The Guardian o USA i terroryzmie...

IP: *.CUSTOMER.DSL.ALTER.NET 30.10.01, 17:19
Backyard terrorism

The US has been training terrorists at a camp in Georgia for years - and it's
still at it

George Monbiot
Tuesday October 30, 2001
The Guardian

"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.

    • Gość: toler Re: The Guardian o USA i terroryzmie... IP: *.CUSTOMER.DSL.ALTER.NET 30.10.01, 17:26
      Oczywiscie artykul ten dedykuje wszystkim tym "forumowiczom" ktorzy zaslepieni
      tragedia 11 wrzesnia nie potrafia zdobyc sie na obiektywna ocene polityki
      Stanow Zjednoczonych.

      pozdr.
      • Gość: toler Re: The Guardian o USA i terroryzmie... IP: *.CUSTOMER.DSL.ALTER.NET 30.10.01, 18:09


        America's Pipe Dream

        The war against terrorism is also a struggle for oil and regional control
        By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 23rd October 2001

        "Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here", Woodrow
        Wilson asked a year after the First World War ended, "that does not know that
        the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?". In
        1919, as US citizens watched a shredded Europe scraping up its own remains, the
        answer may well have been no. But the lessons of war never last for long.

        The invasion of Afghanistan is certainly a campaign against terrorism, but it
        may also be a late colonial adventure. British ministers have warned MPs that
        opposing the war is the moral equivalent of appeasing Hitler, but in some
        respects our moral choices are closer to those of 1956 than those of 1938.
        Afghanistan is as indispensable to regional control and the transport of oil in
        central Asia as Egypt was in the Middle East.

        Afghanistan has some oil and gas of its own, but not enough to qualify as a
        major strategic concern. Its northern neighbours, by contrast, contain reserves
        which could be critical to future global supply. In 1998, Dick Cheney, now US
        vice-president but then chief executive of a major oil services company,
        remarked, "I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as
        suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian." But the oil
        and gas there is worthless until it is moved. The only route which makes both
        political and economic sense is through Afghanistan.

        Transporting all the Caspian basin's fossil fuel through Russia or Azerbaijan
        would greatly enhance Russia's political and economic control over the Central
        Asian Republics, which is precisely what the West has spent ten years trying to
        prevent. Piping it through Iran would enrich a regime which the US has been
        seeking to isolate. Sending it the long way round through China, quite aside
        from the strategic considerations, would be prohibitively expensive. But
        pipelines through Afghanistan would allow the US both to pursue its aim
        of "diversifying energy supply" and to penetrate the world's most lucrative
        markets. Growth in European oil consumption is slow and competition is intense.
        In South Asia, by contrast, demand is booming and competitors are scarce.
        Pumping oil south and selling it in Pakistan and India, in other words, is far
        more profitable than pumping it west and selling it in Europe.

        As the author Ahmed Rashid has documented, the US oil company Unocal has been
        seeking since 1995 to build oil and gas pipelines from Turkmenistan, through
        Afghanistan and into Pakistani ports on the Arabian Sea. The company's scheme
        required a single administration in Afghanistan, which would guarantee safe
        passage for its goods. Soon after the Taliban took Kabul in September 1996, the
        Telegraph reported that "oil industry insiders say the dream of securing a
        pipeline across Afghanistan is the main reason why Pakistan, a close political
        ally of America's, has been so supportive of the Taliban, and why America has
        quietly acquiesced in its conquest of Afghanistan." Unocal invited some of the
        leaders of the Taliban to Houston, where they were royally entertained. The
        company suggested paying these barbarians 15 cents for every thousand cubic
        feet of gas it pumped through the land they had conquered.

        For the first year of Taliban rule, US policy towards the regime appears to
        have been determined principally by Unocal's interests. In 1997 a US diplomat
        told Rashid "the Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will
        be Aramco [a US oil consortium which worked in Saudi Arabia], pipelines, an
        emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that." US policy
        began to change only when feminists and greens started campaigning against both
        Unocal's plans and the government's covert backing for Kabul.

