Plan Columbia Broadens (Plan Andean)... (fwd)

[Jim Choate]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2001 06:51:25 -0400
Subject: Inferno: Plan Columbia Broadens (Plan Andean)...

res ipsa loquitor...

<<   But what did come as a shock was the discovery of language in the bill
(apparently inserted late in the game by Foreign Operations subcommittee
chairman Jim Kolbe) that not only gives the Bush Administration authority to
send as many private military specialists as it wants to Colombia, but to send
them in as heavily armed as they want--and with broad rules of engagement...>>

<< Entitled "Colombian Labryinth," the RAND report asserts that "drugs and
insurgency are intertwined in complicated and changing ways but the former
cannot be addressed without the latter," and concludes US-backed efforts to
reduce the drug supply in Colombia have been ineffective, The reason, RAND says,
is because the US has focused more on "counternarcotics" assistance (aid to
anti-drug police and special military anti-drug units) rather than
"counterinsurgency" (aid to Colombian military in its war with the left-wing
FARC and ELN).

  While a number of investigative journalists and watchdog groups have
demonstrated US aid and assistance has already crossed the line from
counternarcotics to counterinsurgency, RAND recommends that the US once and for
all dispense with the dubious notion that there's any difference between the
two, and lays out an expansive proposal for increasing US military aid and
assistance to Colombian government in its fight against leftist rebels. But use
of US troops is something even the Bush Administration is leery of: at his
confirmation hearing earlier this year, Peter Rodman, Bush's nominee to be
Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, told senators
that " None of us wants to get into a war. The word 'counterinsurgency' scares
the hell out of everybody." >>

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=special&s=vest20010717



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