"To give credit where credit is
due, this is Ed Herman’s work, which was incorporated in our joint book The
Political Economy of Human Rights and is spelled out in detail elsewhere in his
own writings. He’s an economist, as you know, and he did a careful study of
relations between U.S. aid and torture and found a quite dramatic correlation.
This correlation has also been noticed by others. One of the leading, maybe the leading academic specialist on
human rights in Latin America, Lars Schoultz at North Carolina, published an
article back in 1981 pointing out that U.S. “aid has tended to flow
disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens”
and “to the hemisphere’s relatively egregious violators of fundamental human
rights.” That included military aid, and went on right through the Carter administration.
I don’t think anybody has bothered to check it for the Reagan
years because it was so transparently obvious. And it continues right up until
today. Right through the Clinton years, Colombia was by far the leading
recipient of U.S. aid, and also had by far the worst human rights record in Latin America.
That alone makes the point.
In fact, if you look at the leading recipients of U.S. aid, most of it military aid, two countries are in a
separate category: Israel and Egypt, which gets half the aid given to Israel.
This arrangement is part of the Camp David agreements from back in 1979,
unofficially. Aid to Egypt is basically aid to Israel, to encourage Egypt to
sort of play along. But aid to Israel and Egypt is in a separate category, way
above anybody else. If you look at the rest, the leading recipients of U.S. aid
have typically been among the worst human rights offenders. Pakistan, for example, or
Turkey.
In the late 1980s it was El Salvador. Then it switched to Turkey during the years of the Clinton-backed
massive atrocities in Turkey against the Kurds in the 1990s. And then by, I
think, about 1999, Turkey was replaced by Colombia. The reason, which was
transparent, was that Turkey had succeeded in crushing any resistance to its
atrocities, so it didn’t need the military aid that much. And Colombia was still
engaged in vicious and violent counterinsurgency campaigns." Noam Chomsky: What We Say Goes
Torturing Democracy (PBS video)
will not play on all PBS stations. You can play it on-line though. (10/16/2008)
U.S. terrorism watch list tops 1 million 14 Jul 2008 A U.S. watch list
of terrorism suspects has passed 1 million records, corresponding to about
400,000 people, and a leading civil rights group said on Monday the number was
far too high to be effective. The Bush regime disagreed and called the list one
of the most effective tools implemented after the September 11 hijacked plane
attacks -- when a federal "no-fly" list contained just 16 people considered
threats to aviation.