INTERPOL In Colombia 3 + 3 = 8 : Miami IMC

On pages 10 and 11 of the report in English, Interpol begins a description about how it came to be involved in the work. It says that on March 4 it received a request from Colombian authorities asking for Interpol's "independent computer forensic technical assistance to examine the user files on the eight seized FARC computer exhibits".

In Appendix 2, they show a letter that they received from Brigadier General Oscar Adolor Narnjo Truillo, Director General of the National Police of Colombia. In the letter General Naranjo requests that INTERPOL evaluate "three (3) computers and three (3) USB devices." Adding three and three, I arrive at a total of six pieces of computer hardware not eight as INTERPOL mentioned.

The next day Mr. Ronald K. Nobel, the Secretary General of Interpol, sent a letter (Appendix 3) to Ms. Maria del Pilar Hurtado Afanador, the directress of the D.A.S (Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad) in Bogota accepting the invitation to go to Colombia to establish the terms of the agreement. In the letter he, again, mentions six pieces of hardware: "three (3) computers and three (3) USB keys."

But on March 6 Ms. Hurtado sends him a letter (Appendix 4) asking that Interpol look at "the three lap-top computers, the three USB keys and two hard-disk drives." On March 4 there were only six items to look at, but for some reason two hard drives were found someplace by March 6.

Throughout their report, INTERPOL speaks of eight pieces of hardware, but I find no place where it questions why the government originally asked them to check only six pieces. It would seem to me that any reputable detective group would ask for such an explanation.

For multiple reasons, the INTERPOL report doesn't fit my description of good detective work that I learned from Dick Tracy, Columbo and G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown.

Throughout the report INTERPOL speaks of the hardware as belonging to Raul Reyes, although they never present any proof of this. This in itself shows prejudice on the part of INTERPOL. The two experts that reviewed the hardware do not speak Spanish. Who were the experts that decided the computers and materials belonged to Reyes? There is a photo in the report showing Reyes sitting in front of a computer. That's proof that the computers and hardware belonged to him? Dick Tracy would have looked for fingerprints, not only of Raul Reyes (which actually could have been put on the computers after he was dead) but of the authorities who touched the computers also. Father Brown would have wondered how the Colombian authorities could find so rapidly documents that said the FARC-EP helped finance Chávez's political campaign in the '90s and that, as president, Chávez had offered them three hundred million dollars. And I think Columbo would have had more than one question to ask Ms. Hurtado before he walked out the door of the D.A.S. office.

By the way, speaking of Colombian authorities, the report says: "Colombian law enforcement authorities have openly stated to INTERPOL's computer forensic experts that an officer in their anti-terrorist unit directly accessed the eight seized FARC computer exhibits under exigent and time-sensitive circumstances between 1 March 2008, when they were seized by Colombian authorities, and 3 March 2008." In my opinion that sentence was included to show how the Colombian government cooperated with INTERPOL in the task it was given. But I cannot believe that simply "an officer" did everything with the computers during those first three days. To me it is another indication of the the way Colombia has distorted what has happened in the events surrounding those days of the attack on Ecuadorian territory.

And referring to Ecuador, President Rafael Correa has said that if we are to believe what the FARC-EP has supposedly said about Ecuador than we should also believe what they have to say about President Uribe's links to drug trafficking and to the para-militaries. Now that INTERPOL has made back-up copies of everything on these eight pieces of hardware, it would be nice if Colombia would share them with Venezuela and Ecuador so that these countries, which seem to be mentioned so frequently in the computers, could see if any mention is made about Colombia in them.

But in any case, it would seem to me that anyone with common sense would put little credibility into whatever comes out of these supposed pieces of evidence. Where did the computers come from? Who did they belong to? Who put the information into them? Even if they were used by Raul Reyes and even if he did enter some items into them, is it possible that an infiltrated person also put items into the computers? There are a multitude of who, what, when, where, why, and how questions that are not answered in the report. More seriously, they are not even asked.

