Reply #4: SOA name change "Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation "

[ElsewheresDaughter]

same evil different name


http://www.ciponline.org/facts/soa.htm
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Program description Law
The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), located at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, is the U.S. Army’s principal Spanish-language training facility for Latin American military personnel. It is the successor to the School of the Americas (SOA), a facility established in 1946 and legally closed in 2001. The WHINSEC is located in the same building, and offers many of the same courses, as the school it replaces. Along with the U.S. Air Force's Inter-American Air Forces Academy (IAAFA), WHINSEC attracts the largest number of Latin American military students.

The Army’s operations and maintenance account pays the institute’s fixed costs. Student tuition costs are covered mainly by grants through the International Military Education and Training (IMET) and International Narcotics Control (INC) programs, or purchases of training through the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program.

The School of the Americas had been questioned for years, as it trained many military personnel before and during the years of the "national security doctrine" -- the dirty war years in the Southern Cone and the civil war years in Central America -- in which Latin American militaries ruled or had disproportionate government influence and committed serious human rights violations. Training manuals used at the SOA and elsewhere from the early 1980s through 1991 promoted techniques that violated human rights and democratic standards. SOA graduates continue to surface in news reports regarding both current human rights cases and new reports on past cases.

The "Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation" is authorized by section 2166 of Title 10, U.S. Code.
Section 4415 of Title 10, which formerly authorized the School of the Americas, was repealed by section 911 of the 2001 National Defense Authorization Act (H.R. 5408).

The changes the new law makes to the school are enumerated in the bulleted list to the left.

H.R. 5408, http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c106:H.R.5408: the 2001 National Defense Authorization Act (link to the "Thomas" website of the Library of Congress). The changes to the School of the Americas can be found in section 911.