Drug policy expert Sanho Tree on Colombia, quagmire, and the war on ‘narco-terrorism’
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While UN wrangles, ‘undeclared war’
on Iraq enters new phase
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Iraqi defector’s testimony
confuses case against Iraq
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Sharon tosses out ‘road map,’ passes on peace
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WORLD BRIEFS
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Bolivian citizens, media
excluded from Bechtel trial

Washington, DC, Feb. 25— The Bechtel Corporation was handed a powerful victory last week, when a secretive trade court announced that it would not allow the public or media to participate in or even witness proceedings in which Bechtel is suing the people of Bolivia for $25 million. Aguas del Tunari, a subsidiary of the California-based engineering giant, is suing South America’s poorest nation over the company’s failed effort to take over the public water system of Bolivia’s third largest city, Cochabamba. After taking over the water system in 2000, the company imposed massive water rate hikes, which resulted in widespread protests countered by military force that killed one person and wounded 175 others.

Oscar Olivera, a leader of the coalition of Bolivian peasants, workers, and others that formed in opposition to Bechtel, said, “Now the World Bank is not only imposing its ideas and programs on us, it is also preventing the people affected from participating in a case that directly affects our lives. This is profoundly undemocratic.”

Bechtel’s legal action is being heard by the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), a tribunal administered by the World Bank that holds all of its meetings in secret. Bechtel is suing Bolivia for the profits it claims it would have made from the water privatization scheme had the rate hike protests not led to its unplanned departure from the city of Cochabamba in April 2000.

The President of the tribunal arbitrating the case responded last week to a petition filed by Oscar Olivera and a coalition of other Bolivian citizens and public interest organizations seeking to participate in the case.

The President’s letter asserted that the tribunal had no power to permit affected citizens to participate, a stance inconsistent with other arbitral tribunals and US courts, where interested parties are regularly allowed to submit “friend of the court” briefs. The letter also indicated the tribunal’s rejection of the groups’ requests that documents and hearings in the case be open to the public.

The tribunal is comprised of one member appointed by AdT, one appointed by the Bolivian government, and a third - the tribunal’s president - appointed by the President of the World Bank.

“The panel explicitly rejected all of our requests for public participation in this closed-door process,” said Martin Wagner, an attorney for the US-based law firm, Earthjustice. “It is inexcusable that a panel considering an issue as fundamental as the right to water should be able to exclude the very people whose rights will be affected by the case.”

According to Sarah Anderson, Director of the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, “There has been an outpouring of international support for the Bolivian petitioners in this case. So many people have become familiar with such investor-state lawsuits from the NAFTA experience and they see them as one of the most extreme examples of excessive power granted to corporations.”

Requests for public participation denied

In August 2002, a coalition of citizens’ organizations from around the world requested in a letter to the tribunal that the panel make all of the documents and meetings in the case public, that it travel to Bolivia to receive public testimony, and that it allow Bolivian civic leaders to be an equal party to the case. The tribunal’s response to the petition serves as a rejection of this request as well.

“The ICSID Tribunal’s decision reveals structural deficiencies in the ICSID arbitration system,” said Marcos Orellana an attorney for the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL). “By failing to recognize its power to allow affected citizens to participate in the case, the Tribunal’s decision would allow corporations such as Bechtel to manipulate and compromise the integrity of international arbitration, as well as countries’ ability to protect the public welfare.”

The legal team representing the Bolivian petitioners includes California-based Earthjustice and the Washington, DC-based Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), both of which have been involved in attempts to intervene in similar investor-state lawsuits filed under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

“The World Bank’s secret trade court has now made it absolutely clear that it wants to continue doing its work behind closed doors, without pubic scrutiny or participation by the people expected to pay Bechtel off,” said Jim Shultz of the Bolivia-based Democracy Center. “Neither the public nor the media will be allowed to know when the tribunal meets, where it meets, who it hears from, or what they say. This secrecy is just a preview of what communities in the US can expect under the proposed FTAA [Free Trade Area of the Americas, an extension of NAFTA].

