Yair Klein, Colombia, FARC, the US, and drugs

[Ed Jewett]

Yair Klein threatens to blow whistle on Colombian gov’t

27 11 2010 Yair Klein threatens to blow whistle on Colombian gov’t

http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=196194
By DAN IZENBERG
“What I have on these officials is fantastic,” Klein says; Justice Ministry says it does not plan to take any action in former IDF officer’s case.


A Justice Ministry spokesman said Sunday that the ministry does not anticipate having to take any action in the case of former IDF Lt.-Col. Yair Klein, who returned from Russia over the weekend after more than three years in prison. In 2001, Klein was tried in absentia by the Supreme Tribunal of the Manzales district of Colombia and sentenced to 10 years and eight months in prison on charges of training illegal paramilitary groups. The Colombian government issued a warrant for his arrest with Interpol, and he was detained during a visit to Russia in August 2007.
The Colombian government asked Russia to extradite Klein. The government agreed to do so and the Russian courts, in a series of rulings, upheld the decision despite appeals by Klein’s lawyers, including his Israeli attorney, Mordechai Tzivin.
Tzivin appealed the final decision of the Russian Supreme Court in May 2008 to the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that Russia had not taken into account the poor state of human rights in Colombia at the time, as well as a threat by former Colombian vice president Francisco Santos, that Klein would “rot in jail” after his return to Colombia.
The human rights court, in April of this year, forbade Russia from extraditing Klein to Colombia. Russia appealed the decision, but the appeal was denied last month.
On Sunday, in a telephone conversation with The Jerusalem Post, Klein said his entire relationship with Colombia was approved by the Israeli and Colombian governments.
Klein said that in 1988 he was sent by the Israeli Defense Ministry to help protect the organization of banana growers in Colombia at the request of the Colombian government.
Before he had time to take action, he said, the organization was destroyed. He told thePost that in the meantime, however, he was asked by the Colombian government to help train FARC, the left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
Klein indicated that there was a conspiracy involving senior government officials who were cooperating with FARC. He also claimed that FARC fought against the drug cartels in Colombia.
Klein told the Post that if the Colombian government persisted in its efforts to force him to return to Columbia, he would blow the whistle on officials in the current and previous Columbian governments.
“What I have on these officials is fantastic,” he said.
Meanwhile, Tzivin said that for the past month, ever since the European Court of Human Rights prohibited Russia from extraditing Klein, the public, the media and the government in Colombia have been preoccupied with what illegal activities Klein might divulge about Colombian political and military leaders.
Presumably in an effort to persuade the Colombian government to drop the affair, Tzivin told the Post, “My client has information that could cause political shockwaves in the senior echelons of the current and previous Colombian governments.
If exposed, the information could lead to dismissals in the government and the arrest of past and present political and military figures.
“I recommended to my client not to publish the information so as not to cause chaos, since Colombia is now significantly improving the state of human rights in the country.”






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The Inside Poop On the First Israeli Weapons Shipments to the Contras

26 11 2010 Spilled out into the open

http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/week-s-en...n-1.326987Recently declassified Pentagon documents reveal a strange, not to say illicit, 1980s operation called ‘Tipped Kettle,’ in which weapons stolen by Israel from the PLO in Lebanon were transferred to the Contras and to anti-American elements in Iran
By Amir Oren

