Lurching further to the right: Obama admin denies visa to Colombian human rights journalist

[Karmadillo]

Morris is an award winning journalist who has reported on the human rights violations of the Uribe administration. Even the Bush administration allowed him to freely enter the US.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/09/AR2010070905438.html

U.S. denies visa to Colombian journalist Hollman Morris, citing Patriot Act

By Juan Forero
Washington post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 10, 2010

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA -- In his work reporting on this country's drug-fueled conflict, Colombian journalist Hollman Morris has met frequently with high-ranking American officials and been received at agencies from the State Department to the Pentagon.

In January, it was a lunch with State's No. 2, James B. Steinberg, at the residence of the American ambassador in Bogota. A few months before that, he had met Daniel Restrepo, senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs at the National Security Council, to discuss alleged abuses by Colombia's secret police.

But when Morris sought a U.S. student visa so he could take a fellowship for journalists at Harvard University, his application was denied. He was ineligible, U.S. officials told him, under the "terrorist activities" section of the USA Patriot Act. The denial has incensed human rights advocates in Washington, who have raised concerns that the Obama administration has been influenced by Colombian President Álvaro Uribe's government, a frequent target of Morris's critical reports.

Jameel Jaffer, an ACLU lawyer in New York, said the visa denial appeared to be ideological, because no public information tying Morris to terrorism has surfaced. Jaffer had litigated Bush administration exclusions of two prominent Muslim academics, Adam Habib from South Africa and Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss citizen who teaches at Oxford University. The Obama administration rescinded those denials after judges ruled that the government had not made a case for excluding the men.

more...

http://www.chris-floyd.com/articles/1-latest-news/1988-timebends-parsing-progressive-perspectives-on-powers-abuses.html

Timebends: Parsing Progressive Perspectives on Power’s Abuses
Written by Chris Floyd
Friday, 09 July 2010 12:10

Imagine how great the "progressive" furor would be if the Bush Administration had suddenly denied a visa to an award-winning Colombian journalist because of his reportage on human rights abuses by his American-backed government.

Would we not have heard, rightly, how this draconian action exemplified the administration's tyrannical nature, its use of raw, arbitrary power to throttle any voices trying to shed light on the very murky corners of the Drug War and Terror War operations in Colombia that are armed and funded with billions of dollars from American taxpayers?

Would this not have been added to a long train of similar abuses of power – arbitrary confinement and indefinite detention; concentration camps; shielding torturers; escalating pointless wars and killing countless civilians; running secret armies, assassins and covert operations throughout the world, etc. – and served up as a damning indictment of a lawless regime?

So now let us see what our leading progressive lights have to say about the case of Hollman Morris, “a prominent Colombian journalist who specializes in conflict and human rights reporting,” who has just been denied a visa by the Obama Administration, preventing him from taking up a fellowship at Harvard University, as AP reports.

Morris – who “produces an independent TV news program called "Contravia," has been highly critical of ties between illegal far-right militias and allies of outgoing President Alvaro Uribe, Washington's closest ally in Latin America" – has been to the United States many times before. In fact, he was free to enter the country under the loathed Bush Administration. But now, in our bright and glorious progressive era, he has suddenly – dare we say arbitrarily – been declared “permanently ineligible for a visa under the ‘Terrorist activities’ section of the USA Patriot Act,” AP reports.

more...

[Lil Missy]

1. Bush cabal letting him in likely means he's a crook!

[Karmadillo]

2. Afraid not. Here's more on Morris' work to expose injustice & corruption.

https://nacla.org/node/6544

May 4 2010
NACLA
NEW YORK—The North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) announced Tuesday that Colombian investigative journalist Hollman Morris will receive the 2010 Samuel Chavkin Prize for Integrity in Latin American Journalism in honor of his brave work exposing human rights abuses in his country. Morris, 42, a native of Bogotá, has spent more than 15 years covering the armed conflict in Colombia, giving voice to the victims of violence and oppression. He is the editorial director of Contravía (Against the Current), a weekly investigative news show that since 2002 has aired more than 200 half-hour episodes covering the most important human rights cases in Colombia.

