Greatest Deal EVER!

Glas · Sep 12, 2004

spuint said:

what now? sombedody made a conclusion european had no its own culture?
well sure.. european culture is based on many different old cultures..

not like american.. which has its own alphabet, numbers and of course its own language
Click to expand...

Yours is a bastard nation Squirl, a mutt.

Btw, read 'Rogue State' by William Blum to get an idea of the type of aid the US gives to other countries, the conditions imposed on the giving of that aid, the imposition of dictatorial regimes in Central and South America because it suited the US at that time.

Or what about the training and weapons the CIA provide death squads with? Yeah, you're all good and loving and giving.....

-glas-

Btw Blum is ex-State Department. He got so sick of the involvement of the US that he resigned and told the world exactly what the US was up to. The whole book is referenced to sources.

spuint · Sep 12, 2004

btw recetly ive seen a movie "Walker"
its a freestyle about nicaragua and us "aid' in there in 19th century;
its a great movie, grotesque.. very expressive;
about that film

oh, and here short note bout walker
interesting

Glas · Sep 12, 2004

33. URUGUAY 1964 to 1970

Torture -- as American as apple pie

"The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect."{1}
The words of an instructor in the art of torture. The words of Dan Mitrione, the head of the Office of Public Safety (OPS) mission in Montevideo.
Officially, OPS was a division of the Agency for International Development, but the director of OPS in Washington, Byron Engle, was an old CIA hand. His organization maintained a close working relationship with the CIA, and Agency officers often operated abroad under OPS cover, although Mitrione was not one of them.{2}
OPS had been operating formally in Uruguay since 1965, supplying the police with the equipment, the arms, and the training it was created to do. Four years later, when Mitrione arrived, the Uruguayans had a special need for OPS services. The country was in the midst of a long-running economic decline, its once-heralded prosperity and democracy sinking fast toward the level of its South American neighbors. Labor strikes, student demonstrations, and militant street violence had become normal events during the past year; and, most worrisome to the Uruguayan authorities, there were the revolutionaries who called themselves Tupamaros. Perhaps the cleverest, most resourceful and most sophisticated urban guerrillas the world has ever seen, the Tupamaros had a deft touch for capturing the public's imagination with outrageous actions, and winning sympathizers with their Robin Hood philosophy. Their members and secret partisans held key positions in the government, banks, universities, and the professions, as well as in the military and police.
"Unlike other Latin-American guerrilla groups," the New York Times stated in 1970, "the Tupamaros normally avoid bloodshed when possible. They try instead to create embarrassment for the Government and general disorder."{3} A favorite tactic was to raid the files of a private corporation to expose corruption and deceit in high places, or kidnap a prominent figure and try him before a "People's Court". It was heady stuff to choose a public villain whose acts went uncensored by the legislature, the courts and the press, subject him to an informed and uncompromising interrogation, and then publicize the results of the intriguing dialogue. Once they ransacked an exclusive high-class nightclub and scrawled on the walls perhaps their most memorable slogan: O Bailan Todos O No Baila Nadie ... Either everyone dances or no one dances.

Dan Mitrione did not introduce the practice of torturing political prisoners to Uruguay. It had been perpetrated by the police at times from at least the early 1960s. However, in a surprising interview given to a leading Brazilian newspaper in 1970, the former Uruguayan Chief of Police Intelligence, Alejandro Otero, declared that US advisers, and in particular Mitrione, had instituted torture as a more routine measure; to the means of inflicting pain, they had added scientific refinement; and to that a psychology to create despair, such as playing a tape in the next room of women and children screaming and telling the prisoner that it was his family being tortured.{4}
"The violent methods which were beginning to be employed," said Otero, "caused an escalation in Tupamaro activity. Before then their attitude showed that they would use violence only as a last resort."{5}
The newspaper interview greatly upset American officials in South America and Washington. Byron Engle later tried to explain it all away by asserting: "The three Brazilian reporters in Montevideo all denied filing that story. We found out later that it was slipped into the paper by someone in the composing room at the Jornal do Brasil."{6}
Otero had been a willing agent of the CIA, a student at their International Police Services school in Washington, a recipient of their cash over the years, but he was not a torturer. What finally drove him to speak out was perhaps the torture of a woman who, while a Tupamaro sympathizer, was also a friend of his. When she told him that Mitrione had watched and assisted in her torture, Otero complained to him, about this particular incident as well as his general methods of extracting information. The only outcome of the encounter was Otero's demotion.{7}

William Cantrell was a CIA operations officer stationed in Montevideo, ostensibly as a member of the OPS team. In the mid- 1960s he was instrumental in setting up a Department of Information and Intelligence (DII), and providing it with funds and equipment.{8} Some of the equipment, innovated by the CIA's Technical Services Division, was for the purpose of torture, for this was one of the functions carried out by the DII.{9} "
One of the pieces of equipment that was found useful," former New York Times correspondent A. J. Langguth learned, "was a wire so very thin that it could be fitted into the mouth between the teeth and by pressing against the gum increase the electrical charge. And it was through the diplomatic pouch that Mitrione got some of the equipment he needed for interrogations, including these fine wires."{10}
Things got so bad in Mitrione's time that the Uruguayan Senate was compelled to undertake an investigation. After a five-month study, the commission concluded unanimously that torture in Uruguay had become a "normal, frequent and habitual occurrence", inflicted upon Tupamaros as well as others. Among the types of torture the commission's report made reference to were electric shocks to the genitals, electric needles under the fingernails, burning with cigarettes, the slow compression of the testicles, daily use of psychological torture ... "pregnant women were subjected to various brutalities and inhuman treatment" ... "certain women were imprisoned with their very young infants and subjected to the same treatment" ...{11}
Eventually the DII came to serve as a cover for the Escuadrуn de la Muerte (Death Squad), composed, as elsewhere in Latin America, primarily of police officers, who bombed and strafed the homes of suspected Tupamaro sympathizers and engaged in assassination and kidnapping. The Death Squad received some of its special explosive material from the Technical Services Division and, in all likelihood, some of the skills employed by its members were acquired from instruction in the United States.{12} Between 1969 and 1973, at least 16 Uruguayan police officers went through an eight-week course at CIA/OPS schools in Washington and Los Fresnos, Texas in the design, manufacture and employment of bombs and incendiary devices.{13} The official OPS explanation for these courses was that policemen needed such training in order to deal with bombs placed by terrorists. There was, however, no instruction in destroying bombs, only in making them; moreover, on at least one reported occasion, the students were not policemen, but members of a private right-wing organization in Chile (see chapter on Chile). Another part of the curriculum which might also have proven to be of value to the Death Squad was the class on Assassination Weapons -- "A discussion of various weapons which may be used by the assassin" is how OPS put it.{14}
Equipment and training of this kind was in addition to that normally provided by OPS: riot helmets, transparent shields, tear gas, gas masks, communication gear, vehicles, police batons, and other devices for restraining crowds. The supply of these tools of the trade was increased in 1968 when public disturbances reached the spark-point, and by 1970 American training in riot-control techniques had been given to about a thousand Uruguayan policemen.{15}

Dan Mitrione had built a soundproofed room in the cellar of his house in Montevideo. In this room he assembled selected Uruguayan police officers to observe a demonstration of torture techniques. Another observer was Manuel Hevia Cosculluela, a Cuban who was with the CIA and worked with Mitrione. Hevia later wrote that the course began with a description of the human anatomy and nervous system ...

Soon things turned unpleasant. As subjects for the first testing they took beggars, known in Uruguay as bichicomes, from the outskirts of Montevideo, as well as a woman apparently from the frontier area with Brazil. There was no interrogation, only a demonstration of the effects of different voltages on the different parts of the human body, as well as demonstrating the use of a drug which induces vomiting -- I don't know why or what for -- and another chemical substance. The four of them died.{16}
In his book Hevia does not say specifically what Mitrione's direct part in all this was, but he later publicly stated that the OPS chief "personally tortured four beggars to death with electric shocks".{17}
On another occasion, Hevia sat with Mitrione in the latter's house, and over a few drinks the American explained to the Cuban his philosophy of interrogation. Mitrione considered it to be an art. First there should be a softening-up period, with the usual beatings and insults. The object is to humiliate the prisoner, to make him realize his helplessness, to cut him off from reality. No questions, only blows and insults. Then, only blows in silence.
Only after this, said Mitrione, is the interrogation. Here no pain should be produced other than that caused by the instrument which is being used. "The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect," was his motto.
During the session you have to keep the subject from losing all hope of life, because this can lead to stubborn resistance. "You must always leave him some hope ... a distant light."
"When you get what you want, and I always get it," Mitrione continued, "it may be good to prolong the session a little to apply another softening-up. Not to extract information now, but only as a political measure, to create a healthy fear of meddling in subversive activities."
The American pointed out that upon receiving a subject the first thing is to determine his physical state, his degree of resistance, by means of a medical examination. "A premature death means a failure by the technician ... It's important to know in advance if we can permit ourselves the luxury of the subject's death."{18}
Not long after this conversation, Manual Hevia disappeared from Montevideo and turned up in Havana. He had been a Cuban agent -- a double agent -- all along.
About half a year later, 31 July 1970 to be exact, Dan Mitrione was kidnapped by the Tupamaros. They did not torture him. They demanded the release of some 150 prisoners in exchange for him. With the determined backing of the Nixon administration, the Uruguayan government refused. On 10 August, Mitrione's dead body was found on the back seat of a stolen car. He had turned 50 on his fifth day as a prisoner.
Back in Mitrione's home town of Richmond, Indiana, Secretary of State William Rogers and President Nixon's son-in-law David Eisenhower attended the funeral for Mitrione, the city's former police chief. Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis came to town to stage a benefit show for Mitrione's family.
And White House spokesman, Ron Ziegler, solemnly stated that "Mr. Mitrione's devoted service to the cause of peaceful progress in an orderly world will remain as an example for free men everywhere."{19}
"A perfect man," his widow said.
"A great humanitarian," said his daughter Linda.{20} go to notes

The military's entry into the escalating conflict signaled the beginning of the end for the Tupamaros. By the end of 1972, the curtain was descending on their guerrilla theatre. Six months later, the military was in charge, Congress was dissolved, and everything not prohibited was compulsory. For the next 11 years, Uruguay competed strongly for the honor of being South America's most repressive dictatorship. It had, at one point, the largest number of political prisoners per capita in the world. And, as every human rights organization and former prisoner could testify, each one of them was tortured. "Torture," said an activist priest, "was routine and automatic."{21}
No one was dancing in Uruguay.

