cannabisnews.com: Backyard Terrorism 





Backyard Terrorism 
Posted by FoM on October 30, 2001 at 14:15:09 PT
By George Monbiot
Source: Guardian Unlimited
"If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents," George Bush announced on the day he began bombing Afghanistan, "they have become outlaws and murderers themselves. And they will take that lonely path at their own peril." I'm glad he said "any government", as there's one which, though it has yet to be identified as a sponsor of terrorism, requires his urgent attention. For the past 55 years it has been running a terrorist training camp, whose victims massively outnumber the people killed by the attack on New York, the embassy bombings and the other atrocities laid, rightly or wrongly, at al-Qaida's door. 
The camp is called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or Whisc. It is based in Fort Benning, Georgia, and it is funded by Mr Bush's government. Until January this year, Whisc was called the "School of the Americas", or SOA. Since 1946, SOA has trained more than 60,000 Latin American soldiers and policemen. Among its graduates are many of the continent's most notorious torturers, mass murderers, dictators and state terrorists. As hundreds of pages of documentation compiled by the pressure group SOA Watch show, Latin America has been ripped apart by its alumni. In June this year, Colonel Byron Lima Estrada, once a student at the school, was convicted in Guatemala City of murdering Bishop Juan Gerardi in 1998. Gerardi was killed because he had helped to write a report on the atrocities committed by Guatemala's D-2, the military intelligence agency run by Lima Estrada with the help of two other SOA graduates. D-2 coordinated the "anti-insurgency" campaign which obliterated 448 Mayan Indian villages, and murdered tens of thousands of their people. Forty per cent of the cabinet ministers who served the genocidal regimes of Lucas Garcia, Rios Montt and Mejia Victores studied at the School of the Americas. In 1993, the United Nations truth commission on El Salvador named the army officers who had committed the worst atrocities of the civil war. Two-thirds of them had been trained at the School of the Americas. Among them were Roberto D'Aubuisson, the leader of El Salvador's death squads; the men who killed Archbishop Oscar Romero; and 19 of the 26 soldiers who murdered the Jesuit priests in 1989. In Chile, the school's graduates ran both Augusto Pinochet's secret police and his three principal concentration camps. One of them helped to murder Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffit in Washington DC in 1976. Argentina's dictators Roberto Viola and Leopoldo Galtieri, Panama's Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos, Peru's Juan Velasco Alvarado and Ecuador's Guillermo Rodriguez all benefited from the school's instruction. So did the leader of the Grupo Colina death squad in Fujimori's Peru; four of the five officers who ran the infamous Battalion 3-16 in Honduras (which controlled the death squads there in the 1980s) and the commander responsible for the 1994 Ocosingo massacre in Mexico. All this, the school's defenders insist, is ancient history. But SOA graduates are also involved in the dirty war now being waged, with US support, in Colombia. In 1999 the US State Department's report on human rights named two SOA graduates as the murderers of the peace commissioner, Alex Lopera. Last year, 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. The FBI defines terrorism as "violent acts... intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policy of a government, or affect the conduct of a government", which is a precise description of the activities of SOA's graduates. But how can we be sure that their alma mater has had any part in this? Well, 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. Last year, partly as a result of the campaign run by SOA Watch, several US congressmen tried to shut the school down. They were defeated by 10 votes. Instead, the House of Representatives voted to close it and then immediately reopen it under a different name. So, just as Windscale turned into Sellafield in the hope of parrying public memory, the School of the Americas washed its hands of the past by renaming itself Whisc. As the school's Colonel Mark Morgan informed the Department of Defense just before the vote in Congress: "Some of your bosses have told us that they can't support anything with the name 'School of the Americas' on it. Our proposal addresses this concern. It changes the name." Paul Coverdell, the Georgia senator who had fought to save the school, told the papers that the changes were "basically cosmetic". But visit Whisc's website and you'll see that the School of the Americas has been all but excised from the record. Even the page marked "History" fails to mention it. Whisc's courses, it tells us, "cover a broad spectrum of relevant areas, such as operational planning for peace operations; disaster relief; civil-military operations; tactical planning and execution of counter drug operations". Several pages describe its human rights initiatives. But, though they account for almost the entire training programme, combat and commando techniques, counter-insurgency and interrogation aren't mentioned. Nor is the fact that Whisc's "peace" and "human rights" options were also offered by SOA in the hope of appeasing Congress and preserving its budget: but hardly any of the students chose to take them. We can't expect this terrorist training camp to reform itself: after all, it refuses even to acknowledge that it has a past, let alone to learn from it. So, given that the evidence linking the school to continuing atrocities in Latin America is rather stronger than the evidence linking the al-Qaida training camps to the attack on New York, what should we do about the "evil-doers" in Fort Benning, Georgia? Well, we could urge our governments to apply full diplomatic pressure, and to seek the extradition of the school's commanders for trial on charges of complicity in crimes against humanity. Alternatively, we could demand that our governments attack the United States, bombing its military