But if you are looking for someone to answer the questions, I wouldn't call on INTERPOL. Where are Dick Tracy, Father Brown and Colombo now that we need them?

Finally, I would suggest reading the the report itself, an article that appeared on Venezuelanalysis.com and a commentary by Eva Golinger.

-30- (Charles Hardy is author of Cowboy in Caracas: A North American's Memoir of Venezuela's Democratic Revolution, published by Curbstone Press. Other essays by Hardy can be found on his personal blog Cowboyincaracas.com . You may write him at cowboyincaracas@yahoo.com.)

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/charlie-hardy...

http://snipurl.com/29wqb

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=405x4482

The War Machine: Or How to Manipulate Reality

By Eva Golinger

Sunday, May 18, 2008

Interpol’s Creativity

Since 2002, the Pentagon has been seeking evidence that intimately relates President Chávez and his government with the FARC. Top secret documents from the Department of Defense (that we have desclassified under FOIA) evidence that the Pentagon has been unable to find proof of a clandestine, subversive relationship between the Venezuelan government and the FARC. The sources used in some Pentagon documents that attempt to show such a relationship are completely unreliable, since they are mass media outlets from Venezuela and Colombia, such as Globovisión, Caracol, El Universal and El Nacional – all of whom are aligned with the opposition to Chávez.

When the Colombian government bombed the FARC camp in Ecuador on March 1, killing two dozen people in an illegal incursion onto Equatorian territory that was condemned by the Organization of American States (OEA) and only supported by the United States (suprise!), it was all they could do to produce evidence they had been seeking for six years. Just hours after the illegal invasion and massacre (during which 5 innocent Mexican visiting students were killed), the head of Colombia’s National Police, General Naranjo, was announcing they had “found” a “laptop” that belonged to Raul Reyes, the FARC commander killed in the bombing, and that the computer contained information that showed a link between President Chávez and several members of his government, and the handover (or offering) of weapons and money to the FARC. (Now we would have to ask how the Colombian police found that key information so quickly amongst the more than 39,000 word files and several million documents contained on the computers that the INTERPOL report says it would take 1,000 years to read). All of sudden, evidence was found that not even the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency or the world’s top spies could encounter during years of secret missions, agent recruiting and handling and psychological operations; that Chávez was going to sell uranium to the FARC to make dirty bombs; that Chávez promised somewhere between $250-$300 million to the FARC; that he gave them weapons; and that together they sought to overthrow Uribe’s government and install a FARC marxist state.

That mysterious machine contained anything the Empire could ever have dreamed up to bury the Venezuelan government and declare it over and done with.

But, there was a big problem: since the machine had been in the hands of the Colombian government – confessed adversary of its Venezuelan neighbor – and the “Documents” that evidenced the relationship with President Chávez were actually just texts written in Word, without signature or seal, there was little faith in their credibility. How easy it is to just write a document in Word on some computer and say it was written by someone else! Word documents don’t have original signature. If they had found – say – a diary or a journal written by the hand of Raul Reyes, then the situation would be quite different, but a bunch of texts in Word? Emails? In today’s world, electronic information is unreliable. Computers can been manipulated from a remote source. Any decent hacker or computer techie can enter into a system and alter whatever, without leaving fingerprints.

So, Colombia did the intelligent thing. They said – lets let an uninvolved third party evaluate the computers to determine whether they have been manipulated or not by us. And that’s when Interpol came along.

The Secretary General of the International Police (INTERPOL), Ronald Kenneth Noble, is an ex US Government employee, and he was First Undersecretary of the Department of Treasury in charge of the Secret Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Center for Federal Law Enforcement Training, the Network of Financial Crimes Control and the Office of Foreign Assets Control (which, by the way, is the entity in charge of enforcing the blockade against Cuba and the prohibition of US citizens to travel there). Noble has been Secretary General of INTERPOL for 8 years (two terms), and it was he who was in charge of supervising the authentication of the “evidence” obtained by the Colombian government in the FARC camp.

