Just Foreign Policy News
November 16, 2011
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I) Actions and Featured Articles
United Nations: Israeli Settler Violence in the West Bank
The weekly average of settler attacks resulting in Palestinian casualties and property damage has increased by 40% in 2011 compared to 2010, and by over 165% compared to 2009.
http://www.ochaopt.org/documents/ocha_opt_settler_violence_FactSheet_October_2011_english.pdf
Friday, November 18 – Ralph Nader presents: Bruce Fein & Tony Shaffer debate David B. Rivkin & Lee Casey on Bush & Obama: War Crimes of Lawful Wars?
This DC event will be broadcast on C-span.
http://www.debatingtaboos.org/2011/11/bush-and-obama-war-crimes-or-lawful-wars/
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II) Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) Much of the corporate media coverage of a new UN report on Iran strongly asserts that Iran is close to building nuclear weapons, FAIR notes. But the IAEA report does not actually arrive at that conclusion. A Washington Post editorial claiming that the IAEA report "ought to end serious debate about whether Tehran’s program is for peaceful purposes" shows the paper didn’t learn anything from the Iraq war, FAIR says. FAIR notes that the Christian Science Monitor and NPR both carried reports noting that the IAEA report did not in fact say that Iran had a nuclear weapons program.
2) The future of U.S. military support for Bahrain, starting with a $53 million arms deal now on the line, hinges on the findings of a human rights investigation into the Gulf kingdom’s handling of popular protests earlier this year, Reuters reports. The arms sale became unusually controversial in Congress because, critics say, it highlighted a double standard in U.S. policy toward popular Arab uprisings.
3) The Pentagon says threatened budget cuts will invite aggression, endanger national security and devastate its operations, AP notes. But some analysts dismissed the Defense Department’s predictions a scare tactic by bureaucrats desperate to protect their funding. Defense Secretary Panetta has complained that cuts would force the military to rethink its strategy on what missions it could handle in the future. But Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments says that’s just as it should be: "In an era of constrained resources you should adapt your strategy to fit within resource constraints," he said.
Afghanistan
4) President Karzai said Afghanistan would allow long-term U.S. bases as long as U.S. troops stop night raids and detaining Afghans, the Washington Post reports. Karzai’s speech was greeted with some disappointment among U.S. officials, the Post says. The conditions he set, particularly the end of night raids, they said, do not suggest that a strategic partnership agreement will be completed anytime soon.
Iran
5) Republican presidential hopefuls are reviving many of the arguments that neoconservative proponents of armed intervention against Iran lost in the latter years of Bush’s presidency, the Washington Post reports. Mitt Romney said the U.S. should be "working with the insurgents in the country to encourage regime change." But, if "there’s nothing else we can do besides take military action, then of course you take military action." Gingrich backed Romney’s call for possible military action. Republicans seem to be harkening back to the hard-line US posture taken after U.S. troops toppled Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in 2003 and many conservative foreign policy thinkers made Iran’s regime the next bogeyman that needed to be taken out, the Post says.
Iraq
6) JCS chair Gen. Dempsey says some US forces will remain as military trainers on 10 bases in Iraq even after an end-of-year deadline for all US troops to be out of the country, the New York Times reports. A military official said there would be no more than 200 US military personnel in the country. Senator McCain slammed the Administration for agreeing to withdraw US troops in compliance with Iraqi government demands and the agreement that Bush negotiated.
Colombia
7) A Colombian NGO has made new allegations of ‘false positive’ killings of civilians by the Colombian military, some as recent as June this year, says Colombia Reports. Nine are reported to have taken place since Juan Manuel Santos assumed the Colombian presidency.
8) A report by the Latin America Working Group, the Center for International Policy) and the Washington Office on Latin America says that under Plan Colombia, Colombia experienced an "enormous escalation of extrajudicial executions by the army that happened with large amounts of U.S. support and assistance," Inter Press Service reports. This suggests caution regarding claims that Plan Colombia is a model to be applied to countries like Mexico, the report said.
Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) Iran, Nukes and the Failure of Skepticism
Iraq all over again?
