The U.S. Assassination Program in Colombia

Why Are We Only Learning of This Now?

by DANIEL KOVALIK

One of the many paramilitary groups supported by the CIA and Colombian government: disgusting murderers charged with intimidating the civilian population.

On December 21, 2013, The Washington Post published a story entitled, “Covert action Colombia,” about the intimate and critical role of the CIA and the NSA in helping to assassinate “at least two dozen” leaders of the Colombian FARC guerillas from “the early 2000s” to and through the present time. The author of the story, Dana Priest, claims that the story is based on “interviews with more than 30 former and current U.S. and Colombian officials.”

While The Washington Post story reads like an advertisement for the CIA and NSA, there are some truths buried in the piece which are worthy of consideration. The most illuminating statement is that while the CIA and NSA, allegedly in the interest of fighting drug trafficking and terrorism, have assisted the Colombian government in hunting down and murdering Marxist FARC guerillas with U.S.-made smart bombs, “for the most part, they left the violent paramilitary groups alone.”

This is an important point, for as the piece itself acknowledges, the paramilitaries are indeed “violent,” and, with the help of the U.S.-backed Colombian military, have been engaged in a decades-long campaign of terror against the civilian population. And consequently, the U.S. officially designated the predecessor of the current paramilitaries – that is, the AUC — as a terrorist organization. Meanwhile, it is well-accepted that both the Colombian paramilitaries and their military allies are major drug traffickers in their own right.

In short, the U.S. is aligning with known terrorists and drug dealers in Colombia in the name of fighting terrorism and drugs. While this may seem preposterous, there is indeed a logic to it.

First of all, the U.S. is all for terrorism in Colombia. Indeed, paramilitary terror in Colombia, and in Latin America in general, is the brain child of the U.S. and a part and parcel of the “National Security” doctrine initiated by President Kennedy in 1962. As Noam Chomsky has explained on numerous occasions, this doctrine, and the death squads that went with it, was initiated in response to both the Cuban Revolution of 1959 as well as the doctrine of Liberation Theology and its “preferential treatment for the poor” which arose in response to Vatican II. [1]

The result of the implementation of the “National Security” doctrine was massive repression of popular, democratic forces, and the murder, disappearance, imprisonment and torture of those struggling for social justice, such as trade unionists, peasant organizers and priests advocating for the poor. As to the latter group, at least 80 Catholic priests have been murdered in Colombia since 1984.

As Chomsky again notes, “[i]t is not seriously in question, as John Coatsworth writes in the recently published Cambridge University History of the Cold War, that from 1960 to ‘the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites.’ Among the executed were many religious martyrs, and there were mass slaughters as well, consistently supported or initiated by Washington.”

Thus, there is a seamlessness to the decades-long policy of the U.S. in siding with right-wing death squads which inflict terror against the Colombian population – terror which includes the mass displacement of millions of peasants, with Colombia now having the largest internally displaced population in the world at over 5 million; forced disappearances, with Colombia now far exceeding the former Latin American leader, Argentina under the military junta, with over 50,000 disappeared persons; and the “false positive” scandal in which over 3,000 innocent young men were lured to their deaths by the Colombian military which killed them and then falsely passed them off as guerillas in order to justify continued backing by the United States.

Similarly, the U.S. is not against drug trafficking per se, but rather, is only concerned with making sure that its friends – both military and corporate — benefit from the trade. First of all, as noted above, it is well-established that the U.S.-backed Colombian military and its paramilitary allies are some of the chief drug traffickers in Colombia. And again, the U.S. has left their trafficking alone because it is content for these forces to profit from the trade.

As The Guardian recently explained, the entire Western banking system is propped up by billions of dollars of Colombian drug monies. [1] Therefore, it is not in the U.S. interests to too effectively combat drugs. And, sure enough, it has utterly failed to do so despite the over $9 billion it has spent on the ostensible “war on drugs” in Colombia and the greater Andean region. Rather, in what is well-known as the “balloon effect,” all that the U.S. has managed to do is force the drug trade out of parts of Colombia and south to places like Peru, and north to Mexico where over 60,000 innocents have now been killed in the ostensible “war on drugs.”

