Answer to —

5. The CIA manuals used in the School of the Americas was used to train Latin American military officers in which of the following?

May 17, 2021 | revcom.us

 

Answer: d

Since 1946, the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas (SOA, now “rebranded” as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, WHINSEC) has trained military officers from countries all over Latin America. The school’s curriculum includes sniper training, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence, and interrogation tactics—including the use of torture, rape, disappearances, assassinations, and mass killings. CIA and U.S. Army manuals used at the SOA have detailed torture techniques and advocated extortion, blackmail, and the targeting of civilian populations. Hundreds of thousands of people in Latin America have been tortured, raped, assassinated, “disappeared,” massacred, and forced to flee their homes and become refugees by armies and death squads led by military officers trained at the SOA.

CIA torture is certainly not just seen in Latin America. When the U.S. launched its “war on terror”—which was in actuality a war for greater empire—the men the U.S. troops captured were designated “enemy combatants” rather than prisoners of war. The term “enemy combatants” was made up by White House legal advisers to circumvent domestic and international law (like the Geneva Conventions) against holding people without charge indefinitely. In secret “black sites” around the world, the CIA carried out what the U.S. called “enhanced interrogation techniques”—torture, plain and simple. Prisoners were beaten, underfed, isolated, chained, shackled upside down and in painful positions, deprived of sleep, humiliated with attack dogs and other methods, and threatened with death. CIA medical staff were given specific instructions on how to torture people through sleep deprivation, limiting food, chaining prisoners standing for 48 hours in a fixed position, and waterboarding. (Waterboarding, first used by the U.S. troops on people of the Philippines in the 19th century, means tying a person down, repeatedly pouring water into their nose and mouth to the point of drowning, then stopping while the victim coughs air back into their lungs.)

Some people were kidnapped (“rendered”) and taken to a CIA “black site” for torture. One such victim of CIA “rendition” was Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen who was traveling in Macedonia when he was grabbed and taken to a “black site” in Afghanistan, where he was tortured. The CIA quickly concluded he was not a “terrorist,” but he was only released after four months—under the condition that he not publicly reveal what happened.

[Back to quiz]

November 2005: Thousands of people gather outside the gates of Fort Benning during the annual protest against the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formerly known as the Army's School of the Americas. Each cross has the name of a person killed by U.S.-backed military in Latin America. (Photo: AP)