Bush Wants 100 Million in Military Aid to Protect Contributor's Pipeline in Columbia.

Yeah, helping to stop guerillas funded mainly by drug cartels in Columbia is a real drag. We should really just stand by and let them assassinate judges, and political leaders, and ruin the economics of the country, despite the pleas for help from the legitimate government in the capital.

 

C'mon glynch,

In your effort to post any kind of liberal (or, in this instance, anti-Bush) agenda, your post w/o using your intellect. Can't you think of any other factors that went into the decision than protecting lobbying revenues?

1. Helping our corporations protects tax revenues;
2. Helping our corporations protects shareholder equity;
3. HS was not non-responsive; pro-drug running guerillas are being fought;
4. Revenues of a friendly nation are being protected (did you even attempt to find out that Occidental only gest 35% of the oil from this pipeline; the Colombians get 50% and it means $2.3 M in revenues for them EACH DAY the pipeline is shut down;
5. Dissuade other terrorist groups around the world from attacking American corporate interests (like it or not, our livelihoods are integrally tied-in to the welfare of our corporations).

Also, an interesting insight into the bias of this article:
Could it be the over $9 million that Occidental has spent on lobbying since 1996 -- much of it used to push for more and more U.S. military aid to Colombia -- and the $1.5 million the company donated to federal campaigns between 1995-2000?

Let's break this down; the Feds are the ones who will allocate dollars to foreign military support, yet Occ has only contributed $1.5 M to the Fed campaigns over 6 years - thats a measly $250k/YEAR! The $9M amount is irrelevant.

I know you're biased glynch, but please don't waste everyone's time until you do a minimal amount of reasearch.

 

glynch,

I gave multiple reasons for the military support. If it were only to protect Occidental, I don't think that it would happen. But since other factors exist, including precendence, I think that it's a good decision.

Occidental paid over $1.4 BILLION in domestic and foreign taxes on $3 BILLION in operating income in 2000. Through the first 3 quarters of 2001, they have reserved $700 MILLION for taxes (Hey, $2.1 BILLION pays for a lot of social prgrams, no? )

Thanks for the link to a college report, but it dd not really change anything. They guerrillas extort money through kidnappings, bombings, and coca farmer protection. What a great bunch of guys.

I am a little confused by the 'right wing death squads and has a history of killing peaceful protestors and opposition political leaders' analogy. Has the present Colombian regime actually done this, or are they only 'like' other governments that have done this? Do they not have support or legitimacy from the people? Are they not elected?

Also, do you really think the Zapatistas and Colombian guerillas are the same?

BTW, I would hate to see people leave their country if they wanted to stay, but I have no problems with immigrants from any country.

 

Wonderful, just wonderful. First the Taliban/Al Qaeda, then Saddam, and now we can add FARC to glynch's list of "friends"... You sure do have friends in high places.

I doubt you will actually read these, but:

http://web.nps.navy.mil/~library/tgp/farc.htm

http://www.tni.org/drugs/pubs/farc.htm

http://www.locombia.org/1000284209/index_html

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

http://www.au.af.mil/au/aul/bibs/tergps/tgrec.htm

FARC is about as nasty as Communists can get. Can you say "narcoterrorists"? Why does it not surprise me that you oppose the democratically elected government, and want us to just lay off the Communist narco-insurgents? You must be under the mistaken impression that they're freedom fighters...

 

I made a few contentions with my first post. Thanks getting my back, Cohen. US support for the Columbian government is awesome. Several points your anti-US agenda should be aware of...

1. You can't trust FARC

Financial Times February 24 2002

The intransigence of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (Farc) guerrillas made it pointless to revive talks. Farc used the demilitarised zone handed to it as part of the "peace process" to bolster its own military operations. After a deal to save the negotiations was agreed last month, Farc intensified its attacks, further alienating its fighters from most Colombians. As a result, Alvaro Uribe, a presidential candidate who has demanded a tougher line, has surged ahead in the polls before May's election.

2. FARC are not supported by the people

Financial Times Sunday Mar 3 2002

Leading the polls by a huge margin, independent candidate Alvaro Uribe Velez has promised to crack down on the FARC and to build a million-man civilian security force.

3. FARC maintains their insurgency with drug money.

BBC January 7 2002

Now they tax every stage of the drug business, from the chemicals needed to process the hardy coca bush into cocaine and the opium poppy into heroin, right up to charging for the processed drugs to be flown from illegal airstrips they control.

And they make at least $300m from the drug trade every year, added to which is their income from kidnapping and extortion, making them probably the richest insurgent group in the world."