The collection of declassified documents published two weeks ago by the Pentagon reveals infighting among branches of the U.S. administration and intrigues in foreign countries – including 1980s’ Israel. The impression one gets is not especially positive. The Americans are publishing the documents now not because they are trying somehow to suggest to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu how he should behave, but because the law obligates them to reveal records in due course following a review, unless there is a genuine reason to keep them secret. In the aforesaid period Netanyahu served as deputy to Moshe Arens, when he was Israel’s ambassador to Washington, D.C. (1982-83 ). Arens’ staff then also included Gen. Menachem Meron, the military attache in Washington, and spokesman Nachman Shai. Arens and his aides constituted an island of sanity in their relations with the administration of U.S. President Ronald Reagan, at a time of hostility in the U.S. capital toward the government of Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Defense Minister Ariel Sharon.
IDF soldiers with weapons captured during the first day of the Lebanon war. Photo by: IDF Spokesman’s Office The recently revealed documents deal with an operation dubbed “Tipped Kettle,” involving weapons the Israel Defense Forces looted from the Palestine Liberation Organization during Operation Peace for Galilee in Lebanon, and their transfer to the Contras – opponents of the socialistic Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. That was the first episode, of rather questionable legality according to U.S. law, in a more complex story whose second installment, in 1985-1986, became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. Part II was patently illegal – a blatant effort by the White House to violate a Congressional order and to cook up a strange deal involving the sale of American weapons (originally supplied to the IDF ) to anti-American Iran, for use in its war with Iraq; the release of Western hostages being held in Lebanon by Iranian-controlled Hezbollah; and the financing of Contras’ activities thanks to the difference between the sum paid by the Iranians and the true value of the weapons – minus a profit for those engaged in the deal.
By the end of that decade, during the trial of U.S. Marine Col. Oliver North and other officials in the Reagan administration, charged with deceiving Congress and providing false testimony to a special prosecutor, Operation Tipped Kettle was also briefly mentioned in the court proceedings. Now, however, the whole picture has come into view, with its emphasis on the behavior on the Israeli side.
In the fall of 1982, Reagan’s secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger, was trying to implement a policy intended to combat pro-Soviet elements in Latin America, including the Sandinistas. Even more belligerent than he was CIA director William Casey. The CIA had direct intelligence connections with the Mossad, but in the affair of the captured weapons the American agency preferred to hide behind the Pentagon. The system of communication between the CIA and the Pentagon was called Focal Point; it had been used to facilitate connections between them since the mid-1950s. Officially, Israel was unaware then that the weapons taken from the PLO would be used not by the U.S. Army in its training bases, but rather to arm the Contras.
Though the Republicans controlled the White House at the time, the Democrats controlled Congress. The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Edward Boland, achieved a majority for a series of bills named for him, which limited the administration’s ability to help the Contras. In one of the bills, passed in the fall of 1984, all U.S. intelligence agencies were prohibited from any such activity. (North tried to outsmart the law, claiming, after he came under investigation, that the National Security Council, which coordinated the operations, was not an intelligence agency. )
The legislation meant, in effect, that without the specific approval of Congress, no money could be formally budgeted in this case. Therefore, Casey, North and their colleagues had to use subterfuge to supply the arms, for example, by way of “donations” from foreign countries – Saudi Arabia, the Sultanate of Brunei – or circuitous deals with South Korea, Taiwan, China and especially Israel. The loot captured from the PLO during the war, at a cost of hundreds of Israeli dead, was particularly suitable for use by the Contras. And if Kalashnikov rifles fell into the hands of the Sandinistas, there would have been fewer questions about its source.
‘No policy problem’The first of the Pentagon documents concerning Operation Tipped Kettle was sent by Weinberger to Casey on November 17, 1982. The subject: rifles, machine guns and light mortars for infantry fighters “captured by Israeli forces in Lebanon.” The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency “can offer assistance in helping to acquire significant amounts of these types of weapons presently available in Lebanon.” The letter didn’t say from whom exactly the weapons would be purchased – from the Christian Phalange forces, from other organizations or from Palestinians in areas outside IDF control. The State Department, added Weinberger, had “no policy problem with this effort as long as it is not publicized.”
“In a separate action, our efforts to obtain captured weapons directly from the Israeli government have been delayed while their military attache, MG Meron, is out of the Washington area. He should return within the next few days and the subject will be raised at that time … We are prepared to meet your request through the Focal Point System,” wrote Weinberger.
In March 1983, four months later, Weinberger sent Casey a second letter, declaring, “I am glad to report significant progress.” In February, back in Israel, the Kahan Commission of inquiry report on the massacres in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in Beirut was submitted, as a consequence of which Ariel Sharon was dismissed as defense minister. At that point, staff from the embassy in Washington took over at the ministry in Tel Aviv: Arens was at the top, Meron became director general, and Shai was media adviser.
Weinberger reported that “a joint DoD/CIA survey team visited Israel and was shown about 300 metric tons of captured weapons and ammunition suitable for your purposes. Shortly after Ambassador Arens became the new Israeli MOD, the DoD was informed that these weapons would be provided to the U.S. at a small percentage of their market value. This charge, which I understand will be agency funded, would only be for packing and handling and is anticipated to be in the neighborhood of $100,000. My staff is in the process of setting up the movement of these weapons to the U.S. Due to the weight and bulk of these items they will have to be moved by surface transport and thereby will not be available until the May/June timeframe.”
That same day, the U.S. Navy was instructed to provide transport for “military items … that will be shipped from the Israeli port of Ashdod … to the East Coast of the United States.”
Weinberger updated Casey: “The shipment will be available for CIA pickup” and “can remain packed in the 34 Land/Sea containers until reaching their destination. The Land/Sea containers are the property of the Government of Israel and will need to be … returned to Israel.”
