From: jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>
Date: Sun, 22 Sep 1996 14:17:29 +0800
To: jya@pipeline.com (John Young)
Subject: Re: USA_exe
Message-ID: <199609220342.UAA17509@mail.pacifier.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 12:23 AM 9/22/96 GMT, John Young wrote:
>On Sep 21, 1996 16:19:53, 'jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>' wrote: 
>>Pardon me, but what's wrong with this?    Follow the news more closely, and  
>>you'll hear of a group which is operating in southern Mexico, the "EPR," which  
>>is killing off government employees, politicians, and police.  True, they're  
>>not implementing the mathematical, digital-cash basis behind AP, but they
>see  
>>to be making good progress against the corruption which is Mexico.   
>>Increase their productivity by a factor of 10, and the Mexican government would  
>>be terrified.  Increase it by 100, and the Mexican government would fall within  
>>a few months. 
> 
> 
>Jim's makes a good, if gruesome, point here, about the vicious realities of
>do-or-die AP, by even our own apple pie government. 
> 
> 
>The Washington Post reports at length today on the Defense Department's
>disclosure yesterday of heretofore classified trainging manuals used in the
>School of the Americas to instruct Latino troops on killing a wide range of
>civilians for political purposes. 
>To read "Army Instructed Latins On Executions, Torture," about your tax
>dollars working the AP angle: 
> 
>http://jya.com/usaexe.txt 

This article is so wonderfully appropriate to the discussion that I can't 
resist re-posting it here.

I think the part about only discovering the problem in 1992 after 10 years 
is particularly precious.  In addition, I notice that a listing of the 
appropriate targets these army people were supposed to "neutralize" are 
listed as:

   The manual on "Terrorism and the Urban Guerrilla" says that
   "another function of the CI agents is recommending CI
   targets for neutralizing. The CI targets can include
   personalities, installations, organizations, documents and
   materials ... the personality targets prove to be valuable
   sources of intelligence. Some examples of these targets are
   governmental officials, political leaders, and members of
   the infrastructure."


full article posted below:

   The Washington Post, September 21, 1996, pp. A1, A9.
   Army Instructed Latins On Executions, Torture
      Manuals Used 1982-91, Pentagon Reveals

   By Dana Priest

   U.S. Army intelligence manuals used to train Latin American
   military officers at an Army school from 1982 to 1991
   advocated executions, torture, blackmail and other forms of
   coercion against insurgents, Pentagon documents released
   yesterday show.

   Used in courses at the U.S. Army's School of the Americas,
   the manual says that to recruit and control informants,
   counterintelliigence agents could use "fear, payment of
   bounties for enemy dead, beatings, false imprisonment,
   executions and the use of truth serum," according to a
   secret Defense Department summary of the manuals compiled
   during a 1992 investigation of the instructional material
   and also released yesterday.

   A summary of the investigation and four pages of brief,
   translated excerpts from the seven Spanish-language manuals
   were released last night by the Defense Department, which
   recently has taken to making controversial information
   available in the evenings, after the deadlines of the
   prime-time network television news programs.

   The Army School of the Americas, long located in Panama but
   moved in 1984 to Fort Benning, Ga, has trained nearly
   60,000 military and police officers from Latin America and
   the United States since 1946.

   Its graduates have included some of the region's most
   notorious human rights abusers, among them Roberto
   D'Aubuisson, the leader of El Salvador's right-wing death
   squads; 19 Salvadoran soldiers linked to the 1989
   assassination of six Jesuit priests; Gen. Manuel Antonio
   Noriega, the deposed Panamanian strongman; six Peruvian
   officers linked to killings of students and a professor;
   and Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, a Guatemalan officer
   implicated in the death of an American innkeeper living in
   Guatemala and to the death of a leftist guerrilla married
   to an American lawyer.

   The Defense Department said the school's curriculum now
   includes mandatory human rights training and it is an
   effective way to help promote military professionalism in
   a region where that concept is still nascent.

   "The problem was discovered in 1992, properly reported and
   fixed," said Lt. Col. Arne Owens, a Pentagon spokesman.
   "There have been a lot of great changes at the School of
   the Americas."

   When reports of the 1992 investigation surfaced this year
   during a congressional inquiry into the CIA's activities in
   Guatemala, spokesmen for the school denied the manuals
   advocated such extreme methods of operation, which were in
   violation of Army policy and law at the time they were in
   use.

   The 1992 investigation concluded the inclusion of the
   methods was the result of bureaucratic oversight. "It is
   incredible that the use ... since 1982 ... evaded the
   established system of doctrinal controls," said the report
   of the investigation, conducted by the office of the
   assistant to the secretary of defense for intelligence
   oversight. "Nevertheless, we could find no evidence that
   this was a deliberate and orchestrated attempt to violate
   DoD or Army policies."

   The manuals were complied by Army intelligence officials
   using "outdated instructional material without the required
   doctrinal approval" from the Army Intelligence School, the
   investigation report said.

   The material was based, in part, on training instructions
   used in the 1960s by the Army's Foreign Intelligence
   Assistance Program, entitled "Project X." The 1992
   investigation also found the manual was distributed to
   thousands of military officers from 11 South and Central
   American countries, including Guatemala, El Salvador,
   Honduras and Panama, where the U.S. military was heavily
   involved in counterinsurgency.

   One manual, entitled "Handling of Sources," also "discloses
   classified [informant] methodology that could compromise
   Army clandestine intelligence modus operandi," the 1992
   investigation found. Another manual, entitled
   "Counterintelligence," contained "sensitive Army
   counterintelligence tactics, techniques and procedures."

   The Defense Department yesterday said the 1992
   investigators found two dozen objectionable passages among
   the 1,169 pages of instruction. For instance, the manual
   entitled "Handling of Sources" says, "The CI
   [counterintelligence] agent could cause the arrest of the
   employees [informants] parents, imprison the employee or
   give him a beating" to coerce cooperation.

   On several occasions it uses the words "neutralization" or
   "neutralizing," which was commonly used at the time as a
   euphemism for execution or destruction, a Pentagon official
   said.

   The manual on "Terrorism and the Urban Guerrilla" says that
   "another function of the CI agents is recommending CI
   targets for neutralizing. The CI targets can include
   personalities, installations, organizations, documents and
   materials ... the personality targets prove to be valuable
   sources of intelligence. Some examples of these targets are
   governmental officials, political leaders, and members of
   the infrastructure."

   The Defense Department continues to try to collect the
   manuals but, as the 1992 investigation noted, "due to
   incomplete records, retrieval of all copies is doubtful."

   Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II (D-Mass.), an advocate of closing
   the school, said in a statement last night that the manuals
   "show what we have suspected all along, that taxpayers'
   money has been used for physical abuse." Kennedy said, "The
   School of the Americas, a Cold War relic, should be shut
   down."

   [End]

Jim Bell
jimbell@pacifier.com