INTERPOL was charged with a pretty limited and subjective mision, that was to “Examine the user files on the eight seized FARC computers and to determine whether any of the user files had been newly created, modified or deleted on or after 1 March 2008.” INTERPOL did not occupy itself with verifying the origin, accuracy or source of those files or computers, which means that reasonable doubt still remains regarding the true authorship of that data. INTERPOL took for granted that the machines and the evidence pertained to Raul Reyes and the FARC, which in legal terms prejudices the entire investigation because it shows that from the beginning, INTERPOL had already taken the side of the Colombian government.

INTERPOL’s report
states specifically that the scope of their forensic examination was limited to a) determining the actual data contained in the eight seized FARC computer exhibits, b) verifying whether the user files had been modified in any way on or after 1 March 2008, and c) determining whether Colombian law enforcement authorities had handled and examined the eight seized FARC computer exhibits in conformity with internationally recognized principles for handling electronic evidence by law enforcement.” [Interpol Report, page 7].

Subsequently, INTERPOL’s report confirms that the “verification of the eight seized FARC computer exhibits by INTERPOL does not imply the validation of the accuracy of the user files, the validation of any country’s interpretation of the user files or the validation of the source of the user files.” [Interpol Report, page 9].

So, INTERPOL only examined and verified whether the data contained on the computers had been created, modified or deleted after March 1 when it was publicly in the hands of the Colombian government. And although in their own report, INTERPOL concludes that access to the machines between March 1 and March 3 by the Grupo Investigativo de Delitos Informáticos of the Colombian Judicial Police (DIJIN) “did not conform to internationally recognized principles for handling electronic evidence by law enforcement” [Page 31], Secretary General Noble justifies that violation and the modifications made by the DIJIN as part of the difficulties encountered by those law enforcement who “are first on the scene”.

INTERPOL says its role was “exclusively technical” yet Secretary General Noble began his press conference on May 15 with a very partialized political discourse in favor of the Colombian government and condemning the FARC as drugtraffickers and terrorists. When asked by a journalist from TELESUR whether he could confirm the source of the evidence, Noble blurted our “I can say with certainty that the computers came from a FARC terrorist camp…” The journalist asked if they belonged to any person in particular, and Noble responded “yes, the now dead Reyes…”

If we return to page 9 of the INTERPOL report we can clearly read the statement: “the verification of the eight seized FARC computer exhibits by INTERPOL does not imply the validation of the accuracy of the user files, the validation of any country’s interpretation of the user files or the validation of the source of the user files.”

So, how did Mr. Noble know the computers belonged to Raul Reyes if INTERPOL did not analyze their origen?

In the end, INTERPOL can say that technically those computers were not modified or altered after March 1, but that tells us nothing concrete that could serve as legal evidence in a court of law. We don’t know the source of those machines. We don’t know who created the documents, text and data on those computers. There is no way whatsoever to authenticate the information contained on the thousands of Word documents and emails on those computers. They could be stories, wishes, dreams, prayers or fantasies. What they are not is actual hard core proof of a crime.

And as no surprise, the US government has expressed its “concern” over the INTERPOL report and the “ties between the Venezuelan government and the FARC.” (The US government is always “concerned” when it comes to Venezuela. First, Ambassador Donna Hrinak expressed her “concern” over President Chávez’s statements criticizing the US bombing in Afghanistan in October 2001, and months later came the coup d’etat against Chávez. Then it was Ambassador Charles Shapiro who expressed his “concern” about the political crises and the divisions in the country and soon after we had the economic sabotage of the oil industry in December 2002. Later we had Ambassador William Brownfield saying he was “concerned” about the increase in drug transit and the threat to freedom of expression, and we had street violence, an increase in funding to the opposition, and the White House certified Venezuela as a nation “not cooperating” with counterdrug measures and the war on terror. And now what?)