The shipment included 20,000 rifles and submachine guns, 1,000 machine guns, 90 recoil-less rifles, 110 mortars, 1,000 hand grenades and a large amount of ammunition. “The then newly appointed Israeli minister of defense, Moshe Arens, made the final decision that these weapons were to be provided on a gratis basis to DoD. This was one of MOD Arens’ first actions … and was clearly a signal of his desire to improve U.S./Israel relations,” according to the Pentagon documents.
Israel, with one-time and well-calculated generosity, did not lose much money here: In the 1980s, private arms dealers sold similar Kalashnikov rifles, made in Yugoslavia, for $210 each. The market value of all the Kalashnikovs in the shipment in question was only about $4 million; 60-mm. mortars were sold for about $1,500 and 81-mm. mortars for about $5,000.
Added costsA year later, the CIA’s appetite was whetted again; now there were additional factors in the equation. Weinberger’s new undersecretary for international security, Richard Armitage, became a close friend and regular visitor of the new military attache, Gen. Uri Simhoni; the same was true of Weinberger’s senior military assistant, Gen. Colin Powell.
In June 1984, Weinberger received a memo from Armitage describing the process by which the looted weapons had been transferred a year earlier. Armitage mentioned that the mission was accomplished as a result of talks between Maj. Gen. Richard Secord and Meron, and a decision by Arens. In February 1984 the Pentagon was asked to find out whether there were additional weapons available in Israel “under the same financial terms” – i.e., “available for operational use at little or no cost.” In contacts with the Israeli government a few months earlier, in March, it turned out that there were additional weapons stolen from the PLO caches, including Katyushas and anti-aircraft weapons, but that they were “for sale.” A joint Pentagon-CIA survey delegation, headed by the liaison officer with Israel (whose name is erased, apparently a Col. Forster ), went to Israel to examine the items.
“Contacts with the GOI,” noted Armitage dryly, “revealed that they had placed a value of over $77M on these weapons, while DoD sources estimated the cost of the weapons at around $27M.” Or, according to another estimate, $35 million. The head of the U.S. Army Museum, an expert on Soviet weapons, estimated the value at only $17 million.
Armitage’s deputy, U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Edward Tixier, Secord’s successor, was traveling to Israel to discuss a different matter and said he would speak privately to director general Meron to discuss transferring the second collection of captured weapons to the Pentagon at little or no cost. If Tixier succeeded, the weapons could arrive in the U.S. at the end of July and be sent immediately to the CIA.
Prior to the Armitage-Simhoni meeting on May 24, Armitage wrote to a liaison officer subordinate to him that “the chances of the U.S. ever obtaining these weapons is poor if they are not in our possession by July 23, 1984 (the date of the upcoming Israeli election ). Our contacts in the Israel MOD (to include both Mr. Arens and Gen. Meron ) could be gone the following day, and establishing relations with new players could be time-consuming.”
According to the recently declassified documents, Israeli activity was frozen at the time, because of “the confusion in the GOI over what direction U.S. policy in Central America is heading and the role that Israel can and should play in relation to the topic. If you feel that timing is right you may which to discuss the issue of payment for these weapons. Because Israeli funds would have to be found to cover specific project related costs (packing, crating, shipping ), we should offer to pay these line items. We should not offer to pay anything for the weapons for two reasons: the weapons will be used to further Western interests, and in the grand scheme of U.S./Israeli relations, a good will gesture on the part of Israel (at a low dollar cost for them ) would be most helpful with the GOI is requesting U.S. assistance on major projects such as funding for the new SAAR-5 missile-attack boat, the Lavi, the F-4 upgrade, the upgrading of the Merkava tank, and the usage of FMS funds off-shore, to mention a few.
“Prior to moving any of this equipment, there needs to be a lead time of several weeks, so that our EOD [explosive ordnance disposal] and logistics people can do the planning required to make this operation work. There is no time to spare if we are to complete this effort prior to Israeli elections.”
In order to save time, Meron suggested that packing of the weaponry begin – this time, over 100 containers were needed – while internal consultation in Israel continued.
The Arens-Meron camp, the Americans reported to their dispatchers, had two problems: IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Levi, eager to speed up the withdrawal of the IDF from Lebanon, gave top priority to establishing a security zone and therefore also arming of the forces of Saad Hadad – which became the South Lebanon Army – with the weapons in question. The IDF’s security assistance unit, headed by Col. (res. ) Zvi Reuter, and foreign relations department, demanded monetary compensation. Above all, the clock was ticking: Soon there would be a new Knesset and perhaps a new defense minister, who would bring in a new director general.
In the last telegram from Tel Aviv, bearing the censored signature of the liaison officer, there is an hour-by-hour description of the consultations, maneuvering and bargaining: hints that the price could be reduced if a way could be found to increase the aid; anger in the Pentagon at the Israeli chutzpah; examination of alternatives; encrypted telegrams from the embassy; bridging proposals; a “gentlemen’s agreement” without signatures.
The elections came and went and the race between Labor, headed by Shimon Peres, and Likud, headed by Yitzhak Shamir, ended in a tie. A week later, before the Peres-Shamir government was formed, Arens signed an approval of the transaction: Weapons worth $30 million to $40 million in exchange for the expectation of an increase in military assistance. Arens was forced to vacate the ministry in favor of Yitzhak Rabin, who like him was pro-American, but Meron remained in the post of director general for two more years.
The Tipped Kettle papers end with an internal memo, with no addressees or signatories, which was written on the day the Iran-Contra affair was exposed, in November 1986. It reports that Reuter, the head of security assistance , complained that the debt for the second transaction had yet to be paid. The complaint was examined in the Pentagon and it revealed an astonishing finding. The Israeli military attache’s office in Washington and the international branch of the Defense Department had reached a secret arrangement: In return for Israel waiving the payment, the U.S. defense contractor Numax was to retain its security clearance and government contracts after being purchased by Israel.
What the officers and ministers, the officials and ambassadors are doing in secret today will be revealed, thanks to the Americans in another 25 years.





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The Dirt on Yair Klein In Columbia/Antigua/Honduras/Guatemala/Costa Rica

25 11 2010 The Quest for Security in the Caribbean: Problems and Promises in Caribbean

By Ivelaw Lloyd Griffith
http://books.google.com/books?id=vpsXKLy...&q&f=false










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Columbian Interview With Yar Klein

23 11 2010 Mercenary sentenced

JUSTICE Manizales Superior Court sentenced him to 10 years in prison for Yair Klein, an Israeli who trained paramilitaries in the 80′s. WEEK spoke to him.
Monday March 18, 2002
At 55 Gal retired Col. Yair Klein, a veteran of the Yom Kippur War and former instructor of Israeli army officers, had to withdraw from the adventurous life that gave him fame beyond the borders of Israel and can not return to leave their country. If the military of 1.75 meters, 90 kilos of weight, gray hair and blue eyes, set foot abroad run the risk of being extradited to Colombia. Here awaits you in jail because a few months ago the High Court of Manila was sentenced to 10 years and eight months in prison, plus payment of 22 minimum wages, for the strengthening and practical training in military and paramilitary terrorism. Klein was convicted along with two of his men, Abraham Tzedaka Melnik and Terry, who also acted as instructors. Klein shot to fame in June 1989 when a television news showed pictures of the courses that had been issued, along with his companions, the paramilitaries operating in the Magdalena Medio.
However, the Israeli military responded to WEEK from his residence in the port of Jaffa, which today lives in an old Arab house on four floors, that his initial purpose was not that. He maintains that when he came home in 1987 his intention was to ensure that your company hired Police, Speardhead to train its members in matters of defense and security. Your contact on that first trip was Izhack Shoshany Meraioth, the representative of a security equipment firm in Israel. At that time Klein said that he stayed at the Hotel Country 85 and met with Gen. Carlos Arturo Casadiego police and with representatives from the Atlas Security. In his first two visits a week spent in Colombia. The other two, he says, "were longer because it was when I was hired to teach courses in Puerto Boyacá.
The training team Speardhead issued, in addition to the aforementioned characters also included Picciotto Arik Afek, was too ‘professional’. In the summary of research to condemn the Israelis know that the courses are held in the school’s fifty in the swamp Palagua and rural areas of the municipality of Puerto Boyacá. Klein says today from the comfort of your home that "the training was military and defense and in no way a crime or murders (…) I trained farmers and farm people who continually trampling guerrillas without the Army could do something for their rights. "
The version of the Colombian authorities, according to the indictment of the process is very different.The first course gave the Israeli of Romanian descent, it was self-defense. The second was much more offensive and the third made the 20 ‘students’ who took it in experts in handling explosives. The best students were lieutenants of the great lords and the file are referred to by their nicknames: ‘Trap’, ‘Sausage’ and ‘Fercho. " In research papers concludes that "there is certainty as to the trained personnel they have committed serious attacks on our country through the knowledge received by their instructors, as the attack on the Homeland Security Department, DAS, the attack that he killed Antonio Roldán Betancur, governor of Antioquia, the journalist Jorge Enrique Pulido, the newspaper El Espectador and many other serious terrorist events of dye in the country. "
After training some of the men who then terrorized right and left in Colombia, Klein worked with who wanted to overthrow Panamanian Gen. Augusto Noriega and end your adventurous wanderings led him to Africa. They wanted to buy a diamond mine and get rich. Some media sources said in 1999 that the military had tried to negotiate with stones and precious woods in Zambia and Namibia. They got to hear from him in Sierra Leone, where he eventually went to jail in mid-2000. The authorities put him in Freetown, the capital of this country, accused of trying to defraud the government on the purchase of a helicopter of the Russian war. He says he got out alive by a miracle, but lost everything, including his diamond mine.
Today this man, who was born in Kibbutz Nizanim and separated from his wife Hava, a partner in a company car shielding and dreams of creating a school of survival in extreme conditions. "A kind of recreational park," says this soldier of fortune who despite all his past is defined as a family man worried about his four children, who are between 21 and 35. The escalating war between Israel and Palestine made to increase the profits of your business, but has no way to enjoy them out of their nation. The last one tried to leave behind hit him in the port of Jaffa and became a prisoner of his own land.
"I did not feel I did anything against the law"
WEEKLY: What was the reason to return to Colombia in late 1988 or early 1989?
Yair Klein: I was in Bogota to meet Shoshany Izhack Meraioth, who was representing a security equipment firm in Israel and had long lived in the country. I had talked about people Uraba banana groups who were besieged by guerrillas and wanted to do a string of security within its banana and through it found a security complex in the area. This meeting was not finally carried out. Meraioth organized another meeting, I suggested that they, in Puerto Boyaca, with ACDEGAM farmers were also suffering from the same reasons. And so I came to this region to develop self-defense groups.Ranchers and farmers who do not put up with the guerrillas.
WEEKLY: Did you leave your country to share military information to civilians in other countries?
YK: My team asked permission of the Israeli Defense Ministry and informed them that there was no need for authorization because the civilians would be trained to defend their property and place of work, not military. However, after the government of Israel was afraid of possible reprisals by the guerrillas against Jewish families in Colombia.
WEEK: "He knew he was training illegal paramilitary groups?
YK: Neither I nor my colleagues can say with certainty that those who train did not belong to paramilitary groups. Just know that there were many victims of the guerrillas.
WEEKLY: Did you meet members of the Medellin cartel, the likes of Pablo Escobar, Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha or alias Vladimir, as did the courses?
YK: I did not know any of them. The only person with whom I had sex and was connected with drug trafficking was Bita name. Of Israel informed me that was on this road and then cut all ties with him.Nor am I aware of having met ‘Vladimir’. The army and the police were aware of what we were doing and the place was surrounded by military bases. During the weekends the students played football with the soldiers. From one of these bases came after a request for assistance from one of the courses in order to contain a guerrilla attack. I did not feel I did anything against the law, as you will understand I am a foreigner and they do not speak the language, so it could not know in detail how things worked there.
WEEK: He is accused of having trained people who caused the explosion of an Avianca plane in Cali …
YK: I heard that made me responsible for this but it’s crazy. It is said that Bosnia’s partisans helped and even participated in the attack. Spanish investigators came to Israel to talk to me. I was also charged with the death of a man (Luis Carlos) Galán, presidential candidate of that country. The first commission of inquiry said Galán was assassinated with 9 mm bullets, and the second commission found after two months that the bullets came from a Galil rifle and were of 5.56 mm caliber. The weapon in question was in Antigua ready for service in the invasion of Panama. Apparently the weapon came to Colombia at the hands of arms dealers Panamanians.
WEEK: "Then what do you attribute the reaction brought its presence in Colombia?
YK: The issue erupted and turned to advertising by the Americans. Around the same time I was hired to support the government in exile in Panama in order to topple the Noriega regime. Eduardo Herrera who was the commander of Panama before the revolution, was also an ambassador of Panama in Israel and security minister of the government in exile with the ousted president. United States took over the economic side, the proof is the first two checks in my possession and that came from Washington. The truth is that when the Senate gave the OK to the soldiers for the invasion of Panama no longer needed my services. I did not give up my fee and was in Miami when they broke the case of Colombia. The Americans found it very comfortable to harm Israeli interests in Colombia because the Colombian began purchasing Israeli weapons, around 250 million dollars annually.
WEEK: How is your legal status in Israel?
YK: I never had a process in Israel for this reason, it never got a test that could actually prove that I trained the Medellin cartel. But I was convicted for using military knowledge without permission and had a fine. Israel prosecutes persons not complying with the law in other countries. No banishes their citizens who are outside the law but the judges house. I am willing to be tried in Israel and I am willing to testify before the Colombian authorities at the embassy of Colombia. I have nothing to hide. Do not think there is any evidence in Colombia can blame me either there or in any other nation in the world.


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Yair Klein and other extraditable

23 11 2010 Yair Klein and other extraditable

By Alfredo Rangel

This case recalls that of the three Irishmen, James Monaghan, Martin McCauley and Niall Connally, convicted in absentia of training the FARC.
Saturday 28 August 2010
It is very commendable attitude of the government of Russia to seize and prepare to Colombia to extradite a fugitive from justice our Yair Klein. Hopefully other governments have the same arrangement with the Colombian justice system to arrest and extradite fugitives to the three Irishmen were convicted here instructing the FARC terrorist tactics.
As is known, Yair Klein was sentenced in absentia to ten years in prison by a judge in Manila for training irregular groups then funded by Pablo Escobar and Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, including drug lords. These bands then bloodied the country. But the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, echoing the national and international NGOs that unfairly accuse the Colombian State to be a massive and systematic violator of human rights ruled that Russia could not extradite Klein to Colombia because his life was in danger and could be subjected to torture and mistreatment by our government officials.
Definitely, no one knows who she works: Mr. Klein, who sponsored the violation of human rights in Colombia, now relies on the arguments of the NGOs advocating for human rights, to prevent the Colombian judicial action against him. However, the Russian government said that Klein failed to prove the risk he would if he were extradited. Moreover, the Colombian Foreign Ministry has said that Klein would be held in maximum security prison Cómbita, Boyacá, which according to the UN has the highest qualifying for the protection of human rights. Hopefully, then, that the Strasbourg Court will grant more credit to legitimate governments that certain NGOs and proceed to the extradition of Klein.
This case recalls that of the three Irishmen, James Monaghan, Martin McCauley and Niall Connaly, who in absentia after his escape, were sentenced in December 2004 on appeal by the Criminal Chamber of the Court of Bogota, having trained for five weeks to the FARC in the manufacture of explosives and use of unconventional weapons. This training included the development and use of the infamous bomb cylinders with the FARC destroyed dozens of public buildings and hundreds of humble homes in dozens of rural villages, leading to massacres like Bojaya in Chocó. According to BBC News, Irish, members of the IRA, using Colombia as a testing ground to test new weapons and explosives. And according to British security forces quoted by the Sunday Telegraph, these subjects were rehearsing in Colombia a "super equivalent of a small nuclear explosion that could kill hundreds of people and destroying a bunker." (Eduardo Mackenzie, The FARC, a terrorist failure, pg. 491). But the trial judge acquitted them for lack of evidence (how strange, no?), Accepting their argument that they were doing "ecotourism." And while the ruling was the second instance, it flew.
The terrorist mission in Colombia was authorized by the leaders of the IRA at the time they conducted peace talks with the British government. And apparently this was a covert operation to fund, with resources from the FARC drug trafficking, kidnapping and other criminal acts, political campaigns of Sinn Fein, political wing of the IRA. In fact, Martin McCauley, one of the three men in Colombia, was campaign director for Sinn Fein (Loretta Napoleoni, Jihad, p.. 85). At the time, the Colombian prosecutors issued an international arrest warrant against the three men, but support for terrorism of the FARC was covert under the IRA peace agreements with the British government. And so we stayed up until today, no truth, no justice, no repair. But no NGO has called for it.
Yair Klein’s extradition would be a good precedent for other governments to address the claims of Colombia and we handed over a first world city fugitive from justice who walks our free and unpunished by the planet, then to have supported terrorist brutality here . It would be proof that the vaunted global justice is not just for those of poncho. For this reason there are a handful of foreigners extraditable.


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The Career of Carlos Castano: A Marriage of Drugs and Politics

23 11 2010 The Career of Carlos Castano:

