Transparency Debated; WHINSEC Sparks Criticism

Transparency Debated in Congress; WHINSEC (Ex-School of the Americas) Continues to Spark Criticism

• Passage of House legislation concerning WHINSEC.
• School of the Americas (SOA) legacy continued.
• Department of Defense upholds contradictory policy.
• US Foreign Policy in Latin America misguided and ineffective.
• A demand for transparency and change.

The McGovern/Sestak/Bishop Amendment

The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), successor to the Pentagon's notorious School of the Americas (SOA), has once again become a point of attention following recent legislation fueled by ongoing opposition to the school's historically controversial role. On May 22, 2008, the US House of Representatives voted to approve the McGovern/Sestak/Bishop Amendment, which will require the Defense Secretary to release the names, ranks, and countries of origin of all graduates of and instructors at the school upon request. The amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act was passed by a margin of 220-189 votes. If authorized, WHINSEC will be required to release the aforementioned information on all graduates and instructors from 2005-2008 and all years thereafter.

Passage of the amendment was a landmark victory for the social activists and congressmen who have relentlessly fought WHINSEC's chronic lack of transparency in spite of the fact that it is funded mainly by US taxpayer dollars. Representative James McGovern (D-MA) recently told COHA, "I'm very pleased that a majority of my colleagues voted for transparency and accountability. There is simply no reason why the Pentagon should continue to black out the names of WHINSEC attendees. I will be working hard as this process moves along to make the McGovern/Bishop/Sestak amendment the law of the land." The amendment is a significant achievement when contrasted with previous legislative measures pertaining to WHINSEC, because of the extent to which this legislation has progressed in Congress.

Past Legislation in Opposition to WHINSEC

Since WHINSEC's creation in 2001, as the successor to the SOA, a group of congressmen led by McGovern have pushed for the institution's termination and a detailed investigation of its past activities. McGovern first introduced the Latin American Military Training Review Act on May 10, 2001; the act proposed WHINSEC's closure and the creation of a congressional task force to investigate the nature of the education and training that has been conducted at the school (i). The bill failed to progress beyond even its preliminary stages, and reintroductions of the bill in March 2003 and 2005 met a similar fate.

The issue of WHINSEC's status reappeared before Congress again in June 2006 when McGovern proposed an amendment to the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act to halt funding of the school. Though the amendment failed by a vote of 218-188, it led to the first debate in Congress regarding WHINSEC since 2001 and provided an opportunity for McGovern and other representatives to cite multiple reports of human rights violations perpetrated by both SOA graduates as well as some of its current students (ii). In August 2006, only a few months after the aforementioned violations were brought to the attention of Congress, the names of and information about WHINSEC students, instructors and graduates were suddenly classified by the Department of Defense. This was a surprising development considering names of and information about WHINSEC students and instructors had been available to the public upon request for more than 40 years.

The following year, a debate regarding a similar measure to slash WHINSEC funding had revealed that a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by a human rights group monitoring WHINSEC - School of the Americas Watch (SOA Watch) - had yielded a blacked out list of the names of attendees for 2005. WHINSEC's secretive practices combined with evidence regarding some of the alumni's past human rights violations created further resistance to the school from activists. Students, politicians, and various other human rights organizations both in the United States and throughout Latin America joined in opposition.

A Brief History of the SOA/WHINSEC

In 1946, the School of the Americas was established in Panama by the United States Army for the purpose of training Latin American military personnel in combat tactics and strategy. The expiration of the Panama Canal Treaty in 1984 terminated the basis for continuing presence of US military in Panama and forced the SOA to move to its current location in Fort Benning, Georgia. The SOA trained over 63,000 soldiers from some 22 nations (iii). For decades revelations regarding its alumni established that literally hundreds of former students and graduates had been connected with human rights abuses throughout Latin America. The school had invoked persistent criticism for its training tactics and its failure to adhere to its stated mission, which included the promotion of democratic values and sustainable peace.

