| When Dan Mitrione came to Uruguay in a police advisory function, the police were torturing with an obsolete electric needle: |
| 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] |
| "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] |
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]
|
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]
[Historian] Jan Black notes that in Brazil "the marked expansion of the training [of police by the US] program also coincided with an increase in documented reports of the systematic torture of political prisoners..." [53] During the Vietnam War the United States supplied funds and technology for Tiger Cages, interrogation centers, and electronic and other equipment used for torture, and at a very minimum the United States gave its moral sanction for the huge expansion of torture as a standard practice. SAVAK, the Iranian secret police noted for its sadism and frequent use of torture, was set up by the CIA in 1957, and the military officers who ran it from its inception "received special training at the Marine base in Quantico, Va., and attended orientation programs at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. More SAVAK agents received U.S. training under police programs financed by the Agency for International Development..." [54] The chief CIA analyst on Iran from 1968-73, Jesse Leaf, stated that the practice of torture by the SAVAK was well-known to the CIA and that "a senior CIA official was involved in instructing officials in the Savak on torture techniques.... The CIA's torture seminars, Mr. Leaf said, 'were based on German torture techniques from World War II'." [55] |
In Indonesia, where half a million or more [56] were butchered in the 60's,
|
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.
Not only did this allow Suharto's generals to co-ordinate the killings, it meant that the highest echelons of the US administration were listening in and that Suharto could seal off large areas of the country. In the US embassy, a senior official drew up assassination lists for Suharto, then ticked off the names when each was murdered. [65] |
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.
| 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:
|
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]
...U.S. military aid is going directly to the terrorist networks throughout Colombia primarily responsible for trafficking cocaine into U.S. markets in order to fund their activities. Moreover, the United States has been instrumental in helping develop what Human Rights Watch termed a "sophisticated mechanism...that allows the Colombian military to fight a dirty war and Colombian officialdom to deny it." [58] |
- Ted Bagg (excerpted from an unpublished polemic written in 2003, revised December 2008)
| 15. |
Backyard Terrorism; George Monbiot; 1 Nov 01; ZNet; http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2001-11/01monbiot.cfm [this is a pay site] "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. The 90-page contra manual also was cobbled together from past Special Forces training booklets. It, too, counseled the contras in a variety of questionable tactics. One passage recommended the 'selective use of violence' to 'neutralize' civilian Nicaraguan officials. Others suggested creating a 'martyr' for the cause by arranging the death of a contra supporter and assigning 'special jobs' to criminals. ... The CIA manual controversy apparently did not prompt a broader investigation of where the abusive language originated. Similar advice remained in the teaching course at School of the Americas for another seven years, according to the 1992 Pentagon study. Those booklets were still recommending the 'neutralizing' of various 'targets' and 'executions' for political purposes." Lost History: "Project X" & School of Assassins; Robert Parry; 14 Oct 96; http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/lost9.html |
| 16. |
World War 3 Report #16; Watching the Shadows; Bill Weinberg; 12 Jan 02; http://www.ww3report.com/16.html [obsolete] |
| 17. |
MI6 and CIA: the new enemy within; Paul Lashkar and Raymond Whitaker; 9 Feb 03; The Independent; http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=376732 [obsolete] |
| 49. |
KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation; CIA; July 1963; Note in particular Chapter IX, "The Coercive Counterintelligence Interrogation of Resistant Sources," Section H: "Pain". ASCII copies are posted at many sites on the Web. One is Temple of the Screaming Electron (TOTSE): http://www.totse.com/en/politics/central_intelligence_agency/161746.html Facsimile of damning 1984 revision list to 1983 KUBARK update http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB27/02-03.htm Facsimiles of some pages of the 1963 manual itself start at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB27/01-01.htm "The two recently declassified CIA manuals make even more chilling reading. The CIA had written KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation in 1963 for us by US agents against perceived Soviet subversion (KUBARK was the CIA's codename for itself.) While it was not intended to train foreign military services, its successor, Human Resources Exploitation Training Manual -- 1983, which drew heavily on material in KUBARK, was used heavily in Latin American countries between 1982 and 1987, according to a June 1988 memo placed inside the manual (the discrepancy between the 1982 use and the 1983 date on the manual is not explained.) This 1983 manual originally surfaced in response to a June 1988 congressional hearing which was prompted by allegations by the New York Times that the US had taught Honduran military officers who used torture. The 1988 hearing was not the first time such manuals had surfaced. In 1984, a CIA manual for training the Nicaraguan Contras in psychological operations created a considerable scandal. (CIA, Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare, available in book form, New York: Vintage, 1985.)" CIA Offers Handy Torture Tips for Tyrants "We wanted to make sure they did it right", says CIA official; Anarchy for Everybody; http://a4a.mahost.org/cia2.html |
