School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia

Smoke and Mirrors: SOA Graduate Speaks Out
Sunday, January 14th 2007

Willy E. Gutman, The Signal

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras - It took six months of secret negotiations to locate an alumnus of the U.S. Army School of the Americas willing to talk. It took nearly as long to finalize the rules of engagement.

Because he denies receiving anything but "classic war college instruction," and as the more sinister exploits of SOA graduates have been copiously rendered by the media, I reluctantly agreed not to focus on his wartime military activities. It was that or nothing.

Honduran Lt. Col. Roberto Nuñez Montes (Ret.) attended the SOA in 1963 as a cadet. In 1965, he took intelligence courses. A former intelligence chief, Nuñez was cited by America's Watch as the mastermind in 1987 of a raid on the household of a Honduran congressional deputy. More serious allegations against Nuñez have since surfaced.

What the taped interview (here stripped of small talk) lacks in incriminating detail is more than offset by Nuñez's candor and ferocious convictions.

His rhetoric is anchored in unbending soldierly doctrine: However abhorrent, atrocities in wartime are unavoidable, often justified. His arguments offer a stark insight into the military soul.

His optic also adds a chilling dimension to the mood, legacy and contradictions spawned by lingering Cold War paranoia.

Q: Who were your instructors?

A: Officer-level classes were taught by Latin American SOA graduates.

Q: Did the school offer courses on human rights?

A: I don't remember.

Q: Did some SOA graduates commit acts of barbarism?

A: Warring sides give different labels to the tactical components of a military operation.

Q: Military operation?

A: Yes. We were at war.

Q: Against your own people. Civilians. You were not defending against foreign invasion.

A: Civilians subverted by outside influences can destroy a nation.

Q: Old men, women, children?

A: All part of a fifth column.

Q: Are you calling clergy, teachers, students, journalists, peasants and trade unionists a "fifth column," thus justifying-

A: Yes. Communists. They threatened the public order and national security. Ours was a war fueled by outside ideological forces intent on subverting the whole region and-

Q: - justifying the murder of priests and labor organizers because their vision of hope for the poor clashed with the interests of the plutocracy? Some were executed face down in the mud.

A: So what?

Q: - rationalizing the rape and slaughter of nuns who taught children how to read and write? Justifying the "disappearance" of thousands of civilians? Validating the massacre of 900 peasants in El Mozote, and gunning down an archbishop and six Jesuit priests who championed the powerless against the powerful?

A: I don't care if they were the pope. War makes titles, status or celebrity quite irrelevant. They were communists. All the damned lot. They had to be neutralized.

Q: - or throwing people out of helicopters several thousand feet above ground? Or using private houses as detention and torture chambers?

A: Yes, yes, yes. Madness! No one pretends that war is pretty. There was no other way. The main moral question is, what was the right thing to do under the circumstance, not who did it, or how. Many praiseworthy policies are promoted for morally dubious reasons, and many pernicious policies are advanced with the best of intentions.

Q: Good intentions and an unshakable conviction in the morality of a cause do not make such a cause moral, do they?

A: Philosophers must decide, not soldiers. Ultimately, we must ask to what extent the military actions of a debtor nation are driven by the policies and objectives of its creditor.

Q: A nation that depends on the U.S. for survival can never be free - is that what you're saying?

A: It's one way of putting it.

Q: Is there democracy in Central America today?

A: No. What we have are amorphous societies run by improvisation, governments that have no national conscience, no doctrine, no vision, no plan. They have lost sight of the priorities. When everything is important, nothing gets done.


Nuñez sees signs of conspiracy "as vast and nefarious" as the ones that set fire to the region in the 1980s. His is an imported and stubbornly articulated minority view, not just the nostalgic musings of an old warrior. He finds comfort in the notion that the men whose orders he and fellow SOA alumni issued are at large, some chairing large corporations, others basking like sated iguanas, their cozy retirement assured by those they served.

Nuñez also delights in the irony that the punishment called for by some members of Congress for convicted war criminals may never be meted out. In the tug-of-war of accusations and counter-accusations, prosecution of SOA alumni for war crimes, he believes, would "backfire and bring swift and unwelcome scrutiny on the school, U.S. intelligence services and the Pentagon."

Characteristically, the Pentagon has yet to apologize. Nor is the SOA eager to comment. Nonplused by recurring disclosures, it steadfastly rejects any hint of wrongdoing. It continues to cling to a revisionist rendering of reality that goes beyond selective amnesia. I call it exculpation by vehement denial.


Postscript

A news story published in October reveals the clandestine life and arrest in Los Angeles of a former SOA-trained Salvadoran army officer, sub-Lt. Gonzalo Guevarra Cerritos, convicted of murdering six Jesuits, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter in 1989.

The hypocrisy of U.S. authorities is troubling - claiming that they are investigating human rights violations. Fact is, the U.S. engineered these atrocities and in some cases participated in them.

Guevarra is small fry and will probably be paid off to shut up about the details of the murders, then offered sanctuary in some safe haven where thugs are retired with all the comforts of home.

So much for the "democratization" of Latin America.

Willy E. Gutman of Tehachapi is a veteran journalist on assignment in Central America since 1991. His column reflects his own views, and not necessarily those of The Signal.

View the original article: http://www.the-signal.com/?module=displaystory&story_id=45573&format=html



Justice will not be done because in order to interrogate these killers, the purpose of the SOA and the US gov would be uncovered. People would find out that the US is not in any way a democracy! Nor does it foster democracies.

In Defence of Carter

I am taking the liberty of sticking in someone else's letter here for all to read. Ask Pytho about the editorial changes that were made.

More Diverse Opinions Needed in Carter Debate

To the editor:
It is only too trite that the editorial page of the Wheel has featured articles from Jews written in support of Israel and articles from Muslims taking the side of Jimmy Carter, "Carter Under Fire" (Jan. 30). Isn't it time for a perspective-building role reversal in this mother of all polemics?

I used to be more supportive of Israel until I decided to research Israeli policy a bit more. It seems to me that Carter is mostly right in his controversial little book, and many of the points are ripe for discussion among an American audience.

Life in the West Bank is considerably worse than life in Israel. Sustaining this condition for decades based upon an intransigent security doctrine does not comport with international standards.

Unfortunately, most of the criticism of Carter, including Kenneth Stein's, the William E. Schatten Professor of Contemporary Middle Eastern History and Israeli Studies, and the Wheel's own, are unfair. They forfeit substance for personal attack, hearsay, demagoguery and other false devices.

For example, "an avalanche of criticism" leaves out any mention of his many supporters and your remarks about the "three most prominent colleagues" are similarly misleading. Nor is the suggestion accurate that Carter, who had the integrity to retract one line in the book, is on the run or discredited - to the contrary - Carter has defended his position with great poise and sensitivity.

Your suggestion that Carter is a Holocaust denier is downright irresponsible. You paraphrased Stein's claim that the book is "rife with factual inaccuracies," but his recent published clarification was mostly hot air, except for a couple of jabs where he discusses Carter's treatment of Palestinian terrorism. But the facts concerning Israel's occupation of the West Bank do stand up to scrutiny, I'm afraid, and as Israel's most influential partner, the attitudes of the United States do matter.