First, the spokesperson for the Department of State, Sean McCormack stated on May 16 that “this is a motive of concern for us. It’s a concern for the people of Colombia and the government of Colombia…Right now our intelligence community is analyzing the INTERPOL report…You don’t have to look far beyond the many news reports that we have seen recently based on the information found in those laptops and other information…” (Right, when the news media says something in sync with Washington’s foreign policy, it’s pointed to as a valid source, but when they criticize Bush’s policies on Irak or discover inconsistencies with the administration, then they say the media are biased and unrealiable).

The next day, the normally low profile (for now) US Ambassador in Venezuela, Patrick Duddy, appeared on Globovisión declaring that “elements of concern” exist in the documents found on Raul Reyes’ laptop and that “we respect what Interpol has presented and we remind you that there is already a ton of material that has come out in the press and there are elements of conern, but also there is a lot of information and the agencies that have access to it will analyze it.” Of course his statement is identical to that of the Department of State, and that’s no coincidence – that’s because the embassies all receive a “Western Hemisphere Press Guidance” sheet telling them exactly what to say!

So, the next step will be when the CIA, the Pentagon and other official Washington representatives “certify” the information on the computers and launch all kinds of additional accusations towards Venezuela – now with “proof”, even if invented. Wasn’t the power point presentation that Colin Powell so assuredly presented before the UN Security Council regarding the weapons of mass destruction in Irak considered “proof”? So, now we have laptops with non-authenticatible documents that will be used as “evidence” to place Venezuela on the state sponsors of terror list or worse, justify some kind of military incursion onto Venezuela territory to safeguard the world from terrorists.

The Fourth Fleet of the Navy has already been activated, something not seen since World War II, and will be patrolling and coordinating military activity in the Latin American region. Last month, SOUTHCOM launched Operation Enduring Freedom – Caribbean and Central America – which deployed an elite batallon of National Guard and navy ships into the region to prepare strategies to detect and defend against terrorist threats in the region.

In the end, INTERPOL achieved what Washington hasn’t been able to do for years: invent the way to “validate” some kind of bogus evidence against Venezuela that will jusfity US aggressions and possibly the next military intervention.

http://www.chavezcode.com/2008/05/war-machine-or-how-to-manipulate.html

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Extradition of Paramilitary Leaders Undermines Para-Politics Investigation

by Garry Leech

May 13, 2008

In the early hours of May 13, Colombian security forces transported 14 high-ranking paramilitary leaders from their prison cells to an aircraft that whisked them out of the country and to the United States. Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe had ordered that the paramilitary leaders be extradited to face drug trafficking charges in the United States because, as Interior Minister Carlos Holgumn stated, “In some cases they were still committing crimes and reorganizing criminal structures” from their prison cells. The paramilitary leaders were engaged in a demobilization process that called for them to confess their crimes in return for reduced jail sentences. In their testimonies, several paramilitary leaders revealed links between the right-wing militia organization and elected officials and multinational corporations. By extraditing the paramilitary leaders, President Uribe has ensured that they will do no further harm to himself and his political allies as he has effectively stymied future investigations into the so-called para-politics scandal.
Sixty-one elected officials, the majority of whom are political allies of President Uribe, are currently under investigation for ties to right-wing paramilitaries belonging to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). Thirty of the officials are already in prison, including the president’s cousin and former senator Mario Uribe. Much of the evidence linking the politicians with the AUC has come from testimonies provided by paramilitary leaders as part of the demobilization process.
For President Uribe, the demobilization of the AUC—the country’s principal violators of human rights—was supposed to represent a peace feather in his cap. The original goal of the demobilization was to have the paramilitary leaders serve prison terms as short as 22 months—once the negotiating process was considered as time served and good behavior was taken into account. In return, the paramilitary leaders would demobilize all their fighters, confess their crimes and completely dismantle their criminal organizations, including their drug trafficking networks—or at least appear to do so.
However, due to international pressure and virulent protests from sectors within Colombian civil society, Uribe was forced to revise the plan to provide the AUC leaders with a virtual amnesty, instead insisting that they serve eight years in prison. The paramilitary leaders responded by threatening to withdