To help Democrats choose their Candidate, here's a article on General, Wesley Clark for your information. this is a pretty determinitive topic for Democrats and the quotations are not too good for him. feel fee to comment or e-mail:wahkonta@graffiti.net
ARTICLE BEGINS
Boston Globe
Saturday, January 17, 2004

Facing Questions, Clark Backs
Army School

by Joanna Weiss

CONCORD, N.H. -- Retired General Wesley K. Clark
sometimes downplays his Army background, and
criticizes the military's "don't ask, don't tell"
policy on gays. But there is one military institution
he vigorously defends: the controversial academy once
known as the US Army School of the Americas.

Opposition to the school, which trains military
officers from Latin American countries, has long been
a cause celebre among some Democrats and liberal
activists, who say the academy has trained some of the
most notorious criminals of the region and teaches
skills that Latin American armies sometimes use
against their own citizenry. Supporters of the school
point to reforms from the 1990s, and say its courses
teach foreign soldiers about democracy and human
rights.

But many critics have not wavered in their opposition,
and voters on the campaign trail -- in New Hampshire
and elsewhere -- have been questioning Clark about his
support.

Clark never headed the school but had dealings with it
when he led the US Southern Command from 1996 to 1997.
He delivered a graduation speech there in 1996 and has
praised the school before Congress. George Bruno, the
cochairman of Clark's New Hampshire campaign and a
former ambassador to Belize, was a paid adviser to the
school when it reopened with a new charter in 2001.

Now, on the stump, Clark strongly defends the school,
without denying that some graduates have committed
atrocities in their home countries.

At a retirement home in Concord this month, one woman
told Clark that the school's graduates have been
accused of murder. Clark responded that when
white-collar criminals are arrested for fraud, nobody
faults their alma mater.

"There's been a lot of rotten people who've gone to a
lot of rotten schools in the history of the world,"
Clark said. "And a lot of them went to this school.
But a lot of them have gone to Harvard Business School
and a lot of other places."

The US Army School of the Americas, created in 1946,
has been located since the 1960s in a building at Fort
Benning, Ga., and trains 800 to 1,000 Latin American
military officers each year, in courses that last from
six weeks to one year. Former Panamanian leader
General Manuel Noriega is a graduate, along with some
of the most notorious criminals of Latin America,
critics say. Nineteen graduates also were involved in
the killings of seven Jesuit priests and two of their
coworkers in El Salvador in 1989.

Allegations against the school intensified in 1996,
after the Pentagon declassified a report that said
manuals used there in the 1980s advocated fighting
insurgents with execution, blackmail, kidnapping, and
torture.

In 1997, as commander in chief of the US Southern
Command, Clark praised the school before the Senate
Armed Services Committee, saying its mission had
changed since the Cold War days. "This school is the
best means available to ensure that the armed forces
in Latin America and the armies in Latin America
understand US values and adopt those values as their
own," Clark said at the time.

But some members of Congress, including Massachusetts'
late Representative J. Joseph Moakley and former
Representative Joseph P. Kennedy II, pressed for
legislation to close the school. In 2000, Congress did
so. Weeks later, a new school -- the Western
Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation --
reoponed in the same building.

The new institute has an oversight board that includes
members of Congress and academics, said Lee Rials, a
spokesman for the school. He said the law also
requires the school to offer human rights training and
mandates student trips to see US government in action.
The school also offers tours to the public.

But opponents insist the school should be shut down,
and they continue to gather thousands for annual
protests at Fort Benning, organized by a
Washington-based group called SOA Watch. Actor Martin
Sheen is among those who have been arrested for
trespassing there; nuns and priests are often among
the arrested, as well.

US Representative James P. McGovern, a Democrat of
Worcester, introduced a bill last March to shut down
the school, cosponsored by 102 representatives,
including Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio and Richard A.
Gephardt of Missouri -- both candidates for the
Democratic presidential nomination this year. Senator
John F. Kerry, another candidate, signed on to a
Senate bill to shut down the school, introduced in
1998, according to McGovern's staff.

The school has "become a symbol that represents all of
the things we don't want people to think of us in
Latin America," said McGovern, who has endorsed Kerry
in the presidential race. "It's a stain on our human
rights record, and it seems to me that at a time when
we're trying to lift up our credibility around the
world, especially in the area of human rights, it
would be a very powerful statement" to close it.

In New Hamspshire and Wisconsin, Clark has defended
the school to questioners. "We are teaching police and
military people from Latin America human rights," he
said last week in Concord. "And if we didn't bring
them in and teach them human rights, they wouldn't be
able to learn human rights anywhere."

On the stump, Clark tells critics that Bruno will take
them to visit the school, although he sometimes
misidentifies Bruno as a board member.

"He's on the board. He'll be happy to take you down
there," Clark told the woman who questioned him in
Concord. "If you find anything in that curriculum
material or anything that's taught there that looks in
any way remotely connected with human rights abuse or
torture, you let me know, and I promise you, we'll
close the School of the Americas when I'm president,"
he said.

But if "you find nothing wrong [and] you see these
officers and noncommissioned officers in there
learning about human rights, I'd like you to change
your position."
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