BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS

Training manuals produced by the Pentagon and used by the U.S. Army's special school for Latin American military and police officers have recommended bribery, blackmail, and torture against rebels. This was revealed in documents made public by the Pentagon September 20.

The manuals - written in Spanish with titles such as "Interrogation" and "Revolutionary War and Communist Ideology" - advocated methods the Pentagon claims violated U.S. government policy.

These methods include "motivation by fear, payment of bounties for enemy dead, false imprisonment, execution, and the use of truth serum," according to a government report on the manuals prepared in 1992 but kept secret until recently.

The booklet titled "Handling of Sources," refers to "information obtained involuntarily from insurgents" and suggests that intelligence officers dealing with a source could "cause the arrest of the employee's parents, imprison the employee or give him a beating."

U.S. Army intelligence officials compiled the manuals in 1987 from lesson plans that had been in use since 1982 at the School of the Americas, a military academy that Washington opened in 1946 in Panama and moved to Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1984. The school has trained nearly 60,000 officers, including many dictators and military leaders accused of widespread human rights violations.

The military academy's graduates include the late Roberto d'Aubuisson, one of the central leaders of the rightist death squads in El Salvador, and 19 Salvadoran soldiers linked to the 1989 assassination of six Jesuit priests.

The Pentagon said "as many as 1,000 copies" of the manuals had been used at the school or distributed by the U.S. Southern Command's training units in Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Peru. After an internal investigation, the content of these manuals was reported to Congress in a summary form as early as 1991. But the passages ordering blackmail and torture were not made public until September 20, 1996.

In an attempt to cover up Washington's foreign policy, the Pentagon claimed in its statement that these manuals were "mistakenly" based on "old material" reflecting policies that have been scrapped. The military brass says the controversial manuals have now been destroyed.

Of course, no one knows precisely what the School of the Americas teaches nowadays.  
 
 
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