Could US complicity in war crimes in countries like Colombia offer a playbook for domestic repression? After the Cold War, U.S. advisors helped the Colombian military incorporate illegal paramilitaries to assassinate trade unionists, journalists and others.
The Defense Department denies offering instruction in abusive interrogation techniques. But U.S. Army Special Forces advisers say they trained select Salvadoran soldiers in what they call “negative-incentive” methods.
Although East Africa was the site of three out of the four major attacks exchanged since 7 August between US and apparently pan-Islamist forces, the region itself has been painted as merely being a battleground of opportunity for anti-US bombers. However, even before President…
Back in 1989, the CIA built its first counter-narcotics center in the basement of its Directorate of Operations headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Since then, the newly renamed “crime and narcotics center” has increased four-fold, says CIA spokeswoman Anya Guilsher…
After several days in a prison near Baghdad in 1991, I was told “they” wanted to see me. Blindfolded, I was led into a room where, judging from the voices, there were at least half a dozen men. For days, I had heard and sometimes watched as guards beat and tortured Iraqi prisoners. The translator asked what my “real job”…
Why did the Guatemalan military kill American innkeeper Michael DeVine? In April of this year, acting CIA Director William 0. Studeman and other U.S. officials implicated Colonel Julio Roberto Alpírez, who was on the CIA payroll at the time of the crime, in the June 1990 killing…
The changes will mark the ascent to power of the Salvadoran military’s academy class of 1966, the so-called tandona, or ‘big class.’