In 1981, at the Fourteenth Conference of American Armies, the Uruguayan Army offered a paper in which it defined subversion as "actions, violent or not, with ultimate purposes of a political nature, in all fields of human activity within the internal sphere of a state and whose aims are perceived as not convenient for the overall political system."{22}
The dissident Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano, summed up his country's era of dictatorship thusly: "People were in prison so that prices could be free."{23}
The film "State of Siege" appeared in 1972. It centered around Mitrione and the Tupamaros and depicted a Uruguayan police officer receiving training at a secret bomb school in the United States, though the film strove more to provide a composite picture of the role played by the US in repression throughout Latin America. A scheduled premier showing of the film at the federally-funded John F. Kennedy Arts Center in Washington was canceled. There was already growing public and congressional criticism of this dark side of American foreign policy without adding to it. During the mid-1970s, however, Congress enacted several pieces of legislation which abolished the entire Public Safety Program. In its time, OPS had provided training for more than one million policemen in the Third World. Ten thousand of them had received advance training in the United States. An estimated $150 million worth of equipment had been shipped to police forces abroad.{24} Now, the "export of repression" was to cease.
That was on paper. The reality appears to be somewhat different.
To a large extent, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) simply picked up where OPS had left off. The drug agency was ideally suited for the task, for its agents were already deployed all over Latin America and elsewhere overseas in routine liaison with foreign police forces. The DEA acknowledged in 1975 that 53 "former" employees of the CIA were now on its staff and that there was a close working relationship between the two agencies. The following year, the General Accounting Office reported that DEA agents were engaging in many of the same activities the OPS had been carrying out.
In addition, some training of foreign policemen was transferred to FBI schools in Washington and Quantico, Virginia; the Defense Department continued to supply police-type equipment to military units engaged in internal security operations; and American arms manufacturers were doing a booming business furnishing arms and training to Third World governments. In some countries, contact between these companies and foreign law enforcement officials was facilitated by the US Embassy or military mission. The largest of the arms manufacturers, Smith and Wesson, ran its own Academy in Springfield, Massachusetts, which provided American and foreign "public and industrial security forces with expert training in riot control".{25}
Said Argentine Minister Jose Lopez Rega at the signing of a US-Argentina anti-drug treaty in 1974: "We hope to wipe out the drug traffic in Argentina. We have caught guerrillas after attacks who were high on drugs. The guerrillas are the main drug users in Argentina. Therefore, this anti-drug campaign will automatically be an anti-guerrilla campaign as well."{26}
And in 1981, a former Uruguayan intelligence officer declared that US manuals were being used to teach techniques of torture to his country's military. He said that most of the officers who trained him had attended classes run by the United States in Panama. Among other niceties, the manuals listed 35 nerve points where electrodes could be applied.{27}

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Philip Agee, after he left Ecuador, was stationed in Uruguay from March 1964 to August 1966. His account of CIA activities in Montevideo is further testimony to the amount of international mischief money can buy. Amongst the multifarious dirty tricks pulled off with impunity by Agee and his Agency cohorts, the following constitute an interesting sample:{28}
A Latin American students' conference with a leftist leaning, held in Montevideo, was undermined by promoting the falsehood that it was nothing more than a creature of the Soviet Union -- originated, financed and directed by Moscow. Editorials on this theme authored by the CIA appeared in leading newspapers to which the Agency had daily access. This was followed by publication of a forged letter of a student leader thanking the Soviet cultural attachй for his assistance. A banner headline in one paper proclaimed: "Documents for the Break with Russia", which was indeed the primary purpose of the operation.
An inordinate amount of time, energy and creativity was devoted, with moderate success, to schemes aimed at encouraging the expulsion of an assortment of Russians, East Germans, North Koreans, Czechs, and Cubans from Uruguayan soil, if not the breaking of relations with these countries. In addition to planting disparaging media propaganda, the CIA tried to obtain incriminating information by reading the mail and diplomatic cables to and from these countries, tapping embassy phones, and engaging in sundry bugging and surreptitious entry. The Agency would then prepare "Intelligence" reports, containing enough factual information to be plausible, which then made their way innocently into the hands of officials of influence, up to and including the president of the republic.
Anti-communist indoctrination of secondary-level students was promoted by financing particular school organizations and publications.
A Congress of the People, bringing together a host of community groups, labor organizations, students, government workers, etc., Communist and non-Communist, disturbed the CIA because of the potential for a united front being formed for electoral purposes. Accordingly, newspaper editorials and articles were generated attacking the Congress as a classic Communist takeover/duping tactic and calling upon non-Communists to refrain from participating; and a phoney handbill was circulated in which the Congress called upon the Uruguayan people to launch an insurrectional strike with immediate occupation of their places of work. Thousands of the handbills were handed out, provoking angry denials from the Congress organizers, but, as is usual in such cases, the damage was already done.
The Uruguayan Communist Party planned to host an international conference to express solidarity with Cuba. The CIA merely had to turn to their (paid) friend, the Minister of the Interior, and the conference was banned. When it was shifted to Chile, the CIA station in Santiago performed the same magic.
Uruguay at this time was a haven for political exiles from repressive regimes such as in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay. The CIA, through surveillance and infiltration of the exile community, regularly collected information on exiles' activities, associates, etc., to be sent to CIA stations in the exiles' homelands with likely transmission to their governments, which wanted to know what these troublemakers were up to and which did not hesitate to harass them across frontiers.
"Other operations," wrote Agee, "were designed to take control of the streets away from communists and other leftists, and our squads, often with the participation of off-duty policemen, would break up their meetings and generally terrorize them. Torture of communists and other extreme leftists was used in interrogation by our liaison agents in the police."

The monitoring and harassment of Communist diplomatic missions by the CIA, as described above, was standard Agency practice throughout the Western world. This rarely stemmed from anything more than a juvenile cold-war reflex: making life hard for the commies. Looked at from any angle, it was politically and morally pointless. Richard Gott, the Latin America specialist of The Guardian of London, related an anecdote which is relevant:

In January 1967 a group of Brazilians and a Uruguayan asked for political asylum in the Czech embassy in Montevideo, stating that they wished to go to a Socialist country to pursue their revolutionary activities. They were, they said, under constant surveillance and harassment from the Uruguayan police. The Czech ambassador was horrified by their request and threw them out, saying that there was no police persecution in Uruguay. When the revolutionaries camped in his garden the ambassador called the police.{29}
Postscript: In 1998, Eladio Moll, a retired Uruguayan navy rear admiral and former intelligence chief, testifying before a commission of the Uruguayan Chamber of Deputies, stated that during Uruguay's "dirty war" (1972-1983), orders came from the United States to kill captive members of the Tupamaros after interrogating them. "The guidance that was sent from the US," said Moll, "was that what had to be done with the captured guerrillas was to get information, and that afterwards they didn't deserve to live." {30}

return to mid-text

NOTES

1. Manuel Hevia Cosculluela, Pasaporte 11333: Ocho Aсos con la CIA (Havana, 1978), p. 286.

2. A.J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors (New York, 1978) pp. 48-9, 51 and passim. Langguth was formerly with the New York Times and in 1965 served as Saigon Bureau Chief for the newspaper.

3. New York Times, 1 August 1970.

4. Langguth, pp. 285-7; New York Times, 15 August 1970.

5. Alain Labrousse, The Tupamaros: Urban Guerrillas in Uruguay (Penguin Books, London, 1973, translation from French 1970 edition) p. 103.

6. Langguth, p. 289.

7. Langguth, pp. 232-3, 253-4; Philip Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (New York, 1975), see index (Otero's relationship to the CIA).

8. Major Carlos Wilson, The Tupamaros: The Unmentionables (Boston, 1974) pp. 106-7; Langguth, p. 236. Agee, p. 478, confirms Cantrell's identity.

9. Langguth, p. 252.

10. Interview of Langguth in the film "On Company Business" (Directed by Allan Francovich), cited in Warner Poelchau, ed., White Paper, Whitewash (New York, 1981) p. 66.

11. Extracts from the report of the Senate Commission of Inquiry into Torture, a document accompanying the film script in State of Siege (Ballantine Books, New York, 1973) pp. 194-6; also see "Death of a Policeman: Unanswered Questions About a Tragedy", Commonweal (Catholic biweekly magazine, New York), 18 September 1970, p. 457; Langguth, p. 249.

12. Death Squad, TSD: Langguth, pp. 245-6, 253.

13. Michael Klare and Nancy Stein, "Police Terrorism in Latin America", NACLA's Latin America and Empire Report (North American Congress on Latin America), January 1974, pp. 19-23, based on State Department documents obtained by Senator James Abourezk in 1973; also see Jack Anderson, Washington Post, 8 October 1973, p. C33; Langguth, pp. 242-3.

