School of the Americas - Shut It Down (The Nation)

BLOG | Posted 04/25/2007 @ 6:40pm
Shut It Down


This morning hundreds of human rights advocates nationwide began a three day fast to bring attention to the victims of the violence of the School of the Americas and to put pressure on Congress to vote in favor of HR 1707 which would cut funding for the SOA/WHINSEC.

What is the SOA? The School of the Americas in 2001 renamed the "Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation," is a combat training school for Latin American soldiers, located at Fort Benning, Georgia. Since its founding, the SOA has trained more than 60,000 Latin American soldiers in counterinsurgency techniques, sniper training, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence, interrogation tactics, and, yes, torture. These graduates have consistently used their skills against their own people, frequently on behalf of anti-democratic US-supported governments.

Among those targeted by SOA graduates have been educators, union organizers, religious workers, student leaders, and others who oppose the corporate hegemony of the region. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been tortured, raped, assassinated, "disappeared," massacred, and forced into fleeing their countries by soldiers trained by US tax-dollars at the School of the Americas. Initially established in Panama in 1946, the SOA was kicked out of that country in 1984 under the terms of the Panama Canal Treaty. Former Panamanian President Jorge Illueca, called the school the "biggest base for destabilization in Latin America."

So, over the next three days, activists are conducting public fasts and demonstrations in front of Congressional offices, federal buildings and at colleges and universities to inform the public and new members of Congress about the SOA and why there's a popular movement to end its operation.

SOA Watch, an independent organization that seeks to close the school, is asking people to support those fasting by imploring your Congressional reps to support legislation proposed by Rep. Jim McGovern on March 27 (with 72 original co-sponsors!) that would shut down the School of the Americas.

Click here for tips on helping SOA Watch, and check out this YouTube video, narrated by Susan Sarandon, to learn more about the SOA's bloody history.

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/actnow?bid=4&pid=190080

training thugs to take over countries by force. Screw that.

Your taxes can be spent for good abroad too. Imagine the goodwill that it might produce. Particularly as compared to the hatred that things like the School of the Americas has generated for so long.

first" and "take care of your own". Isolationism is beginning sound pretty damned good to me right about now.

We out here keep hoping that you in there will join us in the light some day, for everyone's good, yours as well as ours.

You're welcome anytime.

The idea of countries seems pretty damn stupid- you draw a line on a map. And if something makes that line move, some people become more or less important to you? :eyes:
But seeing as nations don't seem to be going away any time soon, the least we can do is treat each other like human beings who all matter. There isn't a single person on this earth who isn't sacred. (And this is coming from an atheist.)

arrested several times at the School for militarists

Remember how congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle deplored the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib as “un-American”? Last Thursday, however, the House quietly passed a renewed appropriation that keeps open the U.S.’s most infamous torture-teaching institution, known as the School of the Americas (SOA), where the illegal physical and psychological abuse of prisoners of the kind the world condemned at Abu Ghraib and worse has been routinely taught for years.

A relic of the Cold War, the SOA was originally set up to train military, police and intelligence officers of U.S. allies south of the border in the fight against insurgencies Washington labeled “Communist.” In reality, the SOA’s graduates have been the shock troops of political repression, propping up a string of dictatorial and repressive regimes favored by the Pentagon.

The interrogation manuals long used at the SOA were made public in May by the National Security Archive, an independent research group, and posted on its Web site after they were declassified following Freedom of Information Act requests by, among others, the Baltimore Sun. In releasing the manuals, the NSA noted that they “describe ‘coercive techniques’ such as those used to mistreat the detainees at Abu Ghraib.”

The Abu Ghraib torture techniques have been field-tested by SOA graduates — seven of the U.S. Army interrogation manuals that were translated into Spanish, used at the SOA’s trainings and distributed to our allies, offered instruction on torture, beatings and assassination. As Dr. Miles Schuman, a physician with the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture who has documented torture cases and counseled their victims, graphically wrote in the May 14 Toronto Globe and Mail under the headline “Abu Ghraib: The Rule, Not the Exception”:

Much More http://www.laweekly.com/news/news/teaching-torture/1495/

a fair bit over the years. He was never on permanent staff there, but I remember photos he shared of himself when he was there teaching certain courses.

Andy is a decent man (should I say "otherwise"?), a bit of "old school" runs in his veins, and the photo I recall best was of him standing in the midst of a whole bunch of hummingbirds near the feeders in his back yard (at SOA).

At the time when I learned this history of Col. Andy's, I didn't know much about the SOA, though I'd heard of it. Only much later did I learn just what they "specialized in" there, so I never got the chance to ask Andy about it directly.

I hope to hell they close the place down forever. Can't imagine anything "good" it was ever used for, and those spreading/teaching tactics and techniques for torturing human beings have a lot of Ultra Bad Karma in their account.

I don't know if it's gaining any traction yet with the public, but deep down I still feel this torture issue in all its permutations must be bothering a lot of Americans (not to mention the rest of the world!) more than may be apparent just yet.

Bu$hCo and Abu-Gonzo may think they've sold the people on the need for using torture, but I think they've sorely underestimated the tolerance most folks have for something so outright wicked and unjustifiable! Not to mention the fact that it doesn't accomplish its stated goals.

What would a torture advocate say about the fact that employing those monstrous techniques hasn't prevented terror attacks? "We just haven't tortured enough people yet!"?


:mad: :grr: