Monday, December 13, 2004

t r u t h o u t - Victim Claims Abu Ghraib Torture was Official U.S. Policy

t r u t h o u t - Victim Claims Abu Ghraib Torture was Official U.S. Policy: "For many Latin American victims of torture, the infamous pictures of abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison brought back not only chilling recollections of their own experiences, but also confirmed what they have long maintained: that their torturers were following interrogation guidelines set by the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA).

'I had flashbacks when I saw the guy with the hood [at Abu Ghraib],' says Carlos Mauricio, a Salvadorean who was tortured in 1983. Founder of Stop Impunity, a group that seeks to prosecute human rights violators, dismisses as a 'whitewash' the Bush administration's view that Abu Ghraib abuse was the work of a few U.S. army misfits.

'What happened at Abu Ghraib was torture by the book; they were implementing U.S. policy,' Mauricio, 51, told the Sunday Herald.

'The U.S. military deny they teach torture and say it happens in Latin America because soldiers have always been brutal. But what happened at Abu Ghraib belies this.'

Among the SOA's 60,000 graduates are former dictators Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama, Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola of Argentina, Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, Guillermo Rodriguez of Ecuador and Hugo Banzer Suarez of Bolivia. Lower-ranking graduates were involved in the 1980 assassination of Salvadorean Archbishop Oscar Romero and the massacre of 900 civilians at El Mozote, El Salvador, in 1980.

Between 1946 and 1984 the SOA was based in Panama, the former headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command. In 1977, the school was relocated to Fort Benning, Georgia, but in the face of international criticism it was closed by the Clinton administration in December 2000 - only to be reopened a month later on the same site under a new name, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Co-operation (WHINSEC)."