From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Jul 15 2002 - 00:04:10 MDT
At 06:52 PM 7/14/02 -0700, Samantha wrote:
>http://www.observer.co.uk/waronterrorism/story/0,1373,754973,00.html
>Some will accuse me of being "anti-American" for posting such
>things
Pilger does tend to froth at the mouth and get incredibly holier-than-thou,
but I urge people to consider the following citation from that story, which
I think most intelligent observers outside the USA would take for granted
but inside the USA might seem incredible or invented. What interests me in
terms of this list is that *presumably* most extropes rather *dislike* the
sorts of nasty things that governments and their owners get up to, and
hence should have little time for the following evil but characteristics
stunts. I suspect, however, that patriotism or some form of devil-we-know
*realpolitik* might kick in cruelly to overwhelm such judgments:
==========
'In the war against terrorism,' said Bush... following 11 September,
'we're going to hunt down these evil-doers wherever they are, no matter how
long it takes.'
Strictly speaking, it should not take long, as more terrorists are given
training and sanctuary in the United States than anywhere on earth. They
include mass murderers, torturers, former and future tyrants and assorted
international criminals. This is virtually unknown to the American public,
thanks to the freest media on earth.
There is no terrorist sanctuary to compare with Florida, currently
governed by the President's brother, Jeb Bush. In his book Rogue State ,
former senior State Department official Bill Blum describes a typical
Florida trial of three anti-Castro terrorists, who hijacked a plane to
Miami at knifepoint. 'Even though the kidnapped pilot was brought back from
Cuba to testify against the men,' he wrote, 'the defence simply told the
jurors the man was lying, and the jury deliberated for less than an hour
before acquitting the defendants.'
General Jose Guillermo Garcia has lived comfortably in Florida since the
1990s. He was head of El Salvador's military during the 1980s when death
squads with ties to the army murdered thousands of people. General Prosper
Avril, the Haitian dictator, liked to display the bloodied victims of his
torture on television. When he was overthrown, he was flown to Florida by
the US Government. Thiounn Prasith, Pol Pot's henchman and apologist at the
United Nations, lives in New York. General Mansour Moharari, who ran the
Shah of Iran's notorious prisons, is wanted in Iran, but untroubled in the
United States.
Al-Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan were kindergartens compared with
the world's leading university of terrorism at Fort Benning in Georgia.
Known until recently as the School of the Americas, it trained tyrants and
some 60,000 Latin American special forces, paramilitaries and intelligence
agents in the black arts of terrorism.
In 1993, the UN Truth Commission on El Salvador named the army officers
who had committed the worst atrocities of the civil war; two-thirds of them
had been trained at Fort Benning. In Chile, the school's graduates ran
Pinochet's secret police and three principal concentration camps. In 1996,
the US government was forced to release copies of the school's training
manuals, which recommended blackmail, torture, execution and the arrest of
witnesses' relatives.
[etc etc]
===========
Damien Broderick
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