Local governments from Alaska to Chile will be dragged before secret panels as multinational corporations, like Bechtel, seek to undo local environmental, health, worker, and consumer protections, branded as barriers to free trade.”

Aftermath of a revolt against water price hikes

In the late 1990s the World Bank forced Bolivia to privatize the public water system of its third-largest city, Cochabamba, by threatening to withhold debt relief and other development assistance. In 1999, in a process with just one bidder, Bechtel, the California-based engineering giant, was granted a 40-year lease to take over Cochabamba’s water, through a subsidiary the corporation formed for just that purpose (“Aguas del Tunari”).

Within weeks of taking over the water system, Aguas del Tunari imposed huge rate hikes on local water users. Families living on the local minimum wage of $60 per month were billed up to 25 percent of their monthly income. The rate hikes sparked massive citywide protests that the Bolivian government sought to end by declaring a state of martial law and deploying thousands of soldiers and police. More than a hundred people were injured and one 17-year-old boy was killed. In April 2000, as anti-Bechtel protests continued to grow, the company’s managers abandoned the project.

Aguas del Tunari filed the legal action against Bolivia last November, demanding compensation of $25 million, a figure that represents far more than the company’s investment in the few months it operated in Bolivia. The action also aims to recoup a portion of the company’s expected profits from the project. The company filed the case with ICSID under a bilateral investment treaty between the Netherlands and Bolivia. Although Bechtel is a US corporation, its subsidiary recently established a presence in the Netherlands in order to make use of the treaty. The rules in the Dutch-Bolivian treaty are similar to those in NAFTA and the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas.

Source: CorpWatch

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Iraqi defector’s testimony
confuses case against Iraq

By Julian Borger

Washington, DC, Mar. 1— Hussein Kamel, the former head of Iraq’s weapons programs whose 1995 defection has been portrayed by the US and Britain as evidence of Iraqi deceit and the futility of inspections, was a “consummate liar,” according to the last weapons inspector to interrogate him.

The transcript of the interrogation, leaked this week to Newsweek magazine and seen by the Guardian, makes it clear that the defector’s testimony on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was inconclusive and often misleading.

The emergence of the classified statements weakens the case the US and Britain has tried to build against Saddam Hussein, in which Kamel’s defection has been used to bolster claims that Iraq still has thousands of tons of chemical and biological weapons for which it has not accounted.

They reveal that Kamel, who was Hussein’s son-in-law, told United Nations inspectors that Iraq had destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons and abandoned its nuclear program after the Gulf war. But he said blueprints, documents, computer files, and molds for missile parts had been hidden.

Rolf Ekeus, the former chief UN weapons inspector who oversaw the interrogation in August 1995, said much of the chemical arsenal had been destroyed by the inspectors, not Baghdad.

Ekeus agreed that the Iraqi government had probably eliminated its biological arsenal but said he remained convinced that “seed stocks” of bacteria had been retained as well as growth media and fermenters so it could quickly reconstitute its arsenal.

Kamel, who had been the director of Iraq’s military industrial establishment, was assassinated soon after his mysterious decision to return to Iraq just weeks after his high-profile defection.

The US and British governments have pointed to the defection to emphasize the extent of Iraq’s weapons programs and the inherent weakness of inspections.

But Ekeus pointed out that UNSCOM, the UN special commission on Iraq, had already discovered a lot about the Iraqi pre-war biological program earlier that year, forcing Baghdad’s admission in July, a month before Kamel’s defection, that it had pursued germ warfare.

The transcript of Kamel’s interrogation reveals a far more ambiguous picture than the one portrayed in Washington and London.

“Kamel was a consummate liar,” Ekeus said.

While the transcript of the interrogation makes it clear that the defection was less than a breakthrough, it had a psychological impact on Baghdad. The Iraqi government, unsure what he was going to tell the inspectors, became much more forthcoming.

Before Ekeus arrived in Amman to interrogate Kamel, the Iraqis invited him to Baghdad to hand over documents and then took him to Kamel’s chicken farm where several metal containers full of documents had been buried.

