Fort Benning Georgia is, essentially, a torture-training center. They run an institution named The School Of The Americas. The U.S. government brings people from the military from all countries in Central and South America to Georgia and keeps them there for some period of time to train them in torture, kidnapping, and murdering the civilians of their own countries. Of course the average enlistee in a South or Central American military is poor, and eager to please their generous American friends.
The military people are eventually returned to their own countries. When they receive instructions from the U.S., they will do such things as overthrow their own governments, or round up political opposition groups in their own countries and kill all the members, kidnap union organizers and murder them, slaughter entire villages. They do whatever the Americans tell them to do.
This is exactly what happened in the coup in Honduras a few months ago: a U.S.-trained School of the Americas man, technically part of the Honduras military, got a team of trained military people to attack the President's home, beat the President, kidnap him, remove him from his own country, and install some phony two-bit thug dictator to take his place.
This was under Obama's watch, and he must have signed off on it. Otherwise, Obama would have cut off the U.S. aid the day after it happened, as he was legally required to do. Instead, Clinton and Obama both hemmed and hawed, said it wasn't a big deal.
Clinton and Obama together are doing exactly the same things that Nixon and Kissinger did: using the military from other countries to overthrow governments, stage coups, murder and terrorize the civilians, to ensure the U.S. keeps control of the country. And remember: Nixon and Kissinger started by waging war against other nations, but eventually they used those same tactics right here in our own country. Look at Cointelpro: an official U.S. government program of the F.B.I. to set up, falsely accuse, imprison, and/or assassinate the leaders of the Black Panther Party. What change?
There are people who have been protesting against the School of Americas for decades, trying to get it shut down. Below are a couple of good videos, plus a link to their major website. http://www.soaw.org/
When anybody claims that the U.S. using torture in Iraq or Afghanistan was shocking, or contrary to our normal military methods, don't believe it. Not only do we do it, we train and direct others to do it for us. And we need to stop doing it. Everybody in the world knows about this except the Americans, who are willfully kept ignorant by our government.
That's one of the reasons we need public hearings about the U.S. use of torture, directly and indirectly, around the world. Air the dirty laundry, expose the mold to sunshine. Imprison the people who direct these crimes. Why isn't Henry Kissinger in prison? He's an international war criminal, just like Dick Cheney. But these people are never held accountable because they're Americans, and they get away with murder.
If we don't stop this murdering Empire, if we don't start prosecuting and throwing these war criminals into prison, not only will our country continue to engage in international war crimes and murder, but it likely will soon become the norm inside our country as well. Anybody who is not moved by a concern for people of other countries might want to stop and think about your own grandchildren being "disappeared," or tortured, or murdered by future American governments. Remember, unless they're caught in bed with a live boy or dead female, U.S. politicians are never held accountable for their crimes, even murder.
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