Court Statement by Louis Wolf
Testimony before Judge E. Mallon Faircloth,
Federal Court, Columbus, Georgia, January 26, 2009
by Louis Wolf
Since 1946, the School of Americas (SOA), then based at the American base, Fort Gulick in Panama, trained ten different Latin American military officers who would become the most renowned dictators in the hemisphere, and hundreds of senior and mid-level officers who distinguished themselves as gross human rights abusers, serial torturers, drug traffickers, and associates of organized crime.
Your Honor, I do not stand here today just in moral opposition to curricula that SOA created across the map of torture. It is because torture is a logical and necessary component in the very wide gamut of special operations, commando tactics, sophisticated counterinsurgency techniques, covert procedures, military intelligence, covert intelligence activities, psychological warfare, psychological operations or “PSYOPS”, etc., all honed by the British in Malaya, and by the U.S. in the Philippines, Vietnam and Laos, and more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. Likewise, the 1963 CIA ‘KUBARK’ interrogation and torture documents and the early 1980s torture manuals authored by the U.S. Army both documented what has been central to the SOA/WHINSEC curricula taught to thousands of officers from eighteen Latin American countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. These materials specifically instructed their students on how to motivate civilian targets by fear, by extortions, by kidnappings, by use of truth serum, by beatings, by rapes, by false imprisonments, by torture of children in front of their parents and vice versa, by beheadings, by live burials, by public executions, and by massacres.
At this writing, five countries have decided to completely withdraw their personnel from future training at WHINSEC: Costa Rica, Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Bolivia. They have stated “. . . we have absolutely no need for training at this kind of school.” A former Uruguayan general stated he felt “used” by the Pentagon to protect U.S. interests, to the point of leading many of his fellow officers to repress, torture and kill his own people. Other nations which have for years sent their military officers to SOA/WHINSEC for training are actively considering their immediate options as well. Last year, the vote in Congress to cut off funding lost by just six votes, so we may not need to return to Columbus to protest again next year.
It is instructive to read about the WHINSEC seal on WHINSEC’s web site that it features “the colors blue and white and the Maltese cross, the insignia of Christopher Columbus during his explorations of the Caribbean Sea, which represents the heritage of security cooperation of the Western Hemisphere.” After a slave raid in 1495, Columbus later wrote: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold." Columbus was true to his word affirming it further, saying: "We shall take you and your wives, and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and we shall take away your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, and we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault." Historians estimate that during four years, four million native lives were taken in what is now San Salvador. In their effort to whitewash SOA’s role in facilitating the tortures and massacres in Latin America, did Pentagon policymakers choose Christopher Columbus to be a role model for the WHINSEC seal as a declaration that future training should go down a similar path as Christopher Columbus?
As dawn broke on November 23 last year, thousands of people young and old, black, brown, yellow and white, who had come to Fort Benning from across the United States to protest the continued existence of the institution began to gather for the sixteenth year outside the Fort Benning Drive entrance to the base. Some noticed that the very tall and robust flagpole which rises just outside of the newly enlarged perimeter fence, showed a shiny, slippery surface that glistened in the sun. It was apparent that either the U.S. Army or the Columbus police had greased the surface of the flagpole, ostensibly to discourage protesters from shinnying up its heights to enter Fort Benning and register their protest. What traditionally is the patriotic flagpole was this year covered with ignominious grease, thus dishonoring the flag itself.
A visit to the WHINSEC website
states the following as the seventh of eight objectives of the facility in answer to the question “What is the purpose of WHINSEC?”: “. . . to eradicate extreme poverty, which constitutes an obstacle to the full democratic development of the peoples of the hemisphere.” It certainly is true that grinding poverty is prevalent in many of the 22 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. However, to suggest that WHINSEC and the military training it conducts day in and day out is a new and viable solution to the profound poverty and social inequality that prevails in these nations is nothing less than breathtakingly shallow Pentagon propaganda.
This is also personified by the fact that every occupant of the White House routinely recites the mantra: “The United States is the greatest nation on earth.” This statement is certainly not endearing to the other 192 nations of the world, and is a huge and explicit insult to them and their citizens. This is a new era. The day has finally arrived when America’s arrogant doctrine of exceptionalism, as both preached and practiced by George W. Bush and numerous presidents before him, must cease.
President Obama has stated: “I have said repeatedly that America doesn't torture. And I'm gonna make sure that we don't torture. Those are part and parcel of an effort to regain America's moral stature in the world.” Obama also said: “e’ll reject torture - without exception or equivocation.” In the context of SOA/WHINSEC, even if we accept the new President’s premise that American military and intelligence operators will actually stop the practice of torture, will this also mean that we will no longer “outsource” it - or encourage others to torture their citizens for us? If so, then it must start right here at this very United States military school.
In its 50 years, the SOA (and the WHINSEC in its nine years) has trained more than 64,000 Latin American (and more recently, Caribbean) soldiers in combat skills, sniper training, counter-insurgency techniques, use of advanced combat arms systems, commando tactics, and psychological operations. SOA graduates include some of the region's most despicable military strongmen and human rights abusers. Roberto D'Aubuisson, head of the ARENA death squad in El Salvador, attended the SOA. Guatemalan Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, a CIA operative, trained at the SOA most recently in 1990. Shortly after he returned to Guatemala, Alpirez ordered the murder of U.S. citizen Michael DeVine, an American innkeeper who was living in Guatemala, and the 1992 torture of Efrain Bamaca, Guatemalan husband of U.S. lawyer Jennifer Harbury. The DeVine and Bamaca murders and the abduction, rape, and underground torture of U.S. nun Sr. Dianna Ortiz, helped prompt an Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB) investigation.
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http://www.SOAW.org/article.php?id=1718
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