A little history sheds light on our government's indifference to terrorists among us while it claims to be fighting a war against them.
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When Dan Mitrione came to Uruguay in a police advisory function, the police were torturing with an obsolete electric needle: |
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Mitrione arranged for the police to get newer electric needles of varying thickness. Some needles were so thin they could be slipped between the teeth. Benitez [an Uruguayan police official] understood that this equipment came to Montevideo inside the U.S. embassy's diplomatic pouch. [50][51] |
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"The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect." [97] The words of an instructor in the art of torture. The words of Dan Mitrione, the head of the Office of Public Safety (OPS) mission in Montevideo. [98] [102] |
The United States government runs formal schools for terrorists, numbering thousands of methodical murderers and torturers among their graduates who have plagued the "free world" for decades. One such terror academy was called the School of the Americas (SOA) until the mid-90's, when Congress changed its name as an alternative to abolishing it. "...in 1996, the US government was forced to release seven of the school's training manuals. Among other top tips for terrorists, they recommended blackmail, torture, execution and the arrest of witnesses' relatives." [15]
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During the US backed Contra insurgency in Nicaragua
in the 1980s, the CIA distributed an updated version of its 1963
KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual. The manual was
renamed the Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual and
included extensive guidelines on the most effective means of
torture including the use of drugs, sleep deprivation, physical
violence, and solitary confinement. The manual was also used to
train a number of other Latin American militaries. [58][49]
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In Indonesia, where half a million or more [56] were butchered in the 60's,
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Suharto's bloody rise might not have succeeded had
the US not secretly equipped his troops. A state-of-the-art field
communications system, flown in at night by the US Air Force, had
high frequencies that were linked directly to the CIA and the
National Security Agency advising President Lyndon Johnson. |
Immediately before Suharto's army invaded East Timor in 1975, he met with Kissinger and President Ford and obtained their approval, Kissinger indicating that the use of US-supplied weapons for the aggression (prohibited by Congress) must be portrayed as defensive [66]. The Indonesion military tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of East Timorese before departing finally under international pressure in 1999.
Guatemala's US nightmare began when Allen Dulles' CIA overthrew the democratically elected president Arbenz on the false pretext that he was a communist, in order to protect the United Fruit company from taxation and expropriation of its unused landholdings. Arbenz had sought to free the rural population from virtual slavery brought about by an extreme concentration of land ownership [72]. "The Guatemalan Historical Clarification Commission has estimated that 200,000 people were killed in over 30 years of brutal repression, 93 percent of them by government forces." [68][69]
US citizens were caught up in this holocaust. A 23-year-old Ursuline nun from Kentucky, Dianna Ortiz, was kidnapped and brutally tortured by government soldiers in Guatemala. If you want to learn what torture is really like, read her book [100]. Unlike the four American Maryknoll nuns, or the six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter, all murdered in El Salvador by School of the Americas graduates [15], unlike the many thousands, including American hotel owner Michael Devine and guerilla leader Efrain Bamaca-Velasquez [70][72], husband of activist lawyer Jennifer Harbury, who ended up in unmarked graves and "body dumps" [92] throughout Central America, she survived. She lost all memory of her life before the crime and had to be re-introduced to her own parents.
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It turns out that federal investigators and State Department officials made an active effort to cover up her ordeal and to discredit her -- understandably, as the United States is the major source of funding for the Guatemalan military. Her torture stopped when a man with an American accent entered the room and said in English, "Shit." Then he said, in Spanish, to the torturers, "You idiots! Leave her alone. She's a North American, and it's all over the news." To Ortiz he says, "You have to forgive those guys ... they made a mistake." [101] |
In Colombia, "...In 1999 the US State Department's report on human rights [73] named two SOA graduates as the murderers of the peace commissioner, Alex Lopera. Last year [2000], Human Rights Watch revealed that seven former pupils are running paramilitary groups there and have commissioned kidnappings, disappearances, murders and massacres. In February this year an SOA graduate in Colombia was convicted of complicity in the torture and killing of 30 peasants by paramilitaries. The school is now drawing more of its students from Colombia than from any other country." [15]
By remarkable coincidence, more trade unionists are assassinated in Colombia annually than in all the rest of the world:
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In the last fifteen years in Colombia an entire
democratic leftist political party was eliminated by right-wing
paramilitaries; 4000 activists were murdered in the 1980s; 151
journalists have been shot; 300,000 Colombian civilians have been
killed; three out of four trade union activists murdered worldwide
are killed by the Colombian paramilitaries. [57]
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- Ted Bagg (excerpted from an unpublished polemic written in 2003, revised December 2008)
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Backyard Terrorism; George Monbiot; 1 Nov 01;
ZNet; "As an insurgent army, the contras did not
qualify for School of the Americas training. But in summer 1983,
CIA director William Casey proposed giving them their own training
manual. During a trip to Honduras, Casey ordered production of a
'psychological operations' manual for the contras. It would teach
them many of the same intelligence strategies contained in the
seven school manuals. |
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World War 3 Report #16; Watching the Shadows; |
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MI6 and CIA: the new enemy within; |
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KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation; CIA; July
1963; |
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Hidden Terrors; A.J. Langguth; 1978; Pantheon; p251,
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The Washington Connection and Third World
Fascism; |
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Op. Cit.; p49, quoting |
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Op. Cit.; p49, quoting |
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Op. Cit.; p364, Note 40, quoting |
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Op. Cit.; p208. |
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US Military Doctrine and Colombia's War of
Terror; |
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The U.S. War of Terror in Colombia; |
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"Vast oil reserves have been discovered in
Colombia and as a result this South American country has become
the U.S.'s seventh largest oil supplier. In an interview with the
Bogota daily, El Tiempo, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia, Anne
Patterson, explained that the September 11 attacks have made the
'traditional oil sources for the United States' in the Middle East
'less secure.' |
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Indonesia: State Terrorism and the Bali
Bombings; |
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East Timor Revisited |
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Washington's own love affair with terror; |
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Guatemala / Memory of Silence; |
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Searching for Everardo; Patricia Harbury; 1997;
Common Courage
Press; |
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US Sponsored Terror and Genocide in Guatemala / The
Glorious Victory; |
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Country Reports on Human Rights Practices /
Colombia; |
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Salvador; Joan Didion; 1994 (1983) Vintage
International ISBN
0-679-75183-1 |
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"Civilians in the operational area may be
supporting their own government or collaborating with an enemy
occupation force. An isolation program designed to instill doubt
and fear may be carried out, and a positive political action
program designed to elicit active support of the guerrillas also
may be effected. If these programs fail, it may become necessary
to take more aggressive action in the form of harsh treatment or
even abductions. The abduction and harsh treatment of key enemy
civilians can weaken the collaborators' belief in the strength and
power of their military forces." |
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Pasaporte 11333: Ocho Anos con la CIA; |
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Uruguay 1964 to 1970 / Torture -- as American as
apple pie |
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The Blindfold's Eyes; Dianna Ortiz w/Patricia Davis; 2002; Orbis Books |
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Reviewed by Donna Minkowitz; 9 Nov
02; |
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Torture's Teachers |
