Democracy Now! ?@democracynow 2 hours ago

El Salvador: 4 Former Soldiers Arrested for 1989 Murders of 6 Jesuit Priests http://owl.li/Y5bD8

The Phoenix program did not end with those wars just as in a sense it did not begin with them. The tactics of Phoenix are common to all counter-insurgency campaigns and One can read accounts of American actions in the Philippines at the beginning of the 20th century that involve many of the exact same tactics. However the connection between the Phoenix program and later events is far more concrete and Doug Valentine ends his book with America’s dirty war in El Salvador. The US sent the exact same people involved in the Phoenix program to advise El Salvador on how to wage war on it’s own peasants. In Nicaragua there was another infamous example Felix Rodriguez was a PRU adviser in the Phoenix program.

He was an infamous figure a Cuban exile he was involved in the bay of pigs, the murder of Che Guevara in Bolivia, then went to Vietnam to serve in the Phoenix Program. After the war He and some of his exile friends did work as hit teams for Miami drug dealers before being sent to advise and train the contras while helping with their drugs and gun smuggling. Drug dealing had been a major element in the Vietnam War as well (a topic I touched on in my March 2015 Article Wars in Korea and Vietnam) It was so prevalent in South Vietnam that the CIA often paid their informants in heroin as well as cash. The highest levels of the vietnamese government were involved in the drug trade.

In Nearby Laos much of the war centered over a battle for the Opium poppy fields in the plain of jars and many of the coups actually centered around how to divide the profits from the drug trade. The CIA ran a front airline CAT later renamed Air America that smuggled in guns and smuggled out drugs to finance their massive “Secret Army.” In Nicaragua personal friend of then Vice President George H.W. Bush Felix Rodriguez was involved in a very similar scheme flying in guns and flying out drugs to fund the contras. The Contras then terrorized the populace in a horrific manner in exactly the same way the original CIA counter terror teams did. Thus in Central America Phoenix was able to live up to it’s name rising from the ashes of Vietnam. In El Salvador and Guatemala they advised the government in a massive program of torture and assassination.

Death Squads made up a major element in these programs. In Nicaragua they trained the contras to engage in terror and assassination that often targeted Nicaraguan health workers and teachers or any government member they could get their hands on doubtless in an attempt to eliminate the Sandinista “Infrastructure” Of course they also terrorized anyone else who fell into their hands men, women and children. The Phoenix program would rise once again after the wars in central America ended this time in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In Iraq they explicitly called it the El Salvador solution and they sent people who had helped El Salvador wage it’s reign of terror to Iraq to train the Shiite Badr brigades. They would use these to wage a massive campaign of kidnapping and torture aimed at destroying the Sunni insurgency. In Syria they would train Wahhabi death squads in an attempt to overthrow the government in a manner similar to the way they used the contras in Nicaragua only even worse. Again Syria’s infrastructure has been targeted quite literally as the CIA backed death squads attempt to destroy food production, Hospitals schools, water, electricity and power, even cultural sites. Of course they also try to kill as many people as possible. Like the death squads of the phoenix program they frequently commit false flag attacks most famously using chemical weapons in attempt to frame the Assad government. Perhaps the latest site for the rebirth of the Phoenix program is Ukraine where Fascist Death Squads have been unleashed to terrorize the populace although after a recent power struggle the government plans to bring them into the regular army. Most ominous for Americans the entire war on terror apparatus mimics the phoenix program and fusion centers have already been set up to share intelligence on the American population itself as Doug Valentine himself explained in a brilliant series of articles. The Phoenix program has spread terror across the planet. It will doubtless continue to be reborn again and again so long as America and it’s allies long war against the planet continues...

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-phoenix-program/5506322

North Carolina/El Salvador – The 1989 massacre of 16-year-old Celina Ramos, her mother Elba Ramos, and six Jesuit priests at the University of Central America (UCA) in El Salvador, that galvanized opposition to the U.S. relationship with Central American death squads and that sparked the movement to close the U.S. Army School of the Americas, is making headlines again.

A United Nations Truth Commission cited 26 Salvadoran officers for the 1989 “execution-style” massacre. Nineteen of those were trained at the School of the Americas, renamed in 2001 the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). After its role in training human rights abusers came to light, Central Americans frequently dubbed the SOA the “School of Assassins.”

The SOA made headlines again in 1996 when the Pentagon released training manuals used at the school that advocated torture, extortion and execution. Despite this shocking admission, and even in the face of hundreds of documented cases of human rights abuses connecting to soldiers trained at the institution, no independent investigation into the training facility has ever taken place.

Protests calling for the closure of the School of the Americas/WHINSEC have taken place around the November 16 anniversary of the San Salvador massacre since 1990. Last year over 2,000 participated in the annual demonstration at the gates of Ft. Benning, Georgia to call for the closure of the military training school, which continues to instruct Latin American soldiers, as well as to demand an end to U.S.-led militarization in the Americas that continues to fuel violence and forced migration. SOA Watch maintains that for justice to prevail, the U.S. officials who are responsible for the training of repressive foreign militaries need to be held accountable as well.

HNN ?@myHNN 55 minutes ago

Inside story from the young #US diplomat who cracked the case of the #murder of 4 nuns in #ElSalvador in 1980 http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/161969

After four American nuns were murdered by Salvadoran security forces, this young U.S. diplomat cracked the case: http://propub.li/1oaoNSF

Firedoglake

BONNER: Reagan said we send a message to Moscow through Central America; fore-front of american FP

WATCH:


Shadowproof’s Kevin Gosztola and journalist Raymond Bonner discuss his book Weakness and Deceit, chronicling the Reagan Administration’s disastrous intervention in El Salvador in the name of fighting communism...

https://t.co/qksEKCrD1S