Extending the global empire by training foreign military

yes, it's distressing...

The Senate plans to begin consideration today of the defense authorization bill for the coming year. One particularly distressing section of the package would reauthorize the Pentagon to arm and train foreign militaries, something it was first authorized to do for 2006.

you mean something like this...?

Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), located at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, is the Defense Department's principal Spanish-language training facility for Latin American military and law-enforcement personnel (though some civilians attend as well). It is the successor to the School of the Americas (SOA), a facility established in 1946 and legally closed in 2001. The WHINSEC is located in the same building, and offers many of the same courses, as the school it replaces. Along with the U.S. Air Force's Inter-American Air Forces Academy (IAAFA), WHINSEC attracts the largest number of Latin American military students.

i'm not sure where the nyt is coming from, implying that training foreign military is a recent development... the school of the americas was notorious for providing the training underpinnings of some of the most despicable episodes in latin american history, from pinochet in chile, to the "disappeareds" in argentina, to the death squads in el salvador and guatemala...

Although the money involved represents only a $200 million piece of the half-trillion-dollar Pentagon budget, it marks the continuation of a dangerous shift in responsibilities from the Department of State to the Defense Department and the militarization of American foreign policy.

our foreign policy has been "militarized" for a very long time and, as i said earlier, the sole purpose of this training is to establish u.s. agents on their home soil...

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