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lords and masters in Washington DC did. Mass slaughter, torture, terror, massive thievery, massive lawlessness of every kind, in the service of profit, characterize both regimes. The Obama administration seems to be winking at it all, in both cases--winking at the massive crimes of our own junta (--"We need to look forward, not backward." Good God! Couldn't a Harvard legal scholar come up with a better line than that?), and at those committed with $7 BILLION in U.S. military funding in Colombia. Indeed, the Obama team is guilty of more than "winking" at staggering levels of official crime. Clinton & co. are trying to PROFIT from the mayhem that the Bushwhacks funded and encouraged in Colombia, with "free trade for the rich," easier to implement with thousands of union leaders dead and others terrified of asserting labor and human rights.
As for the context of this wiretapping of Ecuador's president, Rumsfeld's plan apparently was, a) to defeat the big effort at the time for a peaceful settlement of Colombia's 40+ year civil war (an effort involving many European and Latin American leaders), and b) to slander and topple Correa in Ecuador and Chavez in Venezuela in the same ugly, murderous swoop.
Uribe had ASKED Hugo Chavez to negotiate hostage releases with the FARC rebels. This request probably came in the context of a four-hour meeting between Chavez and Uribe in which Uribe apologized for an assassination plot against Chavez that had been hatched in the Colombian military. Chavez gladly undertook this task, in the interests of peace, and began successfully getting hostages released (six in all). That is when Rumsfeld likely intervened--or proceeded with what had been a treacherous plot all along--to draw Chavez into contact with the FARC, in order to slander him later, and to hand him a diplomatic disaster, with dead hostages.
The first thing that happened is that, in the days leading up to Chavez's first hostage releases, Uribe suddenly withdrew his request of Chavez, coincident with a Rumsfeld op-ed in the Washington Post, stating, in the first paragraph, that Chavez's help with the hostages "is not welcome in Colombia." This op-ed appeared on the very weekend that the first hostages were to be released. Somebody was jerking Uribe's chain, and it was more than likely Rumsfeld. The Colombia military then open fired on those hostages when they were in route to their freedom, driving them back on a 20 mile hike into the jungle. The hostages' press conference about it was completely ignored by the corpo-fascist media.
Ultimately, Chavez abandoned the effort as too dangerous for the hostages, and the widely supported project to segue hostage releases into a general peace shifted to Ecuador. Raul Reyes, the FARC hostage release negotiator, who was trying to broker a peace in Colombia's civil war, set up a temporary camp just inside Ecuador's border for the release of Ingrid Betancourt and other hostages. Betancourt's family was alerted, and Spanish, Swiss and French envoys traveled to Ecuador o receive her, and were on their way to Reyes' camp when they were warned off. Somebody told them, "Everybody there is going to be killed." That night the U.S./Colombia dropped ten 500 U.S. "smart bombs" on Reyes' camp, killing most of the 25 people who were sleeping there, and then somebody--Colombian military? U.S. special forces?--crossed the border, shot any survivors in the back as they fled for their lives and allegedly seized Reyes' laptop (later laptopS) from the bombed out wreckage of the camp. Thus ended all hope for peace in Colombia's long civil war.
Soon Uribe began making wild accusations against Correa and Chavez--that they were helping the FARC to obtain a "dirty bomb," that they were giving money to the FARC and taking money from the FARC--wild and incoherent accusations, based on the bits and pieces of the contents of Reyes' alleged computer that they deigned to disclose. These turned out to be ridiculous and bogus--highly contrived interpretations of code words. This saga of accusations went on for nearly a year before it was discredited.
The wiretapping of Correa during all of this is part of a pattern of lawlessness that was directed from Washington DC through the U.S. embassy in Bogota, where they have a "war room" with live feeds of special ops in Colombia--just like in Afghanistan. In fact, I believe that many of the tactics used in Afghanistan were first tested out, and "trainings" occurred, in Colombia--a completely lawless state with a government and military that would do anything to keep those billions of U.S. tax dollars coming their way. I have strong suspicions that this even included "turkey shoot" practice against civilians, and I think that the "total diplomatic immunity" provision of the recent, secretly negotiated and signed U.S./Colombia military agreement may be related to U.S. military complicity in mass killings in Colombia.
Rumsfeld was trying to set up Oil War II in South America--a) by perpetuating Colombia's civil war--the opportunistic means for militarizing Colombia and for U.S. military occupation of Colombia , and b) by slandering, discrediting and toppling the two leftist governments adjacent to Colombia, one (Venezuela) with the biggest oil reserves on earth on its Caribbean coast and in its northern provinces (on its border with Colombia), the other with big oil reserves also near Colombia's border, both members of OPEC, both part of the leftist democracy movement that has swept most of the region. That movement is devoted to the sovereignty of Latin American countries, Latin American democratic control of its natural resources and labor conditions, and social justice--yet more reasons to try to draw these countries into a war with Colombia, and to inflict Colombia's mayhem and carnage on the region.
In this context--the context of Rumsfeld's war plan--the Bush Junta reconstituted the U.S. 4th Fleet in the Caribbean (mothballed since WW II)--an action that even Lula da Silva said was a "threat" to the region, and specifically to Brazil's oil reserves--and proceeded with placing this and other U.S. war assets around Venezuela's oil coast and northern provinces. The SEVEN U.S. military bases they have established in Colombia are intended for "full spectrum" military activity in Latin America (according to a USAF document uncovered by Eva Golinger.) They also funded and organized a white separatist rebellion in Bolivia (ally of Venezuela and Ecuador), which unfolded in their last year in office, 2008, preceded by all of the above. And they likely planned the rightwing junta in Honduras--traditional steppingstone for U.S. military ops in Latin America-- both to preserve the U.S. military base and naval facilities in Honduras and to deny Chavez another ally--a coup that occurred six months into Obama's presidency, with many Bushwhack operatives still in diplomatic position in Latin America, and Jim DeMint (Diebold, SC) holding up Obama's appointments in Latin America until certain things got done (the U.S./Colombia military agreement, the coup in Honduras, etc.)
Obama, who initially said that he wanted a new policy of peace, cooperation and respect in Latin America, doesn't seem to have a lot of control over any of this--or is collusive in it. It is too early to tell. (Chavez said, of Obama, that he is "the prisoner of the Pentagon.") Clinton seems pretty clearly collusive--that is, willing to use the death and mayhem and lawlessness in Colombia as an entre for "free trade for the rich" and acquiescing to (if not colluding in) the destruction of Honduran democracy. (The plane carrying the kidnapped president of Honduras out of the country stopped at the U.S. air base in Honduras for re-fueling. Was Clinton aware of this? Did she agree to it? Was it maybe a move to preserve President Zelaya's life? Coup okay, but not offing the president? Hundreds of anti-coup activists have been slain, but so what? Cosmetics is all. Or what? What did our Sec of State, and OUR Pentagon, and our president, and our diplomats in Honduras DO, while Honduran democracy was dismantled? We don't get to know what our money is being spent for.)
Who paid for the wiretapping equipment that Colombia was using in Ecuador? That's what I want to know, for starters. And was this part of the U.S. military "training" of the Colombia military that has been used as the euphemism for the presence U.S. military personnel and U.S. 'contractors' in Colombia?
The Colombian government and military doesn't do anything of this nature--military ops, killing, spying--without direction from Washington. They are clients of the U.S. government (and, by implication, clients of our real rulers--multinational corporations and war profiteers). Spying on Rafael Correa was part of a Rumsfeld-directed effort to start a war. He almost succeeded. (Lula da Silva credits Chavez with preventing it.) Is this war plan still "on the table"?
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