There was an interesting news article this week from the Presbyterian News Service (PNS) about the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.  This is a Spanish language school at Fort Benning, Georgia, where military, police, and a few civilians from Central and South American countries are trained by the U.S. Army.  This Institute, formerly known as the “School of the Americas,” has been the focus of condemnation for decades for allegedly training its students in torture and other questionable techniques which they then took back and applied in their own countries.  The concern has been that the U.S. Army was training foreign operatives in methods that violated human rights. 

This article is interesting because it is about two Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) (PC(USA)) chaplains who either work at or work with the Institute and their perspective and inside knowledge of the school.  As Chaplain John W. Kiser, who teaches ethics at the school says:

“Here’s the problem that I see,” Kiser told the Presbyterian News Service, recently. “Bits and pieces of different things have been glued together and false conclusions drawn. It’s the old line that
two-plus-two does not equal five.”

While they do not deal with the school twenty years ago, they do make a point that graduates of any school are not going to be completely perfect, but out of 60,000 graduates of the Institute in the last 60 years, only 600 have been implicated of a crime and about 100 have been convicted in their home countries.  That is 99% of their graduates who have not had a problem.  As Rev. Kiser says:

“A school should not be held accountable for the moral failings of a few of its graduates.”

The thought is echoed by Chaplain James S. Boelens, also interviewed for the article:

(Boelens) said doing so would be the same as suggesting that Harvard University be held accountable for the murderous acts of convicted Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski — the Harvard graduate who between 1978 and 1995 sent letter bombs that killed three people and injured 29. “The inductive fallacy would be to say that everybody that graduates from Harvard is a criminal.”

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has been prominent in the protests against the school, including the 206th General Assembly (1994) passing a motion calling for its closure and being represented and having media coverage at the annual protest and civil disobedience action.  This past November two PC(USA) protesters, one a pastor, were arrested for trespassing as part of the protest.  Fifteen to twenty years ago closing down the School of the Americas was a major issue for the PC(USA) Washington Office.

I bring up this article because one of the criticism’s I have had in this blog was what I, and those around me in the pews, perceived as a “progressive bias” by the Presbyterian News Service.  ( December 2007 post, November 2007 post, August 2007 post)  I now consider it incumbent upon me to recognize their news coverage of an issue that is in balance with a previous article.  So thank you to the PNS, and particularly Evan Silverstein who wrote both of these articles, for covering both sides of the issue and providing a balance many of us are looking for.  Well done!