Colombia re-arrests ex-spy chief

[dipsydoodle]

Source: BBC News

The former head of the Colombian intelligence service, Jorge Noguera, has been re-arrested over his suspected links to death squads.
The ex-spy chief had been under house arrest since being granted a conditional release from jail in March.
>
He was arrested after being questioned about supplying the names of unionists and rights workers to right-wing militias. A number of people on the alleged hit-list were murdered.


Read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6279714.stm

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see also this post by Snazzy ref. US Co's operating in Columbia: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2907319

[Judi Lynn]

1. Wonderful! This guy is a real winner. Back by popular demand!

He was party to an assassination plot against Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. Pretty damned smooth, isn't it?

From an earlier article:

Published on Thursday, March 8, 2007 by the Guardian / UK
A Dark Underbelly of Mass Graves and Electoral Fraud
Congress is questioning a Latin American policy that has left George Bush with a best friend who is a major embarrassment

by Isabel Hilton

~snip~
But the most dangerous scandal for Uribe comes from the arrest of Jorge Noguera, his former campaign manager and, from 2002 to 2005, head of the DAS. Former DAS colleagues have told investigators of Noguera's close collaboration with Jorge 40 - which included lending him Uribe's personal armoured vehicle - and with other paramilitary leaders. The accusations include an assassination plot against Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez, the murder of political opponents, electoral fraud, doctoring police and judicial records to erase paramilitary cases. Noguera worked directly to Uribe and when the investigations began, the president appointed him consul in Milan. The supreme court has forced his return.

http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0308-33.htm



Slightly less than noble, Uribe's intelligence chief
the incomparable Jorge Noguera

[Judi Lynn]

2. Colombian ex-secret police chief arrested on charges of working with death squads

Colombian ex-secret police chief arrested on charges of working with death squads
The Associated Press
Published: July 6, 2007

BOGOTA, Colombia: Colombia's former chief of the secret police was arrested Friday on charges of colluding with paramilitary death squads.

Jorge Noguera had been freed from jail three months ago due to procedural errors with this arrest. This time, the arrest was requested by Colombia's chief prosecutor, Mario Iguaran, who ordered Noguera held in a maximum security jail on accusations of working with and passing information along to banned paramilitaries.

Noguera ran Colombia's secret police, known as the DAS, from 2002 to 2005. He was hand-picked for the job by President Alvaro Uribe after running Uribe's 2002 election campaign in a part of northern Colombia.

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/07/06/america/LA-GEN-Colombia-Paramilitaries.php

[Judi Lynn]

3. Colombia’s Secret Narco-Police

Colombia’s Secret Narco-Police
Claims of Collaboration with Drug Traffickers and Paramilitaries Sting the Country’s DAS Security Service and Support Allegations of DEA Corruption Published in Narco News

By Dan Feder
Special to The Narco News Bulletin
April 29, 2006

Though it has barely registered in the U.S. press, a national scandal is currently unfolding in Colombia, where a jailed high official of the Administrative Department for Security (DAS, in its Spanish initials) has been speaking freely with journalists about the extensive collaboration between the secret police agency and right-wing paramilitary groups.

Rafael García lost his post as DAS’ information technology chief after being charged with taking bribes from rightwing paramilitaries and narcos (often, one and the same). He now claims that DAS has been working for years, at least since Uribe’s 2002 election, in conjunction with the paras and their narco allies, sharing documents and intelligence to help kill and intimidate activists and unionists, help powerful drug traffickers avoid prosecution and murder informants. And investigative journalists in Colombia have verified and shed more light on a number of these claims.

Sound familiar? Narco News for the past four months has been uncovering a web of corruption linking the U.S.’s own DEA agents and other law enforcement personnel with drug traffickers and paramilitaries in Colombia. The new allegations about paramilitary and narco infiltration of the DAS make the “Kent Memo” (the internal Justice Department document claiming corruption in the DEA’s Bogotá office) all the more believable. They give a picture of a war on “drugs and terror” in Colombia that is corrupt to the core, and in which the most powerful narcos are seasoned experts at working with the same law enforcement entities charged with bringing them down.
(snip)

