> [What that scumbag Horowitz is up to now...]
>
> Chronicle of Higher Education - daily web update - Wednesday, March 3, 1999
>
> Through Ads, Conservative Group Attacks Professors Who Defend Controversial
> Book
>
> By DENISE K. MAGNER
>
> A conservative think tank is running advertisements in student newspapers
> at six leading universities attacking professors who have defended
> Rigoberta Menchú's controversial autobiography even though the book has
> been labeled a fraud.
>
> The Center for the Study of Popular Culture, based in Los Angeles, is
> paying for advertisements in the campus newspapers at Brandeis, Columbia,
> Harvard, and Yale Universities, and at the Universities of Illinois at
> Urbana-Champaign and of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The first ad
> appeared in the Illinois student newspaper last month, but most will not
> begin appearing until today.
>
> The advertisement calls Ms. Menchú a "Marxist terrorist" who has been
> "exposed as an intellectual hoax." It continues: "This fraud was originally
> perpetrated and is still defended by your professors and by the Nobel Prize
> Committee."
Horowitz certainly has an odd sense of timing with this attack. Consider the following...
Friday February 26 12:47 PM ET
Report on Guatemala War Blames U.S.
By ALFONSO ANZUETO Associated Press Writer
GUATEMALA CITY (AP) - A truth commission set up to seek reconciliation after Guatemala's 36-year civil war has blamed the U.S.-backed army for most of the 200,000 deaths and disappearances that occurred during the conflict.
The commission, created under 1996 peace accords, criticized U.S. aid to the army and called on both the government and former leftist rebels to ask the public for forgiveness for the bloodshed.
The report, released Thursday, found the army responsible for 93 percent of the deaths. The Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity was blamed for 3 percent, while 4 percent remain unsolved. The commission looked into about 42,000 deaths from the war.
About 150,000 people were killed in the decades of fighting, and 50,000 disappeared - many of whom are presumed dead.
The report by the Commission for Historical Clarification was Guatemala's first major step in healing the division in a country split since a U.S.-backed coup toppled the Marxist government of President Jacobo Arbenz and put rightists in power in 1954.
The report also noted that ``the government of the United States, through various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and indirect support for some state operations.''
That support helped Guatemalan military and paramilitary units take part in executions as well as kidnapping and torture, The New York Times quoted a staff member of the commission as saying in today's editions.
The panel also found evidence that the United States had knowledge of the genocide, the aide told the Times on condition of anonymity.
By lending support to ``some illegal operations,'' the CIA and other U.S. agencies encouraged the government to commit genocide against the Indian population, The Miami Herald quoted commission member Christian Tomuschat as saying in today's editions.
However, American Ambassador Donald Planty downplayed the U.S. role, saying the abuses were ``committed by Guatemalans against other Guatemalans ... (as a) result of an internal conflict.''
Much of the commission's work was financed with a $1.5 million donation from the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Some accused the Guatemalans of trying to absolve themselves of guilt by saying the government was doing the United States' bidding in the Cold War.
``Blaming the U.S. is a national pastime here,'' The Herald quoted David Holiday, an American political consultant based in Guatemala, as saying.
The commission has no power to bring those responsible for the killings to trial or impose sanctions. But the report recommended the government begin a formal investigation into the army's actions and remove military officers found to have participated in the killings.
On Thursday, protesters outside Guatemala City's National Theater jeered army officers who arrived to hear the presentation of the report with chants of ``Killers, killers! We want justice.''
Defense Minister Gen. Hector Barrios Celada refused to comment on the commission's findings.
Former guerrilla leader Jose Ismael Soto said the rebels wished to reiterate that ``we are ready to take responsibility for our actions in the armed conflict.''
A Roman Catholic Church report released in April 1998 blamed the army for 80 percent of the killings. The bishop who headed the church investigation was bludgeoned to death at his home in Guatemala City two days after its release.
The truth commission's report, based on testimony from 9,200 people from all sides in the conflict, found that most of the war's victims were civilians and Mayan Indians, whom the army considered ``natural allies'' of the rebels.
``They completely exterminated Mayan communities, destroyed their dwellings, livestock and crops,'' the report said. It recorded 626 massacres, of which 32 were the fault of the guerrillas.
Tomuschat, a German citizen who heads the three-member commission, said it was ``clearly genocide and a planned strategy against the civilian population.''
Rigoberta Menchu, the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner, said she was satisfied with the report.
But, she added, she would not forgive those responsible for the killings until the army concedes that such massacres were part of a planned strategy of intimidation. Army officials have said the massacres were excesses on the part of individual officers.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"