Much has been made this past year about torture and prisoner abuse in Iraq and persistent fears that the United States is not taking a good approach to human rights abroad.

While these concerns are valid, there are other, more heinous abuses unreported by the mass media. Just this past year, Colombians – including three children – were beheaded and had their bodies thrown in shallow graves or rivers.

What turns brutal crime into something that demands our attention is that the military forces that attacked these people were likely lead by a U.S. trained commander and this incident is not alone. U.S. trained paramilitary forces have led to some of the worst atrocities in Latin America this past half-century, including the killing of priests, bishops and civilians by death squads operating in the name of dictatorships friendly to the United States, according to the School of the America’s Watch.

The training of these individuals has taken place at a government institution inside Fort Benning in Columbus, Ga. called the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation”, or formerly “The School Of The Americas.”

The School of the Americas, or SOA, was opened in 1946 in Panama as a way to combat supposed communist or socialist movements in U.S. supported countries in Latin America. In 1984, it was forced out of Panama, with former Panamanian President Jorge Illueca calling it “The biggest base for destabilization in Latin America.”

In 1989, after the murders of six Jesuit priests, their caretaker, and her daughter, it was revealed that those who carried out the killings were graduates of the aforementioned SOA, and since that date, on the anniversary of the killings, a protest/vigil has been held outside the school. In 1996, pressure was put on the school to release the manuals used at the school.

These manuals revealed what many had thought all along – they had taught actions such fear, payment of bounties for enemy dead, beatings, false imprisonment, executions and the use of truth serum as means of crushing insurgencies or opposition movements.

Despite the revelation that the school had been teaching foreign soldiers and commanders human rights abuses, the school was not closed. Rather, it changed its name and added human rights classes, yet abuses by former WHINSEC students continue.

Efforts to close the school continue. There is a bill in the House of Representatives to close the school, and this year’s protest had 16,000 participants, this columnist one of them.

Yet even if the school is closed, there is still the problem with the psyche those in charge of the nation seem to be taking toward human rights – whether it’s turning a blind eye to the scores of civilians killed by former students in Latin America in the name of defeating communism or abusing prisoners in Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib in the name of defeating terrorism, there seems to be less concern about how we treat fellow humans as long as we attach a bad name to them.

But what image do we present to the world if we commit acts of inhumanity while fighting terrorism?

In the words of SOA Watch founder Ray Bourgeois, “How do you teach democracy through the barrel of a gun?”

The United States should be doing what it can to spread free democracy and peace throughout the world. You do not spread democracy and peace through acts of terror and murder.

You can help prevent these sort of acts by getting your congressmen to support bill HR 1217, to close the SOA/WHINSEC and end its streak of exporting terrorists.

With 122 sponsors, there is a chance this bill could succeed, but no matter what happens, the leaders of this nation need to have a realization that brutality is not the American way.

Columns reflect the opinion of the author and not necessarily that of the Northern Star staff.