“They wanted to blame it all on Kamel,” Ekeus said. “But Kamel was just carrying out the government’s policy.”

Source: Guardian (UK)

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Sharon tosses out ‘road map,’ passes on peace

Compiled by Seán Marquis

Mar. 4 (AGR)— On Feb. 28 Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s hard-right coalition government became official after winning parliament’s acceptance vote.

Sharon has forged an eight-seat majority in the 120-member Knesset after deals were made with the far-right National Religious Party (NRP), the ultra-nationalist National Union Party (NUP), and the center-right Shinui in the aftermath of January’s elections.

US President George W. Bush restated last week that Israel would be expected to support the creation of a Palestinian state, but the NRP and NUP are fundamentally opposed to such a move.

In a cabinet shuffle Binyamin Netanyahu has accepted the post of finance minister after initially rebuffing the reassignment.

Netanyahu was removed as foreign minister and has been replaced by Silvan Shalom — who had been finance minister and is seen as a Sharon loyalist with little experience of foreign affairs.

Hours before his cabinet was sworn in, the prime minister revealed to the Knesset that he has backed away from his commitment to the Palestinian state envisioned by Washington’s “road map,” as part of the deal to put together his government.

Sharon told the Knesset that the road map is “a matter of controversy in the coalition” and had been dropped from the written agreement which drew far right, pro-settler, and anti-religious parties into the administration.

Sharon also ruled out the division of Jerusalem or the return of Palestinian refugees from negotiations, two key Palestinian and Arab demands for peace.

A Palestinian cabinet minister, Saeb Erekat, said Sharon’s speech killed any prospect of a peace process under the new government.

“He is saying there is no road map, no peace process,” he said. “I think Sharon made it clear tonight that he wants the Palestinians to surrender to him. I hope President Bush will see the light.”

Pregnant woman killed by Israeli Army

On Mar. 3 Israeli troops killed eight Palestinians while storming Bureij refugee camp in the Gaza Strip where they seized a founder of the militant Islamic group Hamas, battled gunmen, and demolished homes.

Palestinian hospital officials said a 33-year-old pregnant woman was killed by falling debris when the army blew up a militant’s house, and tank fire killed a 14-year-old boy.

Nuha al-Magadmeh, nine-months pregnant, was crushed to death 10 days before she was due to give birth.

Israeli soldiers had dynamited a neighboring house because it belonged to the family of a suicide bomber who had killed himself when he tried to blow up a Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip in December.

The wall between the house that was blown up and Magadmeh’s collapsed on her. “We did not go out because the Israeli soldiers ordered everyone to stay inside over a loudspeaker,” said the dead woman’s husband, who has a fractured neck.

In the neighboring Nusseirat refugee camp’s Peace Street, where Tariq Akil, 14, was killed, his uncle, Usama Akil, said he was fleeing because one of his relatives is a wanted militant. The entire family had abandoned their house and run, but the boy was the last to leave. As he ran up the street, a tank opened fire.

Abu Hamdi said he believed the Israeli tank fired the shell at Tariq Akil. “There was no one else here. They were firing at anything that was moving,” he claimed. “If a chicken had been in the street they would have fired at it.”

At least 40 Palestinians were wounded in the operation, which began when undercover troops infiltrated the camp and were followed by tanks.

The operation centered on the arrest of Mohammed Taha, 67, one of the original political leaders of Hamas when it was founded in 1987, and three of his sons, witnesses said.

In the camp, thousands marched in a funeral procession for the eight killed, chanting, “Bombings are the only option.”

Palestinian truce?

Prior to an inter-Palestinian meeting last week, the Palestinian leadership insisted that all factions that wish to take part in the talks in Cairo must sign a proposed moratorium on attacks against Israel before the meeting.

“The Cairo talks must be based on an agreement and not on dialogue and negotiation,” Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) deputy chief Mahmud Abbas told Palestinian radio.

An outspoken opponent of the militarization of the Intifadah, Abu Mazen — a likely candidate for the new post of prime minister — said the leadership had taken an unequivocal, strategic decision in favor of a truce.

