Costa-Gavras’ latest film, “State of Siege,” leveled the serious charge that the United States operated a secret police bomb school where Third World policemen were trained in the manufacture and use of explosive devices to be used against political opposition in their countries. Senator James Abourezk (D-S.D.) has unearthed State Department papers which clearly document that charge. The existence of the Abourezk papers was first disclosed in Jack Anderson’s syndicated column on October 8, but a more detailed account of their content occurred more recently in a Pacific News Service article written by Michael Klare and Nancy Stein. The following information comes from that article.
The papers show that the U.S. government is, in fact, training foreign policemen in bomb-making at a remote desert camp in Texas. In response to Senator Abourezk’s inquiries, the Agency for International Development (AID) has now acknowledged that its Office of Public Safety is providing such instruction.
At the U.S. Border Patrol Academy in Los Fresnos, Texas, foreign policemen are taught the design, manufacture, and potential uses of homemade bombs and incendiary devices by CIA instructors. At least 165 policemen--mostly from Third World countries of Asia, Latin America and Africa--have taken this “Technical Investigations Course” since it was first offered in 1969. All costs of the training ($1750 per student) are borne by AID.
Students spend their first four weeks at the International Police Academy (IPA) in Washington D.C. where they are lectured on topics such as “Basic Electronics,” “Introduction to Bombs and Explosives,” “Incendiaries” and “Assassination Weapons.” After completion of the preliminary course, the trainees are flown to Los Fresnos for four weeks in “field sessions.” According to AID these sessions include “practical exercises” with “different types of explosive devices and booby traps.”
In a memorandum to Senator Abourezk, AID official Matthew Harvey argued that the Technical Investigations Course was set up to help foreign policemen develop “countermeasures” against terrorist attacks on banks, corporations, and embassies.
In order to develop countermeasures, he claimed, the trainee must first study “home laboratory techniques” used “in the manufacture of explosives and incendiaries.” Only then, according to the AID argument, will he be able “to take preventive action to protect lives and property.”
Although Harvey stressed the defensive nature of the training program, he admitted that the Department of Defense found the subject matter so inherently sensitive that it refused to provide instructors for the course. In fact, once a trainee has become proficient in bomb technique, there is nothing to stop him from using the skill offensively against political opposition at home. Such a possibility becomes more real when one examines a list of countries represented at the Texas bomb school (number of trainees per country in parenthesis): Chile (5), Brazil (6), Guatemala (18), the Dominican Republic (4), Bolivia (3), Uruguay (16), Thailand (10), the Philippines (5), Korea (3), and Iran (2). All have pro-American governments in which the police are actively involved in suppressing legal and extra-legal political opposition movements.
Training in torture techniques is described in the documents, too. As Senator Abourezk said, “Maybe the American people don’t have to know about troop movements or the location of nuclear weapons, but they sure as hell can decide whether they want to support torture or not.”
The seriousness of these State Department papers is clear. The U.S. is deliberately and heavily committed to the training of Third World police and military forces in the technique of bombing, assassination and torture. These methods can and are being used to suppress Third World political movements opposed to the U.S. goal of “the commercial conquest of the world,” as Woodrow Wilson put it. Such subordination of human freedom and life to the economic goals of this or any country is a situation of sin and must be clearly labeled as such.
Joe Roos was on the editorial staff of the Post American when this article appeared.
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