Colombia's intelligence agency allied with death squads in unionist murder: Court

[gbscar]

Colombia's intelligence agency allied with death squads in unionist murder: Court
Friday, 10 June 2011 07:26
Jim Glade

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The court's decision is the first that directly states an alliance between the AUC and DAS and was handed down March 30, 2011 at the conviction of extradited paramilitary leader "Jorge 40" who commanded the AUC's Northern bloc.

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Alfredo Correa de Andreis, a sociologist and professor at the northern universities of Atlantico and Simon Bolivar was murdered after being released from a month long detention by police for allegedly being the FARC guerrilla alias "Eulogio." According to the courts, with lack of evidence the court released Correa and upon his release he was killed by Rodrigo Tovar Pupo, alias "Jorge 40," and his bodyguard with the participation of intelligence agency DAS.

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The statement continues, "Under the direction of Jorge Noguera - director of DAS between 2002 and 2005-," it is "proposed that high officials from DAS discretely collaborated with the AUC, in particular with the Nothern bloc led by Jorge 40."

"It is appropriate to acknowledge that it is not simply isolated subjects that simply undertook a crime against the trade union movement ... the assassination against trade unionists in Colombia operates and has operated with the collaboration of state agents at high levels," said Cordoba.

Alirio Uribe, a lawyer for the victims in the case against former DAS leader Jorge Noguera reported to El Tiempo that both the former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe and the United States were aware of such cooperation which he says provided hit lists to Jorge 40 as well as databases on the profiles of trade unionists.

In March, the Colombian government reclaimed land that Jorge 40's Northern bloc had stolen from peasants in the northern Magdalena department.

During testimony in April, former deputy director of counter intelligence for DAS, Jorge Alberto Lagos, said that when he reviewed the organization in 2007, he discovered that paramilitaries had infiltrated all areas and positions, above all during the directorship of Jorge Noguera.

http://www.colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/16873-state-intelligence-agency-allied-with-paramilitaries-in-unionist-murder-court.html

[Peace Patriot]

1. Well, there it is. The U.S. (Bush Junta) was collaborating on the murder of trade unionists.

I've been guessing for a long time that something was very rotten in the U.S. (Obama) protection (and even coddling) of Alvaro Uribe, including letting the Bush-appointed ambassador to Colombia (Wm. Brownfield) contrive, with Uribe, to surreptitiously remove death squad witnesses from Colombia to the U.S., out of the reach of Colombian prosecutors and over their objections (one of these was "Jorge 40"), and to secretly negotiate a U.S./Colombia military agreement, with Uribe, that granted "total diplomatic immunity" to all U.S. military personnel and all U.S. military 'contractors' in Colombia. They gave Brownfield a promotion for these efforts to cover up Bush Junta crime in Colombia.

Then the chief spying witness against Uribe, Maria Hurtado, fled Colombia and turned up in (the U.S. client state of) Panama and there was given instant, overnight asylum as a "political refugee"--also out of the reach of Colombian prosecutors and over their objections. Panama is now defying an Interpol warrant to return Hurtado to Colombia. Panama's president, Martinelli, not popular to begin with, is now in very hot water, internally and in the region, for this defiance of international law and of another Latin American country's legal system. This is the same guy who whined to the U.S. ambassador to Panama about not getting U.S. help to spy on his political enemies (Wikileaks cable)--as his pal Uribe was getting in Colombia! He has to be under great pressure to defy this warrant and I don't think that pressure is coming from just Uribe and his mob. At this point, the interests of Uribe and his mob and the U.S. government are the same!

And I think that another thing the Bush Junta was doing--besides aiding and abetting illegal domestic spying, hit lists and the murder of thousands of trade unionists and others (bloody prep for U.S. "free trade for the rich")--was consolidation of the trillion+ dollar cocaine trade into fewer hands and direction of its revenue stream to U.S. banksters and others. With at least $7 BILLION in U.S. taxpayer money to the Colombian military--extorted from U.S. taxpayers for the corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on drugs," which the Bushwhacks segued into the corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on terror"--the Bushwhacks had plenty of filthy lucre with which to better organize the drug trade, including driving five MILLION peasant farmers from their lands, with state terror, smashing up the smaller, independent cocaine operations, and grabbing the leftist guerrilla coca leaf farms and operations, then using the U.S. 'justice' system to bury some of the witnesses in the U.S. federal prison system, by complete sealing of their cases in U.S. federal court in Washington DC, and furthermore--I'm beginning to think--securing part of the cocaine route to the U.S. with Bushwhack-designed coup d'etat in Honduras. (Obama/Clinton ended up supporting the coup, but I don't think they designed it.)

The Obama administration seems to be under an obligation to protect the Bush Junta and its operatives from investigation and prosecution. ("We need to look forward not backward" on the crimes of the rich and powerful.) The key was, perhaps, Obama's appointment of Daddy Bush pal, Leon Panetta, as CIA Director.* I think Panetta's primary role was to heal the war between the CIA and the Pentagon that Cheney-Rumsfeld had been waging, but a secondary and possibly equally important task was to cover up Junior's filthy bloody trail. In one of his first actions as CIA Director, Panetta went down to Bogota and personally decommissioned Uribe (amidst rumors of a Uribe coup to stay in power) and then Uribe got lavished with cushy academic sinecures at Georgetown and Harvard, and appointment of a prestigious (but very rigged) international legal committee (the one investigating Israel's firing on an aid boat). Uribe is apparently a Bush Cartel "made man." He evidently knows too much and needs to be kept free of the pressure of prosecutors and judges in Colombia, as well as civil suits filed by Colombian victims and their survivors here.

