School of the Americas, Not just for fascists from south of the border anymore

Victim of Latin American torture claims Abu Ghraib abuse was official US policy

By Andrew McLeod

FOR many Latin American victims of torture, the infamous pictures of abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison brought back not only chilling recollections of their own experiences, but also confirmed what they have long maintained: that their torturers were following interrogation guidelines set by the US Army School of the Americas (SOA).

“I had flashbacks when I saw the guy with the hood [at Abu Ghraib],” says Carlos Mauricio, a Salvadorean who was tortured in 1983. Founder of Stop Impunity, a group that seeks to prosecute human rights violators, dismisses as a “whitewash” the Bush administration’s view that Abu Ghraib abuse was the work of a few US army misfits.

“What happened at Abu Ghraib was torture by the book; they were implementing US policy,” Mauricio, 51, told the Sunday Herald.

“The US military deny they teach torture and say it happens in Latin America because soldiers have always been brutal. But what happened at Abu Ghraib belies this.”

Among the SOA’s 60,000 graduates are former dictators Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola of Argentina, Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, Guillermo Rodriguez of Ecuador and Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia. Lower-ranking graduates were involved in the 1980 assassination of Salvadorean Archbishop Oscar Romero and the massacre of 900 civilians at El Mozote, El Salvador, in 1980.

Given the august body of graduates, and their body counts, it should really come as no surprise that the techniques utilized at Abu Ghraib are the same as those taught by the School of the Americas. After all, the faculty of the school wrote the book on 'intelligence gathering' from recalicitrant prisoners, and it seems fairly certain that they were also supervising operations at both Abu Ghraib and Gitmo.

That John Negroponte, who was heavily involved with the Contras and involved in the cover-up of abuses by the US and Argentine-trained Honduran Battalion 316 during his tenure as ambassador to Honduras in the 1980's, is now Iraq's ambassador should give us a good indication of things to come...More cover-ups of human rights abuses of Iraqi prisoners.

It seems to be no coincidence that key figures in the Iran-Contra scandal have made political comebacks that would have left Dick Nixon blushing. Figures such as Elliot Abrams, Otto Reich and others are the intellectual fore-fathers of the neo-con movement. So, with John Negroponte as America's pro-consul...er, ambassador...to Iraq, don't expect any startling new revelations...Just more of the same old, sick shit.