Interpol: FARC files real

[Dinner]

WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it.

So it is a blog? Seriously, you are attempting to dispute the BBC with a blog?

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Arrian
I have no idea who to believe in all of this. From what I can tell, both groups (Columbian gummint and FARC) are untrustworthy. **** it.

-Arrian

Exactly.

So let your brain do some work. laptop, jungle (just how many batteries did Reyes have?), super paranoid organization, files all open, no chain of custody

wouldn't stand up in an American court.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Oerdin
So it is a blog? Seriously, you are attempting to dispute the BBC with a blog?

Since the Beeb obviously didn't do a very good job, yes. It was sloppy work which basically cut and pasted the Interpol press release. A modicum of digging was all it took by this blogger to point out the flaws in the Interpol claims.

[chequita guevara]

from an email list

I originally wrote, pointing to the Colombian regime's "Uranium Dirty Bomb" fabrication against the FARC:

> The tales coming out of the supposedly captured rebel computer are so
> ridiculous and absurd on the face of it that they discredit themselves.

Now "Ruthless Critic," who for some reason seems intent on playing the part of the Marxmail village idiot, responds to my post by quoting at us a New York Times writeup of an Interpol report that says the files on the computer were not altered, according to a forensic examination.

That's just bull****. There is NO forensic examination that can determine that files were not added after a certain date. Both the BIOS and OS clocks are user-settable. Add ALL the files you want, setting the date for when you want them to have appeared, erase recently used file lists and so on, defrag the drive to change the physical layout and voila, there's nothing to show any files were added.

If the CIA agents who organized the attack on Ecuador and have orchestrated the release of the alleged FARC computer material are in the tiniest bit competent, there would have been nothing for Interpol to find.

Even worse, much of the alleged material wasn't even supposedly found on the computer, but on alleged "thumb drives." You can put a file on a thumb drive claiming to have been put there ten years ago, before the damn things even existed.

The whole story about computers in a jungle camp is hokey as ****. Had such computers REALLY been found, the FIRST thing the Colombian authorities would have done is establish a completely transparent and verifiable chain of evidence in the handling of the machines. The failure to do this makes the computers worthless as evidence in any REAL court of law on the planet.

So blatant was the disregard that even the imperialist agent at the head of Interpol was forced to confess that this made Interpol's avowal worthless.

"Mr. Noble told reporters in Bogotá that Interpol could not vouch for the accuracy of the files. He added that a Colombian antiterrorism unit accessed the seized files in the days after the March 1 raid, in a violation of internationally recognized rules on handling electronic evidence, but that Interpol’s experts verified that the action had not altered the content of the archives."

But the REASON for the "internationally recognized rules on handling of electronic evidence" is PRECISELY that tampering can be done without detection. . . .

Now comes the Noble head of Interpol, and tell us a) there's no way they can vouch for the material because b) the Colombian authorities decided to violate international norms for handling this kind of evidence but c) NEVERTHELESS we tell you no files have been altered.

[snoopy369]

Che, you went from a blog to an email list? Nice step up in reliability there

You actually can tell more than your emailer there suggested... it's possible to see a lot of things on the physical level, even if it has been defragged (and being defragged sounds like a hint by itself, if it were).

[chequita guevara]

Logic doesn't need to have a valid "source." It just needs to be logical.

[snoopy369]

Except that your 'emailer' is claiming to have knowledge of what is or isn't possible for INTERPOL to have done. I'd rather have someone who was or is a member of INTERPOL or an equivalent body speak to that fact, thank you ...

[Felch]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
Logic doesn't need to have a valid "source." It just needs to be logical.

Except that the source for your logic is as biased as Fox News.

What is it with all the quotation marks around everything that you and your sources don't agree with? "Source" "evidence" "authenticity"

Just because you can put quotes around it doesn't make it not true.

One question - how are we supposed to operate according to the rule of law when FARC happily murders and kidnaps judges, investigators, and lawmakers? Seems like they brought this on themselves.

[Spec]

Felch sighting!



You lost the "X"?

Spec.

[Whoha]

See how the CIA works?

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Felch
One question - how are we supposed to operate according to the rule of law when FARC happily murders and kidnaps judges, investigators, and lawmakers? Seems like they brought this on themselves.

