U.S. acknowledges Colombia operation

[maddezmom]

U.S. acknowledges Colombia operation By FRANK BAJAK, Associated Press Writer

BOGOTA, Colombia - On the eve of a visit by President Bush, the U.S. Embassy confirmed Saturday that American and Colombian soldiers had conducted a joint operation in the southern stronghold of leftist rebels who are holding three U.S. military contractors.

The rare confirmation followed a report by Colombia's largest newspaper, citing unidentified sources, that two local residents had been detained in the late January operation and interrogated about the contractors' whereabouts.

U.S. Embassy spokesman Marshall Louis said only that "U.S. personnel accompanied Colombian forces in the south and that's all I can say about it."

The U.S. military's rules of engagement bar American soldiers from combat operations in this conflict-scarred nation but permit them to accompany host nation troops in areas where guerrillas operate and to defend themselves if attacked.

more:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070311/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/colombia_us_hostages

[BayCityProgressive]

1. I knew Bush

wouldn't go somewhere without killing someone! His bloodlust grows and he has an appetite for our neighbors to the south...watch out lefty presidents...Bush wants you for dinner!

[PDJane]

2. What Bush wants.......

is to have all the resources of the world in private hands, including water. I would like to see him and his greedy cronies in hell.

[Kagemusha]

3. Um, both of you...

Helping Colombian troops free US citizens held hostage is not despicable behavior.

...Right?

[IndianaGreen]

4. We are talking about 3 despicable mercenaries that we used to kill peasants

They are not protected under international law.

[Kagemusha]

5. Well if you're correct I'll say nothing more.

I was not aware of a mercenary angle.

[IndianaGreen]

6. When their plane was shotdown, we discussed the incident in DU

As it must be obvious by now, many of us take a very dim view of Plan Colombia and are also outraged about the health crisis created by our spraying crops in Colombia. The chemicals we use have caused birth defects in humans and in farm animals.

Take note that Bush has refused diplomacy from the gitgo. From the OP:

Current and former U.S. officials closely involved in the situation have told The Associated Press that Washington has failed to engage in routine negotiations or take other diplomatic steps to seek the hostages' release, making the Bush administration appear increasingly focused on a military rescue.

The Bush administration has denied neglecting to pursue all avenues to safely free the three men.

Marc Gonsalves, Tom Howes and Keith Stansell were captured by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, in February 2003 when their surveillance plane went down in a rebel stronghold in the country's south.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070311/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/colombia_us_hostages

Why are US troops engaged in combat in Colombia anyway?

[Judi Lynn]

8. Article from NY Times, May 18, 2001, "'Private Contractors' Role of U.S. Companies in Colombia is Qu

Published on Friday, May 18, 2001 in the New York Times
'Private Contractors'
Role of U.S. Companies in Colombia Is Questioned
by Juan Forero

BOGOTÁ, Colombia, May 17 — Their presence grew as Colombia's drug war intensified in the 1990's, with the United States hiring American pilots, radar operators, former Army Special Forces trainers and other former military personnel to carry out important missions.

Under private contracts known to only a few members of the United States Congress, these specialists — all working for American companies — have flown spray planes and helicopters, trained and advised Colombian military personnel, repaired high-tech machinery and helped pave remote airfield runways. Supporters of private contractors say that, overall, the companies have completed important work while relieving key American military specialists who would otherwise have had to uproot from strategically significant regions.

But now questions are being raised in the American Congress and even by Colombian officials about the logic of relying on private companies for operations that are not open to public scrutiny.

Americans working in Colombia are constantly exposed to danger, critics note, with three American pilots killed since 1997 when their spray planes crashed. Also of concern to policy makers in Washington and military officials here is whether the United States should be spending tens of millions of dollars annually on contractors when Colombian officials say Colombians could be trained to complete the same operations for much less money.

Indeed, the largest of the companies operating in Colombia, DynCorp of Reston, Va., a $1.4 billion company that has handled many tasks here in the last 10 years, was awarded a five- year, $170 million contract in 1998, according to government reports. American Congressional aides familiar with DynCorp say the company's pilots can earn more than $100,000 a year conducting operations that Colombian pilots could do for less than $40,000 a year.

"When we get a contractor here, we always think we could probably get a Colombian to do this, and a lot cheaper," said a high-ranking official in President Andrés Pastrana's administration who is familiar with contractors. "We can do it with a Colombian company, and it would cost 60 percent less."
(snip/...)

http://commondreams.org/headlines01/0518-02.htm

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From C.I.P. online:

Counternarcotics or counterinsurgency?