14. Klare and Stein, p. 19.

15. New York Times, 25 September 1968, 1 August 1970; Langguth, p. 241.

16. Hevia, p. 284, translated from the Spanish and slightly paraphrased by author; a similar treatment of this and other passages from Hevia can be found in Langguth, pp. 311-13.

17. New York Times, 5 August 1978, p. 3.

18. Mitrione's philosophy: Hevia, pp. 286-7 (see note 16 above).

19. Poelchau, p. 68.

20. Langguth, p. 305.

21. The Guardian (London) 19 October 1984.

22. Lawrence Weschler, A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts With Torturers (Penguin Books, 1991) p. 121

23. Ibid., p. 147, said to Weschler by Galeano.

24. Nancy Stein and Michael Klare, "Merchants of Repression", NACLA's Latin America and Empire Report (North American Congress on Latin America), July-August 1976, p. 31.

25. DEA, arms manufacturers, etc.: Stein and Klare, pp. 31-2; New York Times, 23 January 1975, p. 38; 26 January 1975, p 42; Langguth, p. 301.

26. Argentine Commission for Human Rights, Washington, DC: Report entitled "U.S. Narcotics Enforcement Assistance to Latin America", 10 March 1977, reference to a May 1974 press conference in Argentina.

27. San Francisco Chronicle, 2 November 1981.

28. Agee, pp. 325-493, passim.

29. From Gott's Introduction to Labrousse, p. 7.

30. Cable News Network en Espaсol, 23 July 1998; El Diario-La Prensa (New York) 24 July 1998; Clarin (Buenos Aires) 22 July 1998, p. 45

This is a chapter from Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II by William Blum
Click to expand...

http://members.aol.com/bblum6/uruguay.htm

The tip of the iceberg........

-glas-

Glas · Sep 12, 2004

This is more akin to what the US has given the world in recent times. Everything comes at a price, as far as US foreignpolicy is concerned.

Guatemala, almost on your doorstep......

37. GUATEMALA 1962 to 1980s
A less publicized "final solution"

Indians tell harrowing stories of village raids in which their homes have been burned, men tortured hideously and killed, women raped, and scarce crops destroyed. It is Guatemala's final solution to insurgency: only mass slaughter of the Indians will prevent them joining a mass uprising.{1}

This newspaper item appeared in 1983. Very similar stories have
appeared many times in the world press since 1966, for
Guatemala's "final solution" has been going on rather longer than
the more publicized one of the Nazis. It would be difficult to exaggerate the misery of the
mainly-Indian peasants and urban poor of Guatemala who make up
three-quarters of the population of this beautiful land so
favored by American tourists. The particulars of their existence
derived from the literature of this period sketch a caricature of
human life. In a climate where everything grows, very few escape
the daily ache of hunger or the progressive malnutrition ...
almost half the children die before the age of five ... the
leading cause of death in the country is gastro-enteritis.
Highly toxic pesticides sprayed indiscriminately by airplanes, at
times directly onto the heads of peasants, leave a trail of
poisoning and death ... public health services in rural areas are
virtually non-existent ... the same for public education ...
near-total illiteracy. A few hundred families possess almost all
the arable land ... thousands of families without land, without
work, jammed together in communities of cardboard and tin houses,
with no running water or electricity, a sea of mud during the
rainy season, sharing their bathing and toilet with the animal
kingdom. Men on coffee plantations earning 20 cents or 50 cents
a day, living in circumstances closely resembling concentration
camps ... looked upon by other Guatemalans more as beasts of
burden than humans. A large plantation to sell, reads the
advertisement, "with 200 hectares and 300 Indians" ... this, then
was what remained of the ancient Mayas, whom the American
archeologist Sylvanus Morely had called the most splendid
indigenous people on the planet.{2} The worst was yet to come. We have seen how, in 1954, Guatemala's last reform
government, the legally-elected regime of Jacobo Arbenz, was
overthrown by the United States. And how, in 1960, nationalist
elements of the Guatemalan military who were committed to
slightly opening the door to change were summarily crushed by the
CIA. Before long, the ever-accumulating discontent again issued
forth in a desperate lunge for alleviation -- this time in the
form of a guerrilla movement -- only to be thrown back by a
Guatemalan-American operation reminiscent of the Spanish
conquistadores in its barbarity. In the early years of the 1960s, the guerilla movement, with
several military officers of the abortive 1960 uprising prominent
amongst the leadership, was slowly finding its way: organizing
peasant support in the countryside, attacking an army outpost to
gather arms, staging a kidnapping or bank robbery to raise money,
trying to avoid direct armed clashes with the Guatemalan
military. Recruitment amongst the peasants was painfully slow and
difficult; people so drained by the daily struggle to remain
alive have little left from which to draw courage; people so
downtrodden scarcely believe they have the right to resist, much
less can they entertain thoughts of success; as fervent
Catholics, they tend to believe that their misery is a punishment
from God for sinning. Some of the guerrilla leaders flirted with Communist Party
and Trotskyist ideas and groups, falling prey to the usual
factional splits and arguments. Eventually, no ideology or
sentiment dominated the movement more than a commitment to the
desperately needed program of land reform aborted by the 1954
coup, a simple desire for a more equitable society, and
nationalist pride vis-а-vis the United States. New
York Times, correspondent Alan Howard, after interviewing
guerrilla leader Luis Turcios, wrote:

Though he has suddenly found himself in a position of political leadership, Turcios is essentially a soldier fighting for a new code of honor. If he has an alter ego, it would not be Lenin or Mao or even Castro, whose works he has read and admires, but Augusto Sandino, the Nicaraguan general who fought the U.S. Marines sent to Nicaragua during the Coolidge and Hoover Administrations.{3}

In March 1962, thousands of demonstrators took to the
streets in protest against the economic policies, the deep-rooted
corruption, and the electoral fraud of the government of General
Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes. Initiated by students, the
demonstrations soon picked up support from worker and peasant
groups. Police and military forces eventually broke the back of
the protests, but not before a series of violent confrontations
and a general strike had taken place. The American military mission in Guatemala, permanently
stationed there, saw and heard in this, as in the burgeoning
guerrilla movement, only the omnipresent "communist threat". As
US military equipment flowed in, American advisers began to prod
a less-alarmed and less-than-aggressive Guatemalan army to take
appropriate measures. In May the United States established a
base designed specifically for counter-insurgency training. (The
Pentagon prefers the term "counter-insurgency" to
"counter-revolutionary" because of the latter's awkward
implications.) Set up in the northeast province of Izabal,
which, together with adjacent Zacapa province, constituted the area of
heaviest guerrilla support, the installation was directed by a
team of US Special Forces (Green Berets) of Puerto Rican and Mexican
descent to make the North American presence less conspicuous.
The staff of the base was augmented by 15 Guatemalan officers trained
in counter-insurgency at the US School of the Americas at Fort
Gulick in the Panama Canal Zone.{4} American counter-insurgency strategy is typically based on a
carrot-and-stick philosophy. Accordingly, while the Guatemalan
military were being taught techniques of ambush, booby-traps,
jungle survival and search-and-destroy warfare, and provided with
aircraft and pilot training, a program of "civil action" was
begun in the northeast area: some wells were built, medicines
distributed, school lunches provided etc., as well as promises of
other benefits made, all aimed at stealing a bit of the
guerrillas' thunder and reducing the peasants' motivation for
furnishing support to them; and with the added bonus of allowing
American personnel to reconnoitre guerrilla territory under a
non-military cover. Land reform, overwhelmingly the most
pressing need in rural Guatemala, was not on the agenda. As matters were to materialize, the attempt at "winning the
hearts and minds" of the peasants proved to be as futile in
Guatemala as it was in southeast Asia. When all the academic
papers on "social systems engineering" were in, and all the
counter-insurgency studies of the RAND Corporation and the other
think-tanks were said and done, the recourse was to terror:
unadulterated, dependable terror. Guerrillas, peasants,
students, labor leaders, and professional people were jailed or
killed by the hundreds to put a halt, albeit temporarily, to the
demands for reform.{5} The worst was yet to come.
In March 1963, General Ydigoras, who had been elected in 1958 for
a six-year term, was overthrown in a coup by Col. Enrique Peralta
Azurdia. Veteran Latin American correspondent Georgie Anne Geyer
later reported that "Top sources within the Kennedy
administration have revealed the U.S. instigated and supported
the 1963 coup." Already in disfavor with Washington due to
several incidents, Ydigoras apparently sealed his fate by
allowing the return to Guatemala of Juan Josй
Arйvalo who had led a reform government before Arbenz and still had a
strong following. Ydigoras was planning to step down in 1964,
thus leaving the door open to an election and, like the Guatemalan
army, Washington, including President Kennedy personally,
believed that a free election would reinstate Arйvalo to
power in a government bent upon the same kind of reforms and
independent foreign policy that had led the United States to
overthrow Arbenz.{6} Arйvalo was the author of a book
called The Shark and the Sardines in which he pictured the US as trying to dominate Latin America. But he had also publicly denounced Castro as "a danger to the continent, a menace".{7} The tone of the Peralta administration was characterized by
one of its first acts: the murder of eight political and trade
union leaders, accomplished by driving over them with rock-laden
trucks.{8} Repressive and brutal as Peralta was, during his
three years in power US military advisers felt that the
government and the Guatemalan army still did not appreciate
sufficiently the threat posed by the guerrillas, still were
strangers to the world of unconventional warfare and the
systematic methods needed to wipe out the guerrillas once and for
all; despite American urging, the army rarely made forays into
the hills. Peralta, moreover, turned out to be somewhat of a
nationalist who resented the excessive influence of the United
States in Guatemala, particularly in his own sphere, the
military. He refused insistent American offers of Green Beret
troops trained in guerrilla warfare to fight the rebels,
preferring to rely on his own men, and he restricted the number
of Guatemalan officers permitted to participate in American
training programs abroad. Thus it was that the United States gave its clear and firm
backing to a civilian, one Julio Cesar Mendez Montenegro, in the
election held in March 1966. Mendez won what passes for an
election in Guatemala and granted the Americans the free hand
they had been chafing at the bit for. He served another
important function for the United States: as a civilian, and one
with genuine liberal credentials, Mendez could be pointed to by
the Johnson administration as a response to human rights critics
at home. However, whatever social conscience Julio Cesar Mendez may
have harbored deep within, he was largely a captive of the
Guatemalan army, and his administration far exceeded Peralta's in
its cruelty. Yet the army did not trust this former law school
professor -- in the rarefied atmosphere of Guatemala, some
military men regarded him as a communist -- and on at least two
occasions, the United States had to intervene to stifle a coup
attempt against him. Within days after Mendez took office in July, US Col. John
D. Webber, Jr. arrived in Guatemala to take command of the
American military mission. Time magazine later described
his role:

Webber immediately expanded counterinsurgency training within Guatemala's 5,000-man army, brought in U.S. Jeeps, trucks, communications equipment and helicopters to give the army more firepower and mobility, and breathed new life into the army's civic-action program. Towards the end of 1966 the army was able to launch a major drive against the guerrilla strongholds ... To aid in the drive, the army also hired and armed local bands of "civilian collaborators" licensed to kill peasants whom they considered guerrillas or "potential" guerrillas. There were those who doubted the wisdom of encouraging such measures in violence-prone Guatemala, but Webber was not among them. "That's the way this country is," he said. "The communists are using everything they have including terror. And it must be met."{9}

The last was for home consumption. There was never any
comparison between the two sides as to the quantity and cruelty
of their terror, as well as in the choice of targets; with rare
exceptions, the left attacked only legitimate political and
military enemies, clear and culpable symbols of their foe; and
they did not torture, nor take vengeance against the families of
their enemies. Two of the left's victims were John Webber himself and the
US naval attachй, assassinated in January 1968. A bulletin
later issued by a guerrilla group stated that the assassinations
had "brought to justice the Yanqui officers who were teaching
tactics to the Guatemalan army for its war against the
people".{10} In the period October 1966 to March 1968, Amnesty
International estimated, somewhere between 3,000 and 8,000
Guatemalans were killed by the police, the military, right-wing
"death squads" (often the police or military in civilian clothes,
carrying out atrocities too bloody for the government to claim
credit for), and assorted groups of civilian anti-communist
vigilantes. By 1972, the number of their victims was estimated
at 13,000. Four years later the count exceeded 20,000, murdered
or disappeared without a trace. Anyone attempting to organize a union or other undertaking
to improve the lot of the peasants, or simply suspected of being
in support of the guerrillas, was subject ... unknown armed men
broke into their homes and dragged them away to unknown places
... their tortured or mutilated or burned bodies found buried in
a mass grave, or floating in plastic bags in a lake or river, or
lying beside the road, hands tied behind the back ... bodies
dropped into the Pacific from airplanes. In the Gual n
area, it was said, no one fished any more; too many corpses were caught in the nets ... decapitated corpses, or castrated, or pins stuck in the eyes ... a village rounded up, suspected of supplying the guerrillas with men or food or information, all adult males takenaway in front of their families, never to be seen again ... or everyone massacred, the village bulldozed over to cover the traces ... seldom were the victims actual members of a guerrilla band. One method of torture consisted of putting a hood filled
with insecticide over the head of the victim; there was also
electric shock -- to the genital area is the most effective; in
those days it was administered by using military field telephones
hooked up to small generators; the United States supplied the
equipment and the instructions for use to several countries,
including South Vietnam where the large-scale counter-insurgency
operation was producing new methods and devices for extracting
information from uncooperative prisoners; some of these
techniques were finding their way to Latin America.{11} The Green Berets taught their Guatemalan trainees various
methods of "interrogation", but they were not solely classroom
warriors. Their presence in the countryside was reported
frequently, accompanying Guatemalan soldiers into battle areas;
the line separating the advisory role from the combat role is
often a matter of public relations. Thomas and Marjorie Melville, American Catholic missionaries
in Guatemala from the mid-1950s until the end of 1967, have
written that Col. Webber "made no secret of the fact that it was
his idea and at his instigation that the technique of
counter-terror had been implemented by the Guatemalan Army in the
Zacapa and Izabal areas."{12} The Melvilles wrote also of Major
Bernard Westfall of Iowa City who:

perished in September 1967 in the crash of a Guatemalan Air Force jet that he was piloting alone. The official notices stated that the US airman was "testing" the aeroplane. That statement may have been true, but it is also true that it was a common and public topic of conversation at Guatemala's La Aurora air base that the Major often "tested" Guatemalan aircraft in strafing and bombing runs against guerrilla encampments in the Northeastern territory.{13}

F-51(D) fighter planes modified by the United States for use
against guerrillas in Guatemala ... after modification, the
planes are capable of patrolling for five hours over a limited
area ... equipped with six .50-calibre machine guns and wing
mountings for bombs, napalm and 5-inch air-to-ground rockets.{14}
The napalm falls on villages, on precious crops, on people ...
American pilots take off from Panama, deliver loads of napalm on
targets suspected of being guerrilla refuges, and return to
Panama{15} ... the napalm explodes like fireworks and a mass of
brilliant red foam spreads over the land, incinerating all that
falls in its way, cedars and pines are burned down to the roots,
animals grilled, the earth scorched ... the guerrillas will not
have this place for a sanctuary any longer, nor will they or
anyone else derive food from it ... halfway around the world in
Vietnam, there is an instant replay. In Vietnam they were called "free-fire zones"; in
Guatemala, "zonas libres": "Large areas of the country have been
declared off limits and then subjected to heavy bombing.
Reconnaissance planes using advanced photographic techniques fly
over suspected guerrilla country and jet planes, assigned to
specific areas, can be called in within minutes to kill anything
that moves on the ground."{16}

"The military guys who do this are like serial killers. If
Jeffrey Dahmer had been in Guatemala, he would be a general by
now." ... In Guatemala City, right-wing terrorists machine-gunned
people and houses in full light of day ... journalists, lawyers,
students, teachers, trade unionists, members of opposition
parties, anyone who helped or expressed sympathy for the rebel
cause, anyone with a vaguely-leftist political association or a
moderate criticism of government policy ... relatives of the
victims, guilty of kinship ... common criminals, eliminated to
purify the society, taken from jails and shot. "See a Communist,
kill a Communist", the slogan of the New Anticommunist
Organization ... an informer with hooded face accompanies the
police along a city street or into the countryside, pointing
people out: who shall live and who shall die ... "this one's a
son of a bitch" ... "that one ... " Men found dead with their
eyes gouged out, their testicles in their mouth, without hands or
tongues, women with breasts cut off ... there is rarely a witness
to a killing, even when people are dragged from their homes at
high noon and executed in the street ... a relative will choose
exile rather than take the matter to the authorities ... the
government joins the family in mourning the victim ...{17} One of the death squads, Mano Blanca (White Hand), sent a
death warning to a student leader. Former American Maryknoll
priest Blase Bonpane has written:

I went alone to visit the head of the Mano Blanca and asked him why he was going to kill this lad. At first he denied sending the letter, but after a bit of discussion with him and his first assistant, the assistant said, "Well, I know he's a Communist and so we're going to kill him."
"How do you know?" I asked.
He said, "I know he's a Communist because I heard him say he would give his life for the poor."{18}

Mano Blanca distributed leaflets in residential areas
suggesting that doors of left-wingers be marked with a black
cross.{19}

In November 1967, when the American ambassador, John Gordon Mein,
presented the Guatemalan armed forces with new armored vehicles,
grenade launchers, training and radio equipment, and several
HU-1B jet powered helicopters, he publicly stated:

These articles, especially the helicopters, are not easy to obtain at this time since they are being utilized by our forces in defense of the cause of liberty in other parts of the world [i.e., southeast Asia]. But liberty must be defended wherever it is threatened and that liberty is now being threatened in Guatemala.{20}

In August 1968, a young French woman, Michele Kirk, shot herself
in Guatemala City as the police came to her room to make
"inquiries". In her notebook Michele had written:

It is hard to find the words to express the state of putrefaction that exists in Guatemala, and the permanent terror in which the inhabitants live. Every day bodies are pulled out of the Motagua River, riddled with bullets and partially eaten by fish. Every day men are kidnapped right in the street by unidentified people in cars, armed to the teeth, with no intervention by the police patrols.{21}