As a result of his work, which often takes on the Colombian government’s complicity in human rights abuses, Morris has been targeted by the Administrative Department of Security (DAS), a domestic intelligence service under the command of the Colombian presidency. According to recently released documents, Morris has been subjected to a “smear campaign,” as the DAS itself described it, intended to discredit his journalism. Officials at the highest levels of government have said Morris is “linked” to leftist guerrillas and called him a “terrorist sympathizer”—accusations that, although unsubstantiated, led directly to death threats against him.

Contravía has always been financially supported by the European Union, and more recently by the Open Society Institute. Yet it has been targeted by the Colombian government as a subversive threat. The campaign against Morris and Contravía was just one component of a larger, systematic attempt by the Colombian government’s security apparatus to silence dissenters—including human rights organizations, judges, members of congress, and journalists—through illegal surveillance and intimidation. Despite this, Morris has fearlessly pressed ahead with his investigations, making him an outstanding candidate for the Chavkin Prize.

more...

http://www.centerforinvestigativereporting.org/tags/hollmanmorris

ABOUT CONTRAVIA
Our first segment features Colombian journalists Hollman Morris and Juan Pablo Morris, who created a series on Colombian television that is unearthing the largely hidden history of the country’s long-running guerilla wars. The series, called Contravía, airs on Colombia’s third public channel and online www.contravia.tv.

While the violent tactics of the left-wing guerilla movement, the FARC, have generated considerable press attention—most recently after the release of kidnapped former congresswoman Ingrid Betancourt and other hostages in July 2008—a major component of that violence, by right-wing paramilitary groups, has gone largely unreported. Founded some twenty years ago by landowners to combat the guerillas, the paramilitary groups have transformed into violent criminal enterprises financed through cocaine exports and kidnappings—much like the FARC itself. Over more than two decades, the paramilitary squads have been responsible for the deaths and disappearance of as many as 20,000 people, according to the National Movement of Victims of State Crimes, a human rights group established to protest paramilitary abuses.

The Morris brothers take their cameras deep into the Colombian countryside to probe into the disappearance of thousands of individuals kidnapped over the past decade, and track efforts to unearth their graves far from the cosmopolitan capital city of Bogotá or the eyes of the international or global press. “Our aim,” Juan Pablo told us, “is to reconstruct the memory of those atrocities…. Many of the people who followed the paramilitaries in the 1980s and 90s are running the country today.”

Contravia has uncovered links between paramilitary leaders and high officials in Colombian politics and finance. Thirty senators and representatives in the Colombian Congress have been imprisoned because of their ties to the paramilitary death squads; another sixty have been investigated. That’s a third of Colombia’s 268 member Congress, giving rise to a new term—‘para-politica’—to describe the ongoing crisis as one top politician after another is accused of complicity with the para-military squads. Most of those accused represent political parties that are part of the governing coalition led by President Alvaro Uribe.

more...

[inna]

6. wow. Disturbing. Thank you for this thread. nt

[Karmadillo]

23. You're welcome. Even given the rightward movement of this administration, one wouldn't have expected

them to deny a visa to a person of this caliber. Makes you wonder what's going on that we don't know about.

[G_j]

3. recommending people look into recent US policy

regarding Columbia.

[inna]

5. Do you have a good link? I mean, I know about the U.S.-backed death squads

but I've never researched it in detail.