The lack of conditions or transperency over contractors' military activities gives rise to concerns about their congruence with U.S. policy. U.S. officials like Ambassador Anne Patterson reassure that "the political stomach for going into the counter-insurgency business is zero. It is not going to happen." {Article text from Colombian Defense Ministry} Nonetheless, some observers worry that contractors on counternarcotics missions may be getting too close to Colombia's larger conflict.

Trying to avoid a direct involvement in Colombia's decades-old war, the Pentagon has forbidden the estimated 200 U.S. military trainers here from entering combat areas or joining police or military operations that could result in clashes with guerrillas or paramilitaries. But no such restrictions apply to the American civilians working for DynCorp or another Virginia firm, Military Professional Resources Inc., known as MPRI, both under contract to help Colombian security forces. {Miami Herald, Feb. 22, 2001 - link to article text at Yahoo Groups}

"There have been U.S. media reports that some {DynCorp and MPRI} missions extend beyond drug-fighting and into the Colombian military's war against some 23,000 leftist rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, and National Liberation Army, known as ELN." {Miami Herald, Feb. 26, 2001 - link to article text at corpwatch.org}

http://www.ciponline.org/colombia/contractors.htm

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

_Bush started bumping up the numbers of American military in Colombia, in 2002. I'll bet there's far more than this article indicated by now:

Plan Colombia

~snip~
In March 2002 The Bush administration drafted a plan to expand the US military role in Colombia from counterdrug training to anti-terrorism. The policy shift could require as many as 100 additional American troops to be sent to Colombia. On March 21, the Administration asked the Congress for new authorities. The terrorist and narcotics problems in Colombia are intertwined. President Bush recognized this link when he stated on April 18, after his meeting with President Pastrana, "We've put FARC, AUC on our terrorist list. We've called them for what they are. These are killers, who use killing and intimidation to foster political means... By fighting narco-trafficking, we're fighting the funding sources for these political terrorists. And sometimes they're interchangeable. It is essential for Colombia to succeed in this war against terror in order for her people to realize the vast potential of a great, democratic country ... I am confident that with the right leadership and the right help from America, ... Colombia can succeed. And it is in everybody's interests that she does succeed." The president added that he discussed with President Pastrana "how to change the focus of our strategy from counternarcotics to include counterterrorism."

In July 2002 the US Congress rolled back restrictions that had limited American aid to antidrug programs. The more broad-based U.S. assistance program for Colombia would enable Colombia to use U.S.-provided helicopters and the counter-drug brigade from Plan Colombia to fight terrorism some of the time, as needed. The White House proposal would maintain the 800-person cap on U.S. military personnel and contractors providing training and other services in Colombia. This will not exceed the 400-person cap on U.S. military personnel providing training in Colombia, nor the 400-person cap on U.S. civilian contractors. The new legal authorities sought by the White House allowed U.S. assistance to Colombia to be used to support a unified campaign against narcotics trafficking, terrorist activities, and other threats" to Colombia's national security.

In October 2002, eighteen months after an American missionary plane was mistakenly shot down, the United States resumed a campaign to help Colombia track and force down drug flights. The program was suspended in April 2001 in Colombia and Peru after a Peruvian warplane shot down the missionary flight over the Amazon, killing an American and her infant daughter. Colombian warplanes will intercept drug flights based on intelligence from the United States.

In a significant shift in American policy, in October 2002, United States Special Forces arrived in Colombia to lay the groundwork for training in counterinsurgency. Under a two year $94 million initiative, beginning January 2003 ten American helicopters will bolster the Colombian counterinsurgency efforts, and some 4,000 troops will receive American training. The troops will defend a 500-mile long pipeline, which snakes through eastern Colombia, transporting 100,000 barrels of oil a day for Occidental Petroleum of Los Angeles. The pipeline has long been vulnerable to bombings by Colombia's guerrilla groups. Pipeline bombings by the guerrillas cost the government nearly $500 million in 2001. The two main rebel groups, which view Occidental as a symbol of American imperialism, have bombed the pipeline nearly a thousand times since the 1980's. The Colombian military increased security, deploying five of the six battalions in the 6,000-man 18th Brigade to pipeline protection, up from just two battalions in 2001. The number of bombings fell to 30 in the first nine months of 2002, down from 170 in 2001.

