School of the Americas critic - retired U.S. Army Major Joseph A. Blair

Progressive, The, July, 1997 by Barbara Jentzsch

Washington, D.C.

Joseph A. Blair is a retired U.S. Army major. He taught at the School of the Americas and was a high-level officer in the CIA-led Operation Phoenix program in Vietnam (which resulted in the deaths of more than 40,000 Vietnamese). Blair retired in 1989. In 1993, he publicly criticized the school and called for its closure. Since then, he has been a vocal opponent of the School of the Americas and of U.S. foreign and military policy.

Since 1946, the School of the Americas has instructed Latin American military officers in the art of counter-insurgency warfare.

Graduates include Panamanian dictator, drug dealer, and CIA asset Manuel Noriega; CIA asset Roberto D'Aubuisson (who ordered the,murder of El Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero and was a chief Salvadoran death-squad leader), Colonel Julio Alpirez of Guatemala, responsible for the torture and murder of Guatemalans and U.S. citizens; the soldiers who murdered six Jesuit priests and two women in El Salvador; the perpetrators of the El Mozote massacre and the 1980 rape-murders of U.S. churchwomen in El Salvador. The list still grows.

Blair confirms that torture was taught at the School of the Americas.

"I sat next to Major Victor Thiess who created and taught the entire course, which included seven torture manuals and 382 hours of instruction," Blair recalls. "He taught primarily using manuals which we used during the Vietnam War in our intelligence-gathering techniques. The techniques included murder, assassination, torture, extortion, false imprisonment."

During the Carter Administration, Blair says, the government made a decision to stop using those techniques. But the School of the Americas kept on supplying Latin Americans with "recommendations to use techniques and follow procedures that are clear violations of human rights."

The school's torture lessons live on. "Once you learn it in the school, you retain it for life," Blair says. "There is no message from the U.S. Army that's going to say: `What we told you was a good technique ten years ago is no longer a good technique. You should stop doing it.'"

Blair cites the torture manuals the U.S. government produced and then decades later ordered retrieved and destroyed.

"Literally thousands of those manuals were passed out," he says. "The officers who ran the intelligence courses used lesson plans that included the worst materials contained in the seven manuals. Now they say that there were only eighteen to twenty passages in those manuals in clear violation of U.S. law. In fact, those same passages were at the heart of the intelligence instruction."

Blair scoffs at the claim that the School of the Americas is teaching human rights.

"When I was there, a general who was an officer in the dictatorship of General Pinochet of Chile taught about four hours of human rights," he says. "It was a joke for fifty or sixty Latin American officers to sit in a class and have someone from Chile preach to them about how they should be concerned about human rights in their own country. That four hours has now been expanded to twelve where they sit in a class and discuss the My Lai Massacre, the Geneva Convention, and the Hague convention."

Blair says that students who took part in massacres were allowed to come back to the school.

"In 1994, the U.S. State Department issued a directive that no Latin American military member could attend the School of the Americas if they had a history of known human-rights abuses," he says. "But to this day, three years later, the government has not released such a list. And still, the School of the Americas press office routinely makes public statements that only one-half of 1 percent of graduates have even been involved in humanrights abuses. They do not present any documentation."

Joseph Kennedy, Democratic Representative from Massachusetts, has introduced a bill, cosponsored by thirty-eight other House members, to shut down the School of the Americas. For more information, contact the School of the Americas Watch at 1719 Irving St. N.W., Washington, DC 20010-2612, (202) 234-3440; or check out the group's web site at:http://www.derechos.org/soaw/.