'Dirty Bomb' plot 'discovered'!!

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/05/world/americas/05venez.html?ex=13623 73200&en=18b0b9e31a97763a&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
March 5, 2008
Colombia Is Flashpoint in Chávez’s Feud With U.S.
By SIMON ROMERO
CARACAS, Venezuela — In the four days since Colombian forces crossed into Ecuador and killed a guerrilla leader taking refuge there, tensions between Colombia — Washington’s top regional ally — and its leftist neighbors have erupted, highlighting the fact that Colombia and its policies are increasingly viewed here as American proxies.

President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela called Colombia the “Israel of Latin America” saying both countries bombed and invaded neighbors by invoking “a supposed right to defense” that he said was ordered by the United States. He has sent troops to the border and expelled Colombia’s ambassador. His agriculture minister said Tuesday that the frontier with Colombia would be closed to stop commerce.

In turn, Colombia said it would file charges against Mr. Chávez with the International Criminal Court, accusing him of assisting Colombia’s largest rebel group.

Meanwhile, President Bush fiercely defended Colombia, which receives $600 million a year in American aid to fight the leftist rebels and drug trafficking. He used the diplomatic crisis to push Congress to approve a Colombia trade deal that has languished for more than a year because of concerns among senior Democrats over human rights abuses there.

Mr. Bush, who telephoned Colombia’s president, Álvaro Uribe, on Tuesday morning, told reporters at the White House, “I told the president that America fully supports Colombia’s democracy, and that we firmly oppose any acts of aggression that could destabilize the region.”

Employing a new strategy to portray the trade agreement with Colombia as an issue of national security, Mr. Bush used the occasion to call on Congress to ratify the deal as a way of countering leaders like Mr. Chávez who had emerged as scourges of American policies in the region.

“If we fail to approve this agreement, we will let down our close ally, we will damage our credibility in the region and we will embolden the demagogues in our hemisphere,” Mr. Bush said.

Although Colombia violated the sovereignty of Ecuador, not Venezuela, in its raid, Mr. Chávez, an ally of Ecuador, has taken the lead in accusing Colombia of being an American stooge. That has been a favorite theme of his, especially since November, when Colombia abruptly withdrew support for Mr. Chávez’s mediation with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

Adding to the tensions on Tuesday, Colombia’s vice president, Francisco Santos, said Colombian forces had found evidence that the FARC had been seeking the ingredients to make a radioactive dirty bomb.

Material found on a laptop computer recovered in the raid into Ecuador provided the basis for Mr. Santos’s accusations about a dirty bomb, a weapon that combines highly radioactive material with conventional explosives to disperse deadly dust that people would inhale.

“This shows that these terrorist groups, supported by the economic power provided by drug trafficking, constitute a grave threat not just to our country but to the entire Andean region and Latin America,” Mr. Santos said at a United Nations disarmament meeting in Geneva, in a statement that was posted in Spanish on the conference’s Web site. The rebels were “negotiating to get radioactive material, the primary base for making dirty weapons of destruction and terrorism,” he said.

It was unclear from Mr. Santos’s statement with whom the rebels were negotiating.

Mr. Santos made his claim based on information provided Monday in Bogotá by Colombia’s national police chief about the FARC’s negotiations for 110 pounds of uranium, obtained from the laptop computer of Raúl Reyes, the senior FARC commander killed Saturday in Ecuador.

Colombia’s government also said this week that it had obtained information on the computer showing that Mr. Chávez was channeling $300 million to the FARC. The information is the basis for its plan to file charges against Mr. Chávez in the International Criminal Court, Mr. Uribe said Tuesday in Bogotá.

The tensions produced a heated diplomatic exchange during an emergency meeting convened Tuesday by the Organization of American States in Washington, during which several countries denounced Colombia’s actions as a violation of Ecuadorean sovereignty.

Foreign Minister María Isabel Salvador of Ecuador demanded that the O.A.S. formally condemn the actions by Colombia, dispatch a fact-finding mission to investigate the events on its border, and call a meeting of regional foreign ministers to consider further action.

