"Clinton spills the beans in Colombia after being drugged -- by truth serum," by Dennis Hans, September 25, 2000

"Clinton spills the beans in Colombia after being drugged -- by truth serum," by Dennis Hans, September 25, 2000
© 2000 by Dennis Hans

Clinton spills the beans in Colombia after being drugged -- by truth serum

by Dennis Hans

Cartagena, Colombia, August 30. The honorable William Jefferson Clinton speaking.

You wanna hear something funny? I'm down here in Colombia to give a speech about the drug war, and darned if someone didn't drug me! Seems some clown named Ronaldo at the Cartagena McDonald's spiked my Diet Coke with truth serum. Then he spilled secret sauce all over my speech, so it looks like I'll have to wing it.

First, I need to clarify just who authored "Plan Colombia." Us pushers of the $1.3 billion package pretend this is President Andres Pastrana's plan, to make it look like we're answering the call of an elected civilian leader rather than imposing our will. But the truth is Andy wanted an economic development plan, while his generals and my drug czar, Barry McCaffrey, wanted a plan to intensify the civil and drug wars. I sided with them. So let's get real and call it "Clinton's Plan Colombia" -- "CPC" for short.

One thing I appreciate about Andy is he's a team player. Even though he lost the battle, he went to work selling CPC to the U.S. media and Congress. He eased their concerns by pretending -- I love that word -- he and the high command were committed to ending the unholy alliance between the army and right-wing paramilitary death squads and to subjecting senior officers to the rule of law. In fact, paramilitary massacres have skyrocketed under his watch and senior officers remain above the law. But Andy has so mesmerized the media and Congress with his talk that they've overlooked his walk. Heard the expression "Takes one to know one"? Trust me, Andy truly is The Great Pretender.

And don't sell Drug Czar Barry short. He's just as slick as Willie -- slicker if you factor in his image as a straight shooter. One of his favorite CPC selling points is that Colombia is Latin America's "oldest democracy." Certainly the 1998 election won by Andy was a reasonably free and fair contest -- between two parties that represent the rich, just like back home! But when I hear the term "democracy," I think "civilian control of the military." I think "commander in chief," not army "apologist in chief." As former head of SouthCom, Barry knows well -- but won't acknowledge -- the limits on a Colombian president's power.

Barry also knows that folks don't think "dirty war" when they hear the word "democracy," and Colombia has the longest running one in the hemisphere. For those unfamiliar with the term, a "dirty war" targets legitimate political dissent. Did you know that 3,000 union members have been murdered since 1986, mostly by government forces and their paramilitary partners? Did you know they wiped out a legal, left-wing political party in the late 1980s and early 1990s, murdering scores of elected officials and candidates and thousands of activists? Many were former guerrillas who paid the ultimate price for pursuing reform via peaceful methods in Latin America's "oldest democracy." That's why -- even if my administration were serious about diplomacy -- a negotiated solution would require the same patience and persistence we've brought to Northern Ireland and the Middle East. But we're not serious, so that's that.

Barry and I like to pretend that the army is at war with both the guerrillas and the paramilitaries. We know better, and here's why: For many years we've had more CIA officers and military advisers in Colombia than any other Latin American nation. We pay 'em good money to know the score and to work closely with their Colombian counterparts. In 1990-91 they even helped the Colombians to reorganize their intelligence strategy and increase the use of civilian informants. This was in relation to the civil war, not the drug war, and it paved the way for a steady escalation of paramilitary killings. Twenty years from now, a U.S. president will return to Colombia and apologize for the havoc our policies wreaked.

Human Rights Watch points out that army intelligence is the branch most intimately linked with paramilitaries. True. In fact, our people know the colonels and generals who coordinate the alliance; many are paid CIA "assets." This will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with our Central American counterinsurgencies. Nevertheless, my administration is grateful to the media for ignoring the bleeding obvious, which if revealed would make us look really bad.

I want to talk about "bad apples" and "rogue elements" -- the preferred official lingo for army officers who work with the paramilitaries. Let me tell you who the real army "rogues" are. Now I think of a rogue as a renegade, someone who does his own thing irrespective of the desires of the people at the top. Under my definition, the rogues in the Colombian army are the handful of whistleblowers who have revealed the inner workings of the paramilitary alliance and implicated senior officers in massacres. From the high command's perspective, the "bad apples" are the whistleblowers, and inside the army they are isolated, scared and, in some cases, dead.

My administration has a rogue, too. Harold Koh, the undersecretary of state for labor, human rights and democracy, has produced careful reports on Colombia and given tough speeches that mirror the work of Human Rights Watch. Though he means well, he has no impact on policy. Koh's role, whether he knows it or not, is to give the false impression to dim-witted liberals in Congress that their sole administration ally has the power to ensure that U.S. aid is wisely and humanely used. Koh's net contribution to human rights is negative, as his presence disarms the liberals who could marshal opposition to the ever-increasing amounts of "security" assistance.

You've heard the expression "lies, damned lies, and statistics"? Barry coined it. He has helped to sell the CPC to Congress and the media by citing the great decline in human rights violations by the Colombian army and police in recent years. Of course, he knows as well as I this decline has coincided with skyrocketing massacres by paramilitaries in cahoots with those he euphemistically calls "national democratic forces." That's why human rights groups say the situation continues to deteriorate -- dramatically so under Andy's watch. Unlike Barry, they don't give the high command credit for "outsourcing" the dirty war -- particularly when the army still provides the killers with intelligence, protection and death lists.

One trick the Reagan administration employed to "prove" that the Salvadoran army was weeding out the killers in its ranks was to trumpet that army's statistics on dismissals. Now the Reagan team new the stats were fraudulent -- they probably helped concoct them -- but for PR purposes they took them at face value. Well, my administration is doing the same. But we've been nabbed.

This past Monday, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the Washington Office on Latin America documented how Team Pastrana cooked its books. I won't bore you with the details -- they're available at www.hrw.org/campaigns/colombia/certification.htm. But I do want to stress that this is no case of the Colombian government deceiving the U.S. government. Rather, this is our governments working together to deceive our citizens.

Did you know that the FARC rebels earn an astounding $30-to-100 million from taxing and protecting the drug trade? That's the best estimate of our intelligence people. If you've been paying attention for the last year you probably think they rake in $500 million. That's just a figure we concocted when we were seeking that amount for the Colombian military. Sorry if we gave you the wrong impression. I guess I should also mention that the army-aligned paramilitaries have even stronger links to the drug trade, and drug-money corruption permeates all branches of the armed forces.

You may have heard me use the word "transparency" during the Asian financial crisis. The U.S. insisted that governments in South Korea and Thailand make their banking practices and procedures transparent -- that is, open for all to see. For years human rights groups have been urging us to make transparent the procedures by which we vet Colombian military units for rights abusers, paramilitary links and drug corruption before providing the units with aid and training. We refuse. In this case, "transparency" would reveal just how transparent the vetting process is. Hell, if we went by the book there's not a brigade that would qualify for aid! We don't believe in transparency; we merely invoke it when it suits our purposes.

One more thing: I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. What the hey? I guess the truth serum is wearing off. Hope I didn't say anything foolish. Remember, by implementing President Pastrana's far-sighted plan, we can build a prosperous, democratic, drug-free Colombia. Thank you.

Dennis Hans is a freelance writer whose work has been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, National Post (Canada) and online at TomPaine.com, MediaChannel.org and The Black World Today (tbwt.com). He also has taught mass communications and American foreign policy at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg. He can be reached at HANS_D@popmail.firn.edu.