        Even so, as a transcript of a congress hearing now circulating among war
        resisters shows, Unocal failed to get the message. In February 1998, John
        Maresca, its head of international relations, told representatives that the
        growth in demand for energy in Asia and sanctions against Iran determined that
        Afghanistan remained "the only other possible route" for Caspian oil. The
        company, once the Afghan government was recognised by foreign diplomats and
        banks, still hoped to build a 1000-mile pipeline, which would carry a million
        barrels a day. Only in December 1998, four months after the embassy bombings in
        East Africa, did Unocal drop its plans.

        But Afghanistan's strategic importance has not changed. In September, a few
        days before the attack on New York, the US Energy Information Administration
        reported that "Afghanistan's significance from an energy standpoint stems from
        its geographical position as a potential transit route for oil and natural gas
        exports from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea. This potential includes the
        possible construction of oil and natural gas export pipelines through
        Afghanistan." Given that the US government is dominated by former oil industry
        executives, we would be foolish to suppose that a reinvigoration of these plans
        no longer figures in its strategic thinking. As the researcher Keith Fisher has
        pointed out, the possible economic outcomes of the war in Afghanistan mirror
        the possible economic outcomes of the war in the Balkans, where the development
        of "Corridor 8", an economic zone built around a pipeline carrying oil and gas
        from the Caspian to Europe, is a critical allied concern.

        This is not the only long-term US interest in Afghanistan. American foreign
        policy is governed by the doctrine of "full-spectrum dominance", which means
        that the United States should control military, economic and political
        development all over the world. China has responded by seeking to expand its
        interests in central Asia. The defence white paper Beijing published last year
        argued that "China's fundamental interests lie in ... the establishment and
        maintenance of a new regional security order". In June, China and Russia pulled
        four Central Asian Republics into a "Shanghai Co-operation Organisation". Its
        purpose, according to Jiang Zemin, is to "foster world multi-polarisation", by
        which he means contesting US full-spectrum dominance.

        If the United States succeeds in overthrowing the Taliban and replacing it with
        a stable and grateful pro-western government and if it then binds the economies
        of central Asia to that of its ally Pakistan, it will have crushed not only
        terrorism, but also the growing ambitions of both Russia and China.
        Afghanistan, as ever, is the key to the western domination of Asia.

        We have argued on these pages about whether terrorism is likely to be deterred
        or encouraged by the invasion of Afghanistan, or whether the plight of the
        starving there will be relieved or exacerbated by attempts to destroy the
        Taliban. But neither of these considerations describes the full scope and
        purpose of this war. As John Flynn wrote in 1944, "The enemy aggressor is
        always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are
        always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to
        regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilize
        savage and senile and paranoidal peoples while blundering accidentally into
        their oil wells." I believe that the United States government is genuine in its
        attempt to stamp out terrorism by military force in Afghanistan, however
        misguided that may be. But we would be naïve to believe that this is all it is
        doing.






        23rd October 2001



      • Gość: krecha Re: The Guardian o USA i terroryzmie... IP: *.hwr.Arizona.EDU 31.10.01, 08:04
        Wiekszosc tych "zaslepionych" nie zna angielskiego, wiec to im sie nie przyda.
        Jesli chcesz ich przekonac to musisz przetlumaczyc. A i wtedy nie wiem czy to
        cos da, bo slepy bedzie zawsze slepy.

        pozdrawiam - krecha
    • Gość: nik Re: The Guardian o USA i terroryzmie... IP: *.as5300-5.dialup.nyc.ny.metconnect.net 31.10.01, 15:07
      Można przypomnieć jeszcze szkolenie oddziałów kubańskich, terroryzm CIA, itd
    • Gość: Vist¸ __ Szkoła_Ameryk__ IP: *.wroclaw.sdi.tpnet.pl 05.11.01, 13:20



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      Vist¸__________________________/
      • wallsttr fuck you 06.11.01, 15:15
        Gość portalu: Vist¸ napisał(a):

        >
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        > <a href="http://www.lewica.pl/?dzial=teksty&id=42">www.lewica.pl/?dzial=teksty
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        Ty jak gówno wszędzie się pszykleisz.
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