U.S. INSTRUCTED LATINS ON EXECUTIONS, TORTURE MANUALS USED
1982- 91, PENTAGON REVEALS
Dana Priest Washington
Post Staff Writer September 21, 1996; Page A1
U.S. Army intelligence manuals used to train Latin American
military officers at an Army school from 1982 to 1991 advocated
executions, torture, blackmail and other forms of coercion
against insurgents, Pentagon documents released yesterday show.
Used in courses at the U.S. Army's School of the Americas, the
manual says that to recruit and control informants,
counterintelligence agents could use "fear, payment of bounties
for enemy dead, beatings, false imprisonment, executions and the
use of truth serum," according to a secret Defense Department
summary of the manuals compiled during a 1992 investigation of the
instructional material and also released yesterday.
A summary of the investigation and four pages of brief,
translated excerpts from the seven Spanish-language manuals were
released last night by the Defense Department, which recently has
taken to making controversial information available in the
evenings, after the deadlines of the prime-time network television
news programs.
The Army School of the Americas, long located in Panama but
moved in 1984 to Fort Benning, Ga., has trained nearly 60,000
military and police officers from Latin America and the United
States since 1946.
Its graduates have included some of the region's most
notorious human rights abusers, among them Roberto D'Aubuisson,
the leader of El Salvador's right-wing death squads; 19 Salvadoran
soldiers linked to the 1989 assassination of six Jesuit priests;
Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, the deposed Panamanian strongman; six
Peruvian officers linked to killings of students and a professor;
and Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, a Guatemalan officer implicated in
the death of an American innkeeper living in
The Defense Department said the school's curriculum now
includes mandatory human rights training and it is an effective
way to help promote military professionalism in a region where
that concept is still nascent.
"The problem was discovered in 1992, properly reported and
fixed," said Lt. Col. Arne Owens, a Pentagon spokesman. "There
have been a lot of great changes at the School of the Americas."
When reports of the 1992 investigation surfaced this year
during a congressional inquiry into the CIA's activities in
Guatemala, spokesmen for the school denied the manuals advocated
such extreme methods of operation, which were in violation of Army
policy and law at the time they were in use.
The 1992 investigation concluded the inclusion of the
methods was the result of bureaucratic oversight. "It is
incredible that the use . . . since 1982 . . . evaded the
established system of doctrinal controls," said the report of the
investigation, conducted by the office of the assistant to the
secretary of defense for intelligence oversight. "Nevertheless, we
could find no evidence that this was a deliberate and orchestrated
attempt to violate DoD or Army policies."
The manuals were compiled by Army intelligence officials
using "outdated instructional material without the required
doctrinal approval" from the Army Intelligence School, the
investigation report said.
The material was based, in part, on training instructions
used in the 1960s by the Army's Foreign Intelligence Assistance
Program, entitled "Project X." The 1992 investigation also found
the manual was distributed to thousands of military officers from
11 South and Central American countries, including Guatemala, El
Salvador, Honduras and Panama, where the U.S. military was heavily
involved in
counterinsurgency.
One manual, entitled "Handling of Sources," also "discloses
classified {informant} methodology that could compromise Army
clandestine intelligence modus operandi," the 1992 investigation
found. Another manual, entitled "Counterintelligence," contained
"sensitive Army counterintelligence tactics, techniques and
procedures."
The Defense Department yesterday said the 1992
investigators found two dozen objectionable passages among the
1,169 pages of instruction. For instance, the manual entitled
"Handling of Sources" says, "The CI {counterintelligence} agent
could cause the arrest of the employees {informants} parents,
imprison the employee or give him a beating" to coerce
cooperation.
On several occasions it uses the words "neutralization" or
"neutralizing," which were commonly used at the time as euphemisms
for execution or destruction, a Pentagon official said.
The manual on "Terrorism and the Urban Guerrilla" says that
"another function of the CI agents is recommending CI targets for
neutralizing. The CI targets can include personalities,
installations, organizations, documents and materials . . . the
personality targets prove to be valuable sources of intelligence.
Some examples of these targets are governmental officials,
political leaders, and members of the infrastructure."
The Defense Department continues to try to collect the
manuals but, as the 1992 investigation noted, "due to incomplete
records, retrieval of all copies is doubtful."
Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II (D-Mass.), an advocate of closing
the school, said in a statement last night that the manuals "show
what we have suspected all along, that taxpayers' money has been
used for physical abuse." Kennedy said, "The School of the
Americas, a Cold War relic, should be shut down."
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