11/14/12 – Joey King – The Scott Horton Show

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Our first guest on the show today is Joey King of Veterans for Peace.
Welcome back.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well, Scott.
How about yourself?
Well, I'm glad to hear you're doing well, and I'm doing just fine.
Thanks for asking.
And thanks for joining us on the show today.
So, like I was just telling Jack, Jack Blood who comes on before me is very kind and has me call in and plug the show the last few minutes of his show every day, which is very kind of him.
And he's out there in Atlanta now, and he said he's going to try to join you guys.
You've got a protest at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, this weekend, correct?
That is correct.
So tell us everything.
Well, there is a fundraising concert going on in Atlanta, I believe it's Thursday night.
And then Friday will be a lot of people will be getting into Columbus, Georgia, which is about two hours southwest of Atlanta.
It's on the Georgia-Alabama line.
And thousands of people will be there for Saturday and Sunday, the vigil to try to shut this school down.
They changed the name of it a few years ago to the Western Hemisphere Institute of Security and Cooperation.
So that acronym is WINSEC.
The ministry of taking good, good care of you.
There you go, exactly.
Most activists in the United States and throughout Latin America know it by its original name, which was School of the Americas.
So they've trained lots of people there who have gone on to be parts of death squads throughout Latin America.
Every single coup, up to and including the 2009 coup in Honduras, have been perpetrated by people who are graduates of the School of the Americas.
And that goes back to, I think, 1948 or so.
So all the Latin American coups that you can imagine or have heard of have had a connection to the School of the Americas.
Now, what percentage of that, is it all of them or just a super majority of them, did the coup at the behest of the CIA?
Or is it just when you train somebody how to be a mirrored sunglasses, right-wing colonel, then he's going to be?
That's a good question.
It really depends on which coup we're talking about.
If you look at something like the 1973 coup in Chile, for example, that was definitely something that the CIA had their hand in.
Maybe less so in the Honduran coup, but the U.S. didn't do a whole lot to stop that or fail to recognize that government that was sort of an interim government.
You're talking about the most recent one?
It goes both ways, really.
You're talking about the most recent Honduran coup?
Correct, yeah.
Which was 2010, right?
June 2009.
Oh, okay.
And now, was that the School of the Americas guy took over there?
Actually, two.
Two generals, I think one was an Air Force and one was an Army general, actually did the coup, and then they installed sort of a temporary civilian.
I think he'd been president of the Senate or something.
His name was Micheletti, and he was interim president for something like six months until they had an election to elect Porfirio Lobos, who is the current president of Honduras.
So what all do they teach them at the School of the Americas historically?
They just teach them how to force a democratically elected president into exile or all the different ways and means there, or what do they specialize in exactly?
Well, there's lots of different things they teach them.
Over the past, they had denied teaching torture tactics, but then one of the manuals was leaked, and 60 Minutes did a big expose on it about what all was in this manual, and they say they've stopped doing that, but quite frankly, a lot of what they teach is classified.
We don't exactly know what they teach there.
How to extract a confession.
Yes, yes.
Well, how big of a population is there of any graduating class of these people?
What do they do?
Do they take officers from the different militaries, junior officers, senior officers, and then bring them up here for school?
It's a mix, really.
Depending on the course, there are lots of different courses they run out of the School of the Americas.
Just keep in mind that the School of the Americas is a very, very small part of what is Fort Benning.
You have all sorts of people that are in and out of Fort Benning training.
It's the infantry center, so every single infantryman goes there, every single ranger goes there, every single paratrooper goes through there, and so forth.
So a lot of training goes on at Fort Benning, and the School of the Americas is a small part of that.
But depending on the course that they're in, it may be a senior enlisted person, it may be a junior officer or a colonel or a general from a Latin American army.
It could even be police, too.
They do train a lot of counter-drug interdiction types of courses as well there.
Well, you know, in my getting long, long life now, I've done very little traveling.
But from time to time, I've met people from Latin America especially, or even from the Caribbean, I guess.
In fact, I guess the guy I'll paraphrase for you is a Caribbean guy that I met, where he was just talking about how there's no way Americans can really see this.
They just don't understand.
But to anyone living south of Texas or south of Florida or California, the United States is this massive imperial juggernaut.
It's like this giant dark storm cloud hovering over, above all of them.
It never goes away, and it threatens to send in helicopters full of men in black to kill them and take their things at any time.
And it's just a horrible, frightening imperial presence in their everyday life.
Whereas to hear the American side of it, well, they're lucky.
We go on vacation there and buy their crap.
But Americans just have no idea really what the USA represents to the people on the receiving end.
