School of Terror by John Pilger

Much was made of al-Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan, the target of American bombers. But these 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 some 60,000 Latin American soldiers, policemen, paramilitaries and intelligence agents. Forty per cent of the Cabinet ministers who served in the genocidal regimes of Lucas Garcia, Rios Montt and Mejia Victores in Guatemala are graduates.

In 1993, the UN Truth Commission for 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. They included Roberto D’Aubuisson, the leader of the death squads and the murders of Archbishop Oscar Romero and a group of Jesuit priests. 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. For aspiring terrorists, these recommended blackmail, torture, execution and the arrest of witnesses’ relatives.'

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