Yep they were doing some crazy stuff at Benning in the 80s and 90s, but WHINSEC has since changed for the better.
Fort Benning is the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), the successor to the Army's School of the Americas. Renamed in 2001, WHINSEC is a Department of Defense institute that instructs rising civilian, military and law enforcement leaders from throughout the Western Hemisphere. Its goals explicitly include strengthening democracy, instilling a respect for the rule of law and honoring human rights by educating an array of military and civilian students to solve regional problems, including peacefully resolving border conflicts, fighting terrorism, the illegal drug trade and organized crime, responding to natural disasters and supporting peacekeeping efforts.
The institute was formerly called the School of the Americas, and it trained many international military officers such as Manuel Noriega (U.S.-supported dictator in Panama between 1983 to 1989) and Gonzalo Guevara Cerritos (responsible for instance for the University of Central America massacre of 1989).Graduates of the SOA also include men such as Hugo Banzer Suárez, Leopoldo Galtieri, Efraín Ríos Montt, Vladimiro Montesinos, Guillermo Rodríguez, Omar Torrijos, Roberto Viola, Roberto D'Aubuisson (responsible for the killing of Salvadorean Archbishop Óscar Romero), Victor Escobar, and Juan Velasco Alvarado.Because many of its students have been associated with death squads, and coups in Latin American countries, the school's acronym is reparsed by its detractors as the "School of the Assassins". In 1999, the United States House of Representatives voted to cut off funding for the school, and in 2001, it changed its name: "So widely documented is the participation of the School's graduates in torture, murder, and political repression throughout Latin America that in 2001 the School officially changed its name to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation."
