I think in some cases its like this: "He is a S.O.B...but he's our S.O.B......so you can whine and moan about ties to paramilitary groups and right wing death sqauds, but this is wat it is, the US looking out for its own interests. How many people would shed tears if a guy like Chavez took a bullet? He is a troublemaker and a s.o.b., and he's not OUR S.O.B., he's aligning himself and his country with the Soviets....ummm, I mean Russians. Tell me that Putin has good intentions towards the US. Tell me he is not a dictator. You would be wrong on both counts.
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News accounts have described the Colombia rescue as an operation with "no apparent precedent," as The Washington Post called it. But the United States and other countries have occasionally used such ruse tactics against terror groups. A deceptive infiltration strategy of this kind led to the 2004 capture of Ammari Saifi, known as Abderrezak le Para, the head of a North African terrorist network affiliated with Al Qaeda, says the U.S. counterinsurgency expert. While Al Qaeda is no doubt much more difficult to infiltrate than the FARC, John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School, a chief proponent of this strategy, cites the case of Qaeda propagandist Adam Gadahn as proof that it is an "open network." "If a confused young man from California can join up with Al Qaeda, think what professional operatives might do," he says. Vickers said he could not comment on such operations, but acknowledged: "That tactic has been used previously."
Another unheralded U.S. player in Colombia has been John Rendon, who became notorious a few years ago for the role that his consulting company, the Rendon Group, played in selling the war against Iraq. Rendon has pushed a policy of reaching out to dissident rebels within the FARC—the way U.S. forces did with Iraq's Sunni militias—and "psyops" that exploit dissension in the group.
But the "soft" side works only when it is accompanied by hard-hitting tactics. As Vice Minister Pinzón describes the shift, the Colombian military once fought the FARC to a standoff with conventional tactics: military outposts in villages and towns. Now those posts are manned by police, and the military is sending Special-Ops commandos into the jungle to keep the FARC running. As a result, the FARC has been hounded across the border to other countries, and in March the group's No. 2, Raul Reyes, was killed in a jungle bivouac in Ecuador. "It's a very good approach and it's paying dividends," says Vickers. And "amplifications" on that approach, he says, are "paying dividends elsewhere."
With Michael Isikoff in Washington
© 2008
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