installations, cities and airports in the hope of overthrowing its unelected government and replacing it with a new administration overseen by the UN. In case this proposal proves unpopular with the American people, we could win their hearts and minds by dropping naan bread and dried curry in plastic bags stamped with the Afghan flag. You object that this prescription is ridiculous, and I agree. But try as I might, I cannot see the moral difference between this course of action and the war now being waged in Afghanistan. Note: The US has been training terrorists at a camp in Georgia for years - and it's still at it. Newshawk: RainbowSource: Guardian Unlimited, The (UK)Author: George MonbiotPublished: Tuesday, October 30, 2001Copyright: 2001 Guardian Newspapers LimitedContact: letters guardian.co.ukWebsite: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Related Articles & Web Sites:SOA Watchhttp://www.soaw.org/Monbiothttp://www.monbiot.com School of Americas Reforms Are Ploy, Nun Says http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread5785.shtmlBreaking Rank for Human Rights http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread5770.shtmlColumn: A School That Should Be Closedhttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread3612.shtml 
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Comment #6 posted by xxdr_zombiexx on October 31, 2001 at 04:47:52 PT
State Sponsored Terror
The FBI defines terrorism as "the unlawful use of force or violence committed by a group or individual, who has some connection to a foreign power or whose activities transcend national boundaries, against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a national government, the civilian population or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives"Is this freaky, or whut? leave out "foreign power" and this describes the DEA and FBI, and most of the Fedral Government of the USA. Dr. Zombie defines State-Sponsored Terrorism as the "unconstituional use of force or violence committed by a group or individual in connection to fulfilling his or her Federal Job Description, against persons or property to intimidate or coerce local or state governments, the civilian population, or any segemnt thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives."All the DEA raids this past 2 weeks are specifically intended to terrorize and to "chill" the "liberal" environment of California. They know the shock waves will spread through "underground media" without the need to broadcast over the open air waves. We are definatley the sub-group. Our rights are even more gone than the average american citizen. The DEA fits the definiton of terrorist group.It may well be the time to discuss wide-spread coalition building among the various and seemingly different groups who are going to oppose the idea of Martial Law. The place we are headed is undesireable to many people well-outside of cannabis culture. Many elements of American society are going to be adveresly affected. The following list is the groups I think have goals very similar to ours, and we should focus on developing a dialog with them, especially since we get blacked-out in the media.anti-gun control groups
land-rights groups
pro-choice groups
Death with dignity / Right to Die movementAll these groups focus on personal autonomy and responsibility in life decisions. Siding with the NRA might seem crazy, but the right to keep and bear arms is tecniaclly the same as the right to grow a plant without being arrested, jailed or whacked. Its personal responsibilty and autonomy.I don't own any guns but feel any excessive controls on handguns, let alone an outright , marijuana-style prohibition, would be absolutely disasterous, just as banning drugs has been an unmitigated disaster. Imagine making handguns illegal. Think of the value handguns would aquire overnight. The profits in gun-running would be awesome. what kind of street war would THAT create? Gun dealers battling for turf while battling the ATF/FBI and so forth . Is this desirable?It is the responsible use of handguns that prevents accidents, and most gun owners - most - clearly are responsible. There is no need to criminalize 80 million people, is there? Once you criminalize them and they resist enforcement, are they terrorists? Thus I think some of these groups ought to consider coalition-building with us - imagine the clout we could have !FREEDOM ENDURES
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Comment #5 posted by qqqq on October 31, 2001 at 02:29:47 PT
If you want the best...
..if ya want to get the highest quality terror in the world,,if ya want terror that can be effectivly obscured, and covered up,,if you want it done in the state of the art covert way,,if ya want it to be paid for by the deepest pockets on earth,(funded by the US taxpaying Sheeple),,then you want US terror!....now that's terror done right!.....The US makes most of the best stuff,,weapons,aircraft,propaganda,,,US terror is state of the art.
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Comment #4 posted by mayan on October 31, 2001 at 02:15:39 PT
LOSERS
The fact that they had to rename SOA say's a lot about this camp & our Government also. What a bunch of ignorant losers.
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Comment #3 posted by lookinside on October 30, 2001 at 18:17:52 PT:
hmmm...
this has too much truth in it to EVER see the front page of a major amerikan newspaper...
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Comment #2 posted by Rainbow on October 30, 2001 at 16:47:24 PT
deja vu
Yes 
I think many people feel the same way and this is exactly why we are being targeted - hypocritical, imperialistic, arrogant, and evil.The us is guilty in the us as well as around the world.I have always believed that the old farts in government should do the fighting and not the young. We would have fewer wars I would think.Send asa, asscroft and bush squared to afghan to do their bidding.
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Comment #1 posted by Sudaca on October 30, 2001 at 14:39:55 PT
**chuckle**
**chuckle****chuckle****chuckle**
grin
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