The US Agency for International Development (AID), its Office of
Public Safety (OPS), and the Alliance for Progress were all there
to lend a helping hand. These organizations with their
reassuring names all contributed to a program to greatly expand
the size of Guatemala's national police force and develop it into
a professionalized body skilled at counteracting urban disorder.
Senior police officers and technicians were sent for training at
the Inter-American Police Academy in Panama, replaced in 1964 by
the International Police Academy in Washington, at a Federal
School in Los Fresnos, Texas (where they were taught how to
construct and use a variety of explosive devices - see Uruguay
chapter), and other educational establishments, their instructors
often being CIA officers operating under OPS cover. This was
also the case with OPS officers stationed in Guatemala to advise
local police commands and provide in-country training for
rank-and-file policemen. At times, these American officers
participated directly in interrogating political prisoners, took
part in polygraph operations, and accompanied the police on
anti-drug patrols. Additionally, the Guatemala City police force was completely
supplied with radio patrol cars and a radio communications
network, and funds were provided to build a national police
academy and pay for salaries, uniforms, weapons, and riot-control
equipment. The glue which held this package together was the standard
OPS classroom tutelage, similar to that given the military, which
imparted the insight that "communists", primarily of the Cuban
variety, were behind all the unrest in Guatemala; the students
were further advised to "stay out of politics"; that is, support
whatever pro-US regime happens to be in power. Also standard was the advice to use "minimum force" and to
cultivate good community relations. But the behavior of the
police and military students in practice was so far removed from
this that continued American involvement with these forces over a
period of decades makes this advice appear to be little more than
a self-serving statement for the record, the familiar
bureaucratic maxim: Cover your ass.{22} According to AID, by 1970, over 30,000 Guatemalan police
personnel had received OPS training in Guatemala alone, one of
the largest OPS programs in Latin America.{23} "At one time, many AID field offices were infiltrated from
top to bottom with CIA people," disclosed John Gilligan, Director
of AID during the Carter administration. "The idea was to plant
operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas, government,
volunteer, religious, every kind."{24}

By the end of 1968, the counter-insurgency campaign had all but
wiped out the guerrilla movement by thwarting the rebels' ability
to operate openly and casually in rural areas as they had been
accustomed to, and, through sheer terrorization of villagers,
isolating the guerrillas from their bases of support in the
countryside. It had been an unequal match. By Pentagon standards it had
been a "limited" war, due to the absence of a large and overt US
combat force. At the same time, this had provided the American
media and public with the illusion of their country's
non-involvement. However, as one observer has noted: "In the
lexicon of counterrevolutionaries, these wars are "limited" only
in their consequences for the intervening power. For the people and
country under assault, they are total."{25} Not until 1976 did another serious guerrilla movement arise,
the Guatemalan Army of the Poor (EGP) by name. Meanwhile, others
vented their frustration through urban warfare in the face of
government violence, which reached a new high during 1970 and
1971 under a "state of siege" imposed by the president, Col.
Carlos Arana Osorio. Arana, who had been close to the US
military since serving as Guatemalan military attach? in
Washington, and then as commander of the counter-insurgency
operation in Zacapa (where his commitment to his work earned him
the title of "the butcher of Zacapa"), decreed to himself
virtually unlimited power to curb opposition of any stripe.{26} Amnesty International later stated that Guatemalan sources,
including the Committee of the Relatives of Disappeared Persons,
claimed that over 7,000 persons disappeared or were found dead in
these two years. "Foreign diplomats in Guatemala City," reported
Le Monde in 1971, "believe that for every political
assassination by left-wing revolutionaries fifteen murders are
committed by right-wing fanatics."{27} During a curfew so draconian that even ambulances, doctors
and fire engines reportedly were forbidden outside ... as
American police cars and paddy wagons patrolled the streets day
and night ... and American helicopters buzzed overhead ... the
United States saw fit to provide further technical assistance and
equipment to initiate a reorganization of Arana's police forces
to make them yet more efficient.{28}

"In response to a question [from a congressional investigator in
1971] as to what he conceived his job to be, a member of the US
Military Group (MILGP) in Guatemala replied instantly that it was
to make the Guatemalan Armed Forces as efficient as possible.
The next question as to why this was in the interest of the
United States was followed by a long silence while he reflected
on a point which had apparently never occurred to him."{29}

As for the wretched of Guatemala's earth ... in 1976 a major
earthquake shook the land, taking over 20,000 lives, largely of
the poor whose houses were the first to crumble ... the story was
reported of the American church relief worker who arrived to help
the victims; he was shocked at their appearance and their living
conditions; then he was informed that he was not in the
earthquake area, that what he was seeing was normal.{30} "The level of pesticide spraying is the highest in the
world," reported the New York Times in 1977, "and little
concern is shown for the people who live near the cotton fields"
... 30 or 40 people a day are treated for pesticide poisoning in
season, death can come within hours, or a longer lasting liver
malfunction ... the amounts of DDT in mothers' milk in Guatemala
are the highest in the Western world. "It's very simple,"
explained a cotton planter, "more insecticide means more cotton,
fewer insects mean higher profits." In an attack, guerrillas
destroyed 22 crop-duster planes; the planes were quickly replaced
thanks to the genius of American industry{31} ... and all the
pesticide you could ever want, from Monsanto Chemical Company of
St. Louis and Guatemala City. During the Carter presidency, in response to human-rights
abuses in Guatemala and other countries, several pieces of
congressional legislation were passed which attempted to curtail
military and economic aid to those nations. In the years
preceding, similar prohibitions regarding aid to Guatemala had
been enacted into law. The efficacy of these laws can be
measured by their number. In any event, the embargoes were never
meant to be more than partial, and Guatemala also received
weapons and military equipment from Israel, at least part of
which was covertly underwritten by Washington.{32} As further camouflage, some of the training of Guatemala's
security forces was reportedly maintained by transferring it to
clandestine sites in Chile and Argentina.{33}Testimony of an Indian woman:
My name is Rigoberta Menchъ Tum. I am a representative of the "Vincente Menchъ" [her father] Revolutionary Christians ... On 9 December 1979, my 16-year-old brother Patrocino was captured and tortured for several days and then taken with twenty other young men to the square in Chajul ... An officer of [President] Lucas Garcia's army of murderers ordered the prisoners to be paraded in a line. Then he started to insult and threaten the
inhabitants of the village, who were forced to come out of their houses to witness the event. I was with my mother, and we saw Patrocino; he had had his tongue cut out and his toes cut off. The officer jackal made a speech. Every time he paused the soldiers beat the Indian prisoners.
When he finished his ranting, the bodies of my brother and the other prisoners were swollen, bloody, unrecognizable. It was monstrous, but they were still alive.They were thrown on the ground and drenched with gasoline. The soldiers set fire to the wretched bodies with torches and the captain laughed like a hyena and forced the inhabitants of Chajul to watch. This was his objective -- that they should be terrified and witness the punishment given to the "guerrillas".{34}
In 1992, Rigoberta Menchъ Tum was awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize.
Click to expand...

to be continued.........

Glas · Sep 12, 2004

............continued

Testimony of Fred Sherwood (CIA pilot during the overthrow of the
Arbenz government in 1954 who settled in Guatemala and became
president of the American Chamber of Commerce), speaking in
Guatemala, September 1980:

Why should we be worried about the death squads? They're bumping off the commies, our enemies. I'd give them more power. Hell, I'd get some cartridges if I could, and everyone else would too ... Why should we criticize them?
The death squad -- I'm for it ... Shit! There's no question, we can't wait 'til Reagan gets in. We hope Carter falls in the ocean real quick ... We all feel that
he [Reagan] is our saviour.{35}

The Movement for National Liberation (MLN) was a prominent
political party. It was the principal party in the Arana regime.
An excerpt from a radio broadcast in 1980 by the head of the
party, Mario Sandoval Alarcon ...

I admit that the MLN is the party of organized violence. Organized violence is vigor, just as organized color is scenery and organized sound is harmony. There is nothing wrong with organized violence; it is vigor, and the
MLN is a vigorous movement.{36}

Mario Sandoval Alarcon and former president Arana ("the
butcher of Zacapa") "spent inaugural week mingling with the stars
of the Reagan inner circle", reported syndicated columnist Jack
Anderson. Sandoval, who had worked closely with the CIA in the
overthrow of Arbenz, announced that he had met with Reagan
defense and foreign-policy advisers even before the election.
Right-wing Guatemalan leaders were elated by Reagan's victory.
They looked forward to a resumption of the hand-in-glove
relationship between American and Guatemalan security teams and
businessmen which had existed before Carter took office.{37} Before that could take place, however, the Reagan
administration first had to soften the attitude of Congress about
this thing called human rights. In March 1981, two months after
Reagan's inaugural, Secretary of State Alexander Haig told a
congressional committee that there was a Soviet "hit list ... for
the ultimate takeover of Central America". It was a "four phased
operation" of which the first part had been the "seizure of
Nicaragua". "Next," warned Haig, "is El Salvador, to be followed
by Honduras and Guatemala."{38} This was the kind of intelligence information which one
would expect to derive from a captured secret document or KGB
defector. But neither one of these was produced or mentioned,
nor did any of the assembled congressmen presume to raise the
matter. Two months later, General Vernon Walters, former Deputy
Director of the CIA, on a visit to Guatemala as Haig's special
emissary, was moved to proclaim that the United States hoped to
help the Guatemalan government defend "peace and liberty".{39} During this period, Guatemalan security forces, official and
unofficial, massacred at least 2,000 peasants (accompanied by the
usual syndrome of torture, mutilation and decapitation),
destroyed several villages, assassinated 76 officials of the
opposition Christian Democratic Party, scores of trade unionists,
and at least six catholic priests.{40} 19 August 1981 ... unidentified gunmen occupy the town of
San Miguel Acatan, force the Mayor to give them a list of all
those who had contributed funds for the building of a school,
pick out 15 from the list (including three of the Mayor's
children), make them dig their own graves and shoot them.{41} In December, Ronald Reagan finally spoke out against
government repression. He denounced Poland for crushing by
"brute force, the stirrings of liberty ... Our Government and
those of our allies, have expressed moral revulsion at the
police-state tactics of Poland's oppressors."{42} Using the loopholes in the congressional legislation, both
real and loosely interpreted, the Reagan administration, in its
first two years, chipped away at the spirit of the embargo: $3.1
million of jeeps and trucks, $4 million of helicopter spare
parts, $6.3 million of other military supplies.{43} These were
amongst the publicly announced aid shipments; what was
transpiring covertly can only be guessed at in light of certain
disclosures: Jack Anderson revealed in August 1981 that the
United States was using Cuban exiles to train security forces in
Guatemala; in this operation, Anderson wrote, the CIA had
arranged "for secret training in the finer points of
assassination".{44} The following year, it was reported that the
Green Berets had been instructing Guatemalan Army officers for
over two years in the finer points of warfare.{45} And in 1983,
we learned that in the previous two years Guatemala's Air Force
helicopter fleet had somehow increased from eight to 27, all of
them American made, and that Guatemalan officers were once again
being trained at the US School of the Americas in Panama.{46} In March 1982, a coup put General Efrain Rios Montt,
a "born-again Christian" in power. A month later, the Reagan
administration announced that it perceived signs of an
improvement in the state of human rights in the country and took
the occasion to justify a shipment of military aid.{47} On the
first of July, Rios Montt announced a state of siege. It
was to last more than eight months. In his first six months in
power, 2,600 Indians and peasants were massacred, while during his
17-month reign, more than 400 villages were brutally wiped off
the map.{48} In December 1982, Ronald Reagan, also a Christian, went
to see for himself. After meeting with RЎos Montt, Reagan,
referring to the allegations of extensive human-rights abuses,
declared that the Guatemalan leader was receiving "a bad
deal."{49}

