Human Rights Groups Urge U.S. to Disclose Who Gets Military Aid

 http://forusa.org/blogs/john-lindsay-poland/human-rights-groups-urge-us-disclose-who-gets-military-aid/10750

More than a dozen human rights organizations are calling on the State Department to disclose which military and police units receive U.S. aid in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Colombia, but Washington so far has declined to release the information. The groups highlighted new provisions for transparency in a human rights law, known as the Leahy Amendment, in a letter to Assistant Secretary of State Roberta Jacobson. Leaders from Amnesty International, FOR, Center for Constitutional Rights, Washington Office on Latin America, Drug Policy Alliance, National Security Archives, Open Society Foundations, and School of the Americas Watch were among those calling for release of the information.Most human rights news from Washington is discouraging these days. House appropriators strip out human rights conditions from foreign aid, and the White House has weekly assassination sessions. So even modest human rights advances can be surprising.Last December, President Obama signed a spending bill that included new provisions to a limited but potent human rights law known as the Leahy Amendment. The Leahy Law prohibits assistance to any foreign military or police unit if the State Department has credible information that unit members have committed a gross human rights abuse, such as murder, torture, disappearance, or rape, unless effective measures have been taken to bring those responsible to justice. The law permits no waiver of aid suspension for national security reasons, but does put interpretation in the hands of the State Department. Passed in 1997, the law was used to exclude less than one percent of more than 200,000 individuals and units nominated to receive U.S. military assistance – mostly training – worldwide in 2011. A further six percent of units and individuals nominated did not receive assistance, in some cases because a human rights abuse was identified and delayed approval.But the law’s intent not to give U.S. aid to military and police units with human rights abusers has been eluded in the way the government implemented it. Instead of applying Leahy Law to organizational units of armed forces, the State Department said that “the unit trained is the unit vetted,” and reviewed names of individual officers for reports of the officer being implicated in a gross abuse. This meant that aid besides training - equipment, intelligence, and logistical aid - could flow freely to abusive units. It also meant that an officer from a unit with an institutional problem of abuse could receive training, as if the training were for the individual’s benefit, not his unit’s benefit.The revision to the law signed in December explicitly requires vetting of the units from which individuals are nominated for training. It requires the State Department to keep records of all units receiving U.S.assistance, and to publicly disclose “to the maximum extent practicable” those units excluded from assistance because of human rights abuses. When the U.S. has credible information about a gross abuse but lacks unit information, the new provisions also require the U.S. to try to identify the unit involved. And it requires the State Department to reach out to both other U.S. agencies and beyond the U.S. government for information on abuses.Assistant Secretary Jacobson replied in June, saying only that the State Department reports on military training in its annual Foreign Military Training Reports. However, these reports apply only to training, only to military (not police) forces, and although required to identify units receiving training, often does not do so. The 2010 report on training for Mexican military forces, for example, does not identify a single unit. FOR learned that the report grossly under-reported the number of Mexican personnel that receivedU.S. military training in 2010.Together with other human rights organizations, the Fellowship of Reconciliation will continue to call on the State Department to disclose who is receiving U.S. military aid. Such disclosure is a basic requisite of transparency and a crucial aid in applying important human rights law.

[ED NOTES:THEY WONT,BECAUSE THIS WILL REVEAL;WHAT WE ALREADY KNOW,THAT US IS TRAINING,FUNDING UNITS WICH CARRY OUT MASSACRE AFTER MASSACRE,WE KNOW THIS IS ALREADY A FACT IN HONDURAS...US IS VIOLATING SYMMINGTON AMMENDMENT,GLEN ACT AND LEAHY LAW..THE US GOVT IS AN OUTLAW,PERIOD.COLOMBIA IS AN EXCELLENT ACS EIN POINT,YEARS AGO,AFTER THE CASANARE MASSACRES,WICH WERE CARRIED OUT IN CONJUNCTION WITH US AID,MILITARY TRAINING,AND US CORPORATE FUNDED DEATHSQUADS,THE US WAS EXPOSED,SO THEREFORE IT SWITCHED AID AND CHANNELLED THAT FUNDING INTO OTHER UNITS,KNOWING THAT THE SOLDIERS RESPONSIBLE,WERE DISTRIBUTED INTO THE NEW UNITS THE U.S. CONTINUED TO FUND.THIS IS WELL DOCUMENTED.