Text copied from / source: http://vicsan.forclark.com/comments/2004/1/11/164147/267/1
New York Post, Dec 27, 2003. pg. 016 (Editorial)
Democratic presidential candidate and retired general Wesley Clark has been slammed - unfairly, in our view - for his relationship with the Army's controversial School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Ga.
Clark fought to keep open the school, whose purpose was to train soldiers from Latin American allies of the United States.
But it was closed in 2000, and later reconstituted as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.
Extreme critics of this institution have claimed that the curriculum included assassination, kidnapping, torture and blackmail.
There is no credible evidence for any of this, although it is certainly true that the School of the Americas over the years graduated some of Latin America's nastier dictators and other proven violators of human rights.
These included Panama's Manuel Noriega, Argentina's Leopoldo Galtieri (who started the Falklands War), Chile's Augusto Pinochet - and the El Salvadoran death squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson.
Some of the Salvadoran soldiers responsible for the murders of nuns and priests during that country's horrific civil war were also graduates of the school.
But just because these thugs attended this school does not mean that they trained there to become thugs. Or that they became thugs because they attended.
Besides, the idea that army officers from places like El Salvador, Argentina, Mexico or Chile were actually taught how to torture people at Fort Benning is ludicrous.
What could they possibly learn about torture there that they did not know already?
These are, after all, societies with a long, rich tradition of torture stretching back in an unbroken line to both the Spanish conquistadores and the indigenous peoples they conquered.
Not to mention traditions of coup d'etat and political violence.
Perhaps the School of the Americas failed to
cure many of its Latin American students of their traditional attitudes
toward
the suppression
of free
expression, torture, summary execution, military interference
in politics and so forth.
But that is probably because those reprehensible traditional
attitudes are so deeply embedded in Latin American military
culture.
Perhaps the hope that the combination of professional training and exposure to American military culture - with its abhorrence of interference in politics - might rub off on every School of the Americas graduate was naive.
But it's worth remembering that the minority of the school's 60,000 graduates who subsquently committed human rights abuses probably did so in spite of, not because of, their training there.
And that every country in Latin America except Cuba is now governed by elected leaders accountable to their people - an achievement that may well reflect the influence of the School of the Americas over its 50-year history.
We can think of any number
of reasons why Wesley Clark shouldn't become president.
But his past association with the School of the
Americas isn't on the list.