SOA Training Manuals | # | Uncategorized — J.S. (not the Watergate felon) Magruder @ 4:09 pm When Hannah Arendt wrote about the ‘banality of evil" it was in response to her impression of Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem. Everything about him seemed so commonplace, that without the charges being read, it would be difficult to believe that this very ordinary man was capable of that with which he was charged.
I’ve just completed reading the training manuals for the SOA (School of the Americas) that were released through a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request in 1996. They are posted and available to read HERE though I would caution that the documents are disturbing, partly because the horrific is so casually introduced along with the seemingly mundane business of the day to day. Arendt’s phrase remained foremost in my mind as I read advice to prospective counterintelligence agents on everything from appropriate disguises to the supplies one should have on hand. A few pages later, in an offhand way, without any charged language, it is suggested that priests and nuns not be overlooked as potential terrorists. Knowing how that bit of training advice was applied in El Salvador, it is difficult to read these manuals as anything other than documents of intent. The evil is laid out quite plainly interspersed with the mundane and banal. A section on dealing with entire villages brings to mind the massacre at El Mozote where over 900 civilian villagers were violently murdered.
The SOA training manuals are valuable and important documents that ought to be read, if only to highlight how casually human lives are assigned the dehumanising titles of "subject" and "enemy" so that they may be just as casually massacred. And of course, our complicity in the funding and training of those that would carry out the deeds. The SOA continues to operate at Ft. Benning in Georgia.