[G_j]

15. Establishing US military bases in Colombia

http://www.politicalhotwire.com/forum/index.php?/topic/3959-us-establishes-7-military-bases-in-columbia/

Posted 23 February 2010 - 04:32 PM
Right at Venezuela's border. It never ends. Latin America

Militarizing Latin America

by Noam Chomsky

In July 2009, the US and Colombia concluded a secret deal to permit the US to use seven military bases in Colombia. The official purpose is to counter narcotrafficking and terrorism, "but senior Colombian military and civilian officials familiar with negotiations told The Associated Press that the idea is to make Colombia a regional hub for Pentagon operations," AP reported. There are reports that the agreement provides Colombia with privileged access to US military supplies. Colombia had already become the leading recipient of US military aid (apart from Israel-Egypt, a separate category). Colombia has had by far the worst human rights record in the hemisphere since the Central American wars of the 1980s wound down. The correlation between US aid and human rights violations has long been noted by scholarship.

AP also cited an April 1999 document of the U.S. Air Mobility Command, which proposes that the Palanquero base in Colombia could become a "cooperative security location" (CSL) from which "mobility operations could be executed." The report noted that from Palanquero, "Nearly half the continent can be covered by a C-17 (military transport) without refueling." This could form part of "a global en route strategy," which "helps achieve the regional engagement strategy and assists with the mobility routing to Africa." For the present, "the strategy to place a CSL at Palanquero should be sufficient for air mobility reach on the South American continent," the document concludes, but it goes on to explore options for extending the routing to Africa with additional bases.

On August 28, UNASUR met in Bariloche (Argentina) to consider the military bases. After intense internal debate, the final declaration stressed that South America must be kept as "a land of peace," and that foreign military forces must not threaten the sovereignty or integrity of any nation of the region. It instructed the South American Defense Council to investigate the document of the Air Mobility Command. Problems of implementation were left to subsequent meetings.

Establishing US military bases in Colombia is only one part of a much broader effort to restore Washington's capacity for military intervention. There has been a sharp increase in US military aid and training of Latin American officers, focusing on light infantry tactics to combat "radical populism" -- a concept that sends shivers up the spine in the Latin American context. Military training is being shifted from the State Department to the Pentagon, eliminating human rights and democracy conditionalities under congressional supervision, which has always been weak, but was at least a deterrent to some of the worst abuses.

..more..

[inna]

4. un-fricking-believable. yet another new low. WTF and what's next?

"has just been denied a visa by the Obama Administration, preventing him from taking up a fellowship at Harvard University, as AP reports."


"has been to the United States many times before. In fact, he was free to enter the country under the loathed Bush Administration. But now, in our bright and glorious progressive era, he has suddenly – dare we say arbitrarily – been declared “permanently ineligible for a visa under the ‘Terrorist activities’ section of the USA Patriot Act,” AP reports."


Patriot act... creepy as hell. This is really not good.

[Name removed]

7. Deleted message

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[sabrina 1]

8. Disgraceful. We are allies with Uribe, a man accused of

genocide in his own country. And the OP is correct, if this had happened under Bush progressives would have been screaming. I have a feeling that there will be apologists all over the place now that we have a Democratic administration.

No wonder this country is in the state it is in. I was hoping that all ties with Uribe would be cut off and that the phony Drug War in S. America would start coming to an end if we elected Democrats. But, nothing has changed, in fact it seems to be getting worse, considering the Honduran Coup, the continued propaganda against Democratic Leaders in S. America and now this.

[EFerrari]

9. They can't let him come here. He might say something true about our "best friends".

[laughingliberal]

10. Is there any RW dictator in South America we won't support? Or a voice for people we won't silence?

:nuke:

[MattSh]

11. Thanks...

Chris Floyd had fallen off my radar for awhile.

Maybe I thought with all the change coming, that voices like his would no longer be needed. How wrong I was...

[Name removed]

12. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[murdoch]

13. This is why FARC-EP is necessary

Even an obscure liberal journalist who almost no one has ever heard of, or would have heard of, is not allowed to voice the truth of what is actually going on in Colombia. Despite the corporations completely controlling radio, and television, and to some extent the Internet, the freedom to tell the truth has to be blocked due to the multi-national corporations desire to exploit.

