, a young prisoner escaped from the army torture program and reported that Everardo was alive and being severely tortured. After my third hunger strike to save his life, in March 1995, then New Jersey Senator Toricelli disclosed that official US documents indicated that he had been killed by Guatemalan officers on the CIA payroll.

After receiving many files at last through the FOIA [Freedom of Information Act], it became clear that the State Department and the CIA had known where Everardo was and that he was in the hands of our own CIA liaisons or assets, since the week of his capture. They also knew approximately 300 other secret prisoners of war were suffering the same fate. The files show that all these prisoners were tortured to death, thrown down wells, out of helicopters, etc., yet the truth was only revealed to us in 1995. By then all were dead. We could have saved them.

Harbury's Husband Was Kept in a Body Cast to Make His Torture Easier

In fact, Everardo, Harbury discovered, was kept in a body cast to keep him constrained while he was tortured for more than two years before being executed, all the time with the full knowledge and likely operational involvement of the CIA.

And then there is, of course, the legacy of the infamous School of the Americas (now renamed the euphemistic Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation: WHINSEC). It has been accused of teaching torture, which was confirmed in a US government admission during the Clinton administration. Although now, under its new WHINSEC name, it claims to no longer offer such instruction.

More:
http://truth-out.org/news/item/9685-the-school-of-the-americas-the-cia-and-the-us-condoned-cancer-of-torture-continues-to-spread-in-latin-america-including-mexico

[center] ~ ~ ~[/center]
We can keep pushing through the trolls, when we keep the information coming. Anyone who doesn't believe any of these information bits is most clearly welcome to just start researching, as well, and looking for more light to throw on the subject. We need all the help we can get, and if we don't give up, we can outlast the trolls who are obsessed with trying to block the flow of information here.

Thank YOU, ReRe.

... "Diary of a Hit Man"... (can't remember the exact title.) That's a good book to read. I read these books and then pass them on to family and friends. William Blum is another good author to read. (I think you mentioned him in the previous reply to me.) As far as I know, they still have protests down there near the SOA at Fort Benning. Judi Lynn, what if they started disappearing and torturing dissenters here in the US? I think they do it "over there," because they know they couldn't get away with it here. That's wrong thinking though, because We the People don't like it done anywhere.

"An injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere." ~MLK,JR

William Blum is outstanding. John Pilger. Robert Parry. Peter Kornbluh. There are many others who have been putting their own lives in danger researching and writing about the shadow government war against leftists in Latin America.

Yes, there are still people being arrested at Ft. Benning demonstrations every year, many of them very elderly, too, as you probably remember.

As you may recall, Henry Kissinger was advising during the worst Dirty War years in Latin America, while thousands and thousands of people were being tortured in the worst possible ways, far beyond any nightmares, and thrown out of helicopters and airplanes. As AUC death squad members have testified in Colombia, they have also used ovens to help disappear excess bodies of leftists they wanted to disappear from the face of the planet, as well, when the mass graves weren't getting the job done fast enough.

Hasn't been an easy time for leftists, defenders of the desperate, suffering poor at the hands of the fascist right-wingers in the Western Hemisphere.

Thanks for posting the Martin Luther King, Jr. quote.

.... I have no idea why I can't remember his name. Probably because I do this too much:

...was also involved altho he swore to Senator Paul Wellstone he knew nothing about the death squads down there. "Coincidently" those death squads showed up again in Iraq 2 weeks after Negroponte was installed as ambssador there. Bush just rehired the same thugs that caused so much horror during Reagan's time ~and we let them. Biden voted to install this freak in Iraq and with such a long and sordid history, when many of us wrote begging him not to, but he went right along with those pigs anyway (sorry to denigrate pigs). We knew it, the Bush admin knew it, and it is ridiculous to put on a charade the Bush people are innocent!
Cat in Seattle

coming home to roost. Maybe this time the CIA will really be taken down.

I'm sorry for such sarcasm in relation to a grave topic, but to think that these same monsters are now freely walking around in high places, probably safe and secure in their lives, and possibly advising our current leaders...makes my blood boil.

Knowing of the atrocities that occurred in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, those death squads which were trained and given free rein by the U.S.A...are we just to sit back and tsk tsk as these despicable CIA bastards roam from country to country, decade after decade, wreaking havoc across the planet?

I wonder if President Dilma Rousseff could identify who that "unnamed officer" might be. That old KUBARK manual was used down in Brazil, Colombia, Peru, and who knows where all else, too.

All over the world.

Greg Grandin says Central America was a staging ground for not only Iraq, but the whole War on Terror, even down to the accusations of "terrorist journalism"

http://www.amazon.com/Empires-Workshop-America-Imperialism-American/dp/0805083235/

and everyone's certain Negroponte knew an American priest was going to be killed by Honduras's Moonie dictator

[center]

Father James Carney. People need to know. [/center]
So glad to see the material mentioned Argentina, and its part in the Reagan Contra business in Honduras, and the fact Argentina's President Carlos Saúl Menem, close friend of the entire Bush family was involved at the time. We recall learning that in recent years motions were made to try Menem on his illegal arms trading, as well, finally.

Isn't it time U.S. Americans started learning what their government has been doing in their names to the citizens of the Americas? They have no one to blame now for their own ignorance since information is starting to flow, and those of us who care about the truth are going to find it.

Thank you, so much.

