[ RadSafe ] Colombia Is Flashpoint in Chávez ’s Feud With U.S .

[Steven Dapra]

March 5

         Dirty bomb or not, perhaps this is another opportunity for another 
foreign war.  Shouldn't $600 million a year be enough to wipe out "leftist 
rebels" and drug trafficking in a mere one or two years?  I wonder how long 
Congress has been ladling out this enormous subsidy to Columbia.

Steven Dapra


At 01:22 PM 3/5/08 -0500, Clayton J Bradt wrote:

>March 5, 2008
>
>Colombia Is Flashpoint in Chávez’s Feud With U.S.
>
>By SIMON ROMERO
>CARACAS, Venezuela —” In the four days since Colombian forces crossed into
>Ecuador and killed a guerrilla leader taking refuge there, tensions between
>Colombia — Washington’s top regionaal ally — and its leftist neighbors have
>erupted, highllighting the fact that Colombia and its policies are
>increasingly viewed here as American proxies.

[edit]

>Meanwhile, President Bush fiercely defended Colombia, which receives $600
>million a year in American aid to fight the leftist rebels and drug
>trafficking. He used the diplomatic crisis to push Congress to approve a
>Colombia trade deal that has languished for more than a year because of
>concerns among senior Democrats over human rights abuses there.

[edit]

>Adding to the tensions on Tuesday, Colombia’s vice president, Francisco
>Santos, said Colombian forces had found evidence that the FARC had been
>seeking the ingredients to make a radioactive dirty bomb.
>Material found on a laptop computer recovered in the raid into Ecuador
>provided the basis for Mr. Santos’s accusations about a dirty bomb, a
>weapon that combines highly radioactive material with conventional
>explosives to disperse deadly dust that people would inhale.
>“This shows that these terrorist groups, supported by the economic power
>provided by drug trafficking, constitute a grave threat not just to our
>country but to the entire Andean region and Latin America,” Mr. Santos said
>at a United Nations disarmament meeting in Geneva, in a statement that was
>posted in Spanish on the conference’s Web site. The rebels were
>“negotiating to get radioactive material, the primary base for making dirty
>weapons of destruction and terrorism,” he said.
>It was unclear from Mr. Santos’s statement with whom the rebels were
>negotiating.
>Mr. Santos made his claim based on information provided Monday in Bogotá by
>Colombia’s national police chief about the FARC’s negotiations for 110
>pounds of uranium, obtained from the laptop computer of Raúl Reyes, the
>senior FARC commander killed Saturday in Ecuador.

[edit]