And that includes pretty much everybody from the Rio Grande down to the southern tip of Chile.
It's true.
Over the last however many years you want to look at it, it's basically Latin America threw off Spanish and Portuguese colonialism in the 1820s.
It's been pretty true everywhere, that's for sure.
Recently, I would say in the last ten years or so, Brazil and Argentina and Chile and South America have gained a lot of independence from that model.
Not so much in Central America or the Caribbean, but in South America there is some degree of independence that they really haven't had up until now, just because their economies are growing so big and so fast that if Uncle Sam tells them what to do, they just don't necessarily feel they have to obey anymore.
Yeah, it really is a new era down there, isn't it?
Yeah, and not so much in Central America, but definitely in South America there is a new...and of course Venezuela, I left that one out with Hugo Chavez, he's sort of the nemesis, I guess.
You have to have a nemesis.
Well, now you know me, Joey.
My politics, especially my economics, do not lean left at all.
But I'm very pro-independence, so I don't care if the Venezuelans go Bolshevik red.
It's just none of my damn business.
True, true.
Imperialism tends to create more problems than it solves, as a rule.
Yeah, and so yeah, good for them, it's great to see.
And you know, really it was inevitable at some point that the resistance to American brutality and just America's government's insistence on getting their way on every issue down there for 200 years in a row or whatever, at some point there had to be a pushback that could be effective.
And then I guess without the excuse of a Soviet beachhead in the hemisphere, they really just can't drum up the support to really crack down as hard as they used to, even in the 80s, right?
That's true, yeah.
A lot of the 80s was in Central America, places like El Salvador and Guatemala and Honduras.
And, you know, Grenada and Panama as well.
We actually invaded those two countries, 1983 in Grenada and 1989 in Panama.
So, you know, we definitely put our mark on those two countries and in several other places.
You know, 75,000 people were killed in the El Salvadoran war that started under Jimmy Carter, really.
It's when that started, but definitely fueled and made a lot worse by the Reagan administration.
And, you know, we got a lot of that kind of news in the 80s, but we really didn't get a lot of news about what was going on in Honduras and Guatemala next door.
And it was just practically as bad in those two countries as it was in El Salvador.
Well, you know, I'm so ignorant about the history of all these different Latin American dictators and stuff.
I know I actually even have on the shelf the Washington Connection Third World Fascism by Noam Chomsky, which I believe is an encyclopedia especially of Latin American dictators backed by the United States.
And I really should, you know, finally crack that thing open and memorize it good.
But I do know, I'll tell you one more anecdote about a guy that I knew back 10 years ago or so.
And he told me he was in Brazil on September 11th.
He was in, I forget if it was Sao Paulo or Rio.
And, you know, people will remember, you know, from TV, old TV movies or whatever, where people would gather around on the sidewalk and watch the TV through the store window, that kind of thing.
It doesn't really happen in the U.S. like that anymore, but it was that kind of scene, the way he set it up.
Everyone was gathered around on the sidewalk watching the towers burning and falling on the, you know, through the store window like that.
And he said they weren't celebrating, but they weren't sad about it.
And, I mean, that meant they, meaning the crowd of the townspeople of whichever town it was, I forget now.
And that they would do, like, kind of that silent clench their fist and kind of go, yeah, to themselves.
Like, not real celebration, whooping it up, but the common sentiment was, yeah, now you know how it feels like, what you do to us all the time.
Finally someone hit the Americans back was how they all felt on the street that day in Sao Paulo, whatever.
This was the anecdote delivered to me.
And I just thought, you know, wow, what cruelty might America have ever, you know, inflicted on the people of Brazil?
You know, I sure, and look, I'm Mr. Anti-war guy.
I don't know the first thing about it.
What do you think everybody else knows about it?
Less than nothing, you know?
True.
Yeah, we had a dictatorship in there, I think, in 1964.
There's a member of Vets for Peace in Maine that was actually working as a, I believe, a Jesuit seminarian there at the time.
And we installed a coup in 1964, and he's actually planning on going back in two years on the exact day, because there's a lot of 50th anniversary of that event that's being planned in Brazil surrounding that military takeover.
And they had a military government there for about 20 years, basically supported by the United States.
And you mentioned September 11th, because September 11th in Latin America has a special significance.
They actually have two September 11th remembrances, and the first one was September 11th, 1973, when Augusto Pinochet came into power in Chile in that CIA-sponsored coup.
So their September 11th in Latin America dates back to 1973.
And you said they have another one?
Right.
Lots of people in Latin America commemorate the September 11th, 1973 coup in Chile.
Oh, the second one being ours.
Ours, exactly.
