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Judi Lynn Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Jun-10-11 04:06 PM
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Tweeting ex-president stirs up Colombian politics
Source: Reuters

Tweeting ex-president stirs up Colombian politics
Anthony Boadle
Reuters
3:16 p.m. CDT, June 10, 2011

BOGOTA (Reuters) - Colombia's ex-president Alvaro Uribe is fuming about the direction his successor is taking. And he's letting everyone know tweet-by-tweet.

Snide messages to his 470,000-plus Twitter followers are keeping Uribe in the limelight to the discomfort of current President Juan Manuel Santos, Uribe's former defense minister.

The microblogging feud, ironically, is helping Santos break with his past in violence-ridden Colombia and forge his own path as leader of a booming mineral-rich economy.

Uribe has railed in particular at Santos' flagship legislation that provides reparations to victims of Colombia's armed conflict and the restoration of lands seized from peasants by right-wing paramilitaries and landowners.

Read more: http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/yourmoney/sns-rt-us-colombia-uribetre7592zu-20110610,0,198818.story
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Drunken Irishman Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Jun-10-11 04:15 PM
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1. Wow. A Colombian Sarah Palin.
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naaman fletcher Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Jun-10-11 05:42 PM
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2. a sign that Santos is doing a great job! nt.
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Peace Patriot Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-13-11 03:17 AM
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3. Another piece of shit writing by Rotters....
I don't call them Rotters for nothing.

"The microblogging feud..."?
"So far it has been a one-sided Twitter war...".

There is no "feud." Incoherent writing. Invented bullshit.

-----

"...in violence-ridden Colombia..."
"The former president, whose U.S.-backed crackdown on leftists guerrillas is credited with making Colombia a safer place...".

"Violence-ridden" or "safer"? Incoherent writing, combined with the deceptive practice of using the passive tense to interpose a corpo-fascist view with no evidence or speaker: "...is credited with." Is credited with BY WHOM? Rotters' executives? Drummond Coal? The CIA?

-----

"...leader of a booming mineral-rich economy." (paragraph 3)
"...Colombia, now a booming oil and mining economy." (paragraph 10)

Blatant attempt to manipulate investors. No evidence. No speaker. (Rotters has stock in Exxon Mobil, Drummond Coal, et al?)

-----

The article goes on and on like this. It really is a piece of shit writing--substanceless, incoherent and extremely superficial in that easy-breezy Newsweeky style that treats war, mass death, torture and mayhem and teeny bopper trends all of a piece--and makes you feel like the writers live on Mars. And it arouses my suspicions as to the motives of Rotters in commissioning it and publishing it. What are they trying to accomplish with this crap?

A guess: It's a hack piece to aid in the "laundering" of Uribe's image. Uribe is a Bush Cartel "made man" and ran Colombia like a vast criminal enterprise, probably with the primary aim of consolidating the trillion+ dollar cocaine trade into fewer hands and directing its enormous revenue stream to U.S./EU banksters and others. Obama, apparently under some obligation to the Bush Cartel to keep Junior and his associates out of jail ("we need to look forward not backward" on the crimes of the rich and powerful) (--they teach that at Harvard) has coddled and protected Uribe, with academic sinecures at Harvard and Georgetown and appointment to a prestigious international legal committee, as well as a letter from the State Department to the judge in the Drummond Coal death squad case discouraging the judge from forcing Uribe to testify, and they've done these things and more while conspiring to remove death squad witnesses and spying witnesses against Uribe from Colombia--out of the reach of Colombian prosecutors and over their vociferous objections. Very likely, all this is because Junior's junta was complicit in Uribe's crimes in Colombia, and if Uribe has to testify anywhere--in self-defense or in defense of his many crimes--he might, under pressure, spill the beans.

In Uribe's last year in office, the Bush-appointed U.S. ambassador to Colombia (whom the Obama regime left in place apparently for this purpose), not only arranged for the midnight extradition of death squad witnesses to the U.S. (where they were "buried" in the U.S. federal prison system, by complete sealing of their cases in U.S. federal court in Washington DC), but also SECRETLY negotiated and had Uribe SECRETLY sign a U.S./Colombia military agreement granting "total diplomatic immunity" to all U.S. military personnel and all U.S. military 'contractors' in Colombia. This agreement was subsequently ruled unconstitutional by Colombia's Supreme Court, but it nevertheless provides a presidential signature on "total immunity" more than a decade into the U.S. military presence in Colombia. Also, early this year, the U.S. State Department "fined" Blackwater for "unauthorized" "trainings" of "foreign persons" IN COLOMBIA "for use it Iraq and Afghanistan." The U.S. military and its 'contractors' were working intimately with the Colombian military--providing "training," technical assistance, USAID/Pentagon-designed "pacification" programs, high tech surveillance, drones and other aid--from U.S. military bases and "forward operation locations" in Colombia, WHILE the Colombian military was slaughtering trade unionists, teachers, community activists, human rights workers, journalists, peasant farmers and innocent young men, recruited with offers of jobs, murdered and their bodies dressed up like FARC guerrillas, to up the military's "body count" to earn bonuses and promotions (the infamous "false positives" scandal).

Daddy Bush pal Leon Panetta went to Bogota, in one his first actions as CIA Director, and personally oversaw yanking Uribe off the stage (amidst rumors of a Uribe coup to stay in power) but quite obviously had to offer Uribe protection while removing him from the "line of fire" of Colombian prosecutors (on whom Uribe was illegally spying--as well as on judges). I think Panetta's purpose was protection of Bush Jr.

This is the context of the Rotters article. And my guess is that its main purpose is to aid the coverup of Bush Junta crimes in Colombia. It has the additional financial purpose of legitimizing this blood-drenched preparation of Colombia for U.S./EU "free trade for the rich"--to smear over the horrendous facts of how "free trade" is imposed on a country (by literally decapitating the labor and grass roots leadership, and terrorizing the countryside--in addition to everything else, five MILLION peasant farmers were displaced from their land in Colombia, by state terror--a huge benefit to Monsanto, Chiquita, Drummon Coal, et al, and to the big, protected drug lords). Rotters drains all of the blood and body parts out of this story and turns it into a "Twitter feud."

In La Macarena--the scene of one USAID/Pentagon-designed "pacification" programs--500 to 2,000 bodies were discovered in a mass grave, because local children got sick from drinking the local water which had been polluted by the decaying bodies. With facts like this in mind, re-read this Rotters piece. It is vile in its superficiality.

And a third purpose may be the murky business of the trillion+ dollar cocaine trade--so hard to get a handle on. I suspect any person or entity defending Uribe of benefiting from this trade, one way or another. Rotters may have links to war profiteers (one of the biggest beneficiaries of the corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on drugs"), or, who knows?, maybe its execs have secret bank accounts.
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Judi Lynn Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-13-11 04:51 AM
Response to Reply #3
4. Rotters never looks more useless, and corrupt than when belching this stuff up.
I do find it remarkable that the little prince still insists upon horning into the next President's Presidency, trying to call the shots, acting as if he were the actual Colombian leader, still.

I've never seen that done before, have you? Truly tacky, second rate behavior from this clown.
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flamingdem Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-13-11 04:50 PM
Response to Reply #3
5. good analysis of rotters nt
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naaman fletcher Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Jun-13-11 06:11 PM
Response to Reply #3
6. "Violence-ridden" or "safer"?
Can't it be both?
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