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, 11/16/11
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4430
Much of the corporate media coverage of a new UN report on Iran strongly asserts that Iran is close to building nuclear weapons. But the International Atomic Energy Agency report does not actually arrive at that conclusion, and many critics contend that the speculations that are in the report are misguided.
A USA Today piece (11/9/11) was headlined "UN Agency Issues Red Alert Over Iran’s Secret Nuke Program"–with the "red alert" hype coming from a source in the piece, Rep. Ed Royce (R.-Calif.). On CBS Evening News, Scott Pelley reported (11/7/11), "The U.N.’s nuclear agency is expected to report later this week that Iran is on the threshold of being able to build a nuclear bomb."
On ABC World News, anchor Diane Sawyer announced (11/8/11): "And now, a long-dreaded headline about Iran and nuclear weapons. After a decade of debating whether Iran would build one, a UN report says tonight they will, and it has begun."
ABC correspondent Jim Sciutto added that the IAEA found Iran has "been carrying out activities whose sole purpose can only be the development of a nuclear weapon." Sawyer closed the segment by pleading, "Anything else out there to prevent this, to stop it? Is it too late?" She added: "So much for Ahmadinejad claiming it was only nuclear power plants, always nuclear power plants."
On NBC’s Today show (11/9/11), viewers were told that the "UN reported for the first time Tuesday that Iran is conducting secret tests with the sole purpose of building nuclear weapons."
"A dreaded headline on Iran," declared ABC This Week host Christiane Amanpour (11/13/11). "UN weapons inspectors reveal new evidence the country is working on a nuclear weapons device. Can the United States do anything to stop it now?"
An Associated Press piece (11/9/11) referred matter-of-factly to Iran being "on the brink of developing a nuclear warhead," and a Washington Post piece (11/14/11) about a Republican presidential debate mentioned ways to "deal with Iran’s apparent nuclear weapons program." A USA Today story (11/14/11) referred to a "United Nations report confirming Iran’s nuclear ambitions" and "the strongest finding yet that Iran is going ahead with a bombmaking program." In Time magazine, Joe Klein (11/21/11) wrote, "Even the UN’s extremely cautious International Atomic Energy Agency now believes Iran is working on a nuclear weapon."
This rhetoric wildly overstates the actual findings of the IAEA report.
The first part of the agency’s November 8 report declares–once again–that Iran is not transferring uranium for use in a military project.
The more explosive allegations that media are focusing on are contained in an annex that attempts to lay out evidence that has been circulating for years. The IAEA report stresses concern over allegations over past activities; very little of the report is dedicated to research that could be describing as ongoing. Indeed, the media is focusing primarily on the IAEA’s speculation about what might be ongoing research that could be related to a military program.
But how definitive are the IAEA’s findings? As columnist and University of Southern California chemical engineering professor Muhammad Sahimi wrote (Tehran Bureau, 11/9/11):
‘The most important part of the report deals with alleged work on high conventional explosives, not for conventional weapons, but supposedly for use in triggering a nuclear device. The report discusses in detail fast-functioning detonators, known as "exploding bridgewire detonators" (EBWs), which are needed in nuclear weapons. By the IAEA’s own admission, Iran informed the agency in 2008 that it had developed EBWs for use in conventional and civilian applications.’
Sahimi points out that the IAEA report admits that "there exist non-nuclear applications, albeit few, for detonators like EBWs." The IAEA report also focuses on design and computer modeling research that it suggests Iran may have pursued. The insinuation is that this research has nuclear dimensions, but there is no solid evidence that this is the case. As Sahimi wrote, some of the apparently worrisome computer modeling
could very well relate to Iran’s conventional-warhead missile program that it has never hidden, but has in fact boasted about. Even the IAEA acknowledges such a possibility. The agency itself does not even allege that the enumerated activities are related to a nuclear warhead, but that "they are highly relevant."
[…] As in the run-up to the Iraq War, it was certainly possible to report skeptically on the Iran intelligence. The Christian Science Monitor’s Scott Peterson wrote an excellent report (11/9/11) that began: ‘The latest United Nations report on Iran’s nuclear program may not be the "game changer" it was billed to be, as some nuclear experts raise doubts about the quality of evidence–and point to lack of proof of current nuclear weapons work.’
The article quotes former IAEA inspector Robert Kelley, who is dismissive of the agency’s analysis. And an NPR Morning Edition segment (11/9/11) began by noting that the agency’s new report "was much anticipated, because advanced reporting suggested the IAEA had concluded definitively that Iran is engaged in a full-scale nuclear weapons program. Turns out the report does not say that."
Anyone wondering about the lessons learned from Iraq could find two newspaper editorials, both published November 10, instructive. The New York Times, under the headline "The Truth About Iran," called the IAEA report "chillingly comprehensive" and cheered the agency for standing firm: "The agency did not back down, and neither should anyone else." The Washington Post editorial began:
‘The International Atomic Energy Agency has now spelled out in detail what governments around the world have known for a long time: Iran’s nuclear program has an explicit military dimension.’
The paper declared that the IAEA report "ought to end serious debate about whether Tehran’s program is for peaceful purposes."
The idea that a journalistic outlet would declare this debate over is profoundly troubling–and suggests that in the corporate media, few lessons have been learned from the Iraq debacle.
2) Analysis: U.S. arms deal for Bahrain hinges on rights report
Isabel Coles, Reuters, November 16, 2011
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/16/us-bahrain-rights-arms-idUSTRE7AF1OX20111116
Dubai – The future of U.S. military support for Bahrain, starting with a $53 million arms deal now on the line, hinges on the findings of a human rights investigation into the Gulf kingdom’s handling of popular protests earlier this year. The jury is out.
Originally due last month, the report was pushed back to November 23 after Bahrain’s longtime superpower ally said it would reassess weapons sales once it had seen the result of the inquiry, a move analysts say has given it more political clout.
Not only could the report help decide whether Bahrain gets arms that human rights activists fear could be used to crush further dissent, it could also dictate whether Bahrain heads for more communal violence or toward political reconciliation.
"There will be almost certainly some behind-the-scenes wrangling before the final report is released because there is more at stake than was originally assumed," said Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar. "The U.S. Congress is paying more attention and the arms deal is being called into question. So there is quite a bit at stake for the Bahraini government and the report is going to get a lot of attention, for better or worse."
[…] The arms sale became unusually controversial in Congress because, critics say, it highlighted a double standard in U.S. policy toward popular Arab uprisings.
[…] "If the commission report shows that the government seeks to prevent demonstrations at all costs, then the (arms) sale is likely to be derailed," said Kenneth Katzman, a Middle East expert at the nonpartisan U.S. Congressional Research Service. "If the commission’s report shows that Bahrain’s leadership has tried to address international criticism and concerns about how it has suppressed the demonstrations, then I think the sale is likely to proceed eventually," he said.
[…]
3) Pentagon ratchets up warning against spending cuts, but some analysts call is nonsense
Pauline Jelinek, Associated Press, Wednesday, November 16, 2:14 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/national-security/pentagon-ratchets-up-warning-against-spending-cuts-but-some-analysts-call-it-nonsense/2011/11/16/gIQAJHiLQN_story.html
Washington – What are taxpayers supposed to think? The Pentagon says threatened budget cuts will invite aggression, endanger national security and devastate its operations.
Though that view has plenty of adherents, there also are plenty of naysayers who call the Defense Department’s predictions a scare tactic by bureaucrats desperate to protect their turf.
"This is palpable nonsense … the idea that somehow or another this is going to be Armageddon," said Lawrence Korb, a former assistant defense secretary who is a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress.
At issue is the Pentagon’s effort to prevent $500 billion in automatic, across-the-board defense budget cuts over 10 years if a bipartisan congressional supercommittee can’t agree by Nov. 23 on $1.2 trillion or more in deficit reductions over a decade.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has warned Congress that a half-trillion-dollar cut, on top of $450 billion in savings already planned by the military, "would be devastating for the department."
Korb disagrees. "They’re acting like good bureaucrats … trying to protect their rice bowls," he said.
Added Christopher Preble of the libertarian Cato Institute, "The taxpayer should understand how much we spend on the military" and how much that spending has grown.