But Abu Mazen’s call was swiftly rejected by hardline Palestinian factions. Some of the main resistance groups — Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades — have refused to fall in line.

“A truce under the current political circumstances and developments on the ground amounts to an acknowledgement of defeat,” Hamas official Osama Hamdan said on Al Jazeera television channel. “Resistance must continue, [Palestinian] political aims will be achieved by resistance, not a truce.”

Sources: BBC News, Guardian (UK), Independent (UK), Inter Press Service, Reuters

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While UN wrangles, ‘undeclared war’
on Iraq enters new phase

Compiled by Eamon Martin

Mar. 5 (AGR)— With other nations’ opposition hardening, the White House left open the possibility Tuesday that it would not seek a United Nations vote on its war-making resolution if the measure was clearly headed for defeat.

This week George W. Bush and his advisers began looking beyond the diplomatic showdown in the UN to make plans for a public relations buildup to potential war with Iraq.

Bush has stated he has the authority to launch a war with or without a new resolution and some 300,000 US forces are now poised around Iraq’s borders for his order to attack. But some of Bush’s allies, including British Prime Minister Tony Blair, want the political cover that a UN resolution may provide in the face of strong domestic opposition to a war.

Once the vote is resolved one way or another, Bush will intensify his case for war, officials said. In addition to a possible address, they have discussed a presidential news conference and a Cabinet meeting as ways for Bush to communicate his plans to the nation next week. He may stop short of a specific ultimatum, officials said, but would make it clear that war is imminent in other ways, such as warning journalists and humanitarian workers to get out of Iraq.

This past week the US and the UK submitted a draft resolution to the United Nations saying that Iraq has missed its “final opportunity” to disarm peacefully. No date for a vote is set but US and British officials have said they want to push for one next week after a crucial council session on Friday when UN weapons inspectors are due to deliver their latest report on Iraqi disarmament.

The United States has four publicly committed votes in the 15-member council. France, Russia and China, which have veto power, are opposed and six other nations are on the fence, being wooed by both sides.

A resolution — which would clear the way for an invasion— needs a minimum of nine votes for adoption in the 15-member council and no veto from its permanent members—the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China.

Washington’s strategy is to get the minimum nine votes and then dare France, Russia, or China to veto the measure. On Wednesday, the foreign ministers of France, Russia and Germany announced that they will not allow a UN resolution to pave the way for military action against Iraq.

“Do we need a second resolution? No. Are we going to oppose a second resolution? Yes, as are the Russians and many other countries,” French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin announced. “We will not allow a resolution to pass that authorizes resorting to force.”

When asked whether France would use its veto, as Russia has suggested it might do, de Villepin said, “We will take all our responsibilities. We are in total agreement with the Russians.”

In Washington, Bush sent an unmistakable signal to the Mexican government that he expects them to support the US position on Iraq on the key vote, speaking of possible “discipline” if they don’t.

But Bush said there should be no illusions of him waiting for the UN’s approval to move on Iraq. “It would be helpful and useful, but I don’t believe we need a second UN resolution,” he said.

Still to be resolved is the military question of whether Turkey will allow its territory to be used for US ground forces to open a northern front against Iraq. Saturday’s vote in Turkish parliament against the plan stunned US officials, who were confident that the deployment of 62,000 US troops would be approved after the United States agreed to offer Turkey $15 billion in loans and grants to help cushion the Turkish economy if there is a war. However, the Turkish government has signaled it may table a second motion to parliament for allowing the troops. A senior official in Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) said on Wednesday he expected the motion would pass if parliament voted again.

Allies bomb key Iraqi targets

Meanwhile, the United States and Britain have all but fired the first shots of the second Gulf War by dramatically extending the range of targets in the “no-fly zones” over Iraq to soften up the country for an allied ground invasion.

On Monday, the US said Iraqi concessions would not alter Bush’s countdown toward a possible war.

As Baghdad threatened to stop destroying its Samoud 2 missiles if the US presses ahead with its invasion plans, allied pilots attacked surface-to-surface missile systems and are understood to have hit multiple-launch rockets.

