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Court refuses to release names of US-trained military leaders
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
Posted: October 23rd, 2016
http://www.sfgate.com/nation/article/Court-refuses-to-releas...
Activists have no right to force public disclosure of the names of Latin American military leaders trained at a U.S. Army installation formerly known as the School of the Americas, a divided federal appeals court ruled Friday. A federal judge had ruled in 2013 that the government must identify students and instructors at the school at Fort Benning, Ga., whose graduates have included Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega and Salvadoran death squad leader Roberto dAubuisson. But in a 2-1 ruling Friday, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ... said the information had little public value, and that disclosure would invade the trainees privacy. There are many groups in foreign countries that would seek to harm those who are publicly associated with the United States military, Judge Sandra Ikuta said in the majority opinion. She also cited assurances by the Defense Department and an oversight board that the school ... is complying with a federal law that requires it to instruct students about human rights. Federal law additionally requires the department to deny enrollment to any member of a military unit that has committed a gross violation of human rights, Ikuta said. Dissenting Judge Paul Watford said the majority was taking the governments word that everything was in order a fox-guarding-the-henhouse notion despite past revelations of abuses by School of the Americas graduates. He noted that past training materials disclosed by the Pentagon in 1996 included manuals providing instruction on torturing and executing insurgents.
Note: The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formerly known as the School of the Americas, graduated more than 500 human rights abusers. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing government corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.
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