Inside the dark legacy of the US 'School of Assassins'

[Watchman]

Inside the dark legacy of the US 'School of Assassins'

Published: 19 November, 2010, 22:52
Edited: 22 November, 2010, 12:30

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Imagine a school dedicated to teaching torture, to educating soldiers on how to rape and murder American nuns and assassinate Salvadoran priests; an institution whose mission is to demonstrate how to ‘disappear’ innocent civilians with total impunity.

Now imagine it’s funded with American taxpayer dollars and that it’s located on American soil. But you don’t have to imagine, because for the past 62 years, the School of the Americas has done exactly that.

From Pinochet's soldiers in Chile, D'Aubuisson's death squads in El Salvador, Banzer's minions in Bolivia, Galtieri's operatives in Argentina and Rios Montt's soldiers in Guatemala to the present-day generals responsible for the coup in Honduras and the drug war killings in Colombia, the School of the Americas has a dark legacy. Renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, the school has graduated 65,000 soldiers from 18 countries.

Founded to fight communism in the Western Hemisphere, it quickly became known as the School of the Assassins. But for the past 20 years, Jesuit priest Roy Bourgeois has watched over its gates and held its graduates accountable for their crimes. The School of the Americas Watch (SOA Watch) began with just 10 activists in a small apartment across the street from Ft. Benning in the US State of Georgia.

"I think that as Americans, we have a particular responsibility when our government has been involved in a lot of atrocities throughout history, but even more so today when our military aid is not being used in accountable ways," said Charity Ryerson, an activist with SOA Watch who spent six months in federal prison for intentionally trespassing on Ft. Benning to draw attention to the school's crimes.

On the weekend of November 20th, tens of thousands of activists are set to converge at its gates to demand an end to the militarization and the massacres, the human rights violations and the secrecy and will continue the fight to close the School of the Americas.

 

[mako65]

Haha..needless to say Langley is also behind all this crap!

 

[Watchman]

EXCLUSIVE: CIA Secret 'Torture' Prison Found at Fancy Horseback Riding Academy
ABC News Finds the Location of a "Black Site" for Alleged Terrorists in Lithuania

220 comments
By MATTHEW COLE and BRIAN ROSS
Nov. 18, 2009

The CIA built one of its secret European prisons inside an exclusive riding academy outside Vilnius, Lithuania, a current Lithuanian government official and a former U.S. intelligence official told ABC News this week.

This former Lithuanian horse stable was converted into a secret CIA detention center, according to a...
(ABC)
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Where affluent Lithuanians once rode show horses and sipped coffee at a café, the CIA installed a concrete structure where it could use harsh tactics to interrogate up to eight suspected al-Qaeda terrorists at a time.

"The activities in that prison were illegal," said human rights researcher John Sifton. "They included various forms of torture, including sleep deprivation, forced standing, painful stress positions."

Lithuanian officials provided ABC News with the documents of what they called a CIA front company, Elite, LLC, which purchased the property and built the "black site" in 2004.


Lithuania agreed to allow the CIA prison after President George W. Bush visited the country in 2002 and pledged support for Lithuania's efforts to join NATO.

"The new members of NATO were so grateful for the U.S. role in getting them into that organization that they would do anything the U.S. asked for during that period," said former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, now an ABC News consultant. "They were eager to please and eager to be cooperative on security and on intelligence matters."

Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaite declined ABC's request for an interview.

ABC News first reported that Lithuania was one of three eastern European countries, along with Poland and Romania, where the CIA secretly interrogated suspected high-value al-Qaeda terrorists, but until now the precise site had not been confirmed. Read that report here.

Until March 2004, the site was a riding academy and café owned by a local family. The facility is in the town of Antaviliai, in the forest 20 kilometers northeast of the city center of Vilnius, near an exclusive suburb where many government officials live.