The Case Against the Generals:...War Criminals and Torturers (In US)

[whatelseisnew]

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0817-04.htm


The Case Against the Generals
US Now Home to Hundreds of Accused War Criminals and Torturers from
All Over Latin America
by Joshua E.S. Phillips

When Juan Romagoza was being shocked, shot and hung by his hands, he had every reason to
be terrified of El Salvador's military leaders. Twenty years later, in an American courtroom, the
roles were reversed.

Clenched, curled, the surgeon's fingers struggle to knot
his tie. At last, he grips the loop and hastily feeds the
burgundy tip through with his small, pudgy fingers.

"It's a kind of torture," says Juan
Romagoza Arce, with a wry, quiet laugh as
he prepares for another hectic day at his
Northwest Washington health clinic.
Buttons are even worse. "It's hard to feel
them here," the doctor says, tapping the
tip of his index finger on his thumb.

There is a reason why the fingers that
once wove sutures now strain to knot a
tie. Why the doctor who once performed
emergency surgery now winces at the sight
of blood. Why the executive director of La
Clinica del Pueblo, a health care oasis
for Washington's Hispanic community,
doesn't treat patients.

More than two decades have passed since
Romagoza fled El Salvador, yet it still isn't easy for
him to talk about the torture he endured or the damage it
did. For a long time, the words were too painful, the
memories too searing, the healing too precarious. Then he
was asked to tell his story publicly, in an American
courtroom, as part of what many people considered a
quixotic legal effort to hold his torturers accountable
for what they'd done to him. And what they'd done to El
Salvador.


lots more

[donsu]

1. they have the company of our corrupt generals

nt

[UpInArms]

2. oh yes, they hate us for our "freedom"

Vides Casanova flips through the scrapbooks in the living room of his Palm Coast, Fla., home, where his life now revolves around his children and grandchildren. Look at this, the general urges when he comes across commendations from members of Congress and officers from the Southern Military Command. One lauds him as a "shield of democracy." In a letter accompanying one of two U.S. Legion of Merit awards, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger congratulates Vides Casanova for "broad institutional reform of the Salvadoran Armed forces" and "high professional and ethical standards."

no - the hate that the US gets is for the support of murderous regimes that have no validity or authority other than that with which they torture their own.

[5thGenDemocrat]

3. When my dad was in training for the Counterintelligence Corps in 1950

He noticed that many, perhaps a majority, of his instructors were German. Years later, the news came out that the US, immediately after WWII, had packed up any number of Nazis with counterintelligence experience and shipped them, pretty much as a package, to Fort Holabird, MD.
Dad told us of lectures prefaced with comments like "Now WE wouldn't do this, but..." before going on to mention how to worm information out of prisoners while pert-near but not plumb killing them (a gym sock with a pound of sand in the toe administered upside the head, for example).
My point is that the US has always employed scumbags and ne'er-do-wells when it fits in with their game plan.
John
Dad, thankfully, wound up with a very nice, non-violent job monitoring Radio North Korea from downtown Tokyo.