A Marriage of Drugs and Politics

August 2001
Carlos Castaño’s criminal career spans almost twenty years. It encapsulates the involvement by important sectors of the Colombian army in a Dirty War that originated with President Betancur’s 1982 peace overtures to the guerrillas, and has since frustrated the efforts of four other Colombian governments to find a negotiated solution to the guerilla insurgency.
Castaño’s story begins in the most geographically strategic and resource-rich region of Colombia, known as the Magdalena Medio. He was 16 years old when, in 1982, he and his older brother Fidel, now allegedly dead, joined an army-sponsored "self-defense" group, "MAS" — "Muerte a Secuestradores," (Death to Kidnappers). Motivated to avenge the killing of their father by the FARC, the Castaño brothers received their military training from the Bombona Battalion of the army’s 14th Brigade, based in Puerto Berrio in the Magdalena Medio. Carlos enlisted as a civilian "army guide" and informant, attached to 14th Brigade forces.
The "MAS" provided the model for all the regional "Self Defense groups" that proliferated around the country in the ’80s and ’90s, and that were transformed into a national force, united under Castaño’s command, in l997, when he organized the AUC. Set up by a consortium of wealthy Magdalena Medio political and business leaders and cattle ranchers to protect themselves and their property from the guerillas, "MAS" took its name and inspiration from a Medellín death squad, formed a year earlier by drug baron Pablo Escobar, and "self defense" had little to do with its activities. After receiving their training, "MAS" members were quickly incorporated into army operations and set out to "cleanse" the Magdalena Medio region of suspected "subversives," a code word that applied to anyone critical of the army or their far right supporters, or who sought to promote then President Betancur’s peace overtures to the guerrillas.
Through the ’80s, Pablo Escobar and his associates bought vast tracts of land in the Magdalena Medio. Establishing a pattern that has not altered, drug money flowed to the "MAS," the death squads flourished, and by 1986, some 1,000 Magdalena Medio peasants had been killed and tens of thousands forcibly displaced to clear the land for the traffickers. Civic and community leaders, trade unionists, Indian leaders, opposition politicians, priests, human rights defenders, and journalists, also became victims of the irregular, regional war.
In 1987, with support from army officers, the traffickers imported foreign mercenaries from Israel and Britain to run a death squad school in the Magdalena Medio to impart the skills of the Israeli Special Forces and the British S.A.S. to the Colombian death squads. Retired Israeli army colonel, Yair Klein (last heard of in June 2000, when he was sprung from jail in Sierra Leone) transformed the peasant militias of the MAS into a professional killing machine. Reputedly, Carlos Castaño was Klein’s star pupil. By then, he and his older brother Fidel were paramilitary leaders in their own right. They had their own 150-man paramilitary army, "Los Tangueros," and ruled a fiefdom in the northern state of Córdoba from which they trafficked drugs, conducted a war in the banana fields of coastal Uraba that put one small guerilla faction, (the EPL) out of business, and perfected the art of parlaying services — protection, intelligence, and high-ticket assassinations — to create alliances, first with Pablo Escobar, then with the Cali Cartel.
According to official investigators, the Castaño brothers left their finger prints all over the raging political and drug violence of those years. Among the crimes committed on Escobar’s behalf, Carlos Castaño has been charged with the bombing an Avianca plane that blew up in Colombian skies with 111 passengers on board. The Castaño brothers also provided the guns and the expertise for most of the killings that eliminated the left-wing Unión Patriótica Party, that had emerged from President Betancur’s peace talks with the FARC in 1984. They are also charged with the assassination of two left-wing presidential candidates in the 1990 elections. Fidel Castaño built a network, based around drugs, right-wing politics, and army connections, with some of the wealthiest, most powerful men in the country. That network has survived to protect younger brother Carlos until today.
In 1993, after falling out with Escobar, the Castaño brothers switched allegiances. With funding from the rival Cali Cartel, they formed a 50-man death squad, "Los Pepes" (People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar). Before long, Los Pepes had become indispensable allies of official efforts led by the CIA’s Delta Search Force, in collaboration with the Colombian narcotics police and the DEA, to track and kill the fugitive Escobar.
By the mid-nineties, after the mysterious disappearance of Fidel, Carlos Castaño was back on the northern coast at the head of a new paramilitary force, the "Self-Defense Groups of Córdoba and Uraba" (the ACCU). Sponsored by wealthy landowners, and supported by the army’s 17th Brigade, the ACCU fought a savage Dirty War to drive the FARC from Uraba, and consolidated Castaño’s control over an expanding personal fiefdom in Córdoba and northern Antioquia.
In 1997, Castaño brought Colombia’s dozen or so regional paramilitaries under his military and political leadership to form the AUC. At the AUC’s National Congress, held in Antioquia in August 1999 and attended by civilian and military advisors, the blueprint was drawn up for the formation of a new, national socialist political and military movement, and the decision was adopted to campaign by all possible means for political recognition of the AUC.


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Army of terror: the legacy of US-backed human rights abuses in Colombia.

23 11 2010 Army of terror: the legacy of US-backed human rights abuses in Colombia.


http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournal...5547.html#
Harvard International Review – Winter, 1998