Of course, The Washington Post story on the CIA/NSA program to assassinate FARC leaders, and its accompanying charts which purport to show a decrease in overall drug trafficking, at least from Colombia, fails to point any of this out. As noted above, The Washington Poststory reads like an advertisement for the CIA and NSA and their secret “black ops” programs which are funded by Congress, but which the U.S. public knows little to nothing about. And, the U.S. government would largely like to keep it that way. In this case, I suspect that the CIA and NSA cooperated with The Washington Post story in order to justify future “black ops” funding as well as to impact the ongoing peace talks which are now taking place in Havana, Cuba between the Colombian government and the FARC.

On this latter issue, it is my belief that at least sectors of the U.S. government want to scuttle the ongoing peace talks between the Colombian government and the FARC – as the U.S. has done so often before. [3] In this case, The Washington Post story seems designed to bolster the sectors in Colombia that already oppose the peace process – namely, former President Alvaro Uribe, his political allies and the right-wing paramilitaries which the U.S. has intentionally left alone – by painting the false impression that the civil war in Colombia is militarily winnable.

As we enter the 50^th year of the conflict, it is now evident to any rational person that this not a winnable war for either side, and that a negotiated settlement is the only hope for peace in Colombia and for the civilians caught in the middle of the war. It is critical that those in the U.S. interested in peace join at this pivotal moment with those brave souls in Colombia who are risking their very lives – indeed, 29 members of the pro-peace Marcha Patriotica have been murdered in the past year and a half — to promote a political solution to the half century old conflict in that country. [4]

Daniel Kovalik teaches International Human Rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

Notes.

[1] See, https://www.bostonreview.net/noam-chomsky-responsibility-of-intellectuals-redux

[2] See, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/02/western-banks-colombian-cocaine-trade

[3] See, http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/04/economist-explains-why-colombia-produces-less-cocaine,

[4] See, Killing Peace: Colombia’s Conflict and the Failure of U.S. Intervention (2002), by Garry Leech.

[5] To hear some of the brave Colombian voices of peace and their suggestions for how the U.S. can constructively support the peace process, go tohttp://www.wola.org/video/livestream_perspectives_on_colombia_s_peace_process_and_opportunities_for_us_engagement

Obama’s State of the Union address: An empty and reactionary charade

By Joseph Kishore, wsws.org
(See also the Appendix, with an OpEd by Alternet’s Lynn Stuart Parramore, “Obama’s Underwhelming Plan to Tackle Inequality.”]

obamaSOTU

US President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday was, perhaps even more than his previous addresses, a cynical and reactionary charade. Empty rhetoric was combined with a complete disconnect from the reality confronting millions of people and an assertion of executive power.

The thrust of the speech was a mixture of pro-business nostrums, militarist jingoism and a jumble of penny-ante proposals. The media’s attempt to promote the speech as a major address on inequality was a deliberate falsification aimed at drumming up interest among a generally indifferent and hostile population.

Instead it was a threadbare attempt to cover over the reality of the past year, a year in which the mask fell off a society riven by historically unprecedented levels of social inequality and mass poverty, overseen by a vast police-state spying apparatus, on the verge of another global war of incalculable consequences and presided over by the most right-wing administration in US history.

Obama himself spoke before the members of the US House of Representatives and the Senate, the majority of them millionaires, as a representative of the financial aristocracy and the military-intelligence apparatus.

He began by painting the US as a country undergoing a booming economic recovery, with “the lowest unemployment rate in over five years,” a “rebounding housing market” and a growing manufacturing sector. He did not mention that the unemployment rate has fallen largely due to millions of people having given up the search for work, or that the very small increase in manufacturing jobs is due to the collapse of wages encouraged by the administration.

An empty ritual to preserve the idea of a functioning democracy, at loggerheads with truth in every respect. The mark of a system defined by lies and hypocrisy.

On economic policy, Obama began with a call to make things “easier for more companies” through tax breaks. The two parties, he said, were agreed that, “our tax code is riddled with wasteful, complicated loopholes that punish businesses investing here, and reward companies that keep profits abroad.” He called for a lowering of corporate tax rates, with media reports indicating that this might be as much as 7 percentage points.

In the midst of his praise for the supposed resurgence of manufacturing in America, Obama failed to mention that the historical center of American manufacturing, Detroit, is currently in bankruptcy. With the support of the administration, the courts are being utilized to force through deep cuts in pensions and cut off access to culture and other social rights.

