October 2, 2002

By A.C. Thompson

THE UNITED STATES' terrorist training camp is located on the grounds of Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia. It has churned out some world-class thugs: Panamanian dictator-drug dealer Manuel Noriega, Salvadoran death-squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson, the assassins of El Salvador's Archbishop Oscar Romero, and Peruvian soldiers implicated in the early 1990s murder of nine college students and a professor.

This Army-run training camp, until recently called the School of the Americas, teaches counterinsurgency tactics to Latin American soldiers. In the 1980s and '90s those tactics – as the Washington Post discovered in 1996 – included al-Qaeda-esque practices such as execution, torture, false imprisonment, and blackmail.

Conscious of the school's image problem, the Army last year rebranded it the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation and promoted new courses in human rights and democracy. "We believe that our human rights instruction is among the best offered by military educational institutions anywhere in the hemisphere," reads a statement on the school's Web site.

For the past 12 years Father Roy Bourgeois, who lives in a small apartment outside the gates of the fort, has led a grassroots campaign to shutter the school. We spoke to Bourgeois, who heads a small group called School of the Americas Watch, while he was in the Bay Area last week for a series of speaking engagements.

If Bourgeois weren't a priest he'd make a great Hollywood publicist – he's kept the press, which typically loses interest in an issue in a matter of days, covering the terror school for more than a decade. "It is so hard to work with mainstream media – that's been the biggest challenge of all," Bourgeois said in his soft Louisiana patois. "The reporters say, 'We covered that last year. We've done that story.'"

Still Bourgeois has proved an expert media strategist. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times have both called for the academy's closure in editorials. ("An institution so clearly out of tune with American values and so stubbornly immune to reform should be shut down without further delay," said the nation's paper of record.) Newsweek and most of the TV networks have run scathing stories.

Last year when Sister Dorothy Hennessey, an 88-year-old nun, was arrested for trespassing while protesting at Fort Benning, Bourgeois and his group played the human-interest card to full effect. "They made a mistake when they sent Sister Dorothy to prison for six months," Bourgeois said, laughing. "She was on Good Morning America before she went in. The New York Times did a big story. We'd never received that much print."

Bourgeois has also harnessed the media's obsession with celebrity. In 1999 actor Martin Sheen joined in a faux-funeral procession at the base – Sheen was well-positioned for the cameras at the front of the march – grabbing more headlines.

There are some angles, however, that haven't garnered much coverage. One is the story of Carlos Mauricio, a Salvadoran native who now lives in San Francisco and teaches at Balboa High School. Mauricio was tortured for nearly two weeks in 1983 at the direction of Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, then director-general of the Salvadoran National Guard. Vides Casanova was a guest speaker at the school in the 1980s. In August, Mauricio and two other torture victims won a $54 million civil judgment against Vides Casanova and another general trained at the school. "I was waiting for that day for years," Mauricio explained. "Because in Salvador right now it's impossible to bring them to tribunal."

The Colombia connection also hasn't received the attention it deserves. With the country mired in a ghastly civil war, the school has been training predominantly Colombian troops in recent years. Many of those soldiers have gone on to play starring roles in Colombian death squads, according to Human Rights Watch reports. "The soldiers trained at this school work very, very closely with the paramilitary forces," Bourgeois contended .

And with Iraq dominating the news, few journalists have noticed this: H.R. 1810, a congressional bill introduced by Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) that would close the school, is expected to die this term without a vote. That's terrorism American-style.