PETER SANTINA, Staff Writer, Harvard International Review
After three decades of civil war, Colombia is finally approaching peace. On August 7, 1998, Andres Pastrana assumed the presidency, replacing the discredited Ernesto Samper. The country’s two largest guerrilla armies, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN), had refused to meet with Samper because he received US$6 million in campaign contributions from the Cali drug cartel. The Pastrana administration has moved quickly toward negotiations with the guerrillas, agreeing to the FARC’s demand to demilitarize an area the size of Switzerland in southern Colombia for 90 days while the two sides negotiate. Pastrana was elected by the most votes in his nation’s history and has established a much more cordial relationship with the United States than his predecessor, making the first Colombian presidential visit to the United States in 23 years. President Bill Clinton and Pastrana signed a joint agreement to fight the drug trade, and Clinton promised US$280 million more in US aid to Colombia.
Since his election, however, Pastrana’s popularity in the polls has fallen nearly to the level of Samper’s, due to an enormous amount of social unrest. Mounting opposition to the government’s plans to cut public spending with privatization reforms manifested itself in a three-week national strike of 800,000 Colombian state employees. The strike, which ended on October 27, resulted in the death of seven union leaders. This tragedy highlights the key to Colombia’s human rights catastrophe: political murders. Unions are targeted by right-wing paramilitaries for their opposition to the power of business, especially multinational corporations. According to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, in 1997 alone 156 trade unionists were killed in Colombia. Although unions are one target of political violence, peasants living in the countryside have suffered even more. Brutal paramilitary forces target those suspected of collaboration with the guerrillas and have committed numerous human rights abuses. This relationship between the official military and the death squads has been investigated by the US State Department, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, international think tanks, and human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs), including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
Government Abuses
According to the US State Department, “the [Colombian] Government took no significant action to restrain these powerful paramilitary groups” in 1997. A major factor in the abuse is indeed the complicity of the Colombian government, particularly the armed forces, in the rightist agenda of the paramilitaries in the face of a growing leftist guerrilla movement. The Colombian government, threatened by the socialist rebels, has been unwilling to prosecute either paramilitaries or army soldiers for their human rights abuses because they are more concerned with losing power to the socialist rebels than protecting the basic human rights of Colombian citizens.
General Bedoya, the commander of the armed forces, has said that military courts effectively punish violators, citing a high overall conviction rate for military violations. When asked by Human Rights Watch, however, he could not cite a single conviction for a human rights violation; most military tribunal convictions are for technical offenses such as failure to follow orders. A detailed report on Colombian human rights abuses released by Human Rights Watch in 1998 states that in cases of humanitarian law violations, “allegations against officers are rarely investigated.” The US State Department noted in its 1997 report that, “at year’s end, the military exercised jurisdiction over many cases of military personnel accused of abuses, a system that has established an almost unbroken record of impunity.” The Colombian National Police, although it has improved its record since 1994, continues to show a reluctance to prosecute paramilitaries. According to the Attorney General, the National Police have not addressed over 200 warrants for the arrest of paramilitaries.
Problems with the military and human rights, however, extend beyond a lack of prosecution for abuses. The State Department’s Colombia Country Report on Human Rights Practices for 1997 blamed government forces for “numerous serious abuses,” including extra-judicial killings, forced disappearances, and the torturing and beating of some detainees. On July 29, 1998, President Samper publicly apologized to the families of 49 people murdered by government agents between 1991 and 1993. In each of the state massacres mentioned by Samper, defendants accused of responsibility were absolved by military tribunals until the human rights branch of the Organization of American States found the Colombian government liable for the deaths. Samper conducted a similar ceremony in 1995, in which he accepted government blame for military sweeps through the town of Trujillo in 1989 and 1990 that left 107 peasant leaders and activists dead.
Paramilitary Terrorism
These crimes pale in comparison, however, to those of the brutal paramilitary forces. In the first nine months of 1997, 69 percent of the 3,500 political murders in Colombia could be attributed to right-wing paramilitary groups, according to the US State Department. Death squads continue to roam the Colombian countryside, terrorizing peasants who they suspect of sympathizing with the guerrillas. On October 25, seven trucks of about 100 paramilitary troops entered the northeastern city of San Carlos. They killed ten civilians and abducted 15 others who were on their blacklist of alleged guerrilla collaborators, and left graffiti condemning Pastrana’s overtures of peace toward the guerrillas. Later that same day, other paramilitaries invaded the town of Altos del Rosario and murdered 11 residents.
Unfortunately, this is not simply a recent phenomenon–the Colombian government and armed forces have a long history of cooperation with the death squads. In 1968, the Colombian government legalized the organization and promotion of groups of armed civilians, known as “peasant self-defense groups,” in the context of the growing guerrilla movement. These small private armies were equipped, trained, and logistically supported by the armed forces. The political and economic elites who felt threatened by the guerrillas were particularly supportive of these “self-defense” groups, as they are of the paramilitary forces in Colombia today. These groups were eventually banned in 1989, because of their inneither established procedures to break up the paramilitary groups that they had created, nor did it cut them off from future aid from the armed forces.
Perhaps the most prominent Colombian paramilitary figure is Carlos Castano, who traces his first involvement in paramilitary activity to the training he received in the Bombona Battalion of the armed forces in the early 1980s, when the military, business owners, and ranchers formed the activist group Death to Kidnappers (MAS). By 1983, Colombian internal affairs had registered over 240 political killings by the MAS death squad, whose victims included elected officials, farmers, and community leaders. In his report, Internal Affairs Chief Carlos Jimenez Gomez identified 59 active-duty members of the police and military who belonged to MAS, including the commander of the army’s Bombon Battalion.
The government again contributed to the formation of paramilitary groups in 1994, when it established “special private security and vigilante services” whose members were allowed to arm themselves in self-defense. According to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, known paramilitaries participate in these “Convivir” associations. The Office of the Superintendent of Private Vigilante and Security Groups admitted in November 1997 that it was incapable of fulfilling its responsibility to oversee these legal, state-supported paramilitary organizations. Members continue to be investigated on charges of homicide, torture, and other grave human rights abuses by the government.
The massacre of May 16, 1998, in Barrancabermeja is a clear example of the friendly relationship between the military and the paramilitaries. Camilo Aurelio Morantes, the head of the paramilitary Autodefensas de Santander y Sur del Cesar (AUSAC), has admitted to ordering the attack on Barrancabermeja, which left 32 civilians dead. Morantes is known by the army and the government to be a paramilitary leader, yet he has not been prosecuted for his leading role in the massacre. Furthermore, witnesses have alleged that soldiers waved the paramilitaries through the army check-point while entering and leaving Barrancabermeja. The government investigated the role of ten of the soldiers involved, and the only one detained was an Army corporal who was charged for personally participating in the massacre. A humanitarian worker in Antioquia told Human Rights Watch, “I can’t count the number of times I’ve been stopped at a joint army-paramilitary roadblock. The soldiers are there with their green uniforms and the paramilitaries with their blue uniforms. It’s like different units of the same army.”
US Military Aid
The United States provides a great amount of support for the Colombian armed forces despite its abusive track record. First, the United States continues to train Colombian military officers at both the US Army School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning and the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg. Representative Joseph Kennedy and the Washington Office on Latin America jointly released a report in July 1998 documenting the specific abuses of Colombian graduates of the School of the Americas.
Before the report was released, a video was shown of Colombian soldiers beating unarmed farmers participating in a peaceful protest and then attacking cameraman Richard Velez, who suffered serious internal injuries. The soldiers were operating under the command of SOA graduate Nestor Ramirez. Another SOA graduate, General Hernan Jose Guzman Rodriguez, was dismissed in November 1994 to improve the armed forces’ public image. Guzman protected and supported the death squad MAS between 1987 and 1990, during which time it was responsible for at least 147 murders. In 1986, Guzman commanded soldiers who detained, tortured, gang raped, and executed a Colombian woman and then invented a story that she had committed suicide by shooting herself in the nape of her neck. Guzman’s portrait has hung in the SOA “Hall of Fame” in Ft. Benning since 1993. A final example is Captain Gilberto Ibarra, SOA class of 1983, who forced three peasant children to walk in front of his patrol and detonate mines, killing two of them and seriously wounding the other.

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Tags: state terrorism
Categories : crimes against humanity, How Do We Build the Resistance?, image of the beast, Israel, monsters, Organizing resistance, Shut Down the Source, The Most Moral Army In the World?
Zionist torturers and Colombian oligarchs–(Yair Klien and MAS Death Squads)

23 11 2010 Zionist torturers and Colombian oligarchs

NorteAmericanos_for_Bolivar
Mon, 23 Dec 2002 14:44:30 -0800

A connection between the Israeli Military man Yair Klien and the Colombian Death Squads.
A deadly union of Zionist torturers and Colombian oligarchs.
NorteAmericanos for Bolivar
—– Original Message —– Subject: Colombia’s Paramilitaries and Israel

New World Phalange, Colombia’s Paramilitaries and Israel
by Jeremy Bigwood
December 04, 2002 “I copied the concept of paramilitary forces from the Israelis.”