Guatemala: Watch List

Guatemala, 1954. Death squads and target lists. Schlesinger, S., & Kinzer, S. (1983). Bitter Fruit 197, pp. 207-8, 221

Guatemala, 1954. Goal of CIA was apprehension of suspected communists and sympathizers. At CIA behest, Castillo Armas created committee and issued decree that established death penalty for crimes including labor union activities. Committee given authority declare anyone communist with no right of defense or appeal. By 11/21/1954 committee had some 72,000 persons on file and aiming to list 200,000. Schlesinger, S., & Kinzer, S. (1983). Bitter Fruit, p. 221

Guatemala, 1954. The U.S. Ambassador, after overthrow of Arbenz government, gave lists of radical opponents to be eliminated to Armas's government. NACLA 2/1983, p 4. The military continued up to at least 1979 to use a list of 72,000 proscribed opponents, drawn up first in 1954. NACLA (magazine re Latin America) 2/1983, p. 13

Guatemala, 1954. After Armas made president, labor code forgotten and worker organizers began disappearing from united fruit plantations. Hersh, B. (1992). The Old Boys, p. 353

Guatemala, 1954. Department of State Secretary Dulles told Ambassador Peurifoy to have the government scour the countryside for communists and to slap them with criminal charges. A few months later the government began to persecute hundreds for vague communist crimes. The Nation, 10/28/1978, p. 444

Guatemala, 1954 U.S. Ambassador Peurifoy, after Arbenz resigned, gave Guatemalan army's chief of staff a list of "communists" to be shot. The chief of staff declined. The Nation 6/5/1995, pp. 792-5

Guatemala, 1981-89. Israeli Knesset member General Peled said in Central America Israel is 'dirty work' contractor for U.S. Helped Guatemala regime when Congress blocked Reagan administration. Israeli firm Tadiran (then partly U.S.-owned) supplied Guatemalan military with computerized intelligence system to track potential subversives. Those on computer list had an excellent chance of being "disappeared." It was "an archive and computer file on journalists, students, leaders, leftists, politicians and so on." Computer system making up death lists. Cockburn, A. & Cockburn, L. (1991). Dangerous Liaison, p. 219

Guatemala, 1985-93. CIA collected intelligence re ties between Guatemalan insurgents and Cuba. CIA passed the information to U.S. military, which was assisting Guatemalan army extinguish opposition. Washington Post, 3/30/1995, A1,10

Guatemala, 1988-91. CIA station chief in Guatemala from 1988 to 1991 was a Cuban American. He had about 20 officers with a budget of about $5 million a year and an equal or greater sum for "liaison" with Guatemalan military. His job included placing and keeping senior Guatemalan officers on his payroll. Among them was Alpirez, who recruited for CIA. Alpirez's intelligence unit spied on Guatemalans and is accused by human rights groups of assassinations. CIA also gave Guatemalan army information on guerrillas. New York Times, 4/2/1995, A11


Guatemala: Death Squads

Guatemala, 1953-84. For 30 years the CIA has been bankrolling a man reported to be behind right-wing terror in Central America. The CIA's protégé, Mario Sandoval Alarcon, former Vice President Of Guatemala, now heads the National Liberation Movement (NLM) founded in 1953 by CIA as a paramilitary force to overthrow Arbenz. By mid-1960s Sandoval emerged as head of the organization. The White Hand or La Mano Blanco with close ties to the NLM was responsible for as many as 8000 deaths in the 1960s plus more in the 1970s. Sandoval a pillar of the World Anti-communist League. The CIA still funds Sandoval. Jack Anderson, Washington Post, 1/30/1984

Guatemala, 1954-76. Effect of CIA coup organized labor all but wiped out. Union membership dropped 100,000 to 27,000 immediately and continued decline thereafter, in part due to death squad activity. Barry, T., and Preusch, D. (1986). AIFLD in Central America, p. 21

Guatemala. Police trained by AID public safety program murdered or disappeared 15,000 people. Lernoux, P. (1982). Cry of the People, p. 186

Guatemala, 1954-84. See Jack Anderson column "Links Reported Among Latin Death Squads." Washington Post, 1/12/1984, N. VA., p. 15

Guatemala, 1970-72. Under Arana presidency, with Mario Sandoval Alarcon and others involved in right-wing terrorism, Arana unleashed one of the most gruesome slaughters in recent Latin American history (only in Chile, following the coup against Allende was the degree of violence greater). The New York Times reported in June 1971 that at least 2000 Guatemalans were assassinated between 11/1970 and 5/1971; most corpses showed signs of torture. Most of killing attributed to the officially supported terrorist organizations Ojo Por Ojo (an eye for an eye) and Mano Blanca. Jones, S., and Tobis, D. (Eds.). (1974). Guatemala, pp. 202-3

Guatemala, 1970-87. Violence by security forces organized by CIA, trained in torture by advisors from Argentina, Chile. Supported by weapon, computer experts from Israel. Marshall, J., Scott P.D., and Hunter, J. (1987). The Iran-Contra Connection, p. 133

Guatemala. 1960-82. Trained military death squads who used "terror tactics" from killing to indiscriminate napalming of villages. Special Forces almost certainly participated in operations despite Congressional prohibition. Marshall, J., Scott P.D., and Hunter, J. (1987). The Iran-Contra Connection, p. 193

Guatemala, 1954. The U.S. ambassador, after overthrow of Arbenz government, gave lists to Armas of radical opponents to be eliminated. NACLA (magazine re Latin America) 2/1983, p. 4

Guatemala, 1985. The World Anti-communist League's point man, Mario Sandoval Alarcon, remains a League member even after exposed as a death squad patriarch who was on the CIA payroll. Jack Anderson, Washington Post, 8/9/1986

Much more:
http://www.serendipity.li/cia/death_squads1.htm#Guatemala

Your such a buzzkill, remember we need to cheer more.

See posts #29 and #19 this thread. Jesus found the guy I was talking about but couldn't remember. Was not Miller.