...to the judge in the Drummond Coal death squad case, telling the judge to excuse Uribe from giving a deposition, and implying that national security was at issue. The judge yielded to this pressure.
Drummond Coal is an Alabama company operating in Colombia, and, like Chiquita, was using fascist death squads to deal with its "labor problem." The victims' families sued Drummond Coal in a U.S. court, and requested a deposition by Uribe because of his very close ties to death squad activity in Colombia. (Something like a hundred of his closest cronies, including family members, are either in jail or under investigation for ties to the death squads, drug trafficking, election fraud, ponzi schemes and other crimes. Prosecutors are after Uribe himself on these crimes, and on running an illegal domestic spying program, which fed info to the death squads to intimidate Uribe's targets, which included judges and opposition politicians, and to assassinate labor union leaders.)
So, items like this from the OP, are both shocking and unsurprising at the same time--a contradictory state of emotions, I know, but that's life under extremely corrupt corporate rule:
“At the same time that Clinton’s State Department was lauding Colombia’s human rights record, her family was forging a financial relationship with Pacific Rubiales, the sprawling Canadian petroleum company at the center of Colombia’s labor strife. The Clintons were also developing commercial ties with the oil giant’s founder, Canadian financier Frank Giustra, who now occupies a seat on the board of the Clinton Foundation, the family’s global philanthropic empire.
“The details of these financial dealings remain murky, but this much is clear: After millions of dollars were pledged by the oil company to the Clinton Foundation — supplemented by millions more from Giustra himself — Secretary Clinton abruptly changed her position on the controversial U.S.-Colombia trade pact. --from the OP (my emphasis)
Hillary's switcheroo on "free trade for the rich" with Colombia, explained.
I remember her switcheroo on this but I didn't know why--thought it was just, ya know, typically murky Clinton politics, like her switcheroo on gay marriage in the other direction. But it's becoming very clear, indeed, that everything she does is about money--into her pocket directly or into her big slush fund, the Clinton Foundation.
Likely she switcherooed on gay rights cuz gays have money to contribute. She supported the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) then later switcherooed on gay marriage. She is inconsistent and unreliable on almost any issue you could name that is important to working people, poor people, minorities of all kinds, women's rights (now waffling on 3rd trimester abortions), health care (for single payer, now against it), and on and on.
Bernie Sanders, of course, opposed DOMA from the beginning, voted against it, spoke against it and has been a consistent and strong supporter of gay rights, even when it was unpopular to do so.--and he is consistent and reliable on ALL issues that affect the majority of people.
More on Uribe:
One other thing that's becoming clear is that it was likely Clinton who engineered honors for Uribe in the U.S., including (during her watch as SoS) academic sinecures at Harvard and Georgetown, and appointment to a prestigious international legal commission. It was my theory at the time that Uribe had damaging info on Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld criminal activities in Colombia and this coddling of Uribe had to do with Obama's "we need to look forward not backward" on the crimes of Bush, Cheney & Rumsfeld, et al. But now, despite the fact that Obama seems to be going along with this, it's looking more like Clinton money-grubbing. And it is possibly both.
It was under this charming character's rule that the Colombian military (fed with billions of U.S. tax dollars) was luring young men with promises of jobs, murdering them and dressing their bodies up as FARC guerrillas, to earn bonuses and up their body counts, to impress U.S. senators that they were being sufficiently murderous against leftist guerrillas. (--the infamous "false positives" scandal.)
Uribe has viciously opposed and tried to sabotage the Colombia/FARC peace talks in Cuba, which are promising to end the 50+ year civil war in Colombia. Uribe thrives on bloodshed and war. His rival, Manual Santos, now president of Colombia, initiated the peace talks, and also wants to decriminalize all drugs. Uribe, of course, adores the corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on drugs."
Some of Uribe's criminal connections:
–One of Uribe’s brothers was arrested this February for allegedly leading a death squad against suspected leftists that was run from the family cattle ranch. A Colombian legislator cited testimony that Álvaro himself may have “ordered massacres” from the ranch.
—Another brother was arrested (but not convicted) for suspected ties to cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar; his extramarital partner was later arrested on a U.S. warrant for allegedly working with the head of Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. Their daughter was also listed by the U.S. Treasury Department as a major money launderer.
–Uribe’s two sons are under investigation for massive tax evasion and showed up in the recent “Panama papers” leak as shareholders in a British Virgin Islands tax shelter;
–Uribe’s campaign manager and former chief of staff was flagged by DEA in 2001 as Colombia’s largest importer of a key precursor chemical for the production of cocaine.
–Uribe received contributions to his 2002 presidential campaign from the country’s largest and most murderous paramilitary organization, the AUC, which was listed by Washington as an international terrorist organization. By the time of Uribe’s election, according to one expert, “the AUC had become the most powerful network of drug traffickers in the country’s history.”
Uribe arranged a sweetheart deal to allow AUC leaders to escape serious justice with most of their wealth intact, until the nation’s top courts intervened. Uribe’s chief of security from 2002 to 2005 pleaded guilty in 2012 to taking bribes to protect the AUC.
–And as far back as 1991, a confidential U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report called Uribe a “close personal friend” of Pablo Escobar, and said he was “dedicated to collaboration with the Medellín cartel at high government levels.” It also noted that his father had been murdered “for his connection with the narcotic traffickers.”
--from the OP (links at the OP)
https://consortiumnews.com/2016/05/19/the-clinton-colombia-connection/
I find it interesting that Hillary Clinton is on the other side from the apparent position of the CIA, on the matter of Uribe. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Obama's CIA Director, Leon Panetta, went to Colombia very early in his Directorship (almost the first thing he did, as I recall) and--in my interpretation of events--put the kabosh on Uribe's plan to extend his term of office (Uribe had bribed several legislators to support it), and helped Manuel Santos to replace Uribe--all of this, I concluded, because: a) Uribe was just too (visibly) dirty with his criminal activities to oversee U.S./Colombia "free trade for the rich"; and/or b) Uribe had dirt on the Bush junta, whom Obama, for reasons we may never learn, is pledged to protect from prosecution or even investigation.
We gotta wonder about Clinton's relationship to U.S. spy agencies, given the revelations about her private, insecure email server. Her, at minimum, cavalier attitude toward the nation's secrets and its sensitive documents, has got to be causing them concern. Who she was trying to avoid the scrutiny of, might be another concern to them. (It might have been more than RW morons in Congress.) She appears to have outed an agent, as well. (Name went thru her server.) And was she running rogue ops (say, in Libya)? Something we will likely never know: Does the CIA/NSA want her indicted? Something we may learn too late: She doesn't qualify for a security clearance--so how can she be President?
My objections to Clinton are quite different. But theirs are the ones that count, in this benighted democracy.
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