Its graduates have repeatedly been implicated in cases of torture, rape, massacre and assassination, their victims frequently social rights activists and other civilians. Small wonder that former Panamanian President Jorge Illueca described the school as the "biggest base for destabilization in Latin America."

Bowing to public pressure back home, in 1996 the Pentagon released several of the school's training manuals, detailing a curriculum advocating the use of blackmail, psychological warfare, torture and execution.

By 2000, the appalling degree of human rights abuses committed by SOA graduates prompted several in the House of Representatives to try closing the school, but just before the key congressional vote, SOA personnel presented the Department of Defense with a compromise: "Some of your bosses have told us that they can't support anything with the name 'School of the Americas' on it. Our proposal addresses this concern. It changes the name."

And with that SOA was closed, WHISC was duly opened, and in spite of a few cosmetic additions to the curriculum, America's terrorist training camp continued business as usual.

The farcical charade doesn't get very far with Fr. Roy Bourgeois, founder of School of the Americas Watch. One of the remarkable priests whose untiring social activism is detailed in Strabala & Palacek's "Prophets Without Honor," Bourgeois sees the Latin American military's role as keeping "the poor on edge and the small elite in power. The School of Americas is connected to that."

Bourgeois has done repeated stints in U.S. prisons due to criminal trespass, or "crossing the line" into Fort Benning - but he isn't alone.