Judges from the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to release the names of Latin American military leaders trained at the Army School of the Americas. The court said the information was of scant value to the public and could possibly endanger the leaders’ lives. Critics of the ruling argue that it is appropriate to find out if the instruction is effective in protecting human rights in Latin America and whether trainees were screened to weed out those with records of abuses. Graduates have been linked to atrocities in Guatemala, Peru, and El Salvador. (San Francisco Chronicle, September 30, 2016, by Bob Egelko)
The Pentagon stopped publishing the names of the trainees in 2005 after Army lawyers decided they deserved the same privacy accorded to U.S. soldiers. The dissenting judge in the 2-1 decision wrote, “Because the Institute remained in operation only after Congress mandated reforms designed to fix the problems that formerly plagued the school, the public has a strong ongoing interest in assessing whether those measures are working,” (The District Sentinel, October 4, 2016, by Sam Knight)