In the 1980s, the FARC went on a unilateral ceasefire, and urged the left to enter the political arena. What happened subsequently is many socialist UP candidates were massacred, as well as campaign workers. The Colombian left's attempts to nonviolently get a place at the table through peaceful, democratic means were met by massacre.

Of course, that this ever happened is never mentioned by the Juan Forero's of the world. History has to be written out of existence. You can be sure the arrows of the American eagle will always be aimed at the indigenous, the poor, the peasants and campesinos and working people, to guard the wealthiest of the wealthy in their quest for even more wealth expropriated from the wretched of the earth.

[treestar]

14. There's not much information here on why the visa was denied

Visas can be denied to anyone for many reasons. Sounds one sided, and it's wrong to make a judgment after hearing only one side. What's the administration's side? Oh yeah, we don't listen to that. Just jump to negative conclusions, because we were predisposed to do so.

[Karmadillo]

16. The ACLU lawyer said it was ideological. Here's the AP story on the visa denial.

The outrage over the visa denial doesn't seem one-sided at all. There's nothing in the public record that suggests the visa is justified. Credible organizations are outraged. We'd be happy to listen to the administration's side. Unfortunately, the administration is silent.

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2010/07/us-bars-top-colombian-journalist-from-harvard-labeling-him-a-terrorist/1

<edit>

The curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, which has offering the mid-career fellowships to U.S. and international journalists since 1938, said Thursday that a consular official at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota told him Morris was ruled permanently ineligible for a visa under the "Terrorist activities" section of the USA Patriot Act.

U.S. Embassy and State Department officials refused to confirm the visa denial, citing privacy laws.

"We were very surprised. This has never happened before," said the Nieman curator, Bob Giles. "And Hollman has traveled previously in the United States to give speeches and receive awards." He said he had written the State Department to ask it to reconsider the decision.

Giles told The Associated Press by telephone that the only visa issues ever to arise with Nieman Fellows have been over concerns they might try to remain in the United States — clearly not the issue in Morris' case. Colombia's President-elect, Juan Manuel Santos, was a 1988 Nieman Fellow.

"We're frankly shocked. We feel it's outrageous," Joel Simon, executive director of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, said of the visa denial.

more...

He said the committee had discussed its concerns with State Department officials but was not provided with an explanation.

"They told us they discussed this with Hollman and that's just not true," Simon said.

[treestar]

17. There's nothing there but outrage and judgment without hearing

the side of the U.S. Embassy that found he is ineligible under the terrorist activities section. Maybe they had reason to deny him under the terrorist activity section. That possibility is never discussed. There's no reason to make a judgment without hearing that side first.

[Karmadillo]

18. But the government refuses to speak. So, despite any evidence supporting the denial, we must

withhold judgment?

[treestar]

19. Where does it say they refuse to speak?

Visas can be denied, period, there is little due process on that question. But there is a ruling somewhere that he is ineligible under that section. Where is that? What evidence was used for it? What does it say?

[Karmadillo]

20. Good point. Where is it? What is the administration's justification for the denial?

nt

[asdjrocky]

21. This is just creepy.

I can't think of another word for it.

[Turborama]

22. The Obama administration did not issue the visa denial

That's the job of whoever reviews visa applications at the Consulate in the country concerned. Obama can intervene and overturn the decision, though.

The exact reason for Morris's denial is unclear. But on June 16, at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota, Morris was given a "refusal worksheet" detailing how he could be denied for engaging in terrorist acts or representing terrorist organizations.

An embassy spokeswoman, Ana Duque, said that privacy rules prevented U.S. officials from elaborating. "It's all between the applicant and the consular section," Duque said.

I know all about visa denials, I'm currently dealing with a denial to visit the UK that includes a 10 year automatic refusal of further applications due to an innocent mistake (http://www.google.com/search?num=50&hl=en&safe=off&rls=com.microsoft:en-US&q=paragraph+320+(7b)+%22for+10+years%22&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=">paragraph 320 (7b), if anyone wants to see) and know exactly how asshole-ish consular officials can be.