“Ecuador rejects any effort by Colombia to avoid responsibility for violating its sovereignty, which is a right that secures the peaceful coexistence of all nations,” Ms. Salvador said. “Diplomatic apologies are not enough.”

An apology was not all she got. Ambassador Camilo Ospina of Colombia strongly denied accusations that Colombian troops used military force on Ecuadorean territory, saying that aircraft fired into Ecuador from the Colombian side of the border.

He acknowledged that after the bombing, Colombian forces entered Ecuador to examine the FARC camp. And what they found, he said, was evidence that Ecuador had been harboring members of the FARC.

Mr. Ospina said that, in addition to the alleged payment by Mr. Chavez, the information found on the laptops that Colombian troops seized indicated that President Rafael Correa’s government had met several times with the FARC and allowed them to set up permanent bases in Ecuadorean territory. He said Colombia would seek charges against President Chávez at the International Criminal Court.

“There is not the least doubt that the governments of Venezuela and Ecuador have been negotiating with terrorists,” Mr. Ospina said. “Allowing terrorist groups to keep camps on their territory border for the planning and execution of terrorist acts is a crime and a clear violation of international treaties.” Television in Venezuela also broadcast images of tank battalions heading to the border, following a threat by Mr. Chávez on Sunday that Colombia would be inviting war if it carried out an incursion in Venezuela similar to the one on Saturday in a remote Amazonian province of Ecuador that killed 21 guerrillas.

Mr. Chávez’s threat, which included a taunt that Venezuela would use its Russian-made Sukhoi fighter jets to attack Colombia, has been interpreted here as a sign that Mr. Chávez stands ready to defend the FARC, a group classified as terrorists in the United States and Europe that is reported to operate without hindrance along Venezuela’s porous 1,300-mile border with Colombia.

Contrasting the FARC’s image in Colombia as a group that finances itself through cocaine trafficking and abductions and still plants land mines in rural areas, documentaries on state television here in Venezuela portray the FARC as an insurgency born out of efforts to combat Colombia’s moneyed elite.

On his Sunday television program, Mr. Chávez went further by calling for a minute of silence to mourn for Mr. Reyes, the fallen guerrilla leader whose real name was Luis Édgar Devia.

“Chávez is effectively supporting narcoterrorists who take refuge in Venezuela and Ecuador while saying a democratically elected leader of Colombia cannot fight back,” said Diego Arria, a former Venezuelan ambassador to the United Nations who is a vocal critic of Mr. Chávez.

Still, Mr. Uribe, Colombia’s president, is struggling to convince other countries in the region of Colombia’s need to carry out the foray into Ecuador. Even if they might agree with Mr. Uribe in private, leaders are hesitant to publicly back him, given sensitivities over territorial sovereignty.

“Uribe hasn’t developed much of a foreign policy strategy beyond depending on the United States,” said Michael Shifter, vice president for policy at Inter-American Dialogue, a research group in Washington. “This puts him into a bit of a bind.”

Indeed, few places can profess such longstanding support for the United States as Colombia, which sent battalions to fight alongside American troops in the Korean War.

Despite remaining the largest supplier of cocaine to the United States, Colombia has emerged as a top ally of the Bush administration, with hundreds of American military advisers welcomed there to assist Colombian security forces in counterinsurgency and antinarcotics operations.

But just as Mr. Uribe may be suffering because of his close ties to the United States, he may also be fortunate to have Mr. Chávez as his main adversary. Other countries in the region are increasingly uncomfortable with Mr. Chávez’s belligerence as concern emerges over Venezuela’s intervention in a matter involving Colombia and Ecuador.

“South America is not prepared for conflicts, and we do not want conflicts,” Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, told reporters in Brazil on Tuesday, explaining that his government would try to negotiate a solution to the dispute along with other countries.

Jenny Carolina González contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia, Uta Harnischfeger from Zurich and Ginger Thompson from Washington.