[COLOR=#000000]Carlos Castaño, Mi Confesión 2002[1] In 1983, an intense 18-year-old Colombian arrived in Israel to take a yearlong course called “562.”[2] He was no normal foreign exchange student. His name was Carlos Castaño and the course was about making war, something that he would exceed at: he was destined to become the most adept and ruthless paramilitary leader in Latin America’s history.
Carlos Castaño had been impelled along this vengeful path after his cattle-ranching father had been killed during a botched rescue attempt by the army while being held for a “tax” ransom by the FARC – Colombia’s strongest left-wing guerrilla army.[3] Bitter over their father’s death, Carlos and his older brother, Fidel, vowed revenge, a vengeance that would dovetail with both the interests of the Colombian right-wing landholding classes and US foreign policy. It is a vengeance that continues into the present..
The brothers first offered their services as scouts for the Colombian Army’s Bombona Battalion – fingering FARC sympathizers, providing intelligence and even participating in military operations. But Fidel – some 14 years older than Carlos – concluded that by merely working for the army, they were going to get nowhere.[4] One of the battalion’s majors introduced them to a local paramilitary death squad called “Caruso,” with whom they started a killing spree. When local police started to investigate them, they found it necessary to operate even more clandestinely. Unlike in many other third-world countries under the U.S.’s shadow, Colombia’s police and judiciary have sometimes played an independent role from the Army.
Later, according to press reports,[5] Fidel started his own paramilitary death squad called “Los Tangueros,” named after his ranch, “Las Tangas.”[6] The Los Tangueros was responsible for more than 150 murders during the late 1980s and early 1990s. When discussing this period in his book, Castaño openly talks about murders he has committed or ordered, making his habit of executing what he calls “‘guerrillas’ in towns” sound routine.[7] In one massacre alone, the Los Tangueros captured dozens of campesinos from a neighboring town. Back at the ranch, “they tortured them all night with crude instruments before shooting some and burying others alive.”[8] Los Tangueros along with other death squads dispersed throughout the country would evolve into the present 9,000-strong paramilitary force in Colombia, [9] now killing up to twenty civilians per day.[10]
During the early 1980s when Castaño’s father was captured by the FARC, rural Colombia was rife with small diverse paramilitary units working for the army and the landholding upper classes.[11] Many of these groups were merely the enforcers and protectors of the local wealthy, while others worked protecting the “new rich” of the cocaine trade from the “taxation” of the left-wing insurgencies. Some of these groups bore the names of petty criminal gangs or the names of their leaders. They liked to call themselves “self-defense” or “auto defense” groups, but here we will use the term ‘paramilitaries” to avoid confusion. In the 1980s, these paramilitary groups were disparate and not well trained, and sometimes got involved in turf battles between themselves. If they were to take the offensive against the steady advances of the leftist guerrillas, the paramilitaries would need both political/military training and unification. And while these paramilitaries essentially worked for the same counterinsurgent goals as those of US foreign policy, the US could not directly support them. But another country could.
Exactly how Carlos Castaño got to Israel is still a mystery, as is precisely which entity trained him there. But whoever set it up, the Israeli course “562″ definitely had a strong effect on Castaño. “Something clicked in me, and I began to behave differently[12]…My perception of this war changed radically after my trip to Israel,”[13] he said in his “as told to” Colombian run-away bestseller of interviews edited by Spanish journalist Mauricio Aranguren Molina.
Carlos Castaño was clearly a good and highly motivated student. Of his studies in Israel, which is the subject of chapter 6 of in his book, he reminisces:
“Unlike what one might think, we studied in the classroom more enthusiastically than in the military training. The classes emphasized the regular and irregular ways in which the world operates… It was there that I rounded out my education… [The teachers] insisted on us carrying ourselves well, in both the way we dressed and in the way we spoke in public. I also received a class on how to enter and register in a hotel and we analyzed how to behave around immigration police in airports. We read in libraries and spent long sessions on both the self-esteem and the security that an individual should have. This was an invaluable process which taught me to respect and have confidence in myself, to triumph during tough intimidating moments.”[14]
Most importantly for the eager student, he “received lectures on how the world arms business operates, and how to buy arms.”[15]
And of course, there was also a military component:
“I received instruction in urban strategies, how to protect oneself, how to kill someone, or what to do when someone is trying to kill you, depending on the situation. We learned how to stop an armored car and use fragmentation grenades to break through and enter into a target. We practiced with multiple grenade launchers, and learned how to make accurate shots with RPG-7s, or shoot a cannon shell through a window.”[16]
“We also took complementary courses on terrorism and counter terrorism, night vision equipment, and parachuting. We also learned how to make homemade bombs. In short, we learned what the Israelis know, but, in all sincerity, very little of all of this has been applied to the war in Colombia. I got a very good basic education, and there I learned how to do the most important thing – I learned how to control fear…”[17]
Castaño also describes training that could not have taken place without the express permission of the highest authorities of the Israeli Defense Forces, such as when he performed “airborne maneuvers and [we] parachuted at night over islands of the

[Magda Hassan]

Could some one please enlighten me on what the Department of Justice actually does? :elefant:

[Jan Klimkowski]

Ed - excellent. Many thanks for posting.

Could some one please enlighten me on what the Department of Justice actually does? :elefant:

Or to rephrase the question: precisely whose interests does the Department of Justice serve?

The question can most easily be answered by identifying those whose interests the Department of Justice demonstrably does not serve - as made clear in the OP.