The US Defense Department says it has expanded the number of military targets which can be attacked by US and UK planes patrolling over northern and southern Iraq. The intensification of the attacks in the no-fly zones appears to show that the US and Britain are determined to follow the military route, despite the continuing debate at the United Nations.

Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Friday that the fighter planes were now also authorized to attack missile batteries deployed on Iraqi territory that do not threaten or fire on US aircraft.

Four of the Iraqi sites were hit last week, and Myers said they had been targeted because they were within range of some of the tens of thousands of US ground forces now deployed across the Iraqi border in northern Kuwait as part of an invasion force.

Until now, the US and Britain have insisted publicly that the rules for enforcing the no-fly zones over the north and south of Iraq have not changed - that pilots only open fire if they are targeted. But privately defense officials are admitting that there has been an aggressive upping of the ante in recent weeks to weaken Iraqi defenses ahead of a ground invasion. Analysts confirm there has been an intensification of what is known as “the undeclared war.”

Figures released by the US Central Command show that British and US aircraft have stepped up their bombing over the past few weeks. This year alone they have attacked Iraqi targets more than 40 times.

In the past week, they have attacked Iraqi targets three times. On Thursday they attacked a missile site and communications system near Basra. On Friday they bombed three mobile air defense early warning radars and a surface-to-air missile system near An Nasiriyah, approximately 170 miles southwest of Baghdad. On Saturday, British and US aircraft attacked military communication sites and a mobile radar in the same location.

Last month British and US aircraft attacked the Ababil-100 missile site near Basra, where surface-to-air missiles adapted to hit ground targets were located, according to US Central Command.

The attacks in the zones, now almost daily, have enabled the United States and Britain to degrade Iraq’s air defense capabilities and attack targets that otherwise would need to be hit after war breaks out, defense analysts say.

“From the middle of the year last year onward, there was quite a steep rise in the amount of bombing. And some of the targets were beginning to be slightly more difficult to define as directly related to attacks on the aircraft,” says Timothy Garden, a defense analyst with the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London.

Garden says the recent escalation in the no-fly zones is not by accident, considering the looming war.

“We all expect operations to start sometime over the next three or four weeks, so that’s not surprising,” Garden says.

This week, military sources announced that the United States is preparing a monster new weapon to be used during the first nights of any attack on Iraq. It’s called MOAB, short for a “massive ordnance air burst” bomb. It is a modern, bigger version of the 15,000-pound “Daisy Cutter” used in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf War and Afghanistan.

The MOAB’s massive explosive punch, sources say, is similar to a small nuclear weapon.

Late Tuesday, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein ordered regional governors to tell citizens to start digging foxholes in their gardens.

Sources: ABC News, Associated Press, BBC News, Christian Science Monitor, Copley News Service, Guardian (UK), Newsday, Reuters, The Scotsman, Washington Post

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Drug policy expert Sanho Tree on Colombia, quagmire, and the war on ‘narco-terrorism’

Interview by Nicholas Holt

Sanho Tree is a Fellow at the Washington, DC-based Institute For Policy Studies and director of the Institute’s Drug Policy Project, which studies the international “war on drugs” and works to replace it with policies that promote public health and safety, as well as economic alternatives to the prohibition drug economy. In recent years the project has focused on the US drug war in Colombia and its attendant “collateral damage.”

Colombia’s civil war pits leftist guerrilla groups, the largest of which is the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), against right-wing paramilitaries and the Colombian army, which has close ties to the paramilitaries. The paramilitaries and, to a lesser degree, the FARC, both fund themselves in part through the drug trade. The US has sent $2 billion to Colombia since 1997, most of which went to police and military forces.

Amnesty International reports that in 2001 alone, more than 4,000 civilians were killed in the fighting.

On Feb. 28, Sanho Tree took time from his very busy travel schedule to talk with AGR about recent events in Colombia and the intersections of the “war on terror” and “the war on drugs.”

AGR: The big news with Colombia right now is that the FARC snagged three US citizens after their plane crashed and apparently shot killed the Colombian soldier who was piloting them and another US soldier [see “CIA operatives captured by Colombian guerrillas,” AGR 114, Feb. 20-26]. Who were these men and what were they doing flying around the Colombian jungle?

ST: It’s still a bit sketchy, but the latest report is that they were private military contractors for a company that was a subsidiary of Northrup Grumman and they were doing surveillance flights and gathering intelligence on coca-eradication.

It would be either the State Department or the Department of Defense [DoD] that contracts them, occasionally CIA, too, but, I believe these were DoD contractors.

AGR: Why do government agencies prefer to work with contractors rather than their own people?

ST: Outsourcing government functions has been going on for a long time now…historically, they’ve done things like service air-craft, maintenance, and less of this in the line of fire business. And that’s the real dangerous part of it.

They claim that it’s cheaper, but here we have a situation where US taxpayers are paying $350 billion a year at least for a state of the art military, you know, paramount super power, second to none, and yet tax payers are being asked to pay twice, for a private company to duplicate that kind of power and capability. So there isn’t much of a cost savings.

I think what they’re trying to do is shield this activity from Congressional scrutiny and also media scrutiny. In the past when these people have been killed, they’re listed as private citizens. You don’t have flag draped coffins flying into Dover Air Force base with military honor guards.

AGR: But this is the first time that any of the armed Colombian groups have captured US citizens?

ST: Yeah, and this is actually the worst case scenario. I don’t want to sound crass, but it would have been more convenient for the [Bush] administration if they had simply died in the plane crash. But, [the FARC] have hostages, and they want to swap. So that’s going to be a real sticky situation for the US.

Congressman [Jim] Moran (D-VA) is saying we should have a robust response to this [but] these are all the wrong reasons for getting into a war. We’re backing into a privatized Gulf of Tonkin type quagmire here…and we know the result of that.

There is no public support for a massive escalation, there’s been no debate about it, we don’t have the national resolve, we don’t have the funding necessary for this, and we don’t have a clear set of objectives. There’s no definition of victory for this thing. So, we’re being drawn into a war for all the wrong and ill conceived reasons. Not that there are good reasons for getting involved, but this is definitely not the way you want to do it.

I would like to know what some of these proponents think we’re going to achieve in Colombia. Is it a negotiated solution? Are we there to defeat the guerrillas? Is it about drugs? Nobody is willing to say exactly.

If you take the Colombian government’s word, and take the State Department’s word, that they are opposed to the paramilitaries, that means that there are then 35,000 illegal armed actors in Colombia.

Opposing them, you’ve got roughly 35,000 to 45,000 Colombian military troops that are deployable in the field. The rest of the military is deskbound or they are high-school graduates. If you have a high school diploma, you may not fight in combat.

AGR: You’re not expendable.

ST: Yep. The Colombian elites take care of their own very well. It’s an army of peasants fighting an army of peasants, basically.

So, you’ve got roughly a one-to-one ratio of insurgents versus state troops, and all the military counter intelligence experts tell you you need a ten-to-one ratio to fight a counter-insurgency war.

Keep in mind that Colombia is 53 times the size of El Salvador, the size of Texas and California combined. To give you some sense of the scale, the New York Police Department has about 40,000 uniformed officers to make New York City safe. Imagine taking those 40,000 policemen and scattering them over that vast land mass.

In order to get a ten-to-one advantage, we’re talking about a huge military build up, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the Vietnam War, and there’s no funding for that. So we’re getting drawn halfway into the war, or, perhaps I should say, a fifth of the way into a war that we’re not going to win.

AGR: How does the Colombian situation relate to the build-up for war against Iraq?

ST: You’ve got this build up in Iraq that everyone’s focused on, but that doesn’t mean that the bureaucrats that are in charge of Latin America and Colombia policy in the State Department and elsewhere aren’t doing what they’ve always been doing and they’ve been busy pushing forward on Colombia. Just because the media isn’t covering this as much doesn’t mean it’s not happening. It is happening.