[outsider]

Friday, March 7, 2008 for TomPaine.com/Ourfuture.org
By Greg Palast

Do you believe this?

This past weekend, Colombia invaded Ecuador, killed a guerrilla chief in the jungle, opened his laptop – and what did the Colombians find? A message to Hugo Chavez that he sent the FARC guerrillas $300 million – which they're using to obtain uranium to make a dirty bomb!

That's what George Bush tells us. And he got that from his buddy, the
strange right-wing President of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe.

So: After the fact, Colombia justifies its attempt to provoke a border war
as a to stop the threat of WMDs! Uh, where have we heard that before?

The US press snorted up this line about Chavez' $300 million to "terrorists"
quicker than the young Bush inhaling Colombia's powdered export.

What the US press did not do is look at the evidence, the email in the magic laptop. (Presumably, the FARC leader's last words were, "Listen, my password is ...")

I read them. While you can read it all in español -at http://www.gregpalast.com/farc-documents
- here is, in translation, the one and only mention of the alleged $300 million from Chavez is this:

"... With relation to the 300, which from now on we will call "dossier,"
efforts are now going forward at the instructions of the boss to the cojo
[slang term for 'cripple'], which I will explain in a separate note. Let's
call the boss Ángel, and the cripple Ernesto."

Got that? Where is Hugo? Where's 300 million? And 300 what? Indeed, in
context, the note is all about the hostage exchange with the FARC that
Chavez was working on at the time (December 23, 2007) at the request of the Colombian government.

Indeed, the entire remainder of the email is all about the mechanism of the hostage exchange. Here's the next line: "To receive the three freed ones, Chavez proposes three options: Plan A. Do it to via of
a 'humanitarian caravan'; one that will involve Venezuela, France, the Vatican[?], Switzerland, European Union, democrats [civil society],
Argentina, Red Cross, etc."

As to the 300, I must note that the FARC's previous prisoner exchange
involved 300 prisoners. Is that what the '300' refers to? ¿Quien sabe?
Unlike Uribe, Bush and the US press, I won't guess or make up a
phastasmogoric story about Chavez mailing checks to the jungle.

To bolster their case, the Colombians claim, with no evidence whatsoever,
that the mysterious "Angel" is the code name for Chavez. But in the memo, Chavez goes by the code name ... Chavez.

Well, so what? This is what.

Colombia's invasion into Ecuador is a rank violation of international law,
condemned by every single Latin member of the Organization of American
States. And George Bush just loved it. He called Uribe to back Colombia,
against, "the continuing assault by narco-terrorists as well as the
provocative maneuvers by the regime in Venezuela."

Well, our President may have gotten the facts ass-backward, but Bush knows what he's doing: shoring up his last, faltering ally in South America,
Uribe, a desperate man in deep political trouble.

Uribe claims he is going to bring charges against Chavez before the
International Criminal Court. If Uribe goes there in person, I suggest he
take a toothbrush: it was just discovered that right-wing death squads held
murder-planning sessions at Uribe's ranch. Uribe's associates have been
called before the nation's Supreme Court and may face prison.

In other words, it's a good time for a desperate Uribe to use that old
politico's wheeze, the threat of war, to drown out accusations of his own
criminality. Furthermore, Uribe's attack literally killed negotiations with
FARC by killing FARC's negotiator, Raul Reyes. Reyes was in talks with both Ecuador and Chavez about another prisoner exchange. Uribe authorized the negotiations, however, he knew, should those talks have succeeded in obtaining the release of those kidnapped by the FARC, credit would have been heaped on Ecuador and Chavez, and discredit heaped on Uribe.

Luckily for a hemisphere on the verge of flames, the President of Ecuador,
Raphael Correa, is one of the most level-headed, thoughtful men I've ever
encountered.

Correa is now flying from Quito to Brazilia to Caracas to keep the region
from blowing sky high. While moving troops to his border – no chief of state can permit foreign tanks on their sovereign soil – Correa also refuses sanctuary to the FARC . Indeed, Ecuador has routed out 47 FARC bases, a better track record than Colombia's own, corrupt military.

