US military aid to Colombia serves to enrich defense companies: WikiLeaks founder

[Judi Lynn]

US military aid to Colombia serves to enrich defense companies: WikiLeaks founder
Sunday, 20 March 2011 16:36
Adriaan Alsema

United States military aid to Colombia serves more to enrich private defense companies than to help the Andean nation, said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in an interview published Sunday.

In a video-interview with Colombian weekly Semana, Assange alleged that these interests of large corporations are more important than a desire to help Colombia develop.

"What it's about is that there are several powerful companies and lobbies in Washington such as Lockheed Martin, say Raytheon, Northrop Grumman; military intelligence contractors who lobby Congress and their contacts within the Pentagon and the CIA to engage in special programs in Colombia with provisos written to make sure that the money actually cycles back to the United States," the WikiLeaks founder said.

"It's about transferring money from U.S. tax payers i.e. predominantly from middle class people back to company share holders and senior executives; people who are already rich. For example, by appearing to give the Colombian government aid to buy helicopters, but then attaching provisos so that the helicopters must be of a particular type that only a U.S. weapons manufacturer can provide. That's what's really going on in Colombia as far as military subsidy and what the United States calls the war on drugs is concerned," Assange added.

More:
http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/15021-us-military-aid-to-colombia-serves-to-enrich-defense-companies-wikileaks-founder.html

[Arctic Dave]

1. Yep. That is all our military "assistance" has been about.

The same with the domestic war on drugs.

[Citizen Worker]

2. Look on the bright side. It's also a jobs program.

:sarcasm:

[Judi Lynn]

3. Colombia is no model for drug war

Colombia is no model for drug war
11:00 PM, Mar. 20, 2011

When Washington ramped up its anti-drug efforts through Plan Colombia, more than 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States came through Colombia. A decade later, we get about 97 percent of our cocaine via Colombia.

Amazingly, officials are hailing the program's "success" and want Mexico to learn from Colombia's experience. While Plan Colombia may have helped make that country safer from guerrilla attacks, it has failed as a drug control strategy. Adapting that program in Mexico won't staunch that country's bloodbath and isn't likely to produce better results.

Washington's response to Mexico's increasingly violent drug trafficking problem has emphasized disrupting criminal organizations by breaking them up into smaller fragments. Yet there's no evidence that this strategy of "fracturing" the traffickers ever worked in Colombia, where we've already tried it for two decades.

~snip~
Our practice of repeatedly beating the hornet's nest ensures that the hornets will never settle down. Our politicians see Mexico in flames, and their knee-jerk response is to throw water on the fire by increasing military aid.

More:
http://www.baxterbulletin.com/article/20110321/OPINION01/103210325/0/OPINION0101/Colombia-no-model-drug-war?odyssey=nav%7Chead

[Peace Patriot]

4. The U.S. "war on drugs" is our war profiteers' backup gravy train.

They've been able to count on it between wars. Horribly, for those paying the bills, we now have THREE wars/occupations going on AND the "war on drugs" wherever it can get boots on the ground in Latin America and other regions (which might be costing even MORE than the war machine in the Middle East, when you add up costs like the "prison-industrial complex" and untold social costs, buying governments, funding rightwing groups in Latin America, maintaining and expanding U.S. military bases in Latin America, etc.). This is what is breaking our back, as a country, as a people.

The U.S. "war on drugs" in Colombia has a number of other purposes than keeping Lockheed, Dyncorp, et al, in clover between wars (or as the "fourth war"). I think Assange is right on the money when he says that U.S. war profiteers are USING Colombia's 70 year civil war as an EXCUSE for more wild military expenditures. But I think that U.S. funding of the Colombian military had the additional, specific purpose of mass murder of trade unionists, teachers, community activists, human rights workers, political leftists, journalists, peasant farmers and others--to decapitate local leadership especially in areas where the criminal mafia running the Colombian government wanted to steal land from five million peasants and consolidate the cocaine trade into fewer hands. Amnesty International attributes roughly half of the murders of the trade unionists in Colombia to the Colombian military itself (and the other half to its closely tied paramilitary death squads). These are the fascists, militarists and murderers to whom the U.S. government has been giving $7 BILLION of our tax money. We can only presume that the U.S. government approves of who the money was used to slaughter, terrorize and repress. Otherwise, the U.S. government would withhold the money, right?--if the recipients are killing labor leaders and teachers and so on? Right?

U.S. funding of beastial uses of our tax money extended to the Colombian military luring young men with jobs, murdering them and dressing up their bodies like FARC guerrillas--which the Colombian military conducted en masse to earn bonuses and to impress U.S. senators with "body counts." This went on for years without any objection from the U.S., and even now the U.S. government doesn't give a fuck. The U.S. helped cover for Chiquita International and Drummond Coal, whose execs hired death squads to take care of their "labor problems" in Colombia. And it is my conviction that this is what the U.S. government wanted--blood-drenched prep of a terrorized slave labor force for U.S. "free trade for the rich."

Yet another purpose of our $7 billion in Colombia has been to provide a context of mayhem and murder in which to "train" U.S. assassins for other war theaters. (Earlier this year, the State Dept. "fined" Blackwater for "unauthorized" "trainings" of "foreign persons" IN COLOMBIA "for use in Iraq and Afghanistan.) (I don't believe the word "unauthorized.") This was possibly the main purpose of the secretly negotiated U.S./Colombia military agreement in 2009--which granted total diplomatic immunity to all U.S. military personnel and all U.S. military 'contractors' in Colombia.

You might say the U.S. has used $7 billion of our money efficiently in Colombia, to serve so many corpo-fascist purposes at once. But one purpose that our money has NOT served is even making a dent in the cocaine trade. Cocaine just keeps on flowing. Ha-ha on us.

The Bush Cartel may have had a particular interest in consolidation of the trillion-plus dollar cocaine revenue stream. The multinational corporations who rule here had their interests--killing labor leaders, clearing peasants off the land. And the war profiteers who co-rule here had their interest in selling more weapons of war paid for by you and me.

Oh, we have been mightily fleeced and fooled!