Obama did, however, praise the new CEO of GM, Mary Barra, who was invited to the speech as a special guest. Barra, touted as the first female CEO of a major auto company, is planning to accelerate cost cutting in Europe and America in order to increase already surging profits in the auto industry. He also praised Detroit Manufacturing Systems, an auto parts supplier that has worked closely with the unions to hire workers at a fraction of their former wages.

The president, who has done more than any of his predecessors to funnel money into Wall Street, acknowledged that “corporate profits and stock prices have rarely been higher, and those at the top have never done better,” as if the policies of his own administration had nothing to do with it. He quickly claimed, however, that the American people “don’t resent those who, by virtue of their efforts, achieve incredible success.”

Presumably Obama was referring to the likes of JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Obama’s favored banker, who, despite the repeated and documented criminal activities of his company, has not only gone unpunished, but last week received a 74 percent pay raise.

Obama made as brief a reference as possible to the fact that at the end of last year, due to the actions of Democrats and Republicans, 1.6 million people were cut off of extended unemployment benefits. At the same time, he called for “reforming unemployment insurance so that it’s more effective in today’s economy,” which could only mean introducing greater restrictions on eligibility.

The president was also silent on the Democrats and Republicans having just agreed to slash $8.7 billion from food stamps, only the second cut in the program since it was founded (the first coming just a few months ago). He touted a right-wing immigration reform and his health care overhaul, an opening shot against all the social programs introduced in the 1930s and 1960s.

The headline proposal from Obama, intended as a sop to the trade unions and the administration’s liberal and pseudo-left supporters, was an executive order to require federal contractors to pay a minimum wage of $10.10. This requirement will only apply to new or renewed contracts, not existing ones.

In the run-up to the speech, there was a concerted effort in the media to paint a picture of partisan gridlock, which Obama was proposing to overcome through executive actions. Given that Obama’s actual proposals amount to nothing, and that the parties are agreed on fundamentals, Obama’s repeated insistence that “I’m going to do” what is required has the distinct and ominous odor of a presidential dictatorship.

It is notable that even though it is an election year, Obama made no call for voters to elect individuals pledged to implement his proposals. Rather the speech was an assertion, from an individual who more than any other has presided over the shredding of large sections of the Constitution, that the president has the power to act regardless of opposition. The target of these actions is the working class.

There was almost no mention of the vast police-state spying apparatus that has been revealed over the past year. The president sits on top of a military-intelligence complex that monitors the communications of virtually the entire planet. The day before Obama’s remarks, the latest information from Edward Snowden revealed that the US and its UK partners collect data from cell phone applications in order to determine the “political alignments” of millions of users worldwide.

Obama’s only reference to the collapse of democratic rights was to defend the “vital work of our intelligence community” while promising token reforms in order to boost “public confidence, here and abroad, that the privacy of ordinary people is not being violated.” In fact, these reforms are intended to ensure that the government can go on violating this privacy.

As Obama spoke, Snowden remained in exile in Russia, facing death threats from US military and intelligence officials.

Obama heaped praise on the military, citing a plan for the long-term presence of tens of thousands of US troops in Afghanistan, insisting that the danger from Al Qaeda remains and threatening countries around the world. He welcomed recent moves from the Iranian regime to accommodate the demands of American imperialism and threatened that if Tehran fails to toe the line, war remains an option.

Obama lent support to the protests stoked by the US and European powers in Ukraine, led by extreme nationalist and fascistic forces. He pledged to “continue to focus on the Asia-Pacific,” a reference to the “pivot to Asia” that is aimed at countering China’s rise and threatens to unleash a global conflict.

As has become traditional in such events, Obama singled out individuals in the audience, generally victims of the policies of the ruling class, who are exploited to make various political points. Nowhere was this more sickening than at the end of the speech, when the president heaped praise on a veteran severely maimed by an explosion in Afghanistan.

The assembled congressmen—responsible for wars of aggression that inflicted a similar fate on thousands of Americans, while killing hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis—gave a lengthy standing ovation to one of the victims of their criminal policies. This spectacle was a fitting conclusion to a nauseating political ritual.

______

APPENDIX

AlterNet [1] / By Lynn Stuart Parramore [2]

State of the Union: Obama’s Underwhelming Plan to Tackle Inequality

January 28, 2014 |

And… action! There he is, tall and lean, his pleasant face composed in an expression at once cheerful and slightly supercilious. It’s our president, looking painfully aware of the inauthenticity of political spectacle, but resigned to it, because, whatever. Yet, as disenchantment has settled over his presidency, the Enchanter in Chief must get an enthusiastic vibe going. Which is to say that the wonky incrementalist must pass himself off as a man of big vision and jump over a giant believability gap that has opened in the last six years.

The State of the Union, we’re told, is his last big chance.

The SOTU was born out of a vague mandate in the Constitution that the President check in with Congress from “time to time.” Jefferson didn’t like the spoken delivery, feeling it too imperial, but Wilson brought the custom back. Truman turned the address into a televised spectacle, and Bill Clinton brought it to the web.

So now we’re stuck with it. Officially, Congress is the audience. But the real audience is the American public. Just now, that particular public is not overly thrilled with President Obama, whose job approval rating stands at 43 percent.

Does the SOTU matter? To pundits who need to pundicate, sure. To the public, not so much. The public has a point. Obama talked about a lot of stuff in his 2013 SOTU, like a new jobs program and new gun controls, and Congress pretty much ignored him. He told those pesky politicians to set aside partisanship and work together to pass a budget. Several months later, the government shut down over a budget impasse. And so on.

Now, we’re led to believe that the president has big plans, yes, big plans indeed. He will even thumb his nose at Congress to get them done if need be. His plans include include raising wages to $10.10 for people making a miserly $7.25, the current Dickensian minimum. Oh, wait, he’s only talking about federal contract wages. OK, really only some of them. And only the new ones.

An income of $10.10 per hour falls short of a living wage. The plan does not even match the boldness of conservative California businessman Ron Unz, who wants to raise the minimum to $12 [3] because he doesn’t like having to pay for all the social welfare programs people have to rely on when they get paid squat.

If you were wanting something bold and butt-kicking, something that takes on inequality in America the way Lyndon B. Johnson took on poverty in his 1964 State of the Union address, you did not find it tonight.

You didn’t hear about expanding Social Security, a sensible plan supported by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others. You didn’t hear about getting to full employment (but you did hear some conservative rhetoric about how unemployment is really about workers not having the right skills, which has been repeatedly debunked). You didn’t hear about bringing justice to criminal bankers who prey on hard-working Americas. You didn’t hear about asking the rich to pay their fair share in taxes, or putting a financial transaction tax on Wall Street, or backing off the grotesque Trans-Pacific Partnership, or ending too-big-to-fail, or taking real action to get the money out of politics.

Instead of tapping into the full power of the federal government to tackle our most urgent problems, Obama meekly suggested that government might, in certain cases, be obligated to do something. A little something. At some point.

He mentioned a new retirement savings proposal. If your employer doesn’t offer a retirement plan, which nowadays, usually consists of an inadequate 401(k), then you would be able to deduct a percentage of your paycheck to purchase Treasury bonds and eventually turn your account into an IRA. Congratulations. You are now stuck with a do-it-yourself retirement plan of the sort that has been not working out ever since somebody got the bright idea [4] that ordinary people could transform themselves into sophisticated money managers. The Economic Policy Institute recently released a study proving that do-it-yourself retirement is driving economic inequality, leaving regular Americans further behind than ever. But never mind.

Brian Graff, CEO of American Society of Pension Professionals & Actuaries, who has spoken with Treasury about the president’s retirement plan, shared his view with Politico[5]: “It’s not what I would describe as an earth-shattering move.” You can say that again.

Meanwhile, half the entire population is living at or near the poverty line, while the rich have never had it so good in America. But no biggie.

Obama’s theme tonight was America as the Land of Opportunity. “Opportunity is who we are. And the defining project of our generation is to restore that promise.”

OK, maybe not big opportunity. How about small opportunity? For some folks. Um, not really. Well, what did you want, a pony?

To Struggle With Hindutva Fascists Among the Adivasi Community

By Analytical Monthly Review

Manmohan Singh

Samir Amin in “The Democratic Fraud and the Universalist Alternative” in our issue of October 2011 sets out the fundamental process of the “democratic” fraud:

“Politics of Language, Religion and Identity: Tribes in India” (Economic and Political WeeklyMarch 26, 2005) has set out the contours of the issue:

To begin with, whether tribes are to be treated as Hindus is a debatable question. There are both similarities and differences in the religious practices of the Hindus and tribes. The protagonists of Hindutva have, however, conveniently overlooked the differences. Even on similarities, it is not tenable to treat tribes as Hindus. The similarities have been drawn based on two sources. One is the influence of Hinduism on tribes and the other is similarity due to the fact that both are, to a greater or lesser extent natural religions. There is no doubt that there has been much give and take between the two religions. However the influence of Hinduism on tribes, though present, is not an adequate ground for describing tribes as Hindus. The other aspect that is alluded to is the dimension of natural religion. As a natural religion, tribal religion shares many attributes in common with Hinduism as with the religious practices of tribes in Americas or Africa as well. Yet, it is doubtful if the religious practices of tribes in Americas or Africa can be described as Hinduism or that these tribes can be alluded to as Hindus. To categorise tribes as Hindus in India therefore smacks of cultural and religious expansionism.

This expansionism runs more directly into the ties that bind us yet today to the most rotten corpse of our history: caste. Social scientists, as Xaxa goes on to point out, have generally posited that it is the social organisation of tribes rather than religion per se that make it impossible for a tribal to be Hindu and a member of a tribe at the same time. But it is the concrete historical circumstances, including above all the ability of the hegemonic power to deprive the weakest among us of both self-determination and self-definition, that provides the ground for the hindutva assault on tribal identity. Xaxa points out:

Economic and Political Weekly February 6, 1999)

In fact, history shows that even prior to the coming of Christian missionaries, almost no adivasis sought to become Hindus. The colonial era, with its forest laws and permanent settlements, created the great crisis in tribal life that opened the field to the Christian missionaries. It is a tragedy of the struggle for independence that the poison of communalist identity politics spread by the Hindu missionary organisations such as the Mahasabha and the Arya Dharam Sevak Sangh was encouraged, tacitly and also openly, even by progressive nationalists personally of anti-caste disposition. See, Archana Prasad, “Communalism and Tribal Welfare”Akhbar, September, 2001. The means to this penetration were, as with the Christian missionaries, the provision of the most basic of social services to the displaced and terrorised tribal communities.

With adoption of neo-liberal policies by the ruling classes, once again the speed of the attacks on the tribal communities is increasing day by day — they are being deprived of the conditions necessary for life itself — jal, jangal and zamin (water, forest and land). By indiscriminate mining, setting up industries based on extractivist practices and big dams, adivasis are driven into barren marginal strips of wasteland. Once again the provision of some relief offers an opportunity for militant Hindu organizations of different formations under RSS. The Sangh Parivar has set up a plethora of organizations that focus on tribal areas. Some of the prominent ones are Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, Ekal Vidyalaya, Sewa Bharati, Vivekananda Kendra, Bharat Kalyan Pratishthan, Friends of Tribal Society. Vanvasi Kalyan Parishad itself works through its 32 affiliated organizations. Anti-Christian hate campaigns and violence are only a part of it. An overt aim is to gather vote banks for the immediate goal of seizure of power at the centre, as explained by a VHP official commenting on plans for setting up more Ekal Vidyalayas in Gujarat:

The Foreign Exchange of Hate: IDRF and the American Funding of Hindutva, “Appendix F Adivasi vs Vanvasi: The Hinduization of Tribals in India”, Outlook India November 20, 2002)

In a recent editorial we urged the left to respond to the imminent hindutva fascist drive for power by a mobilisation of our own. As a practical suggestion, joining in a non-sectarian manner — putting aside the grievances of the recent past — with fellow communists active in the struggle of the adivasis for life and livelihood, on both a tactical and a strategic level, might well be among the best options we have.