There are two such civil suits current, against Drummond Coal and Chiquita, for hiring rightwing death squads to take care of their 'labor problem." Uribe defied the subpoena in the Drummond case, and the U.S. State Department sent the judge a letter discouraging him from requiring Uribe to testify. (What "national security" issue could possibly be involved in Uribe telling what he knows about Drummond's death squads?) And the Chiquita case is a revival of a case that AG Eric Holder had made to go away, when he was a private attorney for Chiquita. That case just passed the first hurdle. It's going to court in the U.S. and the Obama team doesn't have "clean hands" to intervene on that one--to prevent Uribe from having to testify (if that arises), or to save Chiquita from having to pay billions of dollars in damages to people who were tortured or had relatives murdered by their death squads.

Neither Drummond Coal, nor Chiquita, nor Uribe and his mafia-like government, conducted mass murder without U.S. assistance. The U.S. had numerous military personnel and 'contractors' in the country, providing training, technical assistance, weapons systems, high tech surveillance, USAID/Pentagon-designed "pacification" programs, and floods of weapons and other aid to the Colombian military and to its closely tied rightwing paramilitary death squads. They worked closely with the Colombian military at bases all over the country, which the Pentagon designates as U.S. military "forward operating locations" and a USAF document described as having the purpose of subduing countries that are "unfriendly to the U.S." (Read: neighboring Venezuela and Ecuador, and their big pots of oil.) They also had Blackwater in Colombia, which, early this year, was "fined" by the U.S. State Department for "unauthorized" "trainings" of "foreign persons" IN COLOMBIA "for use in Iraq and Afghanistan." (The "foreign persons" apparently were Colombians, who are now in the U.A.E., with Xe, Blackwater's new name.)

"Unauthorized," my ass.


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Alirio Uribe, a lawyer for the victims in the case against former DAS leader Jorge Noguera reported to El Tiempo that both the former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe and the United States were aware of such cooperation which he says provided hit lists to Jorge 40 as well as databases on the profiles of trade unionists. --from the OP

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While this item in the OP doesn't prove that the Bush Junta was actively aiding and abetting the murder of civilians in Colombia, we can be sure that Uribe and the U.S. government were more than "aware" that Colombia's chief spying agency was feeding trade unionists' names to the death squads. To believe otherwise would be to believe that the Bush Junta was merely "aware" of the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and U.S. torture dungeons around the world. They ORDERED the torture. It was no anomaly. It was no rogue military or CIA. Torture, death and mayhem were their M.O.!

This is the first indication that Colombian prosecutors are aware of U.S./Bush Junta complicity--if the spiriting of death squad witnesses and spying witnesses out of Colombia, and the coddling of Uribe, didn't tell them this some time ago. I had been wondering if they had resigned themselves to investigation/prosecution beneath the Uribe level, since the U.S. is clearly protecting Uribe. It may be that the political reality in Colombia is similar to ours (only ours is worse)--"made men" don't get prosecuted. This is a statement of the lawyer for the victims, but I think it's indicative of what Colombian prosecutors know and suspect. I don't know if it means they are going after the Bush Junta, but I think it means that they are thinking about it. They've had death threats themselves (and also were spied upon) and it may simply be impossible to take their investigation to the very top of the chain (those giving Uribe his orders--Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al). But one can hope. Maybe these bastards will be gotten, at long last--by one of the countries they ravaged and tried to destroy.


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*(Panetta was a member of Daddy Bush's "Iraq Study Group"--all of them "old CIA"--which likely intervened and ousted Rumsfeld and de-fanged Cheney for the last two years of Junior's term, over the Cheney-Rumsfeld intention to nuke Iran (opposed also by the military brass), over the outing the CIA's WMD counter-proliferation project, and in connection with a serious rift in the Bush Jr White House, Bush/Rove vs Cheney/Libby (during Katrina) as to who was going to take the fall for the CIA outings. It is laughable that Panetta was described as a "novice" when Obama nominated him for CIA Director. That talk was quickly squashed and he sailed through the hearings because he is NOT a novice at the CIA. He has been "deep cover" CIA all along. Everybody at Langley embraced him with joy and popped champagne bottles in celebration, according to reports. They did this for someone they didn't know? For a "novice"? Ha-ha!)

[Judi Lynn]

3. We got the strange news the other day that dead union workers from Alabama's Drummond Company

at the Colombian mine were found buried in land OWNED BY CHIQUITA.

That really kicks the door shut on any sense of mystery about this mess, doesn't it? Case closed!

I really appreciate your comments on the new CIA director. Thank you very much.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Please cross-post this important article in LBN, gbscar. There are many DU'ers who will read it,

who would be very appreciative, no doubt about it.

This is a major story. Horrendous. We knew this was going on, but since the government wasn't investigating under Uribe, nothing was coming of what was well known.

To lock it in as completely relative to US interests, you might put a notation in the block under the text reminding people that Colombia is the US's third largest foreign aid recipient, and the US's closest, if not only supporting government in South America.

I am amazed they have gone as far as this trying to clean it up. This is an enormous story. Rec.