Statement by the Guatemalan Army of the Poor, made in 1981 (by
which time the toll of people murdered by the government since
1954 had reached at least the 60,000 mark, and the sons of
one-time death-squad members were now killing the sons of the
Indians killed by their fathers):
The Guatemalan revolution is entering its third decade. Ever since the government of Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown in 1954, the majority of the Guatemalan people have been seeking a way to move the country towards solving the same problems which were present then and have only worsened over time.
The counterrevolution, put in motion by the U.S. Government and those domestic sectors committed to retaining every single one of their privileges, dispersed and disorganized the popular and democratic forces. However, it did not resolve any of the problems which had first given rise to demands for economic, social and political change. These demands have been raised again and again in the last quarter century, by any means that seemed appropriate at the time, and have received each time the same repressive response as in
1954.{50}

Statement by Father Thomas Melville, 1968:
Having come to the conclusion that the actual state of violence, composed of the malnutrition, ignorance, sickness and hunger of the vast majority of the Guatemalan population, is the direct result of a capitalist system that makes the defenseless Indian compete against the powerful and well-armed landowner, my brother [Father Arthur Melville] and I decided not to be silent accomplices of the mass murder that this system generates.
We began teaching the Indians that no one will defend their rights, if they do not defend themselves. If the government and oligarchy are using arms to maintain them in their position of misery, then they have the obligation to take up arms and defend their God-given right to be men. We were accused of being communists along with the people who listened to us, and were asked to leave the country by our religious superiors and the U.S. ambassador [John Gordon Mein]. We did so.
But I say here that I am a communist only if Christ was a communist. I did what I did and will continue to do so because of the teachings of Christ and not because of Marx or Lenin. And I say here too, that we are many more than the hierarchy and the U.S. government think. When the fight breaks out more in the open, let the world know that we do it not for Russia, not for China, nor any other country, but for Guatemala. Our
response to the present situation is not because we have read either Marx or Lenin, but because we have read the New Testament.{51}

Postscript, a small sample:
1988: Guatemala continues to suffer the worst record of
human-rights abuses in Latin America, stated the Council on
Hemispheric Affairs in its annual report on human rights in the
Western Hemisphere.{52} 1990: Guatemalan soldiers at the army base in Santiago
Atitl n opened fire on unarmed townspeople carrying white
flags, killing 14 and wounding 24. The people had come with
their mayor to speak to the military commander about repeated
harassment from the soldiers.{53} 1990: "The United States, said to be disillusioned because
of persistent corruption in the government of President Vinicio
Cerezo Arevalo, is reportedly turning to Guatemala's military to
promote economic and political stability ... even though the
military is blamed for human rights abuses and is believed to be
involved in drug trafficking."{54} This was reported in May. In June, a prominent American
businessman living in Guatemala, Michael DeVine, was kidnapped
and nearly beheaded by the Guatemalan military after he
apparently stumbled upon the military's drug trafficking and/or
other contraband activities. The Bush administration, in a show
of public anger over the killing, cut off military aid to
Guatemala, but, we later learned, secretly allowed the CIA to
provide millions of dollars to the military government to make up
for the loss. The annual payments of $5 to $7 million apparently
continued into the Clinton administration. 1992: In March, Guatemalan guerrilla leader, Efrain Bamaca
Velasquez, was captured and disappeared. For the next three
years, his American wife, attorney Jennifer Harbury, waged an
impassioned international campaign -- including public fasts in
Guatemala City (nearly to death) and in Washington -- to pressure
the Guatemalan and American governments for information about her
husband's fate. Both governments insisted that they knew
nothing. Finally, in March 1995, Rep. Robert Torricelli of the
House Intelligence Committee revealed that Bamaca had been
tortured and executed the same year of his capture, and that he,
as well as DeVine, had been murdered on the orders of Col. Julio
Roberto Alpнrez, who had been on the CIA payroll for
several years. (Alpнrez thus becoming another illustrious
graduate of Fort Benning's School of the Americas). The facts surrounding these cases were known early on by the CIA, and by officials at the State Department and National Security Council at least a few months before the disclosure. Toricelli's announcement prompted several other Americans to come forward with tales of murder, rape or torture of themselves or a relation at the hands of the Guatemalan military. Sister Dianna Ortiz, a nun, related how, in 1989, she was kidnapped, burned with cigarettes, raped repeatedly, and lowered into a pit full of corpses and rats. A fair-skinned man who spoke with an American accent seemed to be in charge, she said.{55}

NOTES
The details of the events and issues touched upon in this chapter
through 1968 were derived primarily from the following sources:
a) Thomas and Marjorie Melville, Guatemala -- Another Vietnam?
(Great Britain, 1971) Chapters 9 to 16; particularly for the
conditions of the poor, and US activities in Guatemala. Published
in the United States the same year in a slightly different form
as Guatemala: The Politics of Land Ownership.b) Eduardo Galeano, Guatemala, Occupied Country (Mexico, 1967;
English translation: New York, 1969) passim; for the politics of
the guerrillas and the nature of the right-wing terror; Galeano
was a Uruguayan journalist who spent some time with the guerrillas.c) Susanne Jonas and David Tobis, editors, Guatemala (Berkeley,
California, 1974) passim; particularly "The Vietnamization of
Guatemala: U.S. Counter-insurgency Programs" pp. 193-203, by
Howard Sharckman; published by the North American Congress on Latin
America (NACLA, New York and Berkeley).d) Amnesty International, Guatemala (London, 1976) passim; for
statistics about the victims of the terror. Other AI reports
issued in the 1970s about Guatemala contain comparable
information.e) Richard Gott, Rural Guerrillas in Latin America (Great
Britain, 1973, revised edition) Chapters 2 to 8; for the politics of the guerrillas.
1. The Guardian (London), 22 December 1983, p. 5.

2. The plight of the poor: a montage compiled from the sources
cited herein.

3. New York Times Magazine, 26 June 1966, p. 8.

4. US counter-insurgency base: El Imparcial (Guatemala City
conservative newspaper) 17 May 1962 and 4 January 1963, cited in
Melville, pp. 163-4.

5. Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The
Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (New York, 1982), p. 242.
6. Georgie Anne Geyer: Miami Herald, 24 December 1966. Also see:
New York Herald Tribune, 7 April 1963, article by Bert Quint,
section 2, p. 1; Schlesinger and Kinzer, pp. 236-44.

7. Galeano, p. 55.

8. Ibid., pp. 55-6.

9. Time, 26 January 1968, p. 23.

10. Ibid.

11. Atrocities and torture: compiled from the sources cited
herein; also see A.J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors (New York, 1978) pp. 139, 193 for US involvement with the use of the field telephones for torture in Brazil.
12. Melville, p. 292.

13. Ibid., p. 291.
14. Washington Post, 27 January 1968, p. A4, testimony of Rev.
Blase Bonpane, an American Maryknoll priest in Guatemala at the
time.

15. Panama: revealed in September 1967 by Guatemalan
Vice-President Clemente Marroquin Rojas in an interview with the international news agency Interpress Service (IPS), reported in Latin America, 15 September 1967, p. 159, a weekly published in London. Eduardo Galeano, p. 70, reports a personal conversation he had with Marroquin Rojas in which the vice-president related the same story. Marroquin Rojas was strongly anti-communist, but he apparently resented the casual way in which the American planes violated Guatemalan sovereignty.

16. Norman Diamond, "Why They Shoot Americans", The Nation (New
York), 5 February 1968. The title of the article refers to the
shooting of John Webber.

17. Opening quotation: Clyde Snow, forensic anthropologist, cited
in Covert Action Quarterly, spring 1994, No. 48, p. 32.
Right-wing terrorism: compiled from the sources cited herein.

18. Washington Post, 4 February 1968, p. B1. The historic
dialogue in Latin America between Christianity and Marxism, begun in the 1970s, can be traced in large measure to priests and nuns like Bonpane and the Melvilles and their experiences in Guatemala in the 1950s and 60s.

