Actor leads protest at School of the Americas
By Mark Tooley, Institute on Religion and Democracy, December 21, 1998
Last month, actor Martin Sheen joined more than 2,000 activists in trespassing onto Ft. Benning, Georgia as they protested the presence there of the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas. According to leaders of the anti-school campaign, the school is a training academy for Latin American military officers to learn torture, assassination, and subversion of civilian government.
“I make my living as an actor, but this is what I do to stay alive,” explained Sheen to cheering demonstrators. “My faith demands that I challenge the darkness.” He and other marchers had expected to be arrested. To their disappointment, they were instead corralled into buses and deposited at a nearby park.
[Editor’s note: According to a Presbyterian News Service article, an estimated 300-400 Presbyterians took part in this demonstration, including an executive board member of the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship and “more than 10 percent of the total undergraduate enrollment from Presbyterian-affiliated Warren Wilson College in North Carolina.”]Leftist religious groups
Sheen is not the first entertainer to lend his name to the struggle. Actress Susan Sarandon has narrated a video called “School of Assassins” that summarizes the allegations against the school. Those allegations are long on emotional energy but short on facts.
The campaign to close the school is little more than a cri de coeur to resurrect a languid coalition of leftist religious groups that once defended the Marxist guerrilla movements of Latin America in the 1980’s.
The school’s defenders, such as U.S. Army Chief of Staff Dennis Reimer, say it has contributed towards the unprecedented number of democratic, civilian governments throughout Latin America. But groups like the National Council of Churches and the Maryknoll Society, a liberal Catholic order, are still infuriated that leftist insurrections of the 1980’s were defeated by the school’s trainees.
They are working with groups such as the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, the Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala, and the Nicaragua Network, which once functioned as U.S.-based support funnels for Marxist guerrilla forces.
The school has trained 60,000 Latin American military officers. Critics point to a few graduates such as former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and the late Salvadoran right-wing leader Robert D’Aubuisson as typical products of the School who brutalized their countrymen. But this claim is comparable to blaming Cambodia’s genocide on the Sorbonne in Paris, which Pol Pot attended 40 years ago. Or faulting the Russian Orthodox Church for the Soviet Gulag, since Stalin once attended a seminary.
No critic of the school has directly linked human rights abuses in Latin America to any specific training at the school. Efforts to close the school have failed several times in Congress.
‘Torture manuals’
In 1996 the Defense Department released seven training booklets about counter-insurgency that were available at the school between 1989 and 1991. Critics of the school like to call them “torture manuals.”
They hardly merit that distinction. Of 1,100 pages of text in the manuals, only a page and one half of two dozen mostly ambiguous phrases have been deemed offensive. One phrase suggests that a drunken insurgent is more likely to talk. Another mentions the possibility of hypnotism or a “truth serum.” Still another talks about mailing threatening anonymous letters to insurgents. Threats to arrest relatives are cited as one form of potential intimidation.
The closest endorsement of torture is one phrase that refers vaguely to “information obtained involuntarily from insurgents who have been captured.” More typical in the manuals is a warning that an interrogator should not: “be rude, or impolite…make fun of the interrogee…Lose his temper…Use profane language…[or] Argue.”
The manuals discuss counter-insurgency warfare, which entails the killing of enemy combatants. But shooting armed insurgents is not “assassination.” Critics of the school complain the manuals did not sufficiently defend all the niceties of democratic procedure. Whether the charge is valid or not, the Defense Department recalled all seven manuals in 1991, proclaiming they had never been properly authorized. There’s no evidence the manuals were ever even employed in a classroom at the school.
The manuals, along with a graduation list that includes a few tawdry characters, are the only evidence the school’s opponents ever cite. Most critics acknowledge the school teaches the importance of democratic, civilian rule. But they insist that Latin American officers merely sneer at these instructions.
‘Few verifiable facts’
Presumably, these critics think that human rights in Latin America will profit if military officers from that region receive their training from the French, or the Israelis, or even the Chinese. The school’s opponents prefer to assume that most of the world’s evils originate in the United States.
Maryknoll priest Roy Bourgeois, who leads the fight against the School literally outside its gates at Ft. Benning, explains that the U.S. military teaches torture so as to protect the profits of “big corporations” in Latin America.
This style of left-wing rhetoric from the anti-school campaign fortunately failed to persuade during the Cold War. It should not be any more persuasive today. Yet major newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Chicago Tribune have editorialized against the school.
And last year the U.S. House of Representatives came within seven votes of slashing the school’s funding. Most Democrats and many Republicans were attentive to the pleas of nuns and clergymen who lobbied against the school. Before voting again, they should know that the Religious Left campaign against the school offers plenty of angry rhetoric but few verifiable facts.