In the 10 years since the Sept. 11 terror attacks, annual budgets for the military have nearly doubled to close to $700 billion. The U.S. accounts for nearly half of the defense money spent around the world – more than the next 17 nations combined. The U.S. naval fleet is as big as the next 13 navies combined, according to various analyses and some of the Pentagon’s own accounting in recent years.
Though many believe the automatic cuts will never come to pass, here are some points and counterpoints in the debate over looming spending cuts:
– Panetta told senators in a letter this week that after a decade of the threatened cuts, the U.S. would have the smallest ground force since 1940, the smallest number of ships since 1915 and the smallest Air Force ever.
But it’s not about the numbers, according to Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Greater firepower and tonnage make today’s naval fleet smaller but more powerful, he said.
Likewise, Korb suggests the U.S. could safely reduce the number of Navy aircraft carriers and Air Force fighters by 25 percent because the military can rely on unmanned planes and precision-guided munitions.
Defense officials have said the Army and Marines could be decreased by some 65,000 troops or more. Korb suggests cutting 100,000 troops to return to pre-Sept. 11 levels and slashing the nation’s arsenal of nuclear weapons from 5,000 to 311.
– Panetta has used apocalyptic terms such as "doomsday," ”hollow force" and "paper tiger" to describe damage the cuts would do and says the military would have to rethink its strategy on what missions it could handle in the future.
Harrison argues that’s the way it should be. "In an era of constrained resources you should adapt your strategy to fit within resource constraints," he said. "This is a good moment for rethinking the way we’re engaging in the world," including ways allies can share more of the burden.
Preble agreed. "Panetta says that we would have to recalibrate our national security strategy if the military’s budget is cut," Preble said. "I certainly hope that is the case – such a recalibration is long overdue."
– The Pentagon says the $500 billion in reductions would be in addition to $450 billion in savings already planned. Panetta told senators this week that would mean up to a 23 percent reduction in the first year alone in 2013.
But some analysts put the reduction variously at 14 percent, 17 percent or 18 percent over time. And some say drawdowns after World War II, Korea, Vietnam and the Cold War were deeper and faster or at least comparable.
The bottom line, Preble said, is that defense spending under an automatic-cut scenario would return the budget to about where it was in 2007 – "hardly a lean year for the Pentagon."
Afghanistan
4) Karzai calls for partnership with U.S., but with conditions
Joshua Partlow, Washington Post, Wednesday, November 16, 10:35 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/karzai-calls-for-parternership-with-america-but-with-conditions/2011/11/16/gIQAHIYUQN_story.html
Kabul – President Hamid Karzai set the conditions for his country’s strategic partnership with the United States on Wednesday, saying that Afghanistan would allow long-term U.S. bases here as long as American troops stop conducting operations at night, searching homes and detaining Afghans.
Karzai’s comments came at the opening of a large assembly, known as a loya jirga, that drew more than 2,000 delegates from across the country to discuss Afghanistan’s future relationship with the United States, as well as the prospect of negotiating with the Taliban.
"We want to have a strong partnership with the U.S. and NATO, but with conditions," Karzai said. "We want our national sovereignty and an end to night raids and to the detention of our countrymen."
[…] The United States and Afghanistan have been negotiating the partnership document for months. Washington wants long-term bases in Afghanistan for training and counter-terrorism missions. The Afghans want U.S. funding for their security forces and more control over how the U.S. military operates here. Karzai has long criticized U.S. troops for intruding in Afghans’ lives, killing civilians and arresting innocent people.
"The U.S. wants military installations from us. We will give those to them. But we have conditions for this," Karzai said in his speech. "We will benefit from this. Our soldiers will be trained. Our police will be trained. We will benefit from their money."
Among the conditions, Karzai said, are that the night raids and house searches must stop and that U.S. troops should no longer be able to detain Afghans. "They have no right to take prisoners," he said.
[…] Karzai’s speech was greeted with some disappointment among U.S. officials in Kabul. The conditions he set, particularly the end of night raids, they said, do not suggest that a strategic partnership agreement will be completed anytime soon.
