corrente

Here's another dot to connect. Xan's been writing about how contracts for interrogation in Iraq seem to have been mysteriously let through the Interior Department (!), and at a place called Fort Huachuca. Turns out that General Fast, as well as her subordinate Pappas, and several Abu Ghraib interrogatorps, all got their training at Fort Huachuca, which is the Army's school for interrogation. In fact, the Army considers Fast's work at Abu Ghraib such a success that it's promoting her to head of the school!

A glance at the manuals produced by the school show the "bad apples" theory for the crock that it is. What Fort Huachuca is doing is taking the lessons learned from the Reagan dirty wars and updating them for Bush's new dirty war in the Middle East (back).

In 1996, as part of the campaign to close the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA), activists used the Freedom of Information Act to force the release of training manuals used at the SOA, a notorious counterinsurgency training facility for Latin-American personnel. Those manuals, used at the SOA for many years and distributed in the thousands by the U.S. Army to military, police and intelligence units throughout Latin America, explicitly advocated the use of torture--not just "bending the rules" of interrogation, as some have timidly euphemized the current scandal.

In their investigations, activists discovered that the SOA manuals were adapted from training manuals used by U.S. personnel in Vietnam and translated into Spanish right here in Arizona, at Fort Huachuca.
(via Tucson Weekly)

So much for the "bad apples" theory.