Protest the School of Assassins
November 17, 18 & 19
Fort Benning - Columbus, GA
For many people, SOA stands for the "School of Assassins." The annual November date for confronting the SOA was chosen to commemorate six Jesuit priests and their housekeeper, massacred on that day by a U.S.-trained death squad in El Salvador.
The bloody business of the School of the Americas -- training the officer corps of Central and South American governments in the methodology of torture and assassination of political adversaries -- reveals that U.S. military strategy is not just about armed confrontation with other governments around the world. The core curriculum of the SOA is organized terror aimed at non-combatant populations. The death squads in El Salvador, Guatemala, Columbia and Peru provide decades of horrible examples of that fact, and the ties between SOA and some of the most heinous political assassinations in recent years are well documented by SOA Watch.
What is not so well documented is the importance of this curriculum to U.S. military planners who contemplate exercising some of these same methods on political dissent at home.
In the past several years, especially, all of the Armed Services have been undergoing intense training to take military actions against the population of the United States. Consider these examples:
In January 1999 the New York Times reported that "The Pentagon has decided to ask President Clinton for the power to appoint a military leader for the continental U.S." who would direct domestic military operations.
In March, 1999, Paratroopers from Fort Benning were part of special operations exercise that invaded Calhoun County, Alabama, in what Army spokesmen described as "real-world missions ... in environments unfamiliar to our soldiers." Residents reported machine gun fire and explosions, as power went out in several neighborhoods.
In 1998 and again in 1999, the military has staged war games in the San Francisco Bay Area with rather obvious intent. In March 1999, the Marines staged three days of "Urban Warrior" war games, in Oakland, California, in order to learn how to "gain leverage in establishing control over the urban environment" with tactics "designed to collapse essential functions." The military spokesman for that operation was explicit -- "We're doing it so we can figure out how to do urban warfare."
In December 1999, the National Guard is deployed in and around Seattle to contain demonstrations against the World Trade Organization, under conditions of martial law.
"The future urban center will contain a mixed population ranging from the rich elite to the poor and disenfranchised ... the smallest tilt of unfavorable circumstance might be enough to instigate starvation, disease, social foment, cultural unrest, or other forms of urban violence."
- Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr., commandant U.S. Army War College
These preparations are a logical amplification to the more 'civilian' forms of repression: the fact that 90% of cities and towns with populations above 50,000 have military-style SWAT squads; the fact that official police spy operations increase in number every year (according to FBI statistics); the fact that street demonstrations were met with rubber bullets in Los Angeles and Seattle; the fact that the United States now leads the world in number of citizens in jail and with over 3,600 people on death row, mostly people of color.
Especially targeted by today's domestic repressive apparatus are Black and Latino youth, immigrants and the urban poor. But the list of "enemies of the state" also includes political and social activists, women who insist on reproductive freedom, and anyone else deemed to exhibit non-conformist political, social or cultural behavior.
We must Shut down the School of the Americas, and shut down the whole University of Repression!
Refuse & Resist! is the organization for everyone who refuses to go along with todayís national agenda of repression and cruelty, poverty & punishment. We are a non-partisan, national membership organization. We are students and teachers, youth, artists, working people, professionals and activists, well-known and "ordinary" people. We are of different nationalities and political beliefs. Our mission is to build a climate, a culture and a community of resistance to defeat the whole reactionary agenda. If you agree that this needs to be done, then you belong in Refuse & Resist!
[revised 11/13/00]
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