Ours was the second one, in their mind.
In fact, Chalmers Johnson, when he first heard about it, checked the date and thought, could it be Chileans?
They wouldn't crash a suicide attack.
But that was what the anniversary meant to him.
I forgot if it was Tom Englehardt or his publisher called him, the author of Blowback, and said, hey, you need to turn on your TV, Dr. Johnson.
Something's going on.
Yeah, history has a way of repeating itself sometimes.
Yeah, it's something else.
Now, there does seem to be a renewed push, and this kind of reminds me of the early 90s, when after the Soviet Union had fallen, they weren't able to drum up the permanent terrorism threat, weapons of mass destruction, and all that crap in the Middle East yet, and so they had to settle for cocaine dealers as being the enemy du jour in the world, and Patriot Games and all this crap, or was that the right one?
Anyway, you know what I'm talking about.
All the hype and the real foreign policy based on the theory that we're fighting drugs, and that's really what's getting renewed funding and renewed pushback as well, right?
Yes, it's not been very heavily reported in the United States, but it was August 15th, 200 U.S. Marines started patrolling a counter-drug interdiction along with the Guatemalan Army.
So it is not a far stretch from Marines doing police work in Guatemala to where they start doing police work in the United States.
So it's pretty scary, and it's just not been reported.
We apparently signed a treaty, I think it was in July, with Guatemala to legally make this happen, and then a few days later sent some Marines down the train, and then August 15th it went live, and so they're patrolling as we speak, Marines and Guatemalan military in counter-drug interdiction.
Yeah, well, and it's only going to get worse, right?
Because you look at what happened in Mexico where the president said, you know what, I'm so sick and tired of these drug dealers, I'm going to solve this problem once and for all, called out the army to crush them, and all he did was turn the whole thing into a massive war and just militarized the cartels way beyond what they were before, and what, 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 people killed in this thing?
Yeah, and a lot of those people, just to have an alternative route, are going through the countries of Central America, especially El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
Back in May, I believe it was May 4th, there was a mission gone awry that four people were killed on a, I guess the best way to describe it would be a water taxi that lived in a remote village in Honduras, and their water taxi was misidentified, basically, as a drug-running boat along this river, and there were American DEA agents in the helicopter, still a little bit murky as to who actually pulled the trigger on the gunships, but four people died, one of whom was a pregnant woman, there was another 14-year-old boy died in that attack.
So this stuff can really start going south when you start killing innocent people in the name of the drug war.
Yeah, well, and it's such a poor excuse, too.
If anybody's dealing drugs in the world, it's the American government, and everybody knows that, and the banks that they're most closely tied to.
It's been a fundraiser for organizations like the CIA for quite some time, yeah.
You know what's funny to me, though?
Like, well, the best I understand, I don't really know enough about the Vietnam angle.
That just seemed like a more personal profit kind of thing.
Now, in the 80s, Congress wouldn't give them the money, so they needed the money, right?
Selling all that cocaine for the Contras in Nicaragua for the wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua and all that.
But for the heroin in Afghanistan right now, I don't understand why they bother doing it.
I mean, if they have a deliberate policy for, I don't know, trying to get the Chinese and the Russians addicted to opium products or something, then I guess that sort of makes sense.
But doesn't the CIA just write all their own checks?
I mean, what the hell?
What's stopping them?
They have a money machine.
They do whatever they want in the world.
Why do they need drug money?
You know?
Is it just for the individual agents siphoning off their own retirement account, that kind of thing?
That's one of those things we'll never know.
Maybe we can ask General Petraeus.
Yeah, I'm sure he knows.
Somebody waterboard George Tenet.
I bet he'd have some secrets for us.
All right, well, listen.
So spend the next few minutes, if you would, please, telling us all about the School of the Americas.and the organization and how people can take part in it.
And is it true that they might even be able to meet a famous movie star if they go and help support and that kind of stuff?
And then also please talk about Vets for Peace.
Sure, sure.
Well, Veterans for Peace, I would say the School of the Americas watch annual vigils, probably our second biggest gathering.
You know, anywhere from 50 to 100 Veterans for Peace throughout the country normally show up.
Our website is VeteransForPeace.org.
And School of the Americas Watch, we have a council member seat on that.
I'm actually the council member's person on the School of the Americas Watch Council.
So we're very closely affiliated, and that is S-O-A-W.org.
As far as meeting movie stars, you never know who will show up.
I know Martin Sheen's pretty passionate about School of the Americas, and he was there last year and I got to meet him.
He's been there at least two or three times that I'm familiar with.
I've seen the Indigo Girls there a couple of times as well.