19. Galeano, p. 63.

20. El Imparcial (Guatemala City), 10 November 1967, cited in
Melville, p. 289.

21. Richard Gott, in the Foreword to the Melvilles' book, p. 8.

22. AID, OPS, Alliance for Progress:
a) "Guatemala and the Dominican Republic", a Staff Memorandum
prepared for the US Senate Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere
Affairs, Committee on Foreign Relations, 30 December 1971, p. 6;b) Jonas and Tobis, pp. 199-200;c) Galeano, pp. 72-3;d) Michael Klare, War Without End (Random House, New York, 1972)
pp. 241-69, for discussion of the OPS curriculum and philosophy;e) Langguth, pp. 242-3 and elsewhere, for discussion of OPS
practices, including its involvement with torture; the author
confines his study primarily to Brazil and Uruguay, but it
applies to Guatemala as well;f) CounterSpy magazine (Washington), November 1980-January 1981,
pp. 54-5, lists the names of almost 300 Guatemalan police
officers who received training in the United States from 1963 to 1974;g) Michael Klare and Nancy Stein, "Police Terrorism in Latin
America", NACLA's Latin America and Empire Report (North American
Congress on Latin America, New York), January 1974, pp. 19-23,
based on State Department documents obtained by Senator James
Abourezk in 1973;h) Jack Anderson, Washington Post, 8 October 1973, p. C33.
23. AID figure cited in Jenny Pearce, Under the Eagle: U.S.
Intervention in Central America and the Caribbean (Latin American
Bureau, London, updated edition 1982) p. 67.

24. George Cotter, "Spies, strings and missionaries", The
Christian Century (Chicago), 25 March 1981, p. 321.

25. Eqbal Ahmad, "The Theory and Fallacies of Counter-insurgency",
The Nation (New York), 2 August 1972, p. 73.

26. Relationship of Arana to US military: Joseph Goulden, "A Real
Good Relationship", The Nation (New York), 1 June 1970, p. 646;
Norman Gall, "Guatemalan Slaughter", N.Y. Review of Books, 20 May
1971, pp. 13-17.

27. Le Monde Weekly (English edition), 17 February 1971, p. 3.

28. New York Times, 27 December 1970, p. 2; New York Times
Magazine, 13 June 1971, p. 72.

29. US Senate Staff Memorandum, op. cit.

30. New York Times, 18 February 1976.

31. Ibid., 9 November 1977, p. 2.

32. Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, Jane Hunter, The
Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in
the Reagan Era (South End Press, Boston, 1987), chapter V,
passim; The Guardian (London), 9 December 1983; CounterSpy, op. cit.,
p. 53, citing Elias Barahona y Barahona, former press secretary
at the Guatemalan Ministry of the Interior who had infiltrated
the government for the EGP.

33. CounterSpy, op. cit. (Barahona) p. 53.

34. Pearce, p. 278; a book was published later which transcribed
MenchЈ's own account of her life, in which she recounts many
more atrocities of the Guatemalan military: Elisabeth Burgos-Debray,
ed., I ... Rigoberta MenchЈ: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (London,
1984, English translation).

35. Pearce, p. 176; Sherwood's role in 1954: Schlesinger and
Kinzer, pp. 116, 122, 128. His statement is partially quoted in
Penny Lernoux, In Banks We Trust (Doubleday, New York, 1984), p.
238, citing CBS News Special, 20 March 1982: "Update: Central
America in Revolt".

36. Washington Post, 22 February 1981, p. C7, column by Jack
Anderson; Anderson refers only to an "official spokesman" of the
MLN; the identity of the speaker as Sandoval comes from other
places -- see, e.g., The Guardian (London), 2 March 1984.

37. Washington Post, ibid. For a discussion of the many ties
between American conservatives and the Guatemalan power
structure, see the report of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs
(Washington), by Allan Nairn in 1981.

38. New York Times, 19 March 1981, p. 10.

39. Washington Post, 14 May 1981, p. A16.

40. Ibid.; New York Times, 18 May 1981, p. 18; Report issued by
the Washington Office on Latin America (a respected human-rights
lobby which has worked in liaison with the State Department's
human-rights section), 4 September 1981.

41. Washington Office on Latin America report, op. cit.
Presumably it was the traditional right-wing fear of the poor
being educated which lay behind this incident.

42. New York Times, 28 December 1981.

43. Ibid., 21 June 1981; 25 April 1982; The Guardian (London), 10
January 1983.

44. San Francisco Chronicle, 27 August 1981, p. 57.

45. Washington Post, 21 October 1982, p. A1.

46. The Guardian (London), 10 January 1983; 17 May 1983.

47. New York Times, 25 April 1982. p. 1.

48. Ibid., 12 October 1982, p. 3 (deaths, citing Amnesty
International); Los Angeles Times, 20 July 1994, p. 11 (villages,
citing "human rights organizations"). For the gruesome details
of death squads, disappearances, and torture in Guatemala during the
early 1980s, see Guatemala: A Government Program of Political
Murder (Amnesty International, London, 1981) and Massive
Extrajudicial Executions in Rural Areas Under the Government of
General EfraЎn RЎos Montt (AI, July 1982).

49. New York Times, 6 December 1982, p. 14.

50. Contemporary Marxism (San Francisco), No. 3, Summer 1981.

51. The National Catholic Reporter (Kansas City, Missouri
weekly), 31 January 1968.

52. Los Angeles Times, 25 December 1988.

53. Occurred on 2 December 1990; Report, Summer 1991, from
Witness for Peace, Washington, a religious-oriented human-rights
organization concerned with Central America.

54. Los Angeles Times, 7 May 1990.

55. DeVine and Bamaca cases: New York Times, 23 March 1995, p.
1; 24 March, p. 3; 30 March, p. 1; Los Angeles Times, 23 March 1995,
p. 7; 24 March, p. 4; 31 March, p. 4; 2 April, p. M2; Time
magazine, 10 April 1995, p. 43.

This is a chapter from Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II by William Blum
Click to expand...

Glas · Sep 12, 2004

Need we go on? This is the story of just 2 countries, both of them in the Americas.

Read up on some critical views of your countries foreign policy before preaching about how great and good your country really is.

Aid? As I said, only at a price.

-glas-

manoce · Sep 12, 2004

you can go on with Venezuela and year 2002.. to be more up-to-date

here.. we call it fascism

squirl · Sep 14, 2004

Zembla said:

No matter what country you look at, if you dig deep enough you can dig up dirt, and if you dig deeper you can find some gold. Sure the Arabs did lots of good things, but so did the Europeans. The idea of using a screw-like system to transfer water came from Archimedes, Da Vinci successively used a similar contstruction to form the first concept of a propeller/rotor. The first hot-air balloon was created and lifted up by the Montgolfiиre brothers. It was the Brit George Cayley who first created a glider, it was the German Otto Lilienthal who first started to grasp the physics of flight through flying his glider.
Click to expand...

Ok Zembla, I will give screws, balloons and gliders to Europe. What else do you have?

Zembla said:

Its funny that you claim the Americans are cleaner
Click to expand...

This is true, because most of the world think Americans smell like soap-a shower every day? Perfume was invented in Europe as a... well... "substitute" for a shower.

Zembla said:

we're just trying to make clear to you that you need to be sceptic to what your government tells you
Click to expand...

The US Government has no media in America. Sure, the government gives press conferences, but it is the news organizations that do the reporting. How is this different? It is called "American Business Media Enterprise." It is very simple. Like any other business, an error will be exploited by a business' competitors. Thus, if a news network in America reports that President Bush plans to abolish the Civil Rights Act, a rival in the media will discover that this is not the case and come down hard on the network that transmits lies. If a restaurant serves bad food that makes people sick, customers don't even have to wait for the FDA to lock up the restaurant, the law of free enterprise states that:

Word will get out and customers will go elsewhere.

Problem solved.

Zembla said:

Really, you're displaying yourself as a retard, as most Europeans who read this know much more about history than you do
Click to expand...

Doubtful. Very doubtful.How many of you can bring to mind the great and significant tale of Alcibiades without some sort of research? Have you ever had a history teacher with personality? Probably not. Schools are casual in the United States, and being casual schools, more work gets done. Sounds like heresy? Perhaps you should try it. Teachers should not be robotic disciplinarians who punish their students when they defy the instructor?s attempt to force what they believe to be significant information into their students? cranial cavity? verbatim. Seriously, do you think the teacher?s stick is used only to point at the board in Europe? In America, these drones are known as ?nuns.? Nuns aren?t very popular any more. You may try to write me off as a so-called ?self-righteous naпve rebel? when I state that America?s educational system is top-notch. I will prove it.

I am not sanctimoniously flaunting my extraordinary enlightenment with the aim of malevolently disrupting your second-class intellectual prowess. Rather, I am rightfully doing so in a logical manner.

Get out your thesaurus, Book of Words or what have you, and add some common sense, and you will come to find that my ?bitchin? is not fiction diction.

spuint said:

what now? sombedody made a conclusion european had no its own culture?
well sure.. european culture is based on many different old cultures..
Click to expand...

You must be thinking of a different type of culture (which Europe could use more of). The ?culture? that I say Europe has plenty of is the kind you smear on a petri dish and watch as the bacteria multiplies in the agarose.

@Big-jo, he is showing some maturity and reason in this thread. Come on people, pick up the slack! Big-jo knows what he is talking about, and he actually cares. Frog, zembla, spuint and others do not know what they are talking about, and the way these ?specimens? phrase it, it is impossible for others to know what they are talking about either!
But back on topic. Big-jo, does Spain and the rest of Europe not recognize that it was the Arabs that restored technology to Theocratic Europe? Seriously, the Catholic Church would have remained catholic had not the technology been available for the discoveries about the solar system and other scientific breakthroughs. The Arabs jumpstarted the European enlightenment. I will prove it:

The year 1453 had great significance in European history (this is from my memory by the way). This was the year of the fall of Constantinople. When Constantinople fell, the nobility fled the city with the aim of escaping as far from the Arabs as possible. What direction did they go? West of course! These nobles were very knowledgeable in history and modern technology due to their proximity to ancient Greece and the Arabian Empire respectively. These were the most knowledgeable men technically on European soil! They fled west into Italy and the rest of Europe, and there began the Renaissance. The rest is history.