In terms of the budgets, if this war in the Middle-East goes forward, it’ll be tragic all around, but, it could drive oil prices up to $45 or $50 a barrel, at which point all the air-lines go bankrupt, we’ll have a huge massive bail out of almost everything, the ripple effects in the economy will be tremendous, and the revenue base will decline. So with less tax revenues, and the occupation cost in Iraq, and everything else, where do they expect to pay for this war in Colombia? So that, ironically, may be the best chance for not escalating hostilities in Colombia: war in Iraq.

AGR: How does “war on terror” effect the Colombian situation?

ST: Colin Powell was supposed to go to Bogota on 9/11/01. His trip got postponed for more than a year and even still, he was only there for 22 hours. Ever since 9/11, the Colombian government and the military have been trying to lure the US into additional aid in the name of the war of terrorism.

However, if you look at the Bush administration’s definition of what their war encompasses, it is terrorism with an international reach. And what were talking about here, is domestic terrorism in Colombia.

There’s this whole phenomenon of “narco-terrorism,” too. You’ve seen all the commercials, ad nauseum. But of course, there’s no such thing as narco-terrorism. There’s terrorism in Colombia, there’s narco-trafficking in Colombia, but narco-terrorism is a political construct. It’s really important to keep that in mind. It’s one designed to cower members of Congress, to cower legislators into appropriating more funds for these activities for these activities.

[The FARC] is not a terrorist organization. They commit acts of terror, but terror isn’t their main objective. Their objective is “national liberation,” they would call it, or at least conquest of land. They have concrete objectives. They’re not meeting them very well, but at least they have them.

Let’s put it this way: There are poor farmers in Appalachia who grow marijuana, because crops are doing so poorly. We don’t call them “narco-farmers” or “narco-hillbillies.” Students may deal marijuana to make a little money on the side. We don’t call them “narco-students.”

This idea of “narco-terrorism,” first of all, is to hitch an unpopular war on drugs to a more popular war on terrorism, and secondly, it’s designed to make legislators afraid to vote against this stuff, much as, a generation ago, they were terrified to vote against anything that had the word “anti-Communist” in the bill. You’re not for Communism are you? If you vote against the aid now, you’re going to run the risk of looking soft on terror, soft on Communism, soft on drugs, soft on crime. This is a fairly potent political construct they’ve cooked up here.

And this idea of “narco-terrorism” doesn’t help us understand the phenomenon of drug trafficking, nor the phenomenon of terrorism. They’re two, separate phenomenon. Terrorists turn to drug trafficking for the same reason everyone else turns to drug trafficking: because it’s incredibly profitable.

If you escalate a drug war in response to this, it actually benefits those who remain in the drug economy, because you’ve done a number of things:

You’ve tried to constrict supply, while demand remains constant, which drives up prices, and therefore, profits for the people who survive in that economy.

And you’ve taken out the competition for them. The drug war evolves under Darwinian principals. The people we manage to pick up tend to be the ones who are the dumbest, the least efficient. We wipe out the little fish…

There have been a number of …shameless attempts to try to link [international terrorism and the FARC] and they say “We’re being attacked by the FARC. This is terrorism with an international reach, because they’re attacking us in the United States with drugs.”

Well, if they’re attacking us, it’s the strangest form of attack we’ve ever seen, because were demanding to be attacked. We’re willing to pay a 20,000 percent mark-up to be attacked. We can’t get enough of this attack…

Also, the war on terrorism, being a separate and distinct phenomenon, to have the kind of escalating conventional response that we’ve had to this phenomenon, tends to make things worse also. If you look at what drives terrorism, there’s a couple of basic ingredients: extreme hatred, either rightly or wrongly, but it’s there and we have to acknowledge that it’s there and deal with that; and extreme frustration, the belief that they have tried all other options, nothing else has worked, nothing else will work, “we feel extreme pain, therefore, we are going to make you feel extreme pain.”

As though some how that’s going to solve something.

Now, when you bomb someone from 20,000 feet, first of all, bombing doesn’t destroy hatred. It increases hatred. And bombing from 20,000 feet increases frustration, because people can’t strike back at you conventionally. Therefore, they are going to look for asymmetrical means of responding, [like] hitting civilian targets. It increases terrorism.

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