'A New Label on a Bottle of Poison'

Sometimes even the slickest public relations effort doesn't improve a person's or an institution's image. Think of the U.S. State Department's $15 million "Shared Values" ad campaign, which tried to assuage anti-American sentiment in Muslim countries.

More commonly, PR campaigns enjoy partial successes. That appears to be the case with the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC, formerly called the School of the Americas or SOA), a Defense Department facility at Fort Benning, near Columbus, Georgia. While media coverage and Congressional attitudes haven't improved appreciably since WHINSEC launched a major PR effort three years ago, the Institute has achieved a partial détente with some academic figures and human rights organizations.

According to its mission, WHINSEC provides "professional education and training to military, law enforcement, and civilians to support the democratic principles of the Western Hemisphere." Unlike the dozens of other U.S.-based military training facilities, though, the Institute receives a significant amount of public scrutiny. This mostly negative attention is due in large part to protests, outreach and lobbying activities organized by the School of the Americas Watch (SOA Watch).

Since 1990, SOA Watch has worked "to close the SOA/WHINSEC and to change oppressive U.S. foreign policy that the SOA represents." The organization points to hundreds of cases where WHINSEC graduates have been found guilty of or implicated in human rights abuses, including the November 1989 killing of six Jesuit priests and two associates in El Salvador and the February 2005 murder of eight members of the San Jose de Apartado Peace Community in Colombia.

WHINSEC public affairs officer Lee Rials rejected any culpability in these cases, telling PR Watch, "No one's been able to show even one person that took a course here and committed a crime that was related to the course." Yet there are ongoing contacts with trainees, according to WHINSEC's website: "When students return to their own countries, the U.S. military groups there maintain ties with them as part of the U.S. military-to-military engagement plan."

Eventually, the fallout from alumni crimes -- along with revelations that the Institute had used training manuals describing "'coercive techniques' such as those used to mistreat the detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq," as described by the National Security Archive, which made the manuals public last year -- became too much to ignore. In 2000, the then-School of the Americas became WHINSEC, ostensibly because the SOA "had fulfilled its Cold War era mission." Critics dismissed the change as a PR ploy.

In mid-2002, "to counter negative political rhetoric that detracts from the mission of both WHINSEC and the Army," the Defense Department approved a $246,000 "consistent, programmed, proactive public affairs effort in direct support of the Institute." Dubbed WHINSEC's "Strategic Communications Campaign Plan," it was also ridiculed as "putting a new label on a bottle of poison" by SOA Watch communications coordinator Christy Pardew.

(SOA Watch obtained a copy of the PR plan from California-based journalist and activist Aaron Shuman, who was given it by WHINSEC's Rials. SOA Watch shared the plan with PR Watch; it can be downloaded from the SourceWatch article on the Institute.)

Measuring Success

Three years later, have its PR efforts improved WHINSEC's public image? Based on media coverage and Congressional attitudes, the answer is no.

One major goal of the WHINSEC plan is that "media coverage of the WHINSEC is characterized as neutral to positive." An annex to the plan provides a baseline measurement, by evaluating opinion/editorial pieces on WHINSEC published from April 1999 to April 2000. Of these, 77 percent were judged "negative," 9 percent "balanced" and 14 percent "positive." A similar analysis by PR Watch of pieces published from January to mid-July 2005 that mention WHINSEC found a similar trend; 68 percent were negative, 23 percent neutral and 9 percent positive.