The Colombian military tricked the Farc and rescued Ingrid Betancourt as well as three American contractors without a shot being fired http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080704...ia_hostages;_ylt=AnAq953XCVySE.UZ2MZQBROs0NUE
You couldn't invent a better storyline for a Hollywood film. I would imagine that now the FARC become like the the Shinning Path in Peru - a tiny, irrelevant body holed up deep in the jungle....
One of the Keys is that The FARC command is in disarray after the Colombian's took out the leadership hiding in the junges of Ecuador. The Colombian's captured laptops documenting that Chavez is funding the FARC.
Yeah this was a real bangup job! Justin Raimondo I knew there was something fishy about that news item reporting a "daring" rescue effort by the Colombian military of Colombian and U.S. hostages held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and, as it turns out, the whole thing was an elaborate put-up job. According to a report by the Swiss radio outlet Suisse Romande, instead of "infiltrating" and fooling the FARC high command into handing over the hostages to Colombian military personnel, the Colombians paid a hefty ransom. The Los Angeles Times reports: "Colombian authorities sought over the weekend to discredit a Swiss academic and former intermediary in talks with a left-wing rebel group who has been linked to a disputed report that officials paid $20 million for last week's release of 15 high-profile hostages. A Colombian government official who asked to remain unnamed said Sunday that authorities suspect Geneva-based Jean Pierre Gontard was the source for the Swiss radio report last week stating that officials paid ransom for the release of the hostages. … "With the Colombian government's permission, Gontard has represented Switzerland in past efforts to broker a peace agreement with FARC rebels. On June 30, the government announced that he and French diplomat Noel Saez had arrived in Colombia to resume those efforts. Two days later, onetime president candidate Ingrid Betancourt, three American defense contractors and 11 Colombian police and soldiers were rescued after spending more than five years in rebel captivity." "Gontard has been coming to Colombia for years as Swiss representative of a three-nation team, including Spain and France, that has acted as facilitator for possible talks between the FARC and the Colombian government." While the Times is careful to couch the story in terms of the Colombian government's denials, the truth ought to be apparent enough, and, in a sense, their story of "infiltrating" FARC rings true, even in this context, since bribing the enemy is indeed a form of infiltration. Reminds me of the "surge working". The surge didn't work, buying off the Sunni warlords in Iraq by employing their men worked. We should have invaded Iraq with businessmen, not young men.
It is simply astounding how universally negative Guerilla is about anything a nation does anywhere. The singular response to anything positive done by a government is to negate it. Of course that goes double for anything in which the US might be involved....even at the minimal basis. The one person who I can think of who similarly hates organized governments and wants to return society to a deep dark past is Osama bin Laden. The words are different but the goals are eerily similar. As reported in press around the world the freeing of these folks was an astounding feat, done with years of preparation, years of trying to monitor the guerillas (who have several hundred additional captives), and then astoundingly done without firing a shot. Meanwhile the freed captives are ecstatic as are their families. One of the Americans had a child he had never seen. Its a truly happy story.
Quite possible. Most "rebels" are quite dumb anyway, regarding anything that has to do with something else than killing and kidnapping.
His standard for accepting negative information is so low that everything negative qualifies. His standard for accepting positive information is so high that nothing qualifies. There is not a claim of US wrongdoing that he doesn't buy into. (I hope I can be proven wrong on this, but I don't recall him every siding with the US regardless of how baseless the claim.)
Does Bin Laden also read Antiwar.com? THE US, THE US, THE US. Who the hell is THE US? I like many American citizens, but I am not familiar with a person known as THE US. Is it some sort of Borg collective, where good Americans and bad Americans band together and act as one? Is that THE US? Home of the collective, land of the single opinion, the shining city of agreement on the hill? Yes, astounding. Ransom was paid. Amazing. To bad they didn't pay the ransom years ago. Could have saved a lot of suffering.
Here's the video released by the Colombian military of the hostage rescue http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmjgNmO5NjQ
hmmm.... a "claim" of ransom.....and a video of a rescue. They don't seem to reflect the same circumstances. Can you verify with authority the ransom payment actions?
So you commented on my post without reading it or the source? Did anyone actually watch the 53 second MSNBC clip that shows nothing to prove a rescue, but a voiceover from a MSM puppet, reading a story that we now know from insiders is probably false? C'mon people, is it so much to ask adults to use their brain, and not believe everything they are told on the idiot box or by the MSM?
I read everything. When a story has one source, people with experience, people who make decisions, typically legal experts and those who weigh on its evidence usually discount its seriousness. For decades the law, authorities, the legal system, and media have striven to find multiple sources for a story. That is what differentiates the difference between probable truth and rumour. One person breaks a story and suggests something different. It is rumour. Get substantial other sources to confirm the story and it becomes fact. Your source is SO FAR, a single source story. That makes it rumour. Find other sources. Its easy to distribute a point of view with one source. Substance comes from backing it up. Find other sources. Oh...and by the way, if others simply parrot the original story....that isn't substance....that is spreading rumours.
Nonsense. You did not read my source, and now you are trying to claim that because the story hasn't been widely reported, but the propaganda was, therefore I am wrong. This is the same sort of thinking that gets you into trouble when you apologize for the state, when you buy into the war chants and justifications for a police state. The problem is, you don't recognize yourself as capable of determining authority and quality. You rely on others to tell you want to think, what to read, and what to believe. And that, means that you look at the world through a very narrow window.
To be fair, that's not what they found. The documents speculated that they could receive funding from Venezuela - to be paid back at some unspecified time. Anyway, Chavez has now called on the FARC to release all prisoners as a humanitarian gesture and said that the guerrilla war has no place in modern Latin America.
Now that the FARC are being beaten Chavez is changing his tune. When the Colombian military raided into Ecuador and killed key FARC leaders in their jungle hideout, Chavez threatned war with Colombia.
FARC didn't play on releasing the hostages at all, not until their demands where meet, which including getting a Manhattan size piece of their own land and being taken off international terrorist list. Also why would they sell out the most valuable barging chips they had for only $20 million dollars when in fact Chavez is giving them about $300 million a year.