You know, I actually had respect for you until you pulled that shit, John. Go fuck yourself.
I apologize, Olenzero- that line was beyond the bounds, and I am sorry that I said it.
John, it’s the Pit. Cut yourself some slack.
Olent, what he said actually was a logical conclusion to draw from what you said. Don’t take it so personally.
Guin, I don’t quite grasp what that quote you provided has to do with the School of the Americas. The Pinknoiz site simply refers to it as “[o]ne of the CIA’s illegal training manuals for the contras”. What does a CIA training manual have to do with a U.S. Army training facility?
I’m looking at the SOA manuals on the first site you provided, and there’s a lot of material, but I haven’t found anything about torture yet.
Guin - Did you have a love affair with your Latin American Studies professor by chance? He seems to have left quite an impression on you.
I swear, you could hijack a recipe-swapping thread in MPSIMS into “American imperialist dogs created monsters in Latin America.”
Does this jukebox play any other songs? I’m all salsa-ed out.
(Although I applaud you for finally creating a thread for it.)
Fuck you. That was vile.
So, in other words, I can’t have admiration for someone, without fucking them?
Get bent.
Guin- You are correct. My opening question was inappropriate, even if this is the Pit, and I apologize for it.
I stand by the rest, though. So your “fuck you” may still apply.
Aha! I found a part where they talk about torture.
My translation:
A little further down, it says,
My translation:
So apparently the SOA does teach about torture, specifically by telling you never to employ it. More as I find out more.
Here’s another part about torture. Same page, just slightly below the last paragraph I translated.
My translation:
Appology accepted, Milo.
I will admit that with my two favorite professors, I DO have a tendency towards hero worship.
I guess it just ticks me off-since that time Wildest Bill accused me of trading “favors” with my Russian professor so I could get a ride to class.
D’oh! The last sentence should say, “Nevertheless, for the threat of violence to take effect, the authority must apply violence to justify his threats.”
Apology accepted, John, and vitriol retracted.
dropzone - Firstly, if he had said
or something along those lines, the worst I probably would have done is a :rolleyes: and gone into the rebuttal you’ll find below. Unfortunately, he used a much more precise term - my name - and thus passed over into the realm of what most scholarly rhetoricians (is that a word?) call a “cheap shot”. I don’t take kindly to those, and it may happen that I use invective rather than reason to call someone out on it.
End of story. Incident forgotten.
Now - to the logic of the argument. Having a penis and testicles does not make a man a rapist, or even a potential rapist. No more than possession of a gun makes someone a soldier or a terrorist.
Rapists come about because of a specific set of psychological and emotional factors, among which are being brought up to view women as inferior, an unhealthy prioritization of sex as a goal in personal relationships, and finally an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness such that desperation to exert any sort of power becomes a goal. In this last point I’d argue terrorists and rapists have something very much in common.
Soldiers and terrorists come about because they have been trained in the mindset of war and have been taught to seek out an enemy to fight. Who is defined as an enemy depends on the circumstances the soldier finds himself in. Is he in an army led by a military dictator supported by a larger country in the region? Then the enemy is the “insurgency”, whether it be actively fighting elements or merely currents of support for the opposition. Therefore the population must be terrorized into fearing to show that support, and the leaders - or most vocal proponents - of the opposition must be silenced.
Through the Monroe Doctrine, the United States has claimed exclusive right to protect its interests in the Western Hemisphere, and to take any measures it deems necessary to achieve that purpose. Thus it will back any government that appears to support US interests, and will train representatives of the military to become more effective in its actions. Opposition to these governments is thus opposition to US interests, and such opposition must be defeated.
As others have stated in their arguments, this is not knee-jerk anti-Americanism, nor do I support the “polar opposite” embodied in the enemy of the month. If another country were the tallest poppy in the field - England, Russia, hell, even Sweden if they’d been successful in building an empire - they would be acting the same way. It’s the logic of the capitalist system itself rather than any cultural or political reflection of the country at the controls.
Am I missing something here? It seems to me an accurate summation of this paragraph would be “Torture is against the Geneva Convention, but torture involves force, and force must be used to elicit cooperation from the source.” (Source of what, by the way?)
Is this not the same thing as saying torture should be used?
FWIW…
The barracks I lived in while stationed in Homestead, FL, was across the way from the “Inter-American Air Force Academy”. It held a couple of hundred (mostly young, under 25 or so) enlisted airman from nearly all OAS countries. Columbia, Mexico, Panama, El Salvador, you name it. The purpose of IAAFA was not, as some believe, to breed dictators, but to make people from different countries work together to keep them from growing up and killing each other.
Do you really think innocent people go into the WHISC, and come out brainwashed into terrorists (by being “trained in the mindset of war”)?
It’s interesting that the WTC terrorists didn’t get much of a chance to apply military training in this act. Since they were just armed with box cutters and knives, they could have trained at a martial arts school in just about any town in the US.
What does capitalism have to do with this? “Building an empire” sounds more like what the Soviet Union was trying to in eastern Europe than the United States in South America.
Arjuna34
What the fuck?
[sub]Ignoring of my actual views on the subject (which are a whole three pages unto themselves)…[/sub]
God forbid anybody opposed to this “war”–or a pacifist in general–speak out. That would be terrible; all those people expressing their political views openly…
That was clearly not meant, since two paragraphs up it clearly said “Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to obtain informants’ cooperation for interrogation.” This paragraph is describing torture, not saying it should be used.
A “source” is a person who is a source of information, I believe.
But you don’t need much training to kill civilians. If the School of Americas did not exist, wouldn’t those soldiers inclined to kill civilians still have done so? Would perhaps more have done so because they were never taught by the SOA that force against a population is ineffective?
One of my karate instructor’s students killed his wife and then himself. Is my instructor a terrorist? We were taught to use our art only in self-defense, but under your logic, is my instructor not responsible?
I’m sorry, but I can’t help but feel that the far left looks fairly hard for crimes to place upon the US. The motivation for such action I cannot discern and it as mysterious to me as the self abusive whipping rites of the ancient Flagellants.
We’re evil!
SMACK!
EVIIIIILLL!
SMACK!
The US certainly has made mistakes, I see no reason to invent new ones to place upon it.
…Or at least a wire report. Here are excerpts from an AP article dated May 19, 2000 and entitled, “House votes to reform rather than close School of the Americas.”
No. What they are saying in this paragraph is that force and torture are against the GC. Futher, they say that you shouldn’t use THREATS of force or violence because in order for such a threat to be effective, it must be carried out.
Threatening torture or violence backs you into a corner which you’ll have to violate the GC to get out of.