You assume that the rule of law exists in Columbia otherwise? Of all the murders of trade unionists in the world, half of them occur in Columbia. The last guerrilla group that signed a peace agreement and laid down their weapons was massacred. That happened in the early 90s. There reason the FARC and the ELN are at war with the government is because it is the most violent, repressive government in all the Americas. During that same time, the entire peaceful left wing movement was annihilated by the government or the paramilitaries, who, despite media reports to the contrary, are still very active in Columbia, and still have the support of the military. Judges, lawmakers, journalists, union and community organizers, all murdered or exiled by the paras and military.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Oerdin
Since FARC is already on the terrorist list for both the US and EU it basically means Venezuela now officially gets slapped with sanctions for being a state sponsor of terrorism.

Since he has oil, you'll do precisely nothing except whine like the prison *****es you are.

Jesus... how on earth can anyone take the US getting angry about this seriously after Iran Contra.

B-b-b-b-but Chavez!!

[Felch]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
You assume that the rule of law exists in Columbia otherwise? Of all the murders of trade unionists in the world, half of them occur in Columbia. The last guerrilla group that signed a peace agreement and laid down their weapons was massacred. That happened in the early 90s. There reason the FARC and the ELN are at war with the government is because it is the most violent, repressive government in all the Americas. During that same time, the entire peaceful left wing movement was annihilated by the government or the paramilitaries, who, despite media reports to the contrary, are still very active in Columbia, and still have the support of the military. Judges, lawmakers, journalists, union and community organizers, all murdered or exiled by the paras and military.

I'm saying it doesn't exist, in part because guerillas from both sides have made it a policy to kill police, judges, and lawyers.

[Felch]

"Source"

The FARC files

May 22nd 2008
From The Economist print edition
Just how much help has Hugo Chávez given to Colombia's guerrillas?
Eyevine

THEY represent only one side of a story, and most of their claims have yet to be independently corroborated. But Interpol has now concluded that the huge cache of e-mails and other documents recovered from the computers of Raúl Reyes, a senior leader of the FARC guerrillas killed in a Colombian bombing raid on his camp in Ecuador on March 1st, are authentic and undoctored. The documents throw new light on the inner workings of the FARC. And they raise some very pointed questions about the ties between Venezuela's leftist president, Hugo Chávez, and a group considered to be terrorists by the United States and the European Union (EU).

Batches of the documents have been seen by The Economist and several other publications. They appear to show that Mr Chávez offered the FARC up to $300m, and talked of allocating the guerrillas an oil ration which they could sell for profit. They also suggest that Venezuelan army officers helped the FARC to obtain small arms, such as rocket-propelled grenades, and to set up meetings with arms dealers.
Click here to find out more!

Venezuelan officials have dismissed the documents as fabrications. That was contradicted by Ronald Noble, Interpol's secretary-general, who announced in Bogotá on May 15th, after two months of study by a team of 64 foreign experts, that the computer files came from the FARC camp and had not been modified in any way. Mr Chávez called this “ridiculous”, questioning the impartiality of Mr Noble, who is American, and labelling him a “gringo policeman”. However, in one indication of their accuracy, the documents provided information that in March guided police in Costa Rica to a house where they found $480,000 in cash, as an e-mail suggested.

The FARC are in some ways a throwback to a past era in Latin America. In other ways they are part of the new face of organised crime in the region. Old-fashioned Marxists unmoved by the collapse of the Soviet Union, they have flourished since then by drug-trafficking and kidnapping. Their war against Colombia's elected government has almost no public support, especially since they showed no interest in making peace during three years of talks with the government from 1999 to 2002. Since then, a determined security build-up by Álvaro Uribe, Colombia's popular president, has put the FARC on the defensive, driving it into remote jungles and savannahs—and towards the country's borders.

Mr Chávez has long expressed sympathy for the FARC. But Colombian officials, backed by detailed testimony from guerrilla deserters, accuse Venezuela and Ecuador of more than rhetoric, saying they have turned a blind eye to guerrilla camps on their territory. The killing of Mr Reyes, a member of the FARC's seven-man secretariat, underlined the point. The captured documents seem to confirm that FARC commanders have co-ordinated closely with Venezuelan army and intelligence officers on the border for several years, according to a Colombian official.

The documents also cast light on the FARC's strategic thinking. Its overriding objective seems to be to obtain international recognition as a “belligerent force” and to persuade the EU to stop labelling it a terrorist group. The guerrillas are desperate to establish a “strategic alliance” with Mr Chávez. But that was still just an aspiration in early 2007, the documents suggest. “We don't know if we enjoy their trust,” writes Jorge Briceño (alias “Mono Jojoy”), the FARC's military leader, to other members of the secretariat.

Contacts intensified last September after Mr Uribe asked Mr Chávez to mediate with the FARC to release the guerrillas' hostages, including Ingrid Betancourt, a politician with French and Colombian nationality. The secretariat agreed to send one of its members, Iván Márquez, to meet Mr Chávez in Caracas to talk about swapping the hostages for jailed guerrillas—but also, wrote Mr Briceño, “to lay the foundations for mutual political relations...even though this might be in the long term.”

At their meeting, Mr Chávez “approved totally and without batting an eyelid” a FARC request for $300m, Mr Márquez reported to his colleagues in a message published by Spain's El País and Colombia's Semana. In a long e-mail 12 days later, Mr Briceño notes that it was not clear whether the money was “a loan or for solidarity” but that the FARC should offer Mr Chávez help in return. According to a document obtained by the Wall Street Journal, Mr Chávez's interior minister, Ramón Rodríguez Chacín, asked the FARC to train Venezuelan soldiers in guerrilla tactics for use if the United States were to invade.

In an e-mail dated February 8th, Mr Márquez and a colleague report that Mr Chávez (whom they identify with the pseudonym “Ángel”) had told them that the first $50m was “available”, with another $200m over the course of the year. However, there is no corroboration as to whether any money was actually paid. Colombian officials have long said that the FARC was wealthy through drug money. So why were they so jubilant about the loan? Perhaps because army pressure against the guerrillas has disrupted their drug business. The government has evidence that some FARC fronts are short of cash and have trouble paying farmers for coca paste, says Sergio Jaramillo, the deputy defence minister.

The secretariat's e-mail correspondence sheds light on several other matters. It confirms that Manuel Marulanda, the FARC's veteran leader, is still alive and apparently in overall command. It also shows the FARC's cynicism about the plight of its hostages. Mr Briceño says repeatedly that he does not expect to achieve the hostage-for-prisoners swap while Mr Uribe is in power but that the FARC will keep pushing it to create problems for the president. When Mr Chávez asked for Ms Betancourt's release “we told him that if we did that we would be without cards,” Mr Márquez writes.

The e-mails show the extent to which the army has the FARC on the run: the secretariat members often complain of their difficulties in communicating with each other. Days after Mr Reyes was killed another member of the secretariat, Iván Ríos, was murdered by his own bodyguard. This week Mr Ríos's deputy, Nelly Ávila Moreno (aka “Karina”), surrendered. But the FARC is far from defeated. In an e-mail last August Mr Briceño notes that guerrilla landmines are undermining army morale. Their impact is “very good and we are going to increase them,” he writes.

The e-mails released so far represent only a fraction of the almost 40,000 written documents and 610 gigabytes of data on the computers. For all his bravado, Mr Chávez is clearly discomfited by all this. At a get-together of European and Latin American leaders in Lima on May 16th he was unusually conciliatory. Some Republicans in the United States have seized upon the computer cache as grounds for declaring Venezuela to be a state sponsor of terrorism. This could require the United States to impose trade sanctions on a country from which it buys some 10% of its imported oil—and so is unlikely to happen. And the e-mails are not a smoking gun implicating Mr Chávez unequivocally. It was Mr Márquez and other FARC commanders, not Mr Reyes, who handled relations with Venezuela. So there are no e-mails from Venezuelan officials on his computer.

Even so, the documents should trouble Venezuela's South American neighbours. None of them echoed Mr Chávez's call in January for the FARC to be recognised as legitimate belligerents. The centre-left governments in many countries are wary of Colombia's close alliance with the United States, which supplies it with military aid. But all have signed the Organisation of American States' democratic charter, requiring them to support, not undermine, each other's democracies. Last month José Miguel Insulza, the OAS's secretary-general, said that “no evidence” linked Venezuela to the FARC. But the evidence from the laptops suggests that there is certainly a case to be answered—by something more than a blustering denial.

Of course, the $450,000 found in Columbia may have been planted there by the Colombians, CIA, ZOG, or the Care Bears for all we know. It's just that the simplest explanation is that Chavez backed a left wing guerrilla movement that aimed to topple the government of his neighbor and rival.

Why is that so hard to believe? I'm not shocked that the US backs people its allies, why shouldn't Chavez support FARC?

Of course, if he is helping FARC, that's casus belli for the Colombians. Maybe the reason Chavez denies it is because the hero of the Bolivarian revolution is just a yellow bellied, back shooting, bushwacking, coward.

Is that what it is?

[chequita guevara]

Actually, Venezuela's military could stomp Columbia into the ground, if the U.S. stayed out of it.

I wouldn't be surprised if Chavez did support the FARC and ELN, but so far I see no evidence. I'd have to believe the Colombian are telling the truth.