So a lot of famous people show up at this thing usually.
So we'd love to have people come out and, you know, support us.
And if you can get to Atlanta, it's about a two-and-a-half-hour drive, or about a two-hour drive southwest of Atlanta at Columbus, Georgia, at Fort Benning.
Hey, let me interrupt you for just a second and talk about how important I think this is.
I think this is really important, and here's why.
Because I remember being a kid and learning for the first time about, what, the CIA sells drugs?
And what, they support death squads that hack little children to death with machetes?
And what, they sell missiles to the Ayatollah at the same time they back Saddam's war against them?
These kinds of things are how I learned about the true nature of the way things work around here, as opposed to the way they teach it in school.
And so just little things like, what is the School of the Americas, Dad?
That kind of thing can change somebody's life.
That kind of thing is extremely important for breaking right through.
Why would America need a School of the Americas, other than we support right-wing fascist dictatorships all across the Americas, and so this is where we train them?
I mean, there's no other explanation of what it is.
And then, you know, the implication of that is, America's the kind of country that supports right-wing fascist dictators, and why is that, et cetera, et cetera.
So this kind of thing was very important to me, and so I like to believe it could be very important to other people who are, you know, just getting their ear flicked on these kinds of things and just starting to pay attention, you know?
You know, it's funny you mention that today.
I was watching MSNBC's Morning Joe, and today there's a new Oliver Stone documentary that also has a book.
It's kind of a combination, and they had an interview with the writer of the book and Oliver Stone, you know, the pitch of this project.
And I can't remember.
It's got kind of a ring of Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States ring to the title.
But what was interesting, they asked him about Howard Zinn's book, and they said, well, Howard loved this project, and he was with us on it, you know, until he died a couple of years ago.
But Howard kept his book focused more on the domestic issues, and this takes it.
It's sort of a sister companion book to take the empire end of it from World War II up to the present.
So I'm sure they'll have a lot of the stuff that you were talking about, you know, the dirty wars of Latin America that's been going on, you know, basically since the 1820s.
But it's funny that you mention that.
I think I'm going to try to get the book and watch the documentary, because I believe it would have a lot to offer.
Yes, sounds like it.
If someone wants a thumbnail sketch of, you know, what's been going on in Latin America, it's such a big part of it since World War I that I think it would probably do us all good to watch that.
Yeah, for sure.
You know, that's one thing that Oliver Stone can definitely be counted on for, is being really good on the military-industrial complex and the permanent warfare state since World War II.
And, you know, in the movie Nixon, that's the missing 18 minutes, is him explaining, you know, the power of the beast, meaning the new right, the military-industrial complex money built up after World War II, during and after World War II, and how they came to control the government, whatever, the beast.
He has Nixon calling it the beast, and they're the ones who killed Kennedy and whatever.
So, yeah, that promises to be, you know, pretty good.
In fact, even in JFK, he's got, like, Donald Sutherland explaining all the coups and all the people they killed and how well it all worked, and he's just going down the list, right?
So, yeah, that promises to be really interesting.
You know, Kennedy, there was a guy, he had a Freedom of Information Act, apparently it was the longest-running Freedom of Information Act request that had been ever since they passed that law, and he got, you know, the CIA to release the Family Jewels.
He's the one that discovered the Family Jewels and finally got him to do that.
And I heard him interviewed on NPR a couple years ago when they finally released them, and they said, well, yeah, you've been looking at this for X number of years, and it's got, you know, nothing really new in here, because little by little all this had leaked out, it's just the volume of it.
And the interviewer asked, well, what do you find most interesting about it?
He said, well, the thing I find most interesting about it is that John F. Kennedy had 13 coups going at one time in the planning stages.
You know, obviously a lot of those were in Latin America, you know, Cuba and so forth, but a lot of people like to refer to Kennedy in more peaceful terms, you know, because he said about the, if you don't make peaceful change possible, you know, you make violent revolution inevitable or something like that.
But he wasn't that way really in real life.
He was, you know, a big supporter of overthrows of governments, and Latin America has had more overthrows of government than any other region of the world since World War II.
Yeah.
Well, just like Malcolm X said, hey, chicken's coming home to roost.
He just capped DM two weeks earlier or something.
Yeah, exactly.
Thanks so much for your time.
It was great to talk to you.
Everybody, this is Joey King from the School of the Americas Watch.
That's S-O-A-W.org.
And from Veterans for Peace, they got a big shin dig at Fort Benning at the School of the Americas this weekend.
Check out S-O-A-W.org.
Thanks very much, Joey.
You bet, brother.
We'll talk to you soon.
Yeah, you will.
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