U.S. and Colombia Cover Up Atrocities Through Mass Graves
The biggest human rights scandal in years is developing in Colombia, though you wouldn’t notice it from the total lack of media coverage here. The largest mass grave unearthed in Colombia was discovered by accident last year just outside a Colombian Army base in La Macarena, a rural municipality located in the Department of Meta just south of Bogota. The grave was discovered when children drank from a nearby stream and started to become seriously ill. These illnesses were traced to runoff from what was discovered to be a mass grave — a grave marked only with small flags showing the dates (between 2002 and 2009) on which the bodies were buried.
According to a February 10, 2010 letter issued by Alexandra Valencia Molina, Director of the regional office of Colombia’s own Procuraduria General de la Nacion — a government agency tasked to investigate government corruption — approximately 2,000 bodies are buried in this grave. The Colombian Army has admitted responsibility for the grave, claiming to have killed and buried alleged guerillas there. However, the bodies in the grave have yet to be identified. Instead, against all protocol for handling the remains of anyone killed by the military, especially those of guerillas, the bodies contained in the mass grave were buried there secretly without the requisite process of having the Colombian government certify that the deceased were indeed the armed combatants the Army claims.
And, given the current “false positive” scandal which has enveloped the government of President Alvaro Uribe and his Defense Minister, Juan Manuel Santos, who is now running to succeed Uribe as President, the Colombian Army’s claim about the mass grave is especially suspect. This scandal revolves around the Colombian military, most recently under the direction of Juan Manuel Santos, knowingly murdering civilians in cold blood and then dressing them up to look like armed guerillas in order to justify more aid from the United States. According to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pilay, this practice has been so “systematic and widespread” as to amount to a “crime against humanity.” And sadly, when Ms. Pilay made this statement, she literally did not know the half of it.
To date, not factoring in the mass grave, it has been confirmed by Colombian government sources that 2,000 civilians have fallen victim to the “false positive” scheme since President Uribe took office in 2002. If, as suspected by Colombian human rights groups, such as the “Comision de Derechos Humanos del Bajo Ariari” and the “Colectivo Orlando Fals Borda,” the mass grave in La Macarena contains 2,000 more civilian victims of this scheme, then this would bring the total of those victimized by the “false positive” scandal to at least 4,000 –much worse than originally believed.
That this grave was discovered just outside a Colombian military base overseen by U.S. military advisers — the U.S. having around 600 military advisers in that country — is especially troubling, and raises serious questions about the U.S.’s own conduct in that country. In addition, this calls into even greater question the propriety of President Obama’s agreement with President Alvaro Uribe last summer to grant the U.S. access to 7 military bases in that country.
The Colombian government and military are scrambling to contain this most recent scandal, and possibly through violence. Thus, on March 15, 2010, Jhonny Hurtado, a former union leader and President of the Human Rights Committee of La Cantina, and an individual who was key in revealing the truth about this mass grave, was assassinated as soldiers from Colombia’s 7th Mobile Brigade patrolled the area. Just prior to his murder, Jhonny Hurtado told a delegation of British MPs visiting Colombia that he believed the mass grave at La Macarena contained the bodies of innocent people who had been “disappeared.”
The discovery of this mass grave by sheer accident raises the prospect that there are more yet to be found. Certainly, it is the consensus of human rights groups in Colombia that this is only be the tip of the iceberg. In any case, the discovery of this grave, on top of the large magnitude of the “false positive” scandal already known, justifies a serious rethinking of U.S. policy toward Colombia — a policy pursuant to which the U.S. has sent over $7 billion of military aid to Colombia since 2000 and still counting. This policy, which President Obama is only deepening, has continued the U.S.’s long-standing practice of giving the most military aid to the worst human rights abusers. The time is way overdue for this practice to end.
Daniel Kovalik is a human and labor rights lawyer living in Pittsburgh. The information in this article about the mass grave at La Maracena was based on research provided by Justice for Colombia in London and by two brave Colombian human rights leaders, Edinson Cuellar and Carolina Hoyas, who are working tirelessly to spread the truth about this mass grave.
Obama Ready to Appoint Former Military Intelligence Official to Run TSA
Link
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
March 8, 2010
If Obama has his way, military intelligence will soon be running the Transportation Security Administration.
“President Barack Obama plans to appoint a former senior Army official with a career in intelligence to lead the Transportation Security Administration,” reports the Associated Press. “The president is expected to announce his choice, retired Gen. Robert Harding, on Monday, according to an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the announcement is not yet public.”
Under Gen. Harding, the TSA will likely be further militarized and turned into an intelligence operation.
General Harding’s last assignment before retirement from the military was the U.S. Army’s Deputy G2 in intelligence. He was responsible for the planning and execution of the Army’s intelligence programs. From 1997 to until 2000, as the Director of Operations at the Defense Intelligence Agency, he acted as the Department of Defense’s senior Human Intelligence officer. Prior to working at the DIA, Harding served as the J2, Intelligence Directorate, United States Southern Command, under generals Barry McCaffrey and Wes Clark as their intelligence chief. He also directed intelligence with the Joint Interagency Task Force in the so-called War on Drugs. Between 2003 and 2009, Harding was a government consultant on human intelligence and counterintelligence issues. See Harding’s bio here.
The Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA, and the NSA are subject to only token oversight by Congress. During the Bush era, the agency was penetrated by neocons. In 2004, a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst detailed to Undersecretary of Defense for Planning Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans — the group primarily responsible for fake intelligence in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq — came under FBI investigation for spying for Israel.
“The president’s decision to appoint someone with an extensive intelligence background is significant because it comes after the attempted Christmas airliner attack, when the government’s intelligence programs came under scrutiny and attacks by critics who said the Obama administration wasn’t doing enough to foil would-be terrorists. The incident prompted a review of U.S. security policies.”
The Christmas Day non-bombing event was exploited by the Department of Homeland Security to accelerate the installation of naked body scanners around the country. In January, a team of scientists in Britain concluded that a naked body scanner would not have prevented the patsy Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from carrying explosives on the flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.
Congress and the Obama administration also used the Christmas Day non-bombing and the Fort Hood attack to push for extending the Patriot Act on February 25.
Three elements of the Patriot Act that will stay in effect include court-approved roving wiretaps that permit surveillance on multiple phones, court approved seizure of records and property in anti-terrorism operations and surveillance of what is called a “lone wolf,” or a non-U.S. citizen suspected of terrorist activities. Section 215, which allows for the search of library records without probable cause, was also extended despite complaints from the American Library Association, the Daily Titan noted on March 4.
In addition to intrusive and dangerous naked body scanners, the government reportedly provided a research grant to an Israeli technology company to develop mind-reading technology for airports.
Obama’s appointment of Harding to run the TSA indicates the government is interested in further militarizing civilian airports.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is expected to officially announce Harding’s appointment later today.
Sense of Deception 