[…]
Iran
5) Looking for a weakness in Obama’s foreign policy, Republican candidates get hawkish with Iran
Associated Press, Wednesday, November 16, 2:23 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/national-security/looking-for-a-weakness-in-obamas-foreign-policy-republican-candidates-get-hawkish-with-iran/2011/11/16/gIQAFIiLQN_story.html
Washington – Republican presidential hopefuls are focusing on Iran as a weak spot in President Barack Obama’s foreign policy record, and they’re reviving many of the arguments that neoconservative proponents of armed intervention against Tehran lost in the latter years of George W. Bush’s presidency.
Spurred by a recent United Nations report on Iran’s nuclear weapons research, the leading GOP candidates are presenting themselves as hawkish alternatives to Obama and his administration’s two-track policy of pressuring and engaging the Islamic republic. They propose more drastic approaches to prevent Iran from developing an atomic bomb – from funding armed rebel movements to launching military attacks.
"If we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon," Mitt Romney said during Saturday’s foreign policy debate in South Carolina. "If you elect me as the next president, they will not have a nuclear weapon."
The former Massachusetts governor and Republican front-runner said the U.S. should be "working with the insurgents in the country to encourage regime change." But, if "there’s nothing else we can do besides take military action, then of course you take military action."
[…] "There are a number of ways to be smart about Iran and relatively few ways to be dumb, and the administration skipped all the ways to be smart," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said at Saturday’s debate. He called for "maximum covert operations to block and disrupt the Iranian program" and backed Romney’s call for possible military action. If "the dictatorship persists, you have to take whatever steps are necessary to break its capacity to have a nuclear weapon."
Seeking to one-up Gingrich, longshot candidate Rick Santorum said there "isn’t going to be enough time" for tougher sanctions on Iran and more support for pro-democracy groups. He acknowledged the Obama administration’s possible involvement in some of the covert attacks on Iran’s nuclear program.
But he suggested an even tougher approach alongside Israel to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities pre-emptively – similar to the operations the Jewish state conducted against Iraq in 1981 and Syria four years ago. The Reagan administration fumed over the first; the Bush administration acquiesced by silence to the second.
[…] For all the early talk of engagement, Obama has stuck largely to the Bush administration’s latter-year policies of negotiations with Iran alongside international pressure – without the inflammatory rhetoric such as accusations of Tehran’s membership in an "axis of evil."
Republicans see the policy nevertheless as a failure and seem to be harkening back to the hard-line American posture taken after U.S. troops toppled Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in 2003 and many conservative foreign policy thinkers made Iran’s regime the next bogeyman that needed to be taken out.
Then, as now, the argument held that a nuclear-armed Iran would be a mortal threat to U.S. forces in the region and to U.S. ally Israel, whose U.S. backing is wide and deep. Then, as now, the more hawkish voices said time is running out for talking and the U.S. must make clear to Iran that it will use its overwhelming military advantage.
The most likely strategy would be a missile strike on one of Iran’s known nuclear facilities, or sabotage from within the country.
Either is clearly within U.S. power, but Obama’s calculation has thus far been the same as Bush’s: A strike isn’t yet worth the risks it carries. Iran could retaliate against U.S. interests or allies, and the Pentagon assesses that if Iran is bent on acquiring a nuclear weapon, a strike would delay but not prevent it.
GOP candidate Herman Cain said he wouldn’t pursue a military conflict. "The only way we can stop them is through economic means," he said.
Libertarian Ron Paul also held back, saying war powers were vested in Congress.
Rick Perry called for sanctions against Iran’s central bank to "shut down that country’s economy," something the Obama administration has examined in recent months but backed off doing. The fear is that isolating the bank beyond existing U.S. sanctions could drive up oil prices and imperil the fragile world economy.
[…]
Iraq
6) Some Troops To Stay In Iraq As Trainers, Top Officer Says
Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times, November 15, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/world/middleeast/some-troops-to-stay-in-iraq-as-trainers.html
Washington – Some United States forces will remain as military trainers on 10 bases in Iraq even after an end-of-year deadline for all American troops to be out of the country, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Senate committee on Tuesday.
The forces will provide training in counterterrorism to Iraqis and also instruction in operating American-made tanks and F-16 fighter jets, General Dempsey said. The trainers are expected to remain largely on the bases, "so this isn’t about us moving around the country very much at all," he told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
General Dempsey did not provide a number, although a military official later said there would be no more than 200 American military personnel in the country. Overall, there will be about 16,000 American Embassy personnel in Iraq, including a large number of civilian contractors as security guards. Currently there are some 24,000 American troops in Iraq.
