Martin, Martin before writing engage brain please ...
U.S. Government Hid Presence of U.S. Advisor in El Mozote Massacre, Expert Says | El Faro |
A 2018 documentary on the Dutch television network Zembla identified Hazelwood as having inside knowledge of the plot of Coronel Mario Reyes Mena to murder four Dutch journalists in 1982.
[The ambush and murder of the four Dutch journalists was preplanned and intended to murder them. - Oui]
Karl suggests that the same could have been true in the case of El Mozote, especially when taking into account the deep trust, according to reports, that Hazelwood and Monterrosa shared.
Karl's sworn testimony is part of the discovery phase of the El Mozote trial, and will form the basis of evidence presented during the trial. She first traveled to El Salvador in 1981, and has since conducted research on human rights violations during the Salvadoran civil war through official documents, academic work, and direct interviews. Over the past four decades, she has interviewed dozens of political, social, and military figures, from across the political spectrum, who were central to the war -- from Major Roberto D'Aubuisson to members of the guerrilla, also including U.S. diplomats and military officers intimately involved in the country's affairs in recent decades.
She's also an expert on the 12,000 documents on the El Mozote massacre written by civil society groups, international human rights organizations, and the United States and Salvadoran governments. "I think I've read them all," said. In recent years she has also offered testimony in other major cases against civil war abuses: the U.S. trial of Captain Saravia for the murder of Archbishop Óscar Romero; the Jesuit massacre case in Spain; and the U.S. trials of former defense ministers Guillermo García, the highest-ranking official accused in the Mozote case, and Eugenio Vides Casanova for torture.
[...]
... in the second portion of her expert testimony, Karl opened by discussing the role of clandestine U.S. weapons, funding, and disgruntled Vietnam veterans working as mercenaries in El Salvador -- particularly with the Atlacatl Battalion -- to 'fight communism.'
As the C.I.A. and military attachés began to fear a guerrilla victory over the Armed Forces, they ramped up clandestine support for the Battalion, Karl elaborated. 'It was all under the table, as well as the financing,' said Karl. 'The mercenaries were also hard-liners in their way of thinking. The commandos talked about the need to kill civilians, an idea not in the periphery but shared by the mercenaries.'
In an interview given in 2019, Neier told Karl that Elliot Abrams, then Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, complained to him about a January 11, 1982 New York Times article written by Raymond Bonner, in which he described the participation of an American advisor in a torture session that took place in El Salvador. Abrams denied that there was an advisor at the torture session, but he said to Neier, "I'd like to be able to say the same about El Mozote."
January 11, 1982 New York Times article written by Raymond Bonner, in which he described the participation of an American advisor in a torture session that took place in El Salvador.
U.S. Advisers Saw 'Torture Class,' Salvadoran Says
By Raymond Bonner
The New York Times, Monday, January 11, 1982.
MEXICO CITY -- A 21-year-old who asserts that he is a former Salvadoran soldier says that United States military advisers were present at two "training sessions" early last year when two suspected guerrillas were tortured by Salvadoran Army instructors.
In a series of interviews, the young man, Carlos Antoni Gómez Montano, said the men that he described as Americans attended the sessions as observers and did not take part in the torture. But he said they made no apparent effort to stop or protest the activity, in which a 17-year-old youth and a 13-year-old girl were tortured. He said they were subsequently killed, but not in the presence of the American advisers. Their bodies, he said, were dumped on a street in San Salvador.
Mr. Gómez, who asserted that he fled from his paratroop unit at the Ilopango Air force Base outside San Salvador in May, said he had recognized the Americans as part of a group of United States military advisers who arrived in El Salvador a few days earlier.
The sessions, which he said were known as "torture classes," took place late last January, he added.
CIA In Era of Operation Mockingbird
'Times' Spreads Dubious El Salvador Story | CIA Archives |
But U.S. Won't Counter
The U.S. Embassy in El Salvador cabled the State Department on January 25 asking that the "widest possible attention" [??? wtf] be focused on "a totally false article" in the January 11 New York Times alleging that American military advisers in that country observed torture of two suspected guerillas. The cable noted that Radio Moscow had exploited the story in "vicious" anti-American propaganda broadcasts beamed to Latin America. Washington should expose "this blatant example of inaccurate news reporting on Salvador and its use by the left to attempt to associate US assistance with official terrorism and repression," the cable said.
[...]
A photograph was published with the story which showed "Some of the 60 Salvadoran soldiers who arrived yesterday at Pope Air Force Base, N.C., to begin 10 weeks of training at Fort Bragg. An infantry battalion of 1,000 enlisted men and more than 500 junior officers will be trained there."
...
Just one day after the story appeared, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) monitored a Radio Moscow broadcast which used the Times as its source for the charge that "gringo military advisers who are, in fact, CIA executioners," had actually participated in the "torture sessions." Radio Moscow claimed that some of the Salvadorans who had come to the U.S. for military training were "specially chosen" by the CIA and Pentagon to learn "the art of torture" and "how to set up prison and concentration camps."
"Even a cursory reading of the January 11 article raises two questions," the cable said. "How could the NYT publish so prominently such a condemnatory article by a Salvadoran army deserter without checking the facts on the ground?"[the U.S. military welcomes journalists on the ground in the battle zone - ☹] A second and even more serious question has to do with the timing of the release of the story which itself was not dated.
30 Years Ago Today in El Salvador, US-Trained Soldiers Murdered 6 Priests in Cold Blood | Jacobin - 16 Nov. 2019 |
On November 16, 1989, six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter were murdered in their residence on the campus of the Jesuit Central American University (UCA) in San Salvador, El Salvador. Thirty years later, the massacre remains emblematic of the indiscriminate savagery exercised by the servants of the Salvadoran ruling class, the impunity they enjoy, and the devastating legacies of US intervention in the region.
The Jesuit murders drew international outcry, but the victims were only eight of some seventy-five thousand killed and ten thousand more disappeared during the twelve-year civil war (1980-1992). Formally, the conflict pitted the US-backed military dictatorship against the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) leftist guerillas. But the Salvadoran state tortured and slaughtered civilians with abandon. At the war's close, a 1993 United Nations Truth Commission report attributed only 5 percent of the bloodshed to the insurgents. The regime and its paramilitaries bore responsibility for the vast majority of the conflict's deaths, disappearances, and displacements.
SOA Watch marks 25th year of speaking out against 'School of Assassins' | National Catholic Reporter - 18 Nov. 2014 |
For a quarter of a century, the government has tried to silence them. It's beaten them, spied on them, infiltrated their ranks, denied them permits, arrested them, strip-searched them, handed them steep fines and maximum sentences.
And yet they keep speaking out -- determined to shut the doors of a secretive U.S. combat school for Latin American soldiers and to keep alive the memories of those tortured and killed by its graduates.
This November marks the 25th year that SOA Watch -- a human rights group founded by Roy Bourgeois -- has organized demonstrations outside Fort Benning, Ga., home of the U.S. Army's controversial School of the Americas, known since 2001 as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.
The annual events began on Nov. 16, 1990, on the first anniversary of the murders of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter in El Salvador -- murders carried out by SOA-trained officers.
This year, as in so many years past, the government tried to disrupt the Nov. 21-23 protest, which features the leader of an association of families of the disappeared in Colombia, along with a Jesuit priest who's received death threats for his human rights work in Honduras.
The story of how the government has tried to silence the school's critics is also the story of how SOA-trained officers have silenced its victims forever, from international figures like Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero to tens of thousands of nameless Latin Americans, a huge percentage of them women and children.
While the first SOA demonstration came on the first anniversary of the Jesuit massacre, the first protest against the U.S. training of Salvadoran troops at Fort Benning harkens back to 1983, when the School of the Americas was still located in Panama and coming under increasing fire. The Panamanian newspaper La Prensa dubbed it the "School of Assassins," while Panamanian President Jorge Illueca called it "the biggest base for destabilization in Latin America."
The U.S. Army brass were quietly contemplating moving the school to Georgia in 1984 and, as a trial run, had flown some 525 Salvadoran soldiers there for training in the summer of 1983.
When Bourgeois, then a Maryknoll priest, learned of the training on U.S. soil, he headed to Georgia to organize protests, although he knew nothing about SOA then.
But as a former naval officer and Vietnam veteran, Bourgeois knew firsthand what the training meant. And he knew that the Salvadoran military had been behind the 1980 murders of Romero and four U.S. churchwomen, two of whom were friends and fellow Maryknollers, Srs. Ita Ford and Maura Clarke.
After weeks of protesting to no avail, Bourgeois and two friends -- Oblate Fr. Larry Rosebaugh and Linda Ventimiglia -- devised a plan to speak directly to the Salvadorans. They sneaked onto the base in military uniforms, climbed a pine tree near the Salvadoran barracks, and broadcast a recording of Romero's last homily, in which he urged members of the Salvadoran military not to obey orders to kill.
As the startled Salvadorans heard the dead bishop's voice booming from the treetops in the middle of the night, military police with dogs and M-16s swarmed under the tree, cursing and threatening to shoot down the three trespassers. The homily played on and on before the MPs got them down, strip-searching Rosebaugh, gagging Ventimiglia, and striking Bourgeois from behind and throwing him against a tree.
They were all given maximum sentences by U.S. District Court Judge J. Robert Elliott, known for halting marches led by Martin Luther King Jr. and for overturning the conviction of Lt. William Calley for murdering 22 unarmed Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai massacre.
Mr. Longman, I've always respected you and valued your insight in domestic issues of the U.S. ... often unparalleled ... you lost some respect and certainly I will not follow you on "knowledge" on foreign policy ... just horrible what you produced this week. ☹
Just about impossible to grab and link any of your X-Twitter messages.
The Judge: A Predictable Outcome in a Segregationist's Courtroom | Emory University |
'I sent them a good boy and they made him a murderer' | Pulitzer Prize |
The My Lai story, as readers experienced it when it was first published in 1969.
In the fall of 1969, a friend with a source in the military called a part-time political columnist for The Village Voice with a tip: a U.S. soldier was being court-martialed for leading a massacre of Vietnamese civilians, and the Army didn't want it reported. The columnist, Geoffrey Cowan, decided to pass the tip on.
On Oct. 22, he called Seymour M. Hersh, a 32-year-old freelancer who had quit his wire service job and served the previous winter as press secretary in Sen. Eugene McCarthy's insurgent presidential campaign. Hersh decided to give the story a go.
From a dingy office in Washington he made more than two dozen calls before someone gave him a sketchy account of what had happened. He called Fort Benning in rural Georgia, where he believed the accused officer was being held. A public affairs officer there referred him to a short piece buried in the Sept. 7 New York Times. From this Hersh learned that Lt. William L. Calley was being held for murdering an unspecified number of Vietnamese civilians in 1968.
Hersh found Calley's lawyer and flew to Salt Lake City to interview him. He traveled to Fort Benning and prowled the base until he found Calley.
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My Lai massacre remembered in Vietnam | Al Jazeera English !
Papal document challenges Catholic Universities
Released Sept. 25 under the title Ex Corde Ecclesiae or from the Heart of the Church was hailed by Catholic higher academic leaders in the U.S.
Academic freedom
[...]
In article the photo of Ft. Benning protest was included.
Bill Barnett, center, takes the blood pressure of David Scott of Detroit Sept. 27, 1990, at Fort Benning, Ga., as Scott and other hunger strikers continue their protest begun Sept. 3 to end U.S. training of Salvadoran troops. (AP/Charles Kelly)
Ex Corde Ecclesiae | John Paul II - Vatican |
Rome August 15, 1990 -- It is the honour and responsibility of a Catholic University to consecrate itself without reserve to the cause of truth. This is its way of serving at one and the same time both the dignity of man and the good of the Church, which has "an intimate conviction that truth is (its) real ally ... and that knowledge and reason are sure ministers to faith". Without in any way neglecting the acquisition of useful knowledge, a Catholic University is distinguished by its free search for the whole truth about nature, man and God.
The present age is in urgent need of this kind of disinterested service, namely of proclaiming the meaning of truth, that fundamental value without which freedom, justice and human dignity are extinguished.
By means of a kind of universal humanism a Catholic University is completely dedicated to the research of all aspects of truth in their essential connection with the supreme Truth, who is God. It does this without fear but rather with enthusiasm, dedicating itself to every path of knowledge, aware of being preceded by him who is "the Way, the Truth, and the Life", the Logos, whose Spirit of intelligence and love enables the human person with his or her own intelligence to find the ultimate reality of which he is the source and end and who alone is capable of giving fully that Wisdom without which the future of the world would be in danger.
The Bishops of the U.S. have become ultra-conservative on a path of its own doom.
Catholic universities and colleges continue to ignore Ex Corde Ecclesiae | 17 march 2022 |
The 2012 USCCB report ignored Notre Dame's providing the highest honors to pro-abortion politicians including President Barack Obama and then-Vice-President Joe Biden. Notre Dame's President John Jenkins rejected any pretence of "collaboration" with the presiding bishop, the now-deceased Bishop John D'Arcy, who publicly pleaded with him to reverse the decision to honor President Obama with an Honorary Degree at Commencement. The report also ignored Georgetown faculty's lobbying for abortion and same-sex "marriage", and its student pro-abortion club Hoyas for Choice. And it ignored Notre Dame's "Coming Out Closets" event celebrating the GLBTQ community on campus. It also ignored the many Catholic universities with close ties to Planned Parenthood--the largest abortion provider in the country.
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After outcry, SOA Watch receives new permit proposal for annual protest | 21 Aug. 2014 |
The city of Columbus, Ga., facing growing public opposition to its attempt to restrict the dimensions and location of the SOA Watch annual demonstration at Fort Benning, Ga., has issued a new proposal that would permit a return to the traditional site. The new proposal also apparently lifts the limit on the number of people allowed to participate.
The city has faced an outpouring of public opposition to the restrictions, announced earlier in the summer, including a letter signed by 12 members of Congress arguing for reinstatement of the broader permit granted in past years.
Lawyers for the city in a letter to SOA Watch said city authorities are now willing to allow the demonstration to return to its usual site along Fort Benning Road, permitting activists to use two of four lanes leading up to the main gate. In prior years, the city closed the street and allowed use of the entire roadway.
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2013 SOA Watch protest at Fort Benning
Did the USSR exploit the NY Times article? Of course, an easy header to score with a perfect assist from US State Department for trashing the content and the Pentagon doesn't know better, remained silent as it was policy for decades past and more decades to come. Damn war criminals ... cost lasts for generations to come.
WHO TO BLAME FOR UNDERMINING HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE UN CHARTER?
The long history of domestic and foreign policy Human Rights abuse ... what New World Order?
Hoover's FBI: Patriotism, Nationalism, MAGA, Fascism | 6 Sept. 2024 |