So much to say, so little time.

-afi-- · Sep 14, 2004

Squirl:
How many of you can bring to mind the great and significant tale of Alcibiades without some sort of research? Have you ever had a history teacher with personality? Probably not. Schools are casual in the United States, and being casual schools, more work gets done. Sounds like heresy? Perhaps you should try it.

Squirl, seriously, you're fucking talking out your ass and making Americans look like complete and total idiots. Stop it. You're fucking arrogant, and you are putting on a show of complete and utterly ridiculous nationalism.

Please. Fucking knock it off.

squirl · Sep 14, 2004

Afi, apparently you cannot distinguish between arrogant Europeans and a level-headed person calling them out on it. There is a big difference.

-afi-- · Sep 14, 2004

No, apparently you can't realize that you're fucking wrong and you're being a douche.

Yes, you're being a vag-rag and it's fucking obvious and embarrassing to me and probably any other american on this board. I can say when a European is being arrogant and stupid, I've done it before, but in this case you're the one being arrogant and stupid. You're saying things without having a fucking clue about them, and it's obvious.

Seriously, stop.

Glas · Sep 14, 2004

@ squirl: You really are an ignorant little retard. In Scotland (pop. 5M) alone we have had inventions such as tarmac, the pneumatic tyre, the steam engine, the television (debatable), the light bulb, penicillin....

In Scotland alone, not to mention the rest of the UK, not to mention the rest of Europe.

Fuck off you little ignorant arrogant nationalistic prick. You really are worse than Allsop.

-glas-

big-jo · Sep 14, 2004

squirl said:

When Constantinople fell, the nobility fled the city with the aim of escaping as far from the Arabs as possible.
Click to expand...

Turks

-frog- · Sep 14, 2004

This is getting funnier with every squirl's post... c'mon tell us more opcorn:

Glas · Sep 14, 2004

@ squirl:

as for your crap about soap;

Eau de Cologne (French for "water of Cologne"), or "cologne" for short, is a type of perfume. In its original formulation, it was an alcoholic and watery suspension or distillation of the oils of bergamot, lemon, orange and orange blossom, with the addition of lavender oil and rosemary oil.

Eau de Cologne is said to have been invented by Giovanni Paolo de Feminis towards the end of the 17th century. On October 8th, 1792, the Cologne merchant Wilhelm Mьlhens received as a wedding present an old parchment with the recipe for "aqua mirabilis" (miracle water).
Click to expand...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eau_de_Cologne

In modern times, the use of soap has become universal in industrialized nations due to a better understanding of the role of hygiene in eliminating disease vectors such as germs. Manufactured bar soaps first became available in the late nineteenth century, and advertising campaigns in Europe and the United States
Click to expand...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap

Soap wasnt even invented when perfume first came in to being, so your claim that Europeans used perfume in spite of soap is, like the rest of your ignorant comments, complete bullshit.

I have to laugh....you fat fucking Yanks probably cause enough body odour under your multiple layers of skin to create a hole the size of LA in the ozone layer.

-glas-

-afi-- · Sep 14, 2004

Glas said:

you fat fucking Yanks probably cause enough body odour under your multiple layers of skin to create a hole the size of LA in the ozone layer.
Click to expand...

cmon glas... low blow there

Glas · Sep 14, 2004

I know afi, im just taking the argument to the extremes that squirl is using. To be fair, I could re-word the sentence to

'the majority of Yanks are fat fuckers......'

because that would be a factual statement.

Please, dont think for a second that I think you are like that, or that I am generalising all Americans. As I said, im just fighting fire with fire, its the only way to show up squirl's arguments for what they are - a load of fuckin crap.

No offence meant afi

-glas-

-afi-- · Sep 14, 2004

OK, sounds good to me

Remember glas, always heed to your own advice (cough, signature, cough)

Actually, see this one through, just this once!

Zembla JG13 · Sep 14, 2004

squirl said:

Ok Zembla, I will give screws, balloons and gliders to Europe. What else do you have?
Click to expand...

Are you kidding? How do you think we ever got to America? By inventing nothing? By sitting on our asses, not washing ourselves and soaking us in perfume?

The US Government has no media in America. Sure, the government gives press conferences, but it is the news organizations that do the reporting. How is this different? It is called "American Business Media Enterprise." It is very simple. Like any other business, an error will be exploited by a business' competitors. Thus, if a news network in America reports that President Bush plans to abolish the Civil Rights Act, a rival in the media will discover that this is not the case and come down hard on the network that transmits lies. If a restaurant serves bad food that makes people sick, customers don't even have to wait for the FDA to lock up the restaurant, the law of free enterprise states that:

Word will get out and customers will go elsewhere.

Problem solved.
Click to expand...

You're really a class act, still you try to show us how your ideal (to make sure you understand the sarcasm) media privatisation is the solution for every free speech conflict. And still you - in between the lines - try to tell us the US is the only nation where people are free to speak. Wake up, you're posting on a Russian board, speaking with Europeans, and this thread hasn't been locked up yet, while I'm SURE for 100% that this thread would've been locked up if it was posted on a board with American moderators, reason? They value freedom of speech much less high than you would like to believe. Wake up, media has been privatised in Europe a looooong time ago, probably even before it was in the US.

Doubtful. Very doubtful.How many of you can bring to mind the great and significant tale of Alcibiades without some sort of research? Have you ever had a history teacher with personality? Probably not.
Click to expand...

God it's getting irritating to speak to somebody who's SO want to be right that he forgets he doesn't know SQUAT. You are trying to make us believe you actually know the European schooling system better than us? And to answer your question, EVERY history teacher I've had has personality, dunno if it's so odd to have teachers with personalities in the states, over here it's common practice. Seriously, every teacher I had has a somewhat different way of teaching than the other, but all are very distinctive and NONE just read from their book with a careless and robotic flair. To answer your other question: we don't learn tales at school over here, we study history, not some matter of legends myths or whatevers, those are preserved for Latin, English, French, German or Dutch classes.

Schools are casual in the United States, and being casual schools, more work gets done. Sounds like heresy? Perhaps you should try it. Teachers should not be robotic disciplinarians who punish their students when they defy the instructor?s attempt to force what they believe to be significant information into their students? cranial cavity? verbatim.
Click to expand...

I really don't know what age you're exactly living in, but the teaching methods you describe are something from before last half-a-century. Teachers don't punish students, we've got grade systems to punish students, if you so insist on calling it punishments. Also, it aren't the teachers who decide what's significant information worth teaching, it's the government, they leave the freedom of choice about additional subjects to the teachers, I'm not sure if private schooling complies to the government standards either.

Seriously, do you think the teacher?s stick is used only to point at the board in Europe? In America, these drones are known as ?nuns.? Nuns aren?t very popular any more. You may try to write me off as a so-called ?self-righteous naпve rebel? when I state that America?s educational system is top-notch. I will prove it.
Click to expand...

Again you pretend to know what's like to go to school in Europe, you've been getting too many fairy-tales from your teachers or neighbors or whatever, because I really can't fathom where you get this crap. What you're saying is utter nonsense, and YET you believe it, I guess because you so desperately want to.
America's educational system? Funny you should mention, please, go look up the figures, there's been studies about the schooling system, and guess what, America didn't rank all as high as you want to make us believe. And now that I've read somebody who claims to be a fully schooled American, I have no difficulty understand how it could be so much lower than expected. Again you're posting opinions, trying to counter facts with opinions.

I am not sanctimoniously flaunting my extraordinary enlightenment with the aim of malevolently disrupting your second-class intellectual prowess. Rather, I am rightfully doing so in a logical manner.
Click to expand...

So, you tried to throw us second-rate Europeans off guard with that phrase? Sorry to say, your attempt failed, sadly. You're playing the person, not the ball, but I guess I've done the same. Your extraordinary enlightment, well, that might be what you say, if you are extraordinarily enlighted, I'm sorry to say, but America's got a long way to go then. So you think you are rightfully proving us wrong? You really are blinded by the exchange of words aren't you, getting all personal I see.

Get out your thesaurus, Book of Words or what have you, and add some common sense, and you will come to find that my ?bitchin? is not fiction diction.
Click to expand...

So, you're trying to say our English is crap? Ok then, lets switch the conversation to French, or German, a language which most of the Europeans can understand and speak. Now honestly, point out to me where my English goes wrong, and maybe you'll catch a bone.

@Big-jo, he is showing some maturity and reason in this thread. Come on people, pick up the slack! Big-jo knows what he is talking about, and he actually cares. Frog, zembla, spuint and others do not know what they are talking about, and the way these ?specimens? phrase it, it is impossible for others to know what they are talking about either!
Click to expand...

Funny little intermezzo. So you judge your own claimings and behavior as being mature? You think you are reasonable? And as for the rest: so if people who DON'T know what they're talking about could easily correct your false statements and claimings, well then I guess you're really at a severe loss in the intellectual department.

The Arabs jumpstarted the European enlightenment.
Click to expand...

Europeans jumpstarted American science, and America as a whole in fact.

So much to say, so little time.
Click to expand...

You've already said plenty to prove yourself a fool, it's wiser to shut up before things get worse.

<Z>

Zembla JG13 · Sep 14, 2004

-afi-- said:

Actually, see this one through, just this once!
Click to expand...

Well, I'm going to start using the ignore function again I'm afraid. He's getting more and more riduculous with every post. I've seen where this is going long before, there is no end I just hope he's only being so shortsighted and unreasonable in this thread.

<Z>

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