Congress – undermining U.S. military training?
By Dr. J. Michael Waller
Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA).
A congressman who supported Marxist guerrillas who killed American troops in the 1980s is now pushing to suspend US military training in the region – just as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is spreading political subversion throughout the hemisphere.
Congressman James P. McGovern (D-Mass., pictured) was a Capitol Hill staffer in the ’80s when he distinguished himself as a die-hard supporter of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla and terrorist organization backed by Cuba and the Soviet bloc. The FMLN committed thousands of atrocities in El Salvador, and singled out off-duty US Marine Embassy guards, American soldiers and an American Jesuit priest, Fr. Francisco Peccorini, for assassination.
Today, McGovern and a coalition of groups that include other FMLN partisans – including the Center for International Policy, Maryknoll Brothers and Sisters, Pax Christi and the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) – is attacking the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, the US Army-run school to train Latin American military officers.
McGovern circulated a letter on February 7 urging his colleagues to cosponsor a bill “to suspend operations” of the school pending an “investigation” into its counterinsurgency training programs. The Massachusetts congressmen and his friends at CISPES have been trying to shut down the school for years.
McGovern says he is concerned about the fact that of the thousands of officers who have gone through the training, some were human rights abusers. He would be more credible if he had opposed communist human rights violations in the hemisphere, including those of his friends in the FMLN, and made an issue of the human rights situations today in Cuba and Venezuela.
In 2001, McGovern joined a successful Cuban-backed political warfare campaign to force the US Navy to shut down its important military training facility in Vieques, Puerto Rico.
The fact that McGovern doesn’t seem to mind those abuses shows that his agenda today is the same as it was twenty years ago. It looks like Chavez has a reliable ally on Capitol Hill to undermine Latin American militaries from Washington while the Venezuelan dictator does his work down there on the ground. Download rep_mcgovern_ltr_0702.pdf
[Note: There is a problem with the security certificate on the WHINSEC website. A security warning says that the problem “may indicate an attempt to fool you or intercept any data you send to the server.” I don’t know if WHINSEC opponents hacked the site, but WHINSEC has been notified of the problem.]
Mr. Gaffney is the host of Secure Freedom Radio, a nationally-syndicated radio program heard weeknights throughout the country. He is an associate author of highly acclaimed Shariah: The Threat to America and the publisher of over a dozen other books and monographs from the Center for Security Policy Press.
In April 1987, Mr. Gaffney was nominated by President Reagan to become the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, the senior position in the Defense Department with responsibility for policies involving U.S.-USSR relations, nuclear forces, arms control, missile defense policy and U.S.-European defense ties. He acted in that capacity for seven months during which time, he was the Chairman of the prestigious High Level Group, NATO’s senior politico-military committee. He also represented the Secretary of Defense in key U.S.-Soviet negotiations and ministerial meetings.
From August 1983 until November 1987, Mr. Gaffney was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy under Assistant Secretary Richard Perle.
From February 1981 to August 1983, Mr. Gaffney was a Professional Staff Member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by the late Senator John Tower (R-Texas). And, in the latter 1970’s, Mr. Gaffney served as an aide to the late Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson (D-Washington) in the areas of defense and foreign policy.
Mr. Gaffney holds a Master of Arts degree in International Studies from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service.
Mr. Gaffney’s leadership has been recognized by numerous organizations including: the Department of Defense Distinguished Public Service Award (1987), the U.S. Business and Industry Council’s Defender of the National Interest Award (1994), the Navy League of the United States’ Alfred Thayer Mahan Literary Achievement Award (1999), and the Zionist Organization of America’s “Louis Brandeis Award” (2003), the Western Conservative Summit’s Stephen H. Long Award (2015), the Council for National Policy’s George Washington Military Leadership Award (2016) and the IMPACT Award from Ginni Thomas and United in Purpose (2017).
Mr. Gaffney was born in 1953 and resides in the Washington, D.C. area.
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