The School of the Americas came under even more heightened scrutiny after Salvadoran SOA graduates methodically killed six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter at the University of Central America in El Salvador in 1989. This killing involved 26 perpetrators, 19 of whom were SOA graduates. In addition to this incident, SOA critics can cite numerous examples of graduates and students who have committed other heinous abuses. Infamous SOA graduates include Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama. Joining them on the roster of pathological students are the military personnel responsible for the brutal assassination of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, and the culprits of the Mozote massacre in El Salvador. SOA alumni have also been linked to the murder of five US churchwomen in El Salvador, in addition to the gunning down of union leaders, journalists, priests, students and professors across Central and South America and the Caribbean. The readiness with which critics find examples of the group's atrocities is exactly why opponents of the school have worked so tirelessly to close its doors permanently.

What's in a name?

Demands against the institution to change its practices or to close its doors have been mounting annually. In 1996, public pressure forced the Pentagon to release training manuals used at the school, which revealed that tactics such as execution, torture, and blackmail were part of the SOA's curriculum (iv). In 2001, just as legislation proposed by the opposition movement was posed to win congressional approval, the Pentagon came in with a plan to effect a last minute rescue. By order of a cosmetic fix to address its noxious image, the Pentagon altered SOA's name in the Defense Authorization Bill for the 2001 fiscal year (v). The School of the Americas' closure coincided with the launching of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), which occupies the same buildings used by the SOA, uses more of the same personnel, and only differs in name, not mission.

The Department of Defense claims that the School of the Americas closed because it had fulfilled its Cold War-era purpose. To justify the opening of WHINSEC the Department of Defense cited the need for an institute to foster democracy throughout the hemisphere. There are few who swallow this explanation; SOA changed its name, critics insist, because it had become unpalatable, but one of its school officials claimed, "One school closed because it had fulfilled its mission; WHINSEC opened to meet new and changing needs (vi)." As for that, WHINSEC asserts its mission as being, "To provide professional education and training to eligible personnel of nations of the Western Hemisphere within the context of the democratic principles set forth in the charter of the Organization of American States [OAS] (vii)." Its critics insist that name-change and new ideological goals mask the simple fact that the SOA's legacy lives on.

Among its clauses, the OAS charter claims that its members must work to promote representative democracy with due respect for the principle of non-intervention, as well as the promotion and protection of human rights as a prerequisite for the existence of a democratic society. The charter also asserts that the promotion of democracy, peace and development are inseparable parts of a renewed and integral vision of solidarity in the Americas (viii). Other principles of the OAS charter to which WHINSEC insists it faithfully subscribes include working to eradicate poverty, to aid in encouraging judicial proceedings, and to promote economic, social and cultural development. Finally, WHINSEC's mission states that it aims to foster mutual knowledge, transparency, confidence and cooperation among the participating nations as well as to promote democratic values and respect for human rights (ix). These principles, however, are categorically inconsistent with a number of basic WHINSEC practices as viewed by its critics.

In WHINSEC's Defense

WHINSEC reminds its critics that it offers classes in peacekeeping and human rights, with a mandatory eight-hour instruction on human rights, the rule of law, due process, civilian control of the military, and the role of the military in a democratic society (x). Similar classes were also included in the SOA curriculum after news of the torture memos broke, but were habitually poorly attended and not considered as being central to a promising career for SOA students. When WHINSEC replaced the SOA, its sponsors pointed out that the new school would put less emphasis on military training and more on leadership development and peace support. The SOA also claimed to place emphasis on leadership training, but issues of importance to civil society were always sacrificial to skill training, tactics, and coat of arms. Another matter to consider is whether the students, if so minded, rejected democracy-oriented parts of the syllabus, while actively absorbing items concerning more violent military strategies.

WHINSEC, like the SOA, continues to be a military training institution that uses strategies and academic material aimed at advancing a military education so as to achieve its goals of democracy and peace building. WHINSEC defends its transparency by citing its Board of Visitors (BOV), a group intended to oversee the quality of teaching at the school that is similar to the SOA's board of overseers. The BOV at WHINSEC is comprised of fourteen members, six of whom are handpicked by the Secretary of Defense, with the remainder coming from the Senate and House Armed Service Committee, the State Department, and other military appendages. The BOV reports on the practices of the institute and its relevance to US foreign policy, but is limited in its capacity to engage in critical analysis of the school's overall performance. Therefore, there is little assurance that the BOV will provide the kind of scrutiny that the SOA board failed to provide.

The Department of Defense's Inconsistencies Revealed

WHINSEC faithfully mirrors the SOA in form and philosophy, as well as in its insistence that it is capable of meeting its self proclaimed goals. If the SOA was deemed outdated, nonresponsive and unnecessary by its critics, what purpose will the nearly identical WHINSEC serve? The same failure of the SOA to claim responsibility for the results of its teaching is manifested in WHINSEC's operating philosophy, which claims it cannot be held accountable for the future conduct of graduates of the school. There is no procedure in place to analyze the actions of the alumni on the reputation of the institution and how their behavior might reflect the quality of education they received from either the SOA or WHINSEC. Due to the lack of a systematic tracking method, WHINSEC claims that they are not responsible for the human rights abuses that former students have committed. Yet they have boasted, "The vast majority [of students] contributed positively to the region's transition to democracy (xi)," even though they have made no effort to evaluate the conduct of their graduates in normative terms. If, as they claim, the Department of Defense does not oblige the school to track former students, how can they ensure that these students contribute positively to the region? In fact, the defense that the Pentagon offers in this respect is purely anecdotal, if not a total invention.

At the same time, the US government prides itself on conducting a thorough background check of all incoming students to ensure that, "if there is any hint of wrongdoing in the student's past, the student is not permitted into the United States to attend WHINSEC (xii)." If students come to WHINSEC with a clean past, as suggested, yet commit human rights abuses after they leave, perhaps the screening process is flawed or the school has had some influence on the graduates' actions.

Until August 2006, independent groups such as the SOA Watch had been tracking the institute's former students and their actions. However, when WHINSEC began blocking the names of its students and instructors, this task became nearly impossible. Thus, to carry out the proposed Congressional legislation mandating openness would be an important step in the direction of holding members of the SOA/WHINSEC community accountable for the manner in which their graduates apply what they learned in the classroom.

Contradiction and Misrepresentation by the Department of Defense

The Department of Defense's classification of WHINSEC files in 2006 and failure to adhere to FOIA requests coming from the public, demonstrates how transparency is far from being a constant with the Pentagon. Where does the US military stand on the subject, since transparency fluctuates at the convenience of the authorities? A prime example of the contradictions between goals and tactics in achieving its foreign policy ends can be seen in the treatment of Luís Posada Carriles, a notorious SOA alumnus who never graduated. Today, Posada walks the streets of Miami a free man, though he previously admitted he was the mastermind behind the bombing of a Cuban passenger jet in 1976, which killed 73 people. The US government is fully aware that Posada is charged with terrorism in Venezuela, but he has been allowed to find de facto sanctuary in the US.

Further evidence of a policy based on convenience rather than principles is the Department of Defense's inability to provide a concrete reason for its decision to classify school files in order to protect personal information, which had never appeared to be a problem before, over four previous decades. What happened in the past three years that left WHINSEC feeling it has something to hide? Why now? The long list of human rights abuses at the hands of SOA graduates could make WHINSEC's sudden need for confidentiality readily understandable.

In recent years, there has been a substantial Latin American backlash against the school that is supposedly committed to aiding society and promoting cooperation. Since January 2004, when Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez became the first regional leader to withdraw his country's military personnel from participating in the WHINSEC program based on the organization's past human rights violations, four more Latin American countries have reported their intent to withdraw from the school. Over the past two years, leaders from Uruguay, Argentina, Costa Rica, and Bolivia have all declared their withdrawal from the school due to related human rights issues, including torture and social repression. In addition, WHINSEC's negative image in these countries also played a role in the decisions to withdraw (xiii).

A Misguided Approach to Foreign Policy in Latin America

Growing opposition to WHINSEC both in the US and in Latin America demonstrates the flawed nature of its inclusion as a component of US foreign policy. The failure of past US initiatives in Latin America should have been a warning to WHINSEC officials against employing the armed forces to "promote democracy." Both direct and indirect US support for military intervention in Latin America on national security grounds, from the 1970's to the 1990's, including those in Chile, Brazil, Guatemala, Argentina, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, should provide some insight into the danger of using military devices to support democracy. Military movements in all these countries employed the calculated use of intimidation resulting in the repression of their citizens' freedoms. The widespread abuse of human rights completely contradicted the democratic values professed by the United States. Promoting democracy by means of militarism in Latin America usually is not a successful strategy and carries with it a large potential for negative consequences. Why does the United States continue linking itself so aggressively to the Latin American military if the past is filled with disturbing evidence of this baleful approach?

The actions of the Department of Defense with respect to WHINSEC demonstrate that the school's true goal is not what is advocated in the mission statement, but is instead to act as a vehicle with which the Bush administration can further project its conservative values and covertly oppose governments and regional bodies that are seen as too leftist. Instead of promoting Latin American interests and democracy, Professor Lesley Gill of American University, author of School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas, observes that WHINSEC is a "central tool in the construction of US hemispheric dominance (xiv)." The aim of US foreign policy as embodied by WHINSEC, is to provide a source of influence and stabilization of the Latin American region, in sharp contrast to the supposed aims stated in its motto, "Libertad, Paz y Fraternidad" (Freedom, Peace, and Brotherhood) (xv).

A Call for Responsibility

With the McGovern/Sestak/Bishop Amendment moving towards deliberation at a joint House-Senate conference committee and the March 2007 Latin America Military Training Review Act still in committee, WHINSEC promises to remain under scrutiny from Congress and regional activists. The mounting pressure against WHINSEC and its contradictory practices could very well persuade the Department of Defense to either more clearly define WHINSEC's goals and missions, or realize that a new policy is needed. A new policy should encourage constructive engagement between the north and the south and would probably benefit from the absence of an institution that has such a troubled history (xvi).

For more information regarding SOA and WHINSEC see COHA's past articles:

i. http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h107-1810
ii. http://dc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/143300/_index.php
iii. http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/18/spotlight/
iv. Priest, Dana. "US Instructed Latins on Execution, Torture." Washington Post. 21 September 1996.
v. www.soaw.org
vi. https://www.infantry.army.mil/WHINSEC/about.asp?id=37
vii. https://www.infantry.army.mil/WHINSEC/about.asp?id=37
viii. InterAmerican Democratic Charter, OAS available at http://www.oas.org/OASpage/eng/Documents/Democractic_Charter.htm
ix. https://www.infantry.army.mil/WHINSEC/about.asp?id=37
x. U.S. Code Title 10, Section 2166
xi. https://www.infantry.army.mil/WHINSEC/about.asp?id=37
xii. https://www.infantry.army.mil/WHINSEC/about.asp?id=37
xiii. http://www.soaw.org/pressrelease.php?id=142
xiv. Gill, Lesley. "Soldiering the Empire." http://mala.mayfirst.org/files/pdfs/Militarism_Empire.pdf
xv. https://www.infantry.army.mil/WHINSEC/about.asp?id=36

This analysis was prepared by COHA Research Associates Michael Katz and Elizabeth Reavey

The Council on Hemispheric Affairs, founded in 1975, is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan, tax-exempt research and information organization. It has been described on the Senate floor as being "one of the nation's most respected bodies of scholars and policy makers." For more information, please see our web page at www.coha.org

ENDS

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