By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 31 1998; Page A34

Under the Leahy law, the secretary of state, on the recommendation from embassy officials, must ensure there is no credible evidence of human rights violations by specific police or military units before they are eligible to receive U.S.-funded military training, equipment or U.S. loan guarantees for the purchase of equipment.

But the law does not spell out who, exactly, is responsible for collecting the information necessary to make a decision. Neither an embassy's military group, which has direct contact with a host military, nor the defense attache and CIA station chief are explicitly required to turn over relevant information or participate fully in the vetting process.

Some Pentagon officials worry that such a reporting requirement would undermine years of efforts to build close relationships between the U.S. military and foreign officers. Some human rights organizations, and Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), worry that without the military's help, the law could become almost worthless.

While training funded under the International Military Education and Training program (IMET) has received considerable congressional scrutiny since the 1980s, when it was discovered that some of El Salvador's worst human rights violators had been trained at the Army's School of the Americas, the same oversight is not routinely applied to U.S. military training programs in foreign countries.

This year, an amendment to the law was inserted to cover such programs. The change was made, Leahy aides said, after a series of articles in The Washington Post detailed how U.S. special operations troops involved in the Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) program had trained troops in countries with poor human rights records, among them Indonesia, Rwanda, Turkey, Sierra Leone, Equatorial Guinea, Suriname and Papua New Guinea.

Legislators concerned that U.S. military commanders were misusing funding for the JCET program -- which is supposed to train U.S. troops, not foreign troops -- also passed legislation requiring the secretary of defense to approve all planned JCETs and to file an extensive report next year on the purpose and details of each of the previous year's JCET deployments.

The Pentagon has been slow to cooperate with some requests for information about the training. Under pressure from Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.), chairman of the House International Relations Committee's subcommittee on human rights, Pentagon officials promised six months ago to turn over the names of Rwandan officers who had received U.S. Special Forces training and to provide all documents related to the training of troops in Rwanda and Indonesia. Smith wants to know if Rwandan officers allegedly involved in massacres during the civil war in neighboring Congo had received U.S. training.

Since then the Defense Department has failed to give Smith names of any Rwandans who received training. Instead, the department sent 15 boxes of irrelevant papers, including generic Army engineering and dated infantry training manuals, and academic monographs from the Army Center for Lessons Learned on such topics as the civil war in Lebanon.

"Almost none of this information is relevant to the most important question," Smith said. "Were we or were we not training murderers and torturers?"

U.S. Special Forces troops recently visited Rwanda to do an assessment of the Rwandan military's needs. The assessment is being used within the Defense Department to argue for a new, broader military relationship.

In May, the Defense Department suspended the Indonesia JCET program indefinitely, in part, said several U.S. officials, to mollify members of Congress who threatened to end the entire JCET program when they discovered U.S. troops were training Indonesian forces that had a well-documented history of human rights abuses.

The department has since told Smith it "did not routinely screen Indonesian participants in JCETs, nor were training rosters routinely maintained," according to the U.S. Pacific Command. A human rights committee at the U.S. Embassy in Indonesia is developing a database for future training.