Thursday, March 13, 2008

Colombia to Chavez

I found these words very interesting as the bolloxed up media never bring the real politicians and their dodahs into front line debate. Here we get some. Very nice!

"Back in the early '90s, then Sen. Uribe was already well-known to U.S. intelligence officials. A now-declassified 1991 report from the Defense Intelligence Agency listed Uribe among "important Colombian narco-traffickers," noting that he was "a close personal friend of Pablo Escobar" and "dedicated to collaborating with the Medellin [drug] cartel at high government levels."

If they only knew! Today, of course, Uribe runs the show, and his organized crime connections no longer simply "collaborate" with the highest levels of government -- they sit in Colombia's most powerful posts. Consider:


Just last year, Uribe's foreign minister was forced to resign after her brother, a senator, was jailed for colluding with right-wing paramilitary groups in a series of murders and kidnappings. Like the FARC, Colombia's paramilitaries are designated as a terrorist organization by the United States and Europe.


That same month, the head of Colombia's secret police, who also served as Uribe's campaign manager, was arrested for "giving a hit list of trade unionists and activists to paramilitaries, who then killed them."


Last March the Los Angeles Times turned up CIA documents alleging that Uribe's amy chief "collaborated extensively" with death squads, back in 2002, [and] colluded in the massacre of 14 people for their perceived leftist politics.


In May, the trial of a paramilitary leader revealed that Uribe's defense minister had plotted with the terrorist group to destabilize past presidential administrations.


Currently 14 of Uribe's closest congressional allies sit behind bars for their own terror links. Their trials have uncovered untold horrors, including mass graves in the southern province of Putumayo, where at least 211 bodies were discovered last spring.

Outside the Middle East, there is no government on earth with as many direct links to known terrorist organizations as Colombia. And this listing, as jaw-dropping as it seems, may just scratch the surface. Colombia is a tough place to investigate corruption. For two full years, Uribe's police intelligence unit illegally tapped the phones of journalists looking into these unfolding scandals. They also surveilled the homes of opposition politicians, and in last fall's elections, a whopping 30 major candidates turned up dead. Taking on the Uribe regime comes with enormous risks."




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