POST SCRIPTS

in the US where all foreign soldiers who attend said school start off their training with extensive humans rights classes. In addition to the human rights classes we can ensure that none of the money we are spending to support our allies goes to things like torture training, or wmd development. Instead they receive useful training in hand to hand combatives, small unit tactics, mission planning, etc.

The School of Americas makes perfect sense to anyone without an absurd far left political agenda.

Lee Rials, public affairs officer for the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, as the School of the Americas is now called, sent the E-R an e-mail defending his institution.

"I find it amazing that the truth about the School of the Americas and the institute is about 180 degrees from the beliefs these people (the demonstrators) have," he wrote.

"They accept the assertions of this political movement without questioning or looking at the facts that are available to them. The most stark refutation of their beliefs is that not one single example of anyone using what he learned at the school to commit crimes exists - not one.

"The indisputable fact that some who did attend at some time did later commit crimes is irrelevant because no one has shown any cause-effect relationship."

I truly enjoy the analysis difference here. You see the SoA rep says (accurately I might add) that there is no evidence of someone committing crimes based off what they had learned at the School of Americas.
Now there is a large Catholic contingent which usually shows up at these demonstrations because a while back some nuns were killed in Central America by individuals some of whom had attended the school. So why is their former attendance irrelevant as Mr. Rial suggests? Well, its simple, the School of Americas doesn't have a "How to kill a Catholic nun" class. At the risk of sounding obtuse; I can only assume that since Nuns are peaceful and generally unarmed, military training isn't required to kill one. All that is required is a desire to go to hell and avoid the long lines.

Now lets take a look into the liberal argument.

Protester: "Webster said she didn't put any stock in Rials' remarks. She said, "if 1 percent of the graduates of any school were committing serious crimes, it would make sense to look into what was being taught at that school."

First of all, were any of these protesters calling for a "...look into what was being taught at the school." I don't think so, they were screaming, shouting, and breaking the law, all in the name of closing the school down.

Secondly, there have been quite a few real live terrorists who have received training in the US at institutions such as Yale. And as far as I know, Yale doesn't require classes on human rights for its students, but I don't see these same people getting on a bus to go there. The reason is simple. Many of the protesters you see showing up at these demonstrations are more left wing, anti-military than anything else.

Look, if you want to believe that the US is taking the time and effort to ship military students from all over the western hemisphere for the purpose of teaching them how to torture and murder, then my guess is, nothing is going to convince you otherwise. But, it simply isn't true. Military education is just that, a form of education. What an individual chooses to do with it is their decision. Bringing them to the US to train them gives us far more oversight on what is going on.

These same liberals are the ones who want us to step up foreign aid to the third world, which is coincidently some of the least accountable funding you can provide, yet they turn their noses up at the SoA.

The math isnt that hard to compute. These protesters don't like the military. If they were truly concerned with people recieving training here, which they used for evil in their homeland, then there are far more non-military, non-government, highly liberal institutions which they should "...look into what was being taught at the school." Nick Freitas, USA