Court refuses to release names of US-trained military leaders

Photo: G. MARC BENAVIDEZ, AP Fort Benning law enforecment, left, line up and watch for...

Bay Area activists have no right to force public disclosure of the names of Latin American military leaders trained at a U.S. Army installation formerly known as the School of the Americas, a divided federal appeals court ruled Friday.

A federal judge had ruled in 2013 that the government must identify students and instructors at the school at Fort Benning, Ga., whose graduates have included Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega and Salvadoran death squad leader Roberto d’Aubuisson. But in a 2-1 ruling Friday, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said the information had little public value, and that disclosure would invade the trainees’ privacy and could endanger their lives.

“There are many groups in foreign countries that would seek to harm those who are publicly associated with the United States military,” Judge Sandra Ikuta said in the majority opinion.

She also cited assurances by the Defense Department and an oversight board that the school, now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, is complying with a federal law that requires it to instruct students about human rights. Federal law additionally requires the department to deny enrollment to any member of a military unit that has committed a “gross violation of human rights,” Ikuta said.

Dissenting Judge Paul Watford said the majority was taking the government’s word that everything was in order — a “fox-guarding-the-henhouse notion” — despite past revelations of abuses by School of the Americas graduates. He noted that past training materials disclosed by the Pentagon in 1996 included manuals providing “instruction on torturing and executing insurgents.”

Whether the human rights training is effective, and whether the Army is screening out members of Latin American military units with records of abuses, “are not idle questions given the school’s checkered history,” Watford said.

Plaintiffs lawyer Duffy Carolan said she would encourage her clients to ask the full appeals court for a new hearing. The ruling comes less than six weeks after the death of one of the lead plaintiffs, Judith Liteky, 74, of San Francisco, a longtime activist who had organized the western branch of School of the Americas Watch in 1999.

The school, founded in 1946, trains Central and South American military leaders in combat and counterinsurgency techniques. Names of its attendees were withheld until 1994, when President Bill Clinton’s administration started releasing the information. The list contained more than 60,000 names of graduates before President George W. Bush’s administration halted disclosures, citing the rise of terrorism since Sept. 11, 2001. President Obama’s administration has continued Bush’s policy and defended it in court.

Besides d’Aubuisson and Noriega, the school’s graduates have included 19 Salvadoran soldiers implicated in the 1989 killings of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her 16-year-old daughter. Watford, in his dissenting opinion, said there was no evidence that any of the 60,000 identified graduates had been subjected to harassment or violence based on their attendance at the school.

But Ikuta, joined in the majority by Judge Andrew Kleinfeld, said “simple common sense” supports the government’s argument that attendees would be at risk if their names were revealed. There is little evidence of errors in the current screening process, she said, and disclosure of the names would add little to public awareness.

“Even if individual attendees are later alleged to engage in human rights abuses, such subsequent incidents are unlikely to shed light on what the government is currently up to” at the school, Ikuta said.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @egelko