The United States helped the government of Colombia to resume drug interdiction flights, which were suspended in April 2001 after a missionary plane was mistakenly shot down in Peru. The mishap resulted in the deaths of US missionary Veronica Bowers and her infant daughter, prompting authorities to insist on more stringent safety procedures before the anti-drug flight program could be re-launched. With a stronger emphasis on safety protocols, the Airbridge Denial program resumed in Colombia in late August 2003. To ensure that safety standards are maintained, the program's certification process will take place each year. In April 2003 the United States signed a bilateral agreement with the government of Colombia that spelled out procedures that will be followed in this program.

As of September 2003 there were more than 2,000 US personnel from 32 US agencies at the US embassy in Bogotá. This US embassy has surpassed the US embassy in Cairo as the largest US embassy in the world. As of July 2003 there were 358 US troops in Colombia, three times the 117 US troops in Colombia in November 2001. Five US citizens employed as contractors were killed in Colombia during 2003, and a total of 21 US government-titled aircraft had been downed since 1998.
(snip)

In March 2004 the Bush administration asked Congress to increase by 75 percent the number of US troops and contractors in Colombia, citing the need to bolster its fight against drug traffickers and rebel fighters. The Bush administration wanted Congress to raise the cap on US soldiers and advisers to 800 from 400, and to increase the limit on civilian contractors to 600 from 400. These increases were approved in October 2004.
(snip/...)

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/colombia.htm

[Kagemusha]

13. ...I read about the "not taking routine steps" part but...

Ok, tell me how surveillance is engaging in combat, please?

Because I never said anything about NOT taking a very dim view of Plan Colombia. But I don't go calling surveillance flights over a friendly country's airspace "combat" either.

[Bacchus39]

14. what about Colombian law?

and what peasants did they kill? do you think Colombia is a nation of 40 million Juan Valdezs???

so you are saying kidnapping is not a crime under either Colombian or international law??

[IndianaGreen]

7. Hostages' Families Fear Military Rescue

The US government put these 3 mercenaries in harm's way. Basic decency demands that the government that put them in that bind should resort to negotiating their release, instead of endangering their lives by pursuing an Old West solution.

Hostages' Families Fear Military Rescue

By LARA JAKES JORDAN

Updated: 10:46 p.m. ET March 8, 2007

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration appears increasingly focused on undertaking a risky military rescue of three Americans held hostage more than four years by drug-trafficking leftist rebels in Colombia.

Current and former U.S. officials say the U.S. government has failed to engage in routine negotiations or take other diplomatic steps of the kind used in similar hostage situations.

Additionally, the Justice Department refuses to consider exchanging the Americans for two Colombian guerrillas held by the United States.

The Bush administration denies neglecting to pursue all avenues to safely free the three men _ contract workers Marc Gonsalves, Tom Howes and Keith Stansell, who were captured in February 2003 by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17521564/

[IndianaGreen]

9. The U.S. military presence in Colombia, February 26, 2003

The U.S. military presence in Colombia, February 26, 2003

On February 13, a plane carrying four Defense Department-funded contractors and a Colombian sergeant was forced to make an emergency landing while on an intelligence mission over the department (province) of Caquetá in southern Colombia. The four U.S. civilians aboard the Cessna 208 worked for California Microwave Inc., a unit of Northrop Grumman, a leading defense contractor.

Rural Caquetá has long been a stronghold of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a 17,000-member, nearly 40-year-old guerrilla group that since 1997 has been on the U.S. State Department's list of international terrorist groups. It appears that FARC rebels arrived almost immediately at the scene of the plane crash, where they killed the Colombian soldier on board and one of the U.S. citizens. The FARC announced on February 24 that the three remaining Americans are in their power, and that they plan to hold them - along with over twenty prominent kidnapped politicians - to pressure for the release of guerrillas in Colombian jails.

<snip>

Last year, the Bush Administration began widening the scope of its military assistance mission in Colombia. In August, Congress approved an administration request to allow all past and present anti-drug aid to be used against guerrillas and paramilitaries. In November, President Bush signed a secret order, National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD) 18, which broadened several of the American military's guidelines in Colombia, particularly with regard to intelligence-sharing.

In mid-January, a contingent of sixty U.S. Special Forces arrived in the conflictive department of Arauca in northeastern Colombia, where they are to train the Colombian Army in an effort to protect the Caño Limón-Coveñas oil pipeline. These trainers' guidelines allow them to accompany their Colombian military counterparts outside the perimeters of military bases, but prohibit their presence in an area if there is a significant likelihood of combat.

