Another excerpt from "Alive and Kicking" --[Excerpt] Any U.S. policy affecting Castro's interests likely will face intense opposition from a few groups, based mainly in Washington and New York City, supportive of the regime. It already has begun with the arrival of al-Qaeda terrorists to the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. One of the most vocal denouncers of U.S. treatment of the detainees is Michael Ratner, vice president of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York. In a debate with this writer on the New York City affiliate of National Public Radio, Ratner stood up for the rights of the terrorists to be treated as prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention. That's hardly surprising; in a CNN standoff during the Cold War, Ratner affirmed that he was a supporter of Castro and his regime. [End Excerpt]
(This is another Ellen Ratner brother. The other one is the RATner associated with the discredited doctored N.Y. fireman raising flag statue.)
Cuba withholding facts on 4 suspects, Chile says-- SANTIAGO, Chile - (AP) -- President Ricardo Lagos complained Monday that Cuba has not been forthcoming with information on four wanted Chilean terrorism suspects believed to have escaped to the communist island.
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), flush with a fortune in drug money and rested after three years of peace talks, is fighting a fierce battle against Colombia's democratic government and threatens to install its own totalitarian, anti-Western regime. If it succeeds, analysts say, the Marxist-Leninist FARC, which is on the State Department's list of terrorist groups, would become the world's newest outlaw regime and even more of a haven for terrorists and drug traffickers.
A Rand Corp. report prepared last summer for the Pentagon calls the Colombian crisis "the most serious security challenge in the Western Hemisphere since the Central American wars of the 1980s."
………….Colombian President Andres Pastrana, who had staked his presidency on the peace process and gave the FARC its own demilitarized zone (DMZ) the size of Switzerland, came around to Menges' point of view by Feb. 20, when the FARC hijacked a commercial airplane and kidnapped a senator. Colombians as a whole, facing a new presidential election in May, have become increasingly hard line against the FARC and a smaller Communist narcoterrorist group, the National Liberation Army (ELN).
The FARC, after 38 years of fighting, was building up impressive momentum to fight the Colombian army head-on and possibly overthrow the government by the end of Pastrana's term, according to the Rand study. That report helped underscore the urgency in the Bush administration to tackle Colombia. Assistant Secretary of State Reich visited Bogotá in mid-February, telling reporters of "a plan to contain and eliminate the violence in Colombia."
The Communist guerrillas there are determined to take full power. "Now that the president of Colombia has tried political negotiations for three years and the guerrillas have responded with violence, it's time for the United States to provide full political, intelligence and military-assistance support to Colombia so the guerrillas can be defeated and peace restored," says Menges.
Pastrana finally got it by the time the FARC kidnapped the senator. He gave a national speech itemizing 117 terrorist attacks during the previous 30 days, including four car bombings, murders of women and children and poisoning of aqueducts. He echoed President Bush's "with us or with the terrorists" theme. On Feb. 21, he ordered the army into the DMZ under Operation Thenatus to take control of the huge region. With Israeli-made Kfir-C7 and French Dassault Mirage fighter jets, as well as a fleet of turboprop-driven counterinsurgency aircraft, Colombian forces ran some 200 sorties against the FARC in the first day of fighting.
So far, the Bush administration's support for Colombia has been strong in principle but a work in progress. It has not revoked Clinton's presidential directive and has asked Congress only for military assistance to help Colombia guard an oil pipeline that is a frequent target of FARC attacks - a pipeline, by the way, owned in part by U.S.-based Occidental Petroleum. Menges argues that the United States can provide Colombia with the necessary training, intelligence and equipment "consistent with efforts to fight international terrorism."
"The guerrillas draw political strength and sustenance from a robust network of supporting organizations, both in Colombia and overseas. Multiorganizational networks aided the insurgencies in El Salvador and Guatemala and the Sandinistas in the 1980s, but have assumed a larger role with the information revolution of the 1990s, and particularly with the development of the Internet," according to the Rand report. "The FARC and the ELN have developed a wide range of multiorganizational supporting networks both in Colombia and overseas. The strategic objectives of these networks is to restrict the actions of the Colombian state and its agencies and to deny it international support."
That's the big problem for U.S. policy: how to defuse the FARC's instant activist support base in the United States and in Congress. The FARC has a base of pro-Castro and pro-Marxist groups in the United States who use the Internet, as well as traditional grass-roots demonstrations and letter-writing campaigns, to press their cause. They backed Dodd's failed blockage of Reich (see "Smearing Reich," Aug. 5, 2001).
One of the main activist groups opposing U.S. assistance to Colombia is the New York-based International Action Center (IAC). Headed by former attorney general Ramsey Clark, the IAC is staffed by veteran leaders of the Workers World Party (WWP), a Marxist-Leninist fringe group with a history of street theater going back to the Vietnam War and the Attica Prison uprising. The IAC openly supports an array of terrorists, cop-killers and even convicted communist spies on its Website (see "Domestic Front in the War on Terror," Jan. 7). [End Excerpt]