The DAS does not fall under any justice department but rather is directly controlled by the president’s office. It is small wonder, then, that such revelations about the DAS would surface under the watch of Álvaro Uribe Vélez, the narcopresidente himself. The scandal has been brewing since last fall, when a DAS chief — who received his post shortly after Uribe took office — resigned after the Bogotá newspaper El Tiempo discovered some tapes that let the cat out of the bag. As Ramón Acevedo reported for Narco News in November:

After many years of international and national pressure to abide by international human rights, the Colombian government continues to use the military and paramilitary “death squads” as main weapons against the civilian population and political opposition. For decades, the Colombian military and their paramilitary allies have enjoyed a high level of impunity from judicial processes. Most recently, on October 23rd the head of Colombia’s secret police (DAS), Jorge Noguera, resigned after the discovery of tapes discussing the agency’s alleged plans to give intelligence information to the paramilitaries. In addition, the paramilitaries have boasted many times of how they control more than 35 percent of the Colombian congress.
(snip)

http://www.narconews.com/Issue41/article1747.html

[Bacchus39]

5. are you telling us there is corruption in Colombia?

p.s. note this is coming from an official already jailed.

[Judi Lynn]

6. Pat Robertson is praying for you! He hopes you will get well soon.... Denial can be painful.

[Bacchus39]

7. denial of what? corruption in Colombia

hello??? this is the breaking news forum.

[Bacchus39]

4. its good that the Colombian government is investigating this

it seems that Colombians in general are more concerned about this though.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070705/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/colombia_anti_kidnapping_protest;_ylt=AuLNPcJd.HgnWLqHVbSlh9m3IxIF
BOGOTA, Colombia - More than a million people marched through Colombia's major cities Thursday and drivers honked horns in unison in a mass protest to demand the immediate liberation of the country's kidnap victims.

[Judi Lynn]

8. You'll be overwhelmed to know the author of "Confessions of an Economic Hitman,"

John Perkins, just said, at 6:24 p.m., EST, on Talk Left, that Uribe maintains his power through violence and fear.

Apparently this man who has spent his life very close to people in government throughout the world doesn't know quite as much as you.

[Bacchus39]

9. more than you that's for sure

I think his claim that Uribe is in power through violence and fear is exaggerated to say the least. did he provide any insight on potential solutions to Colombia's civil war?

[Peace Patriot]

10. Uribe has tolerated the shootings, torture and chainsawings of thousands of

innocent people--union organizers, peasant farmers, community elders, political leftists--and the dumping of their remains in mass graves, as well as large scale drug trafficking, right under his nose--horrendous rightwing paramilitary activities that have been directly tied to his chief of intelligence, the head of the military and many Uribe office holders including Uribe relatives. He should long ago have been impeached for malfeasance, but the Bush Junta props him up with billions of our tax dollars mostly in military aid--guns, rifles, bullets, armored vehicles, helicopters, toxic pesticides and, who knows, probably some chainsaws--all the equipment needed to terrorize the parts of the country that the big drug lords, or Monsanto, or Chiquita Banana want to control.

And you are defending this?

The way to end the civil war--in which 80% to 90% of the deaths have been attributed by human rights groups to the rightwing paramilitaries who have been PROTECTED by the Uribe government--is to de-fund the Uribe government and hold honest, TRANSPARENT elections, under OAS auspices.

Enough is enough! The US/Bush Junta has been torturing prisoners, holding prisoners indefinitely without trial in secret prisons all over the world, terrorized Iraq by slaughtering half a million innocent people in the initial bombing alone (according to the British doctors' report), has randomly tortured Iraqis, has fostered chaos and civil war, has created millions of refugees, and has meanwhile been supporting similar horrors in Colombia.

The M.O. is the same. These are heinous crimes--fostered and protected by the cloak of governmental legitimacy. Bush. Uribe. Criminals who know how to avoid accountability. And it is no surprise that they are big pals. These regimes are disgusting to civilized people, and I can only wonder what kind of 'Ann Coulter' mind would leap to their defense.

[Bacchus39]

12. honest transparent elections have already taken place

and if you don't believe they have, who do you propose should organize the new elections? Colombians or the OAS? paramilitaries, the rebels, and narcotraffickers have all preceded the current administration.

I would be all for defunding from the failed war on drugs.

however, none of your "solutions" will end the violence in Colombia.

[Flanker]

11. For whatever reason Colombians don't really view the paras as terrorists

Maybe they argue that because the FARC came first they should be offered a break.