US renews investigations of extradited ex-paramilitaries

[Judi Lynn]

US renews investigations of extradited ex-paramilitaries
Monday, 18 April 2011 18:21
Marguerite Cawley

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U.S. authorities have moved forward a series of 200 proceedings in investigations into over a dozen ex-paramilitary leaders detained in the U.S. since 2008, Colombian media reported Monday.

After meeting Monday with her U.S. equivalent, Eric Holder, in Washington D.C, Colombia's Prosecutor General Viviane Morales said that she was informed that U.S. proceedings against the extraditees have been renewed, after a pause last year that coincided with the change in Colombia's administration.

The AUC ex-paramilitaries were extradited to the U.S. in May 2008 by the administration of then-President Alvaro Uribe to face drug trafficking charges.

Among those extradited are Diego Murillo alias "Don Berna," Salvatore Mancuso and Rodrigo Tovar Pupo alias "Jorge 40," accused along with drug trafficking charges of being responsible for tens of thousands crimes against humanity, including assassinations, rape, forced disappearance and forced displacement.

More:
http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/15682-us-authorities-renew-investigations-of-14-ex-paramilitaries.html

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Colombian militia leader confesses to massacres
Sibylla Brodzinsky in Medellín The Guardian, Thursday 18 January 2007

A senior commander of Colombia's rightwing militias has admitted taking part in some of the country's most grisly crimes in the first of what could become a flood of confessions from demobilised paramilitary leaders.
Salvatore Mancuso told a prosecutor in Medellín this week that he was responsible for hundreds of kidnappings, murders and massacres during his 15-year career in the death squads that spread terror throughout Colombia in the name of fighting leftist rebels.

In two days of testimony, Mancuso admitted to directly participating in or ordering the murder of hundreds of people, among them mayors, union leaders and peasants. With presentations projected from his laptop computer, Mancuso listed in chronological order the massacres at El Aro, Mápiripan, El Salado and other towns, all of which he called "anti-subversive operations". He also named the victims.

Some relatives of the dead heard the confessions. When Miryam Areiza heard Mancuso read her father's name as he recounted the 1997 massacre at El Aro, where he and 14 others were tortured and killed, she said she felt ill. "Where does he get off saying my father was a guerrilla? My father was a peasant, tending to his farm. He was tortured and killed and Mancuso was responsible," she said outside the special room for victims and their families to watch the closed proceedings.

More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/jan/18/colombia.sibyllabrodzinsky

[Peace Patriot]

1. My guess: Holder is trying to determine if these 'detainees' have info on Bush Junta crimes in

Colombia, and will loosen up access to them, to Colombian prosecutors, only when he has determined that matter, or he has been assured that they are now sufficiently intimidated or conditioned (tortured? brainwashed? threatened?) that they won't tell what they know.

To understand this situation, it is essential to ask WHY the U.S. wanted death squad witnesses in U.S. custody on drug charges, why they whisked them out of Colombia in the dead of night over the objections of Colombian prosecutors, and why they completely sealed their cases in U.S. federal court in Washington DC. Also, WHY does Colombia's prosecutor now have to go begging to the U.S. Dept. of Justice to find out what is being done with these 'detainees'?

--

"After meeting Monday with her U.S. equivalent, Eric Holder, in Washington D.C, Colombia's Prosecutor General Viviane Morales said that she was informed that U.S. proceedings against the extraditees have been renewed, after a pause last year that coincided with the change in Colombia's administration." --from the OP (my emphasis)

--

"Among those extradited are Diego Murillo alias "Don Berna," Salvatore Mancuso and Rodrigo Tovar Pupo alias "Jorge 40," accused along with drug trafficking charges of being responsible for tens of thousands crimes against humanity, including assassinations, rape, forced disappearance and forced displacement.

"The extradition was, and continues to be, highly controversial, both because it was done without approval from the Colombian Supreme Court and because the paramilitaries are being tried only on drug trafficking charges in the U.S, while in Colombia they face charges of tens of thousands of human rights violations.

"In fall 2010, the U.S. government removed seven of the extraditees from public records, thus making it virtually impossible for their victims to receive compensation, since the accused are no longer in cooperation with the Colombian justice system.

"According to newspaper Terra Colombia, the Office of the (Colombian) Prosecutor General has also had limited access to the AUC leaders since the extradition, and has on several occasions requested improved collaboration from U.S. authorities in this regard.

"In accordance with this, Morales reportedly said of the visit with Holder that they discussed 'general themes' and that they did not "touch on any particular case." --from the OP (my emphasis)

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What I suspect here is a U.S. (Obama, Clinton, Holder, Panetta) cover up of U.S./Bush Junta death squad and cocaine profiteering crimes in Colombia on top of the general war crime of giving $7 BILLION U.S. tax dollars to the criminal Uribe regime and the criminals in the Colombian military, who were not just slaughtering Colombians in their 70 year civil war but were also slaughtering Colombian peasants, trade unionists, teachers, community activists, human rights workers, political leftists, journalists and others, and displacing 5 MILLION peasant farmers from their land--the bloody prep for U.S. "free trade for the rich" (decapitating grass roots leadership of the poor majority; terrorizing survivors) that U.S. transnational corporations now hope to benefit from, by the Obama-pushed trade agreement, soon to be approved by the scumbag, Diebold/ES&S fascist U.S. Congress.

