“Colombian Military Commanders beamed with pride as they recounted the details of the rescue of 15 hostages from the steaming jungles of southern Columbia on Wednesday(02 Iúil/July 2008) in a dramatic military rescue operation worthy of a Hollywood script”
So reported Mark Duffy in the “Irish Times”, Friday, Iúil/July 4, 2008. And that’s exactly what it was - a Hollywood script. The Colombian murder regime, massively subsidised by Washington, was desperate for some sort of positive PR stunt to justify the flow of US taxpayers’ money to its corrupt and wasteful political junta in Bogota. Colombia’s ratbag dictator, Alvaro Uribe, a sleazy right-wing politician whose links with the vicious and blood-soaked right-wing paramilitaries who operate with impunity under his regime in Bogota, are becoming ever more apparent and being subjected to intensified scrutiny by international media, especially by US newspapers, badly needed some positive media spin at this time.
McCain on standby:
The forthcoming US general election, with the exit of Buckfush a certainty, and a new, much less sympathetic government in Washington the likely outcome, loomed large over the future of the Uribe regime. There is a direct connection here also, with the presence in Bogota of John McCain, Republican candidate in the US election only days before the so-called “rescue” took place. Who benefits most from the media hype following such an event? First, Uribe, gets kudos for defeating the FARC “terrorists” and increases his stock with the Washington power elite. Next, McCain cashes in on the “success” of the Buckfush policy of supporting the “ant-terrorist” Uribe regime right on time for the final months of the election campaign when he knows who the Democrat nominee will be.
Then, in Paris, Sarkynoze is available(having cancelled his proposed Irish visit) to welcome the most high-profile former hostage, Ingrid Betancourt, who has strong links to France, in the full glare of media hype as his poll ratings are at their lowest since his election last year. The only way Sarkynoze could have been on standby for this event was if he had advance knowledge of this “rescue” and the only way the “success” could be guaranteed for the entire operation was that it was a pre-arranged ransomed release with no possibility of a shoot-out with the FARC units involved. Yet the mainstream media swallowed whole the propaganda line emanating from Bogota.
On Friday, Iúil/July 4 2008, Swiss State Radio (RSR), in a broadcast from Geneva, cast doubt on the whole story quoting its own “reliable sources” that one of the captured FARC guerrillas, “Comandante Cesar”, who had charge of Betancourt and other hostages including three American contractors, captured in 2003, also released, had been paid a $20 Million bribe to stage the “rescue” and allow himself to be “captured” to provide a triumph for the Colombian Armed Forces and Uribe. The Swiss Radio report also suggested that US Special Forces were in charge of the whole operation, not the Colombian Army which is one of the most corrupt and
incompetent in South America. The three American hostages were flown directly to a military base in San Antonio, Texas, and not allowed to speak to media.
Meanwhile, Mediaparte, the French news web site founded by the former chief editor of "Le Monde" and other journalists, also reported that the rescue was “not an achievement of the Colombian military, but due to the surrender of a group of the FARC members” following direct negotiations by the Colombian secret services with the guerrilla group that held Betancourt captive.” Citing Colombian sources, it reported that Alvaro Uribe had told a group last May that a surrender of those holding the hostages was being negotiated. Mediaparte added that the Sarkozy government agreed to offer the ex-guerrillas sanctuary in France after their surrender.
The Colombian government has access to large amounts of money supplied by Washington to make payoffs to guerrillas for changing sides. This was evident in the killing last March of FARC leader Ivan Rios, whose bodyguard killed him and then presented his severed right hand to the authorities to collect a $2.5 million US bounty.
CANARD
“The rescue is a success for the country’s hardline and popular President Alvaro Uribe, who has always preferred military to political solutions..” gushed the “Irish Times” editorial of Friday, Iúil/July 4 2008 while condemning the FARC “bloody, pseudo-Marxist war against the Colombian authorities” and repeating the Mi5 and CIA canard “assisted, it is widely accepted, by Provisional IRA technical know-how”. This tired old canard invented by MI5 and the CIA a few years ago, and repeated ad nauseum ever since, is mere propaganda and has no basis in fact.
It is just another ludicrous assumption that a group like FARC, which has been fighting a civil war in Colombia for more than thirty years has any need for foreigners to come and “train” them when all they have to do is join the Colombian Army and get all the training they want. If they needed any advice about improvised explosive devices, well, they didn’t have to go too far away for it as a full manual of instructions was kindly provided by none other than George Bush Senior as long ago as 1961. Bush Senior headed a team in the CIA at that time which produced such a manual which was dropped by air to its agents in Cuba in an effort to cause mayhem and disruption to the new Revolutionary Government of Fidel Castro in Cuba. This manual then became available to the Cubans and, of course, to every Tomas, Ricardo and Enrico of guerrilla movements throughout Latin America. Another glorious own-goal by the CIA.
MURDER INC.
One of the “beaming” military commanders was General Carlos Montoya Uribe, head of the Colombian Armed Forces. In a shameless exploitation of the traumatised hostage, Betancourt, Montoya staged an embrace with her in front of world media already gathered in advance.
Montoya received training in the US at the notorious “School of the Americas” where torture techniques were part of the curriculum and units from the rotten dictatorships of Pinochet and others in Latin America were also accommodated.
Recent research has put the spotlight on Montoya’s sinister record in the Colombian murder regime; a cable despatched in 1979 by the U.S. embassy in Bogotá, declassified at the request of the non-governmental National Security Archive (NSA), a U.S. research institute, "reveals that a Colombian army intelligence battalion linked to Montoya secretly created and staffed a clandestine terror unit in 1978-1979," researcher Michael Evans said in an article published in July 2007 in the Colombian weekly Semana. "Under the guise of the American Anti-communist Alliance (AAA or Triple-A), the group was responsible for a number of bombings, kidnappings and assassinations against leftist targets during that period," he wrote. Evans, the head of NSA's Colombia Documentation Project, also referred to a mass grave discovered in the department of Putumayo in March 2007 containing the remains of more than 100 victims "killed over the same two-year period that Montoya led the Joint Task Force South, the U.S.-funded unit charged with coordinating counternarcotics and counterguerrilla operations in that region from 1999-2001." "Declassified documents also detail State Department concern that one of the units under Montoya's command at the Task Force, the 24th Brigade, had ties with paramilitaries based in the town of La Hormiga, the location of the gravesite," he said.
This is the butcher which the “Irish Times” presents to its readers as the “beaming commander” of the grand rescue of the FARC hostages. Now, it is absolutely abhorrent and inhuman for any group to take people as hostages and abuse them but, welcome though their release is, when the alleged “rescuers” are as bad, or even worse than their declared enemies, there is no need to glorify them in the public press.
FearFeasa Mac Léinn
Áth Cliath/DUBLIN, 24 Iuil/July 2008.
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