4. These freakers are now being linked to the old Peruvian Shining Path, who were Maoists in the true sense of the word.

 

Actually, things are much different in Columbia than in El Salvador and Guatemala (and Nicaragua is different from those two). Generalizing that all conflicts in Latin America are the same is false. In Columbia there is are three groups: FARC, the government, and the right wing groups (who use the so-called 'death squads). Unlike in El Salvador, where the 'death squads' were merely an extention of the government, in Columbia they are independent from, and not sponsered by, the government. And FARC is not the last bastion of the democratic opposition. They are left (pardon the pun) over Marxists in the Shining Path mold who no longer get outside support since the rest of the world has turned from exporting revolution as in Nicaragua, Chile, and El Salvador.

The issue of whether we should legalize drugs is mostly irrelevant. Even if we were to legalize pot, legalization of cocaine is another issue entirely. Many of those you would point to as supporting 'legalization' would not go so far as to legalize ALL drugs. And, like cigarettes, a highly regulated market does not remove the blackmarketeering, and the subsequent profit. Finally, even if we did legalize drugs it would still be consistent to support the Columbian government against FARC.

As for corporate welfare, why wouldn't the US government act to protect US business interests? That is certainly within the scope of the reason we have a government, to protect our property, right? Especially when it is consistent with the wishes of the popularly elected government, which is radically different than in Somoza's Nicaragua or in Guatemala? FARC's stated goal is to turn Columbia into another Somalia, where they've dismantled all infrastructure and created total chaos for the civilian population. Not something we should have a problem acting against.

 

A Terrorist Regime Waits in the Wings
Posted March 4, 2002
By J. Michael Waller

The Taliban regime is gone, but a new one soon may emerge — not in far-off Afghanistan, but in Colombia, a country nearly twice the size and on the front door of the United States.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), flush with a fortune in drug money and rested after three years of peace talks, is fighting a fierce battle against Colombia's democratic government and threatens to install its own totalitarian, anti-Western regime. If it succeeds, analysts say, the Marxist-Leninist FARC, which is on the State Department's list of terrorist groups, would become the world's newest outlaw regime and even more of a haven for terrorists and drug traffickers.

A Rand Corp. report prepared last summer for the Pentagon calls the Colombian crisis "the most serious security challenge in the Western Hemisphere since the Central American wars of the 1980s."

Will the United States help the Colombians save their democratic republic and destroy the narcoterrorist FARC? Or will it continue to keep its hands in its pockets and deny Colombia the intelligence, equipment and training needed to defeat the guerrillas on its own — only to have to send U.S. forces to fight another terrorist regime in the future?

President George W. Bush, with his man Otto Juan Reich now the head of the Office of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the State Department, seems not to have chosen yet. He is hamstrung by a Democrat-controlled Senate, where any laws or funding pertaining to Colombia would have to go through the hands of a long-time ally of the Latin American revolutionary left — Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs. Administration sources tell Insight that State is leaning toward a very strong and detailed Pentagon proposal to help Colombia defeat the FARC. The roadblock is on the National Security Council (NSC), where John Maisto — a career Foreign Service officer and Clinton holdover — is urging a cautious wait-and-see approach. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice is following Maisto's lead for now, say sources.

Twice the size of France, straddling the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea and bordering mega-oil exporters Venezuela and Ecuador, Colombia is vital to U.S. national and economic security. Its national police force has earned a hard-fought reputation as one of the most professional in the world, and received strong U.S. support (even some from Dodd, in whose state the Colombian police's Blackhawk helicopters are built) in the fight against drug trafficking. But FARC sympathizers and others still traumatized about Vietnam successfully blocked efforts to provide meaningful counterinsurgency assistance to the Colombian military.

During the 1990s, the Clinton administration looked the other way as the FARC grew stronger. In 1995, according to a recent Rand study for the Pentagon, it had 7,000 fighters on 60 fronts; five years later, there were 15,000 to 20,000 FARC combatants on more than 70 fronts. The huge increase was financed with money from American cocaine and heroin users, but the Clinton administration reversed long-standing bipartisan policy and drew a distinction between drug traffickers and guerrillas. On condition of anonymity, a senior State Department official assured Insight with a straight face in 1999 that "there is no such thing as narcoterrorists."

In this spirit, President Bill Clinton signed Presidential Decision Directive 73, literally to deny intelligence data to the Colombians lest it help the counterinsurgency, even though the United States would provide similar data to the Colombian police to stop drug trafficking. Both the White House and Congress barred Colombia from using U.S. antinarcotics aid against the FARC in counterinsurgency activity, allowing the equipment to be used only by police battling drug production and smuggling — two key FARC industries, but only tangential to the narcoterrorist hold on the countryside.