The evidence for specific Bush Junta war crimes in Colombia is hard to find. You have to pay attention. The newsbits float by quickly like flotsum and jetsum in the corporate 'news' "river of forgetfulness."

For instance, earlier this year the U.S. State Dept. "fined" Blackwater for "unauthorized" 'trainings" of "foreign persons" IN COLOMBIA "for use in Iraq and Afghanistan." Consider the extradition of death squad witnesses from Colombia, and sealing of their cases in U.S. federal court in Washington DC, in this light. Do these witnesses know something about U.S. participation in "turkey shoot" practice in Colombia?

Another bit of 'news' flotsum: The U.S. State Dept--via the Bushwhack-appointed U.S. ambassador in Colombia, William Brownfield--was, at the same time, secretly negotiating and secretly signing a U.S./Colombia military agreement (with Uribe) that included total diplomatic immunity for all U.S. military personnel and all U.S. military 'contractors' in Colombia. Why, after a decade in Colombia, did the U.S. military and its 'contractors' suddenly need signed total diplomatic immunity in 2009?

More jetsum: 500 to 2,000 bodies found in a mass grave in La Macarena, Colombia--an area of intense, Afghanistan-like Pentagon/USAID operations in Colombia.

Then there is the fact that, despite the billions of U.S. tax dollars thrown into the U.S. "war on drugs," it's hardly made a dent in the cocaine flowing out of Colombia. Was it intended to? Or was it, instead, intended to concentrate this trillion dollar-plus revenue stream into a fewer hands and direct its flow more surely toward U.S. banksters, the CIA and the Bush Cartel?

What the mafia-like Uribe and the mass murder-prone Colombian military, could accomplish--with all that U.S. money and support-- is removal of millions of the small coca leaf farmers from their farms (where they also grew food and fed their families and communities), appropriation of FARC guerrilla coca farms and their trade routes, destruction of other unfavored cocaine operations, and the massive transfer of these coca growing areas to the favored, protected, protection-paying, big drug lords.

Uribe had many uses to the Bush Junta--among them, use of Colombia for launching black ops against its socialist neighbors Venezuela and Ecuador (including recent revelations that the "Black Eagles"--the fascist death squad organization that replaced the AUC--had moved into Venezuela's border states, to instigate mayhem and destabilization, and to topple and assassinate Chavez. (The "Black Eages" have ties to Uribe's security/spying apparatus, the DAS.) War profiteering for U.S. war profiteers (the U.S. "war on drugs" being their backup gravy train). Experiments in "pacification" for the "Project for a New American Century" in the Middle East. Experiments in how the USAID and the U.S. military can be used to stimulate the heroine trade in Afghanistan (?). Blood-drenched prep for U.S. "free trade for the rich." Help in covering up crimes of U.S. corporations in Colombia (Chiquita, Drummond Coal). But Uribe's primary usefulness may have been in consolidating the trillion dollar-plus cocaine revenue stream--a project commensurate with the Bushwhacks' chief characteristic: massive greed.

Finally, there are the quite obvious efforts of the Obama administration to coddle and protect Alvaro Uribe--including not only these death squad witness extraditions (and their "burial" in the U.S. federal prison system), and not only the probable U.S. participation in spiriting the chief spying witness against Uribe out of Colombia, but also HONORING Uribe--"laundering" his image--with academic sinecures at Harvard and Georgetown and appointment to a prestigious international legal commission. Why on earth would the Obama administration do this except as part of a cover up of Bush Junta crimes?--which they have done across the board, of course, in their failure to even investigate, let alone prosecute, Bush, Cheney & Rumsfeld, et al, for torturing prisoners and egregiously unjust war. Their association of their government with Uribe has no practical value for the Obama administration. It is in fact extremely counter-productive in their efforts to repair relations with South America and to cozen trade deals with Brazil, for instance (now led by a president, Dilma Rousseff, who was tortured by the U.S. supported rightwing junta in Brazil). Why would they do it?

That the Obama administration is covering up Bush Junta war crimes in Colombia is the best explanation for why they are coddling Uribe, and for other puzzles, such as why they would offend and sabotage Colombia's Supreme Court and its prosecutors with these extraditions.

I think it is quite useful to turn the "news" upside down and look at it from the underside. It's my "rule of thumb" for anything Bushwhacks say--that, whatever they assert, the opposite is true; and whatever they accuse others of doing, THEY are doing. But in general--and especially with an alleged Democratic administration in the White House--it is hard to do, because we are so incredibly brainwashed--even the most alert among us--to believe phrases like "the U.S. 'war on drugs'"--to believe that the U.S. somehow has good intentions with these billion dollar investments in mayhem and bloodshed. But the "war" that is being conducted is not against "drugs." It is against PEOPLE. The drugs never stop flowing. The trillions of dollars in drug profits is never stemmed. And millions of people are murdered--MOST of them having nothing to do with the drug trade; most of them leftists merely exercising their civil rights; most of them poor. And when you start seeing this underside--for instance, that a phrase like "the war on drugs" is a propagandistic lie--a whole lot of things start making sense, including what may well be an Obama administration cover up of what the Bush Junta was using the "war on drugs" FOR.