For his cool, peaceable handling of the crisis, I will forgive Correa for
apologizing for his calling Bush, "a dimwitted President who has done great
damage to his country and the world." (Watch an excerpt of my interview with Correa here.)

Amateur Hour in Blue

We can trust Correa to keep the peace South of the Border. But can we trustour Presidents-to-be?

The current man in the Oval Office, George Bush, simply can't help himself: an outlaw invasion by a right-wing death-squad promoter is just fine with him.

But guess who couldn't wait to parrot the Bush line? Hillary Clinton, still
explaining that her vote to invade Iraq was not a vote to invade Iraq,
issued a statement nearly identical to Bush's, blessing the invasion of
Ecuador as Colombia's "right to defend itself." And she added, "Hugo Chávez must stop these provoking actions." Huh?

I assumed that Obama wouldn't jump on this landmine – especially after he was blasted as a foreign policy amateur for suggesting he would invade
across Pakistan's border to hunt terrorists.

It's embarrassing that Barack repeated Hillary's line nearly verbatim,
announcing, "the Colombian government has every right to defend itself."

(I'm sure Hillary's position wasn't influenced by the loan of a campaign jet
to her by Frank Giustra. Giustra has given over a hundred million dollars to Bill Clinton projects. Last year, Bill introduced Giustra to Colombia's
Uribe. On the spot, Giustra cut a lucrative deal with Uribe for Colombian
oil.)

Then there's Mr. War Hero. John McCain weighed in with his own idiocies,
announcing that, "Hugo Chavez is establish[ing] a dictatorship," presumably because, unlike George Bush, Chavez counts all the votes in Venezuelan elections.

But now our story gets tricky and icky.

The wise media critic Jeff Cohen told me to watch for the press naming
McCain as a foreign policy expert and labeling the Democrats as amateurs.
Sure enough, the New York Times, on the news pages Wednesday, called McCain, "a national security pro."

McCain is the "pro" who said the war in Iraq would cost nearly nothing in
lives or treasury dollars.

But, on the Colombian invasion of Ecuador, McCain said, "I hope that
tensions will be relaxed, President Chavez will remove those troops from the borders - as well as the Ecuadorians - and relations continue to improve between the two."

It's not quite English, but it's definitely not Bush. And weirdly, it's
definitely not Obama and Clinton cheerleading Colombia's war on Ecuador.

Democrats, are you listening? The only thing worse than the media attacking Obama and Clinton as amateurs is the Democratic candidates' frightening desire to prove them right.

******************

Watch Greg Palast's reports from Venezuela and Ecuador for BBC Television
Newsnight and Democracy Now! Compiled on the DVD, "The Assassination of Hugo Chavez."

http://www.GregPalast.com

$300 MILLION FROM CHAVEZ TO FARC A FAKE

Here's the written evidence… and - please say it ain't so! - Obama and Hillary attack Ecuador

Note: Saturday, Bobby Kennedy hosts Greg Palast on "Ring of Fire" on Air America Radio. Sunday, catch Palast with Amy Goodman on WABC Television (New York), hosted by Gil Noble, Channel 7 at 1 pm(est).

For his cool, peaceable handling of the crisis, I will forgive Correa for apologizing for his calling Bush, "a dimwitted President who has done great damage to his country and the world." (Watch an excerpt of my interview with Correa here.)

Amateur Hour in Blue

We can trust Correa to keep the peace South of the Border. But can we trust our Presidents-to-be?

Watch Greg Palast's reports from Venezuela and Ecuador for BBC Television Newsnight and Democracy Now! Compiled on the DVD, "The Assassination of Hugo Chavez."


http://www.GregPalast.com

[outsider]

Update on Venezuela news, re Raul Reyes' laptop and reactivation of the US 4th Fleet after 58 years:

http://www.nineeleven.co.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=118341#118341