| 50. |
Hidden Terrors; A.J. Langguth; 1978; Pantheon; p251,
quoted on p4 of: |
| 51. |
The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism; Noam Chomsky & Edward Herman; 1979; The Political Economy of Human Rights, v1; South End Press. |
| 53. |
Op. Cit.; p49, quoting United States Penetration of Brazil; Jan Black; 1977; U. Penn.; p146. |
| 54. |
Op. Cit.; p49, quoting U.S.-Iran Ties Strong but Controversial; 9 Jul 78; New York Times. |
| 55. |
Op. Cit.; p364, Note 40, quoting Ex-Analyst says C.I.A. Rejected Warning on Shah; Seymour M. Hersh; 7 Jan 79; New York Times. |
| 56. | Op. Cit.; p208. |
| 57. |
US Military Doctrine and Colombia's War of Terror; Doug Stokes; 25 Sep 02; ZNet; http://zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=9&ItemID=2384 "An appalling death toll and a deplorable trade union rights situation: in 2000, more trade unionists were killed in Colombia than in the whole world in 1999." Annual Survey of Trade Union Rights; International Confederation of Free Trade Unions; 2001; p52; http://www.icftu.org/www/pdf/survey2001en.pdf |
| 58. |
The U.S. War of Terror in Colombia; Doug Stokes; 2 Dec 02; Information Network of the Americas; http://www.colombiareport.org/colombia142.htm [obsolete] |
| 59. |
"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.'
According to Ambassador Patterson, sourcing U.S. energy needs from Colombia would allow 'a small margin to work with,' which would mean the United States could 'avoid price speculation.' Such a strategy necessitates the elimination of any regional threat to U.S. oil interests, which is clearly illustrated by the Bush administration's request for $98 million in aid for a specially trained Colombian military counterinsurgency brigade devoted solely to protecting the U.S. multinational Occidental Petroleum's 490-mile-long Cabo Limon oil pipeline in Colombia." Ibid. |
| 65. |
Indonesia: State Terrorism and the Bali Bombings; John Pilger; 27 Nov 02; Green Left Weekly #518; http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2002/518/518p15.htm |
| 66. |
East Timor Revisited Ford, Kissinger and the Indonesian Invasion, 1975-76; William Burr & Michael L. Evans (eds.); 6 Dec 01; National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 62; http://www.nsarchive.org/NSAEBB/NSAEBB62 |
| 68. |
Washington's own love affair with terror; Robin Miller; Sept 01; ZNet; http://www.zmag.org/millerterror.htm [obsolete / page now blank] |
| 69. |
Guatemala / Memory of Silence; Report of the Commission for Historical Clarification Conclusions and Recommendations; Guatemalan Historical Clarification Commission (CEH); 25 Feb 99; http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ceh/report/english/toc.html Conclusions; http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ceh/report/english/conc1.html Chart of Violations, by Group Responsible; http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ceh/report/english/graphics/charts/page86.gif |
| 70. |
Searching for Everardo; Patricia Harbury; 1997; Common Courage Press; http://www.commoncouragepress.com/harbury_everardo.html [obsolete] |
| 72. |
US Sponsored Terror and Genocide in Guatemala / The Glorious Victory; Carlos Fuentes; Tr. by Evan Fowler; 24 Apr 95; El Pais Internacional; http://web.mit.edu/thistle/www/v9/9.06/7genocide.html |
| 73. |
Country Reports on Human Rights Practices / Colombia; U.S. Department of State; 1999; http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/1999/380.htm http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/1999 |
| 92. |
Salvador; Joan Didion; 1994 (1983) Vintage International ISBN 0-679-75183-1 http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0679751831/ref=sib_dp_pop_ex?ie=UTF8&p=S00G#reader-link |
| 94. |
"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."
Psychological Operations, [Field Manual] FM33-5; U.S. Department of the Army; 1962; p115. quoted in Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counterterrorism 1940-1990; Michael McClintock; 2002; Counterterror and Counterorganization / The Terror Option; http://www.statecraft.org/chapter10.html http://www.statecraft.org/index.html |
| 97. |
Pasaporte 11333: Ocho Anos con la CIA; Manuel Hevia Cosculluela; 1978; Havana; p286. |
| 98. |
Uruguay 1964 to 1970 / Torture -- as American as apple pie Excerpted from the book, Killing Hope; William Blum; 1995; http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Uruguay_uned_WBlum.html |
| 100. | The Blindfold's Eyes; Dianna Ortiz w/Patricia Davis; 2002; Orbis Books |
| 101. |
Reviewed by Donna Minkowitz; 9 Nov 02; http://www.salon.com/books/review/2002/11/19/ortiz/ |
