Colombia: The Importance of Being Earnestly Idiotic

Jack: I don't actually know who I am by birth. I was... well, I was found.
Lady Bracknell: Found?
Jack: Yes. The late Mr. Thomas Cardew, an old gentlemen of a kindly disposition found me and gave me the name of Worthing because he happened to have a first class ticket to Worthing at the time. Worthing is a place in Sussex. It's a seaside resort.
Lady Bracknell: And where did this charitable gentlemen with the first class ticket to the seaside resort find you?
Jack: In a handbag.
Lady Bracknell: A handbag?
The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde, 1895


Just to show that the age of total inept Austin Powers dumbassery is alive and well in the British Secret Service, let's all shout "Yeah Baby!" at how an agent recently jeopardized very large anti-narcos operation by leaving a memory stick with names and details of all concerned in a handbag on a bus in Colombia. The UK Times has the story:

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British spy loses secrets in a handbag

A BRITISH agent has thrown the war against drug traffickers into chaos by leaving top secret information about covert operations on a bus in South America.

In a blunder that has cost taxpayers millions of pounds and put scores of lives at risk, the drugs liaison officer lost a computer memory stick said to contain a list of undercover agents’ names and details of more than five years of intelligence work.

It happened when the MI6-trained agent left her handbag on a transit coach at El Dorado airport in Bogota, Colombia. Intelligence chiefs were forced to wind up operations and relocate dozens of agents and informants amid fears the device could fall into the hands of drugs barons.

The incident, which was hushed up by the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca), the agent’s employer, is an embarrassment for the government. It is another blow for yada yada continues here

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Here's an extract from another report on the ballsup

"A source claims the memory stick contained details of anti-narcotics intelligence compiled over more than five years. The loss risked the lives of undercover agents and informants who have now had to be relocated. He said the total cost of aborted operations was £100m..."

There is a secret US military base in Peru.....

The secret document as published by La Primera today

.....which only comes as a surprise to those silly enough to believe what the liars that inhabit the Twobreakfasts government say. Peru newspaper La Primera has today got its hands on a secret memo (not secret any more though) that outlines the US military prescence in the VRAE coca growing region of Peru. Even this humble corner of cyberspace knows as much, though. In this post back in February I wrote...

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In fact, there might not be a formal US air base in Peru the same as the one in Ecuador, but anyone who hangs in the right places in lowland Peru more than a week knows the VRAE airbase, supposedly Peru soldiers only, is constantly packed full of US soldiers, planes, copters and air crew.

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...which, funnily enough, is the exact scenario laid out by La Primera in its report today. Here's a section translated by yours truly:

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• "....The government categorically denied the possibility of the installation of a US military base in our country. However, La Primera has gained access to an official document stating the Ministry of Defence coordinated with the ex-commander general of the armed forces, Edwin Donayre, the request of the United States of America to construct an Operations and Intelligence Command Centre at the Pichari military base in the Valle de los Rios Apurimac y Ene (VRAE).

• Via notice 058 VPD/A/SEC dated March 10th 2008, the Vice-minister of Defence Policy, Nuria Esparch Fernández, told Donayre that the administration of the sector coordinated with the Southern Command, via the the Constulting and Military Assistance Group of the United States, the construction plans for "A centre of medical assistance and a command centre for operations and intelligence in the territory where the armed forces are stationed in Pichari."."

Oh how they insulted Evo Morales when he had the balls to accuse Peru of running a secret US base. Let's see what they throw at each other this time, as apologies from Twobreakfasts are as unlikely as a hunger strike.

Colombia: Another day, another gov't human rights abuse: But this one is big.

The Colombian weekly magazine 'Semana' has today broken another big story. Those Spanish speakers amongst you should stop reading this, go here immediately and read the report, but as a quick resumé of Semana's scoop:

• Colombia's official snoops, the "Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad" (Administrative Department of Security) normally known as DAS has been eavesdropping on anyone and everyone regarded as a 'threat'.

• The list includes opposition leaders, journalists critical of the government, members of the judiciary that have been heading cases against government officials, government functionaries and civil servants.

• Just before a new head of DAS took up his post on January 22nd, mountains of documents were secretly destroyed by DAS. An anonymous whistleblower who works as a detective at DAS (obviously anonymous, as if his identity were revealed he could probably count his life expectancy in minutes) told Semana (via Ottotrans™):

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"We received the order to collect everything we had in several offices in the building and in external centres and take it to the Counterintelligence. For two days we collected portable hard drives, we changed computer hard drives, collected CD-ROMs, voice archives and confidential documents. I alone, not counting my colleagues, took two boxes full of these things.

"Of all the boxes that were taken to Counterintelligence, with documents, recordings and such, only one survived, which was taken out of the 11th floor on Wednesday afternoon. I don't know what was left in it or where it was taken. I just know that everything else was destroyed."

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• But possibly the most damning and chilling aspect of the Semana report is the allegation, backed up by its anonymous sources, that DAS ran a network of information sales and would sell official intelligence to narcotraffickers, paramilitaries and guerrilla groups such as the FARC. In a country with an appalling record of extrajudicial killings, union leader asassinations and attacks on judicial bodies, this is an astonishing revelation (though it has to be said, hardly a surprise for those who have followed the rise and rise of Alvaro Uribe and his pseudo-democratic government).
  

Let's see how much of a fuss is made of this story amongst English language media sources. Colour me cynical, but don't hold your breath up there.......



UPDATE: Good English language site Colombia Reports has its take on the story here.