At a sometimes heated hearing, both General Dempsey and Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta tried to counter criticism from Republicans on the panel that the Obama administration was abandoning Iraq, but also sought to make their case that any military personnel left behind would have limited roles.
Although the Pentagon wanted to leave as many as 20,000 troops in Iraq as a hedge against future violence, President Obama announced last month that all American troops would be home by the end of December.
Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who ran against Mr. Obama in 2008, was hardly satisfied with Mr. Panetta’s and General Dempsey’s endorsement of the president. He repeatedly asked them why the administration had failed to negotiate an agreement to leave some American forces behind in Iraq after eight years of war, and was skeptical of the administration’s argument that American forces could not stay because the Iraqis had refused to give them immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts.
"The truth is that this administration was committed to the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and they made it happen," Mr. McCain said testily to Mr. Panetta.
"Senator McCain, that’s just simply not true," Mr. Panetta shot back.
After some more back and forth, Mr. McCain rejoined, "It is how it happened. I was there, Mr. Secretary. You were not."
The two were not finished.
"This is about negotiating with a sovereign country, an independent country," Mr. Panetta said. "This is not about us telling them what we’re going to do for them or what they’re going to have to do."
Mr. McCain responded, "This is about our needs as well, Mr. Secretary."
[…]
Colombia
7) Colombia’s military continues to kill civilians: NGO
Miriam Wells, Colombia Reports, Tuesday, 15 November 2011 17:55
http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/20468-false.html
A Colombian NGO has made new allegations of ‘false positive’ killings, some as recent as June this year.
In a report due to be released November 21, the Center of Investigation and Popular Education (Cinep) recounts details of 961 new allegations of ‘false positives’ – a term used to describe the Colombian military killing civilians then passing them off as guerrillas to inflate their success rate.
Nine are reported to have taken place since Juan Manuel Santos assumed the Colombian presidency.
Santos told media in March that the "issue of false positives was gone," and that "there has not been a single false positive case since October 2008."
But Cinep says of the 961 new allegations it has documented, which took place between 1988 and 2011, nine happened since Santos took office.
In the most recent case, army and police units bombed near Cerro de Azul village, in the San Pablo municipality of the Bolivar department, while villagers were sleeping on June 20, 2011. It is alleged that 17-year-old Adinson Vaquero Valencia, who died in the attack, was then passed off as a militant in a FARC camp.
The report, ‘Debt to Humanity 2: 23 Year of False Positives,’ which will be released by Cinep on Monday, also cites the case of 17-year-old Luis Esteban Campo, who died in an army shooting near the main square in the municipality El Tarra, Norte de Santander department on August 2010.
Witnesses say they saw soldiers dress Luis Esteban Campo Rolon as an illegal militant and plant a gun on him. Brigade 30, which carried out the attack, said soldiers were responding to a gunfire attack, and Campo was carrying a short-range weapon.
Other cases involving minors include 16-year-old Jeisson Alejandro Sanchez, killed while running errands in the town of Vista Hermosa, in the department of Meta, then allegedly dressed as a guerrilla.
A further three alleged civilians were killed in the bombing of an Afro-Colombian settlement in La Loma in Riosucio, in the Choco department, on April 17, 2011.
Jose Angel Mendoza Asprilla, Juan de Mata Perea Reyes and Mario Martinez Rivas were killed in their home and then reported as dead guerrillas, according to Cinep.
The ‘false positives’ scandal first came to light in 2008, when men who had disappeared from Soacha, a town south of Bogota, were found in a mass grave near the Venezuelan border. It was discovered the men had been registered by the army as guerrillas killed in combat.
The Colombia Prosecutor General’s office is now investigating more than 3,000 cases.
8) Perils and Lessons of U.S. Aid
Elizabeth Whitman, Inter Press Service, Nov 14
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=105838
New York – A new report has highlighted a connection – and not always a positive one – between U.S. foreign aid to Colombia and Mexico and violence and crime rates in those countries, pointing out that U.S. policy toward Mexico deserves careful application of lessons learned from the aid the U.S. has supplied Colombia since 2000.
