School Of The Americas A Disgrace

Well, I’ll be dipped in snuff, I said. I slapped my forehead in amazement and further opined, Shoot me for a billy goat. Slap me naked, and sell my clothes. I felt like a near-sighted porcupine trying to make time with a cactus.

The cause of my wonder was a Washington Post Sept. 22 report that the U.S. Department of Defense has admitted training Latin American military leaders in the arts of torture, execution, blackmail and other forms of coercion from 1982 to 1991.

Let me be more precise: The source of my amazement was not learning that my government has used my tax money to train Latin American thugs in torture, execution and blackmail. No joke, Sherlock. What astonished me is that it was in the news. In The New York Times. On “Dateline.” The subject of indignant editorials. Congressional representatives demanding that funding for the infamous School of the Americas be deleted. Calls for presidential leadership in the face of these shocking new charges.

Great hickey on a bun, what does it take?! If you want a shining example of what’s wrong with the American media, try this tale on for size. The open sewer called the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Ga., has been known to anyone who cared to find out about it for years. And years and years. Father Roy Bourgeois, a Maryknoll priest of the pacifist persuasion, is doing time a federal pen in Georgia right now for committing trespass at the School of the Americas.

Now, there’s a splendid example of your tax dollars at work: We not only pay to train people in torture, execution and blackmail - in order to further democracy south of our border, of course - but we also pay to lock up a pacifist priest because he’s such a menace to society that he objects to this project. And your news media are then shocked, shocked, to learn of all this. Imagine, courses taught by the U.S. gummint right in the U.S.A., advising students to “arrest and imprison informants’ parents, imprison the informant or give him a beating.” Does this mean there’s not an Easter bunny?

If the Establishment media had wanted to learn about the School of the Americas, they could have tried reading the non-Establishment media. The Progressive, which maintains high standards of journalism, has carried many articles on American-trained Central and Latin American thugs. The Nation has been known to mention the matter from time to time. Peace newsletters, foreign-policy reports, journalists who keep track of the CIA, the religious press, including The Christian Century - the sources are out there. But they’re not “official,” are they? It’s not like having the Department of Defense forced to admit all this baloney that informed people have known for years. If The Washington Post had wanted to amaze itself earlier, it might have tried reading some of its own columnists - Mary McGrory, for example.

Look at the honor roll of graduate students of the School of the Americas:

Roberto D’Aubuisson, leader of El Salvador’s infamous death squads.

Manuel Noriega, Panamanian dictator and drug-dealer.

Nineteen of the Salvadorian soldiers linked with the 1989 assassinations of six Jesuit priests.

Six Peruvian officers tied to the murder of university students and professors.

Officers who oversaw the massacre of 900 peasants at El Mozote, El Salvador.

Three of the five who raped and killed the four U.S. churchwomen in El Salvador in 1980.

Two of the five assassins of Archbishop Romero of El Salvador. Father Bourgeois has now done more time in a Georgia prison than all five of the Archbishop’s assassins together ever served.

Now, aren’t we proud of these graduates, fellow citizens? Aren’t we grateful we paid to educate them to behave in such a beautifully democratic manner? Imagine how grateful our Latin and Central American neighbors are.

At least we heard about the four nuns, the six priests, the archbishop and the 900 peasants: Imagine how many “informants” we never heard about at all - not to mention their parents, wives and children, who were, in turn, tortured to produce “cooperation.”

The School of the Americas recommended “neutralization” (you notice that torture and assassination are taught in Orwellian language) as a regular way of doing business. It means “to kill.” To how many families of how many “neutralized” citizens (to whom we were trying to bring “democracy”) do we owe amends?

Let’s make one small amend. Let’s shut down the School of the Americas. Rep. Joe Kennedy has been trying to get funding for the school yanked for five years without success. It’s time. It’s past time.

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