While U.S. law gives the executive branch a good deal of freedom to deploy troops in such "operations other than war," the U.S. Congress has expressed concern about "mission creep" - the possibility that U.S. personnel may find themselves embroiled in Colombia's conflict. As a result, a provision that first appeared in the 2000 "Plan Colombia" aid package, and which has been renewed each year through 2003, sets a maximum of 400 U.S. military personnel and 400 U.S. citizen contractors who can be in Colombia at any given time. The law adds, "no United States Armed Forces personnel or United States civilian contractor employed by the United States will participate in any combat operation in connection with assistance made available by this Act for Colombia".

http://www.ciponline.org/colombia/03022601.htm

[Judi Lynn]

12. Mission creep. Really! The people they want to kill are still the same.

In the 1960's, they pretended they were "communists" or "sympathizers," and now they are "illegal drug traffickers" or "terrorists" or even still "leftists."

You have to wonder if the trainers are the ones who taught the paramilitary they can kill peasants, then dress up their dead bodies with the identification needed to create a resemblance to FARC, and claim they had to protect themselves from them and had to kill them all, just like the ones dug up last year or so, re-dressed as guerrillas.

Pipe-line protectors trained by U.S. personel, sponsored by the U.S. taxpayers, guaranteed they are free to shoot up the place, kill all the citizens in their road, clear them all out, if they explain it wsa "self defense."

[IndianaGreen]

10. Plan Colombia: A Closer Look

Plan Colombia: A Closer Look

Report prepared by Garry Leech, July 2000


The Plan even goes so far as to distort Colombian history in the section titled, "The Armed Conflict and Civil Society," when it states, "There are three main protagonists of the conflict." It then names the two guerrilla factions--the FARC and the Army of National Liberation (ELN)--and the illegal "self-defense" groups. It completely ignores the role of the Colombian Armed Forces and the violence perpetrated by them against Liberal and Communist peasants in the 1950s under the Conservative regime of President Laureano Gómez and the military dictatorship of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. It was the Army's slaughter of the rural peasant population that resulted in the formation of peasant self-defense groups in the 1950s that eventually evolved into the FARC in the 1960s.

The Colombian Army was a protagonist long before the guerrilla groups and the modern-day paramilitaries existed. Furthermore, the U.S. aid is going to a military that, according to a February 2000 Human Rights Watch report, still maintains close ties to paramilitary forces that continue to wage a dirty war against the rural peasant population.

Conclusion

It is clear that Plan Colombia's intent is to combat the principal threat to the nation's political and economic elite: the FARC. Also, with the implementation of neoliberal economic policies, in conjunction with the military component of the Plan, multinational corporations stand to profit from increased access to Colombia's extensive natural and human resources such as oil, natural gas, minerals and a relatively industrialized workforce. Such neoliberal policies have failed to improve the standard of living for the majority of people in the other Latin American countries that have implemented them, it is unlikely they will in Colombia.

As a strategy for solving the drug trafficking problem, Plan Colombia will not drastically affect the availability of narcotics in the United States. Even if the military assault against the FARC and peasant coca growers in southern Colombia is successful, it will only be a temporary setback for both the insurgency and the drug trade. If the FARC derives 70 percent of its income from non-drug sources, it is doubtful that eradicating its drug income will bring it to its knees.

As for coca production, history has shown that the "balloon effect" (when eradicated in one area, production moves to another) is inevitable. Furthermore, Plan Colombia targets the peasant coca growers in the south while virtually ignoring the narco-traffickers and their paramilitary allies located primarily in northern Colombia. Narco-traffickers will not allow the eradication of coca in one region of Colombia to seriously interfere with their trade.

The fact that 80 percent of the U.S. aid package is going to the Colombian military and police make it clear that Plan Colombia is a plan of war, not of peace. The 20 percent of the aid that is being directed to socio-economic problems is mere window dressing and does not propose any systemic changes that seriously address Colombia's socio-economic problems or threaten the status of the country's political and economic elite.

http://www.colombiajournal.org/plancolombia.htm#six

[Peace Patriot]

11. Very important information here, that all North Americans should become aware of.

Where are your tax dollars (...ahem, checks written on your future tax dollars) going?

And what is Bush really up to in Colombia and South America this week?

Thanks to all the above posters--for background on Plan Colombia, the Bush Cartel's private army for destabilizing and toppling democratic governments.