"Our government has an absolute obligation to press for justice and ensure that… U.S. assistance doesn’t contribute" further to problems, Lisa Haugaard, co-author of the report "A Cautionary Tale: Plan Colombia’s Lessons for Mexico and Beyond", told IPS.
These problems range from increases in violence, crime and human rights abuses to impunity for those who carry out those abuses, says the report, published Nov. 10 by the Latin America Working Group Education Fund, the Centre for International Policy (CIP) and the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).
With 1.4 billion in aid supplied to Mexico from 2007 to 2010, the U.S. retains some responsibility for actions carried out by the individuals or institutions to whom this aid flowed, argued the report, especially with three-quarters of the aid going to military and police forces.
Four years after the launch of the Mérida Initiative, as it was known, "meaningful improvements in public security have not been achieved." Killing or capturing major leaders of organised crime "has made violence more generalised" and triggered "new power struggles that have multiplied the violence", the report found.
More importantly, after decreasing for two decades, violations and abuses in Mexico by the military and the overall homicide rate increased from 2007 to 2010, a period that overlaps the years of U.S. aid, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch.
The homicide rate grew by over 260 percent, while "the government counted nearly 35,000 deaths related to organised crime from December 2006 to the end of 2010, with number of killings increasing dramatically with each passing year", the report said.
According to "A Cautionary Tale", the flow of U.S. aid under the framework of the Mérida Initiative – meaning a majority of the aid goes to the military – continues, and new aid seems likely to be approved despite budget constraints.
In 2000, the U.S. and Colombia agreed on an aid package of approximately 8.5 billion dollars as part of an anti-drug strategy. They called it Plan Colombia, and most of the aid went to the military police. Over 70,000 Colombian military and police personnel were trained, according to the report.
Although Plan Colombia succeeded to a certain degree – many parts of the country are now more secure and according to government statistics, murders were reduced by a third – the country also saw an "enormous escalation of extrajudicial executions by the army that happened with large amounts of U.S. support and assistance", Haugaard said.
"Policymakers assured members of Congress that human rights abuses would decrease because the U.S. would supply training to those forces," she added. Still, those responsible for such killings have yet to face consequences for their actions.
One of the main lessons of Colombia, Haugaard continued, is that "if you have a climate that fosters abuse, you will have abuse," so in order to ensure that abuses do not escalate, investigation and prosecution of those abuses in civilian courts are necessary.
The report notes that because Colombia is the only Latin American country over the past decade to have significantly reduced violent crime, "Plan Colombia… may appear tempting to policymakers" when it comes to policy towards Mexico.
But, it cautions, Plan Colombia’s so-called success is "only a partial, and fragile, victory at best" that has "come at an unacceptably high human and institutional cost", making it "an experience from which to draw lessons".
Plan Colombia did offer some positive lessons, Haugaard pointed out. Aid to Colombia was held up a couple of times, when the State Department started listening to Colombian human rights groups, since aid was supposed to be contingent upon human rights conditions.
Meanwhile, discussion within the administration and among policymakers and thinktanks often refer to Plan Colombia as a model, the report argues.
"We think it’s very important for policymakers to learn from some of the negative experiences of Plan Colombia as well as the positive experiences," Haugaard said. "We want to encourage U.S. policymakers to think about how they design these aid packages."
The report presented several recommendations, including creating opportunities for youth who might otherwise be tempted to engage in violence, strengthening and working with civil society institutions rather than the military, and protecting civilians.
"A Cautionary Tale" called for the U.S. government to take responsibility for the damage its funding had contributed to, or ways U.S. policy – domestic and foreign – have helped to exacerbate rather than reduce violence and crime.
The U.S. remains the world’s top consumer of cocaine, accounting for 36 percent of the world supply in 2010, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.
The report called for the U.S. to tackle domestic issues that are more politically difficult but are damaging to Latin American societies, such as the high use of and demand for drugs and its lack of control over the flow of assault weapons into Mexico, Haugaard said. "The U.S. is still not shouldering its share of the burden."
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https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/blog/dailynews