some negatives on Eric Holder

[ensho]

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_4051.shtml


Attorney general nominee Holder represented firm that hired right-wing paramilitaries who killed union activists



President-elect Barack Obama’s choice to be attorney general, Eric Holder, represented Cincinnati-based Chiquita International, the banana giant that paid $1.7 million to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a group designated by the United States as a terrorist group. Moreover, Holder, as the attorney for Chiquita, may have been aware of arms and ammunition shipments to the AUC, which was involved in massacring Colombian peasants and union activists.

In 2003, after Chiquita board member Roderick Hills approached his old law firm partner Michael Chertoff, then the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, and revealed to Chertoff that Chiquita was paying “protection money” to the AUC, Chertoff and Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson reportedly sat on the case. There is now ample reason to believe that Holder, who was well aware of serious crimes being committed by Chiquita in supporting a terrorist group, weighed in with the Justice Department to downplay the investigation of Chiquita. And Holder had a powerful ally in the Bush White House. George W. Bush’s deputy chief of staff, Joe Hagin, had been a Chiquita executive at the time the payments were being made to the AUC terrorists. Moreover, the AUC has been linked to the Colombian government of President Alvaro Uribe, a close political ally of Bush, as well as former President Bill Clinton, Holder’s boss when he was deputy attorney general. One of the charges leveled against Chiquita is that is has paid bribes to politicians in Colombia.

The U.S. ambassador to Colombia in 2003 was Anne Patterson, now the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan and someone seen as supportive of U.S. covert operations that are not always legal.

Chiquita’s ties to the Bush White House do not stop with Hagin and Uribe. At the time the payments to the AUC were being made, Chiquita’s chairman was Cincinnati’s multi-billionaire Carl Lindner, Jr., a “Super Ranger” donor to Bush and a significant player in delivering Ohio to the Bush column in 2004.
-snip-
--------------------------------