Susana Pimiento's blog

The Fellowship of Reconciliation and eighteen other Colombian and US Human Rights groups, issued a call today to the US Government not to certify Colombia as meeting the human rights conditions required to receive U.S. military assistance.

PDF Attachment: 

us-colombian_ngo_statement_on_certification.pdf

A couple weeks after the ruling declaring invalid the US-Colombia military bases agreement, as the dust settles, politicians and analysts are giving kudos to the Constitutional Court ruling saying that it was for the better.  Most of those voices come from former supporters of the deal —including liberal party presidential candidate, Rafael Pardo— can be explained largely by the strong anti Chavez sentiment that saw the bases agreement as a strong deterrent tool against Venezuela.

Colombia’s Constitutional Court ruled invalid the agreement signed last October allowing the United States to use at least seven military bases in Colombia.

On May 4, the Colombian Senate held a special hearing on the illegal activities of the Colombian intelligence Agency (DAS). Such activities have included not only illegal surveillance, but a series of acts that amount to State terrorism, such as death threats, kidnappings, harassment of children, blackmailing and framing of Supreme Court Justices, opposition leaders, journalists and human rights defenders. DAS even created a manual for how to threaten the children of their targets.

We learnt this week about the secret prisons run by the Iraqi army designed to isolate hundreds of Sunni prisoners from the action of courts. God forbid, with no evidence that would stand in trial, the prisoners would have been granted a habeas corpus request! Detainees were disappeared, their relatives unable to find their whereabouts. Tortured. Sodomized. Raped.