Heard around the Net (verbatim): An exchange on hunting

Excerpts found on the International Animal Rescue Foundation World Action South Africa (Facebook) page

“The bottom line is that far too many people still regard these crimes against animals as “normal” and legal behavior. In my view, this alone should be proof conclusive that “God” does not exist, and if s/he exists, what a mess s/he made of our planet by making humans the summit of the animal pyramid! All of it compounded hugely by widespread human ignorance, selfishness and political corruption. Not to mention the ineptitude of so many big animal protection groups.”—P. Greanville

lionessKiller

International Animal Rescue Foundation World Action South Africa•••
“The time will come when public opinion will no longer tolerate amusements based on the mistreatment and killing of animals. The time will come, but when? When will we reach the point that hunting, the pleasure in killing animals for sport, will be regarded as a mental aberration”.Killer – Gary Kock — with Ishtar Freya Locutora, Marina Zárate, Natalia da Luz, Paddy Panda Da Bear, Temur Lachkepiani, Edna Molewa, Land Macs, Simone Emaitre, Bunny Carranza, Helen Troy, Jose Calos Depre, Charmaine Marion Gold, Ainim Lolliepop Torina, Craash Beck, Gavin Tonks, Manuela Mescalchin, Bob Linden, Michele Brown, Jasha Kossio, Daca Granic, Patti LePage and Titi Franciosi.Like · · Share · 11 November 2013

William Lewis People. Lots of us kill animals for meat, shoes, handbags and belts. We destroy wildlife through pollution and by building roads and railways
These lions are beautiful but are often bred on farms to be shot as a commodity. Is that really any worse than what we do to other animals. I am an animal lover, a vet and have worked with lions. I think we need to put this in perspective and not get carried away with emotions. It also creates tourism…And jobs and helps to drive the local economy. It’s not all bad
Like · Reply · 3 · 12 November 2013 at 01:55
- Denise Nelson Raising canned animals, who get used to humans, is EVIL!!!!!!!!!
  Like · 12 November 2013 at 07:02
- Branford Perry William Lewis, the elimination of human-induced injustice and evil cannot be eliminated by so called “calm reasoning” alone. It also requires emotion, passion, to stay the course. What you say is correct as far as it goes: most of us humans are INDIRECTLY involved in huge crimes against animals, and more information and mobilization of the public is need to make a dent on that (where is the bloody media when we need them?), but killing animals for pleasure belongs in a different category, that of human depravity. Besides, accepting calmly that ONLY through the death of animals can we manage some ameliorations is bankrupt moral reasoning parading as common sense. As a vet you should be leading the charge instead of going along with the lowest common denominators in the human pack. South Africa—a mess of a country, corrupt to the bone—resembles and reminds me of Texas…
  Like · 29 minutes ago
Wilhelm Drubel The Only Good Hunter Is A Dead Hunter‼️
Like · Reply · 4 · 11 November 2013 at 20:16
David Erasmus Killing wild animals for ‘fun’ is not appropriate behaviour…
Like · Reply · 3 · 12 November 2013 at 05:51
Patricia Bess-Greiner Dear Gary Koch I pray that a hunter shoots you and mount your head on their wall!!!
Like · Reply · 1 · 12 hours ago
Rina Cranko Robinson Wilhelm i totally agree with you.THE ONLY GOOD HUNTER IS A DEAD HUNTER!!!!!
Like · Reply · 2 · 12 November 2013 at 01:07
Patricia Bess-Greiner Not this murderer again. I can not stand the sight of this coward SOB
Like · Reply · 1 · 12 hours ago
Brad Thorpe Wow, this man looks so proud of himself. Well done for shooting a defenceless animal you coward. Id love you tie your hands and feet up and put you in the wild and see how strong you’d be then. Punk ass!!
Like · Reply · 1 · 12 November 2013 at 03:49
Martha Elva Morales Moreno Q estúpido
Like · Reply · 12 November 2013 at 01:53
David Erasmus Must be mentally disturbed to think this is cool…….
Like · Reply · 1 · 12 November 2013 at 01:19
Thomasina Knight Now what’s he gonna do? Now that he’s killed this fine lioness. Sacrilege! Where does he live? He should be next.
Like · Reply · 1 · 11 November 2013 at 23:32
Jody Crane Now!!!! Right Now!!!
Like · Reply · 1 · 11 November 2013 at 21:38
SirSuresh Waran BASTARD…
Like · Reply · 1 · 11 November 2013 at 20:11
Christina Wittkamp Idiot
Like · Reply · 11 November 2013 at 18:40
Kenneth Hope Shoot Gary Kock….his name says a lot about him…
Like · Reply · 1 · 11 November 2013 at 17:19
Laura Griesbach Gary kock; fitting name…
Like · Reply · 13 hours ago
Charmaine Bosman Jou moordenaar kom laat ons jou skiet !!!!!!!!See TranslationLike · Reply · 12 November 2013 at 12:12
David Erasmus Massive breeding of Lions for ‘canned hunting’ is also just so wrong…
Like · Reply · 12 November 2013 at 06:08
Tina Fitzgerald DOUSCHE BAG
Like · Reply · 11 November 2013 at 19:22
Peter Kaagaard Madsen we must help wildlife not just shoot them for sjovet it is one of the most beautiful cats animals we have on earth
Like · Reply · 11 November 2013 at 19:08
To Give Bastard!
Like · Reply · 11 November 2013 at 16:29
Annette M Rowley Wanker,,, that is all
Like · Reply · 12 hours ago

Another great accomplishment for humankind.

