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The
CIA in Columbia: Bush Revisits Iran-Contra?
January
23, 2002
by Faun Otter
For some reason, our always-probing US media have hardly
mentioned the rising toll of murdered civilians in Colombia,
the heart of Latin America's cocaine exporting region. The
BBC report that the right wing hit teams, the AUC, are led
by medellin drug lords such as Jose Rodriguez Gacha and Fidel
Castano. The AUC sign up anyone who wants to grab a gun and
slaughter people that they brand "guerrillas." Their
recruits are a mixture of local warlords, drugs traffickers
and disaffected members of the security forces, ominously
similar to the Contras under Reagan.
The paramilitaries have experienced tremendous growth under
Bush's chum, president Andres Pastrana. This is due in part
to their links to the Colombian army. As their numbers have
swollen, so have the number of massacres and murders of left-wing
intellectuals, union workers, human rights activists and journalists.
For anyone who has read about the CIA supervised methods
of suppressing peasant populations, the AUC's procedures are
chillingly familiar -
"The death squads arrive in communities in areas of guerrilla
influence with a list in hand. The list contains names of
suspected guerrilla sympathisers. All those on the list are
killed, usually in front of their families and in a most gruesome
manner." [Source]
The parrots may squawk, "September eleventh changed everything!"
But clearly, it didn't change CIA procedures in our southern
neighbor's homelands. We still have people slaughtered for
getting in the way of our covert foreign policies. The classic
example of our thug-based foreign interference was the massacre
of 800 civilians in El Mozote. Never heard of it? Start your
search engine and plug in El Mozote along with the name Bonner.
You may not be aware but the CIA have a legal requirement
to report criminal actions by their operatives. You also may
not be aware that under Reagan, the CIA persuaded Attorney
General French Smith to grant them a secret waiver that exempted
them from the legal duty of reporting drug crimes by their
foreign assets.
How are we hiding the financing of Colombia's drug cartel
death squads with US money? Its the big lie (as usual) we
are told that the money is for an ANTI-drug
effort! We are supplying several hundred military advisers
to train three elite battalions of the Colombian army. We
have sent dozens of Super Huey and Black hawk helicopters
and an unknown number of delightfully benign sounding "private
contract pilots and technical crews" AKA the CIA's hit men.
The price tag (paid in US dollars from you and me, the tax
payers) - $1,600,000,000. But that is spread over two years.
Gosh, what a deal! If you ever see our press cover this, it
may be dubbed "Plan Colombia" and you'll hear about the laudable
stated goal of wiping out half of the coca fields within five
years. The vast majority of the money is to be expended on
a military incursion into the guerilla haven in southern Colombia.
That is where about half the country's coca can be found,
much of the affect land only recently converted to this crop.
So let me see, the "leftist" rebels have half the cocaine
and the CIA's buddies have about half. So where is a military
attack focussed? The coke fields that are in competition with
the CIA. Plan Colombia won't cut drug use in the US but it
should push up the price of cocaine and make coke dealing
more profitable.
Listen to these words from Marc Cooper in The Nation:
"The Indian communities have been caught in the crossfire
and have lost much of their traditional leadership in the
bloodshed."
This last paragraph could describe the cocaine coup in Bolivia,
the Contras, death squads in El Salvador or Nicaragua. It
all starts to sound the same. As the public are distrcated
by Enron and the war on empty caves, are Otto Reich and his
friends supervising the drug supplier's death squads under
the pretence of fighting 'leftist' guerillas? There are just
a few too many Iran-Contra players being brought in by the
Bush regime for this possibility to be ignored.
If you want to learn more about CIA involvement in the drug
trade, read any of these texts:
"Lost History" by Robert Parry - PBS and AP investigative
journalist shows the rest of the media how research used to
be done in the good old days. Excellent use of published government
papers.
"Barry and the boys" by Daniel Hopsicker - NBC news producer
digs into the files on murdered super drug dealer Barry Seal...
and finds he was a CIA agent and member of the same air guard
unit as Lee Harvey Oswald. Keep a vomit bag handy, this reveals
more than you want to know about the crime family we call
an intelligence agency.
"Cocaine Politics" by Peter Scott and Jonathan Marshall -
with sources as indisputable as grand jury indictments, this
is well documented evidence of narcotics being an instrument
of our foreign policy.
"Dark Alliance" by Gary Webb - investigates the LA crack
market and CIA/NSC use of drug dealers to secretly fund ring
wing Latin American guerillas. The original story broke in
the San Jose Mercury News. This is the follow up book with
new info on DEA and FBI turf wars over drug dealer arrests
- and none arrests, as you will be dismayed to learn.
"Firewall" by Lawrence Walsh - watch as GWB's handlers in
the Enron crisis attempt the same old ploy they used for Reagan
during Iran-Contra, namely building a "firewall" of plausible
deniability around their boss. Walsh is, as with the other
authors, a reliable source. He was the independent counsel
in the government investigation.
If you want to buy any of these books, be sure to use the
DU
bookstore link to Amazon. It helps pay for this den of
free thought. The other way to check this accuracy of these
stories would be to wait 12 years for the Bush regime's papers
to be released..... Oh, sorry. That's doesn't work anymore
now the selected president and his men have placed their papers
above the law.
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