The distinction struck many as absurd. "Now does one say aid can be used against narcotics traffickers but not against the guerrillas, when the guerrillas have been the traffickers?" asks Constantine Menges, a former national intelligence officer for Latin America who served on the White House NSC.

The Bush administration appears to agree. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) chief Asa Hutchinson routinely refers to the Colombian guerrillas as narcoterrorists. In a recent public appearance, he stated, "We should understand very clearly today that there is a drugs-to-money-to-terror relationship that is historic, that is current and that is threatening to our future."

"The United States should dispense with self-imposed limitations on the sharing of intelligence," Menges advises. "It should also include permission for Colombian forces to use U.S. military aid against the Communist guerrillas, which are not only the major threat but the major narcotics traffickers."

Intelligence sources say the United States has an unmatched ability to monitor FARC operations and communications from the sky and space, and that sharing real-time data with the Colombian military would allow Colombia to bomb and otherwise strike FARC positions with deadly accuracy, stopping FARC attacks before they could begin.

Colombian President Andres Pastrana, who had staked his presidency on the peace process and gave the FARC its own demilitarized zone (DMZ) the size of Switzerland, came around to Menges' point of view by Feb. 20, when the FARC hijacked a commercial airplane and kidnapped a senator. Colombians as a whole, facing a new presidential election in May, have become increasingly hard line against the FARC and a smaller Communist narcoterrorist group, the National Liberation Army (ELN).

The FARC, after 38 years of fighting, was building up impressive momentum to fight the Colombian army head-on and possibly overthrow the government by the end of Pastrana's term, according to the Rand study. That report helped underscore the urgency in the Bush administration to tackle Colombia. Assistant Secretary of State Reich visited Bogotá in mid-February, telling reporters of "a plan to contain and eliminate the violence in Colombia."

The Communist guerrillas there are determined to take full power. "Now that the president of Colombia has tried political negotiations for three years and the guerrillas have responded with violence, it's time for the United States to provide full political, intelligence and military-assistance support to Colombia so the guerrillas can be defeated and peace restored," says Menges.

Pastrana finally got it by the time the FARC kidnapped the senator. He gave a national speech itemizing 117 terrorist attacks during the previous 30 days, including four car bombings, murders of women and children and poisoning of aqueducts. He echoed President Bush's "with us or with the terrorists" theme. On Feb. 21, he ordered the army into the DMZ under Operation Thenatus to take control of the huge region. With Israeli-made Kfir-C7 and French Dassault Mirage fighter jets, as well as a fleet of turboprop-driven counterinsurgency aircraft, Colombian forces ran some 200 sorties against the FARC in the first day of fighting.

So far, the Bush administration's support for Colombia has been strong in principle but a work in progress. It has not revoked Clinton's presidential directive and has asked Congress only for military assistance to help Colombia guard an oil pipeline that is a frequent target of FARC attacks — a pipeline, by the way, owned in part by U.S.-based Occidental Petroleum. Menges argues that the United States can provide Colombia with the necessary training, intelligence and equipment "consistent with efforts to fight international terrorism."

"The guerrillas draw political strength and sustenance from a robust network of supporting organizations, both in Colombia and overseas. Multiorganizational networks aided the insurgencies in El Salvador and Guatemala and the Sandinistas in the 1980s, but have assumed a larger role with the information revolution of the 1990s, and particularly with the development of the Internet," according to the Rand report. "The FARC and the ELN have developed a wide range of multiorganizational supporting networks both in Colombia and overseas. The strategic objectives of these networks is to restrict the actions of the Colombian state and its agencies and to deny it international support."

That's the big problem for U.S. policy: how to defuse the FARC's instant activist support base in the United States and in Congress. The FARC has a base of pro-Castro and pro-Marxist groups in the United States who use the Internet, as well as traditional grass-roots demonstrations and letter-writing campaigns, to press their cause. They backed Dodd's failed blockage of Reich (see "Smearing Reich," Aug. 5, 2001).

One of the main activist groups opposing U.S. assistance to Colombia is the New York-based International Action Center (IAC). Headed by former attorney general Ramsey Clark, the IAC is staffed by veteran leaders of the Workers World Party (WWP), a Marxist-Leninist fringe group with a history of street theater going back to the Vietnam War and the Attica Prison uprising. The IAC openly supports an array of terrorists, cop-killers and even convicted communist spies on its Website (see "Domestic Front in the War on Terror," Jan. 7).

On Feb. 22, the day after Pastrana launched Operation Thenatus, the IAC held "emergency protests" in front of the Colombian Mission to the United Nations in New York City and the Colombian consulate in San Francisco. The IAC is planning nationwide militant demonstrations against U.S. aid to Colombia and against the U.S. war against terrorism in general on April 27.

Pastrana could buckle without strong U.S. backing. Angel Rabasa, a Rand analyst who coauthored the Pentagon report, tells Insight the Colombian government could go in either of two directions. "One is to make the recapture of the [demilitarized] zone part of a military strategy that would break the logistical and military axis of the guerrillas and decisively change the military balance." That, however, would be costly for the country and could provoke international opposition. "The other alternative is a more or less peaceful occupation of the zone, supposing the guerrillas would permit it," Rabasa says.

That would permit Colombian forces to take over the local towns and the FARC could retreat into the countryside. "The government could say it acted in a decisive manner, but in reality without much substantial change," Rabassa adds, because the FARC would remain intact.

The FARC, however, is vulnerable. "The organization has some critical weaknesses, notably its linkage to criminal elements and its lack of support among the population at large. Opinion polls estimate overall FARC support at about 5 percent of the population," according to the Rand report. "In the areas where it predominates, the FARC has endeavored to institutionalize popular support by setting up political support groups, but it enforces its rule through selective terror and intimidation."

Says Menges, "This is the time to defeat them."

J. Michael Waller is a senior writer for Insight.

http://insightmag.com/main.cfm/include/detail/storyid/195021.html

glynch, once again you have totally missed the point and totally misunderstood the threat presented. Once again, all you can think about is a diabolical conspiracy within the Bush administration.

The Drug War is a secondary consideration here. Actually I agree with you on that one - I believe that ALL drugs should be legalized and regulated, and this preposterous "war" should end. But again, that consideration is secondary.

As Hayes pointed out, the Colombian conflict is quite a bit different than other Central/South American conflicts. He correctly pointed out that the right-wing "death squads" down there are not affiliated with the government in power there, although you simply assume that they must be.

If you want to begin actually researching the issue, I have given you 5 links already to begin. They are not from right-wing whacko sites, either. Please feel free to educate yourself on the topic before you comment on it.

 

No argument about this. It is really tough when the dominant system is not great, or even pretty bad. But sometimes, as I think in these two cases, the alternative is at least as bad, if not worse.

I just disagree. Pot is not physically addictive. Its mainly harmful because of the smoke, which if were cheap would be less of a problem, since you could ingest it (brownies....mmmmmm). Coke is physically addictive. It creates aggressive behavior, where pot creates relaxed behavior. Totally different. Same with heroin. Its totally addictive. All consuming. Just a nasty substance that should be shut out.

As long as you place equal blame on the former Soviet Union. In each of these cases the conflict was a proxy war, and in each of these cases the opposition (especially the Sandinistas) committed similar atrocities to the government.

Nope, and I wouldn't either. But that doesn't mean a guerilla movement can't transform away from their original purpose and become something as bad as what they originally sought refuge from. FARC is like this. The Shining Path was like this. Castro's Cuba and the former Soviet Union, and China were/are like this.

 

I just read the last year's threads started by glynch and have come to the realiztion that I disagree with with glynch on EVERY imaginable topic under the sun. I soooo wish search would work again. I want to read the balance of your work! It's not fair that I can only track you down by the threads you started.

I am stunned. It's baffling. We could not be more polar.

We need to grab a beer sometime. I wanna try to fix you.

 

Many of my friends from South America and Central America have a strong disdain for the Narcotraficos and the remnants of the communists that have become rebels and drug funded separatists.

I have friends personally that have been kidnapped by these groups. I don't understand how we can not support the government and a LARGE investment (the tax funds by Occidental) by training their troops to fight the COMMUNISTS and DRUG-BACKED SEPARATISTS.

The communists lost and so now they simply act as separatists and fight the main government with the backing of the drug dealers. Great combination of trash, don't you think??

And PLEASE stop repeating the Bush-Enron garbage. The irony of it is that the financial scandal was so complicated and web-like that even the CEO (Ken Lay) didn't know until it was too late and and then people expect the genius Bush to have untagled outside partnerships and trading corruption and bad projects that led to Enron's demise!!

And don't slant this as Bush's cronies, because the republican group has always been for deregulation and more public competition in all industries.

 

i'm fairly certain we're past the statute of limitations to argue with glynch on this one.

 

If your Harvard ban thread can be resurrected why not Glynch???

 

Well, one was like 3 months ago, this one, a year ago.

 

actually i was kidding...