Handwringer condemns secrecy of war against FARC

You knew that it had to happen after the Washington Post wrote about the “secret” CIA involvement in Colombia’s war against FARC in that region. Conor Friedersdorf worries that the secrecy surrounding the operations there somehow makes him and his fellow travelers feel bad about themselves;

About the foreign policy being carried out with taxpayer money, in our names: Does the American public want to spend billions of dollars helping Colombia to assassinate the leaders of its leftist insurgency movement (with apparent success, such that the rebel forces are in disarray)? Do Americans want their NSA and CIA directly complicit in a Latin American army’s program of assassinations?

If the matter were put to a vote in Congress, or made the subject of a plebiscite, it isn’t at all clear to me that interventionist champions of U.S. involvement in Colombia would prevail. Yet the United States is providing Colombia with money, smart bombs, NSA intelligence, and CIA personnel to help target and kill rebel leaders.

Why isn’t there any criticism of the program in the U.S.?

Perhaps opposition never had a chance to take shape because the program has been conducted in secret. It is public now thanks to the Washington Post’s Dana Priest. The U.S. provides “real-time intelligence that allows Colombian forces to hunt down individual FARC leaders and, beginning in 2006, one particularly effective tool with which to kill them,” she reports. “That weapon is a $30,000 GPS guidance kit that transforms a less-than-accurate 500-pound gravity bomb into a highly accurate smart bomb.” In theory, assassinations are still illegal under U.S. law, a prohibition put in place due to bygone abuses of covert CIA killing.

Has it really been all that secret? I mean, Marc Gonsalves, Keith Stansell, and Thomas Howes were prisoners of FARC for five years and they were captured while doing contract work for the CIA and their plane crashed. It was in all the papers. Someone dropped a guided bomb on the cranium of Raul Reyes, and last I knew, Colombia didn’t have a guided bomb manufacturer. Just because the Washington Post wrote an article about it a few days ago, that doesn’t make it news to those of us who pay attention to the war against terrorism.

I celebrate to various degrees when a terrorist is killed, but I guess little Conor’s feelings get hurt that they’re doing it with his tax payer dollars, although that’s one of legitimate things that the government is doing with our dollars. He makes it sound like it’s part of the war against drugs, but really, it’s the war against terror since Maoist FARC has been waging it’s war on the democratically elected government of Colombia since the mid-60s before the word narco-terrorists ever existed.

When President Bush announced the war against terrorists, the first ones I thought of were FARC. Conor doesn’t think it’s fair that we drop bombs secretly on unsuspecting terrorist chiefs in Colombia, but they can avoid that circumstance by not being terrorist chiefs. The tens of thousands of innocent victims of FARC didn’t get that chance to make a choice.

I’m glad that Atlantic finally found fault with this Administration, but I’d be more glad if they didn’t criticize him for acting like Bush. And I’m not so sure that Americans wouldn’t vote for a war against terror, especially since the Boston Marathon Bombing. It is indeed better to kill them there before they come here.

Thanks to Chock Block for the link.

Category: Terror War