Phoebe Sickal-DeSmet Raising animals to round up or send to be hunted down and slaughtered is not sport. What, pray tell, is sportsmanlike conduct?
Like · Reply · 18 hours ago · Edited
Shanon Monteith What an asshole!
Like · Reply · 27 January at 22:58
Andrew Fuller There’s has got to be better ways to raise money Mr Lewis ?
Like · Reply · 23 hours ago
Anonymous Tiers monde Dieu aima les oiseaux et inventa les arbres. L’homme aima les oiseaux et inventa les cages.
Like · Reply · 11 November 2013 at 18:16
Krisztina Földi Idióta barom!!!!!!Idiot!!! (Translated by Bing)Like · Reply · 22 November 2013 at 15:34
Chantel Cronje I hate hunters. Kill the hunters not the animals…
Like · Reply · 11 November 2013 at 23:42
Maria Widger Hope he gets what he deserves. Big man when he has a big gun Prick !

• The hunter’s name could not be corroborated but many on this thread claim it is one Gary Kock.

Holder the Hypocrite

Why Doesn’t Snowden Get the Same Deal, the DoJ Routinely Gives Major Corporate Crime Figures?

by RUSSELL MOKHIBER

Attorney General Eric Holder said last week that prosecutors would be willing to talk to National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden on the condition that Snowden be willing to plead guilty to criminal charges.

Holder doesn’t require that condition to negotiate with the most egregious corporate criminals.

In fact, during is tenure, Holder has perfected the government’s practice of offering deferred and non prosecution agreements to major corporations to settle major corporate crime cases.

Under a deferred prosecution agreement, the corporation is charged with a crime, but if the company abides by the agreement for a period of years, then the government drops the criminal charges.

Under a non prosecution agreement, the government just collects a fine. There is no criminal charge. There is no admission of wrongdoing.

Since taking office in February 2009, Holder has dished out deferred and non prosecution agreements to more than 100 large publicly held corporations, including JPMorgan Chase (Madoff Ponzi scheme), Archer Daniels Midland(foreign bribery), Diebold (foreign bribery), UBS (interest rate manipulation),HSBC (money laundering), Pfizer (foreign bribery), Wachovia (money laundering), Tyson Foods (foreign bribery), Barclays Bank (Trading with the Enemies Act), Deutsche Bank (tax shelter fraud).

How is what Snowden did any worse than what these companies did?

In an editorial earlier this month titled Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower, the New York Times wrote that as a result of Snowden’s leaks, “the public learned in great detail how the agency has exceeded its mandate and abused its authority, prompting outrage at kitchen tables and at the desks of Congress, which may finally begin to limit these practices.”

During is tenure, Holder has perfected the government’s practice of offering deferred and non prosecution agreements to major corporations to settle major corporate crime cases.

“The revelations have already prompted two federal judges to accuse the N.S.A. of violating the Constitution (although a third, unfortunately, found the dragnet surveillance to be legal). A panel appointed by President Obama issued a powerful indictment of the agency’s invasions of privacy and called for a major overhaul of its operations.”

“Considering the enormous value of the information he has revealed, and the abuses he has exposed, Mr. Snowden deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight,” the Times wrote. “He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a great service. It is time for the United States to offer Mr. Snowden a plea bargain or some form of clemency that would allow him to return home, face at least substantially reduced punishment in light of his role as a whistle-blower, and have the hope of a life advocating for greater privacy and far stronger oversight of the runaway intelligence community.”

Forget the criminal plea.

Holder ought to give Snowden the same deal he routinely gives major corporate criminals — a deferred or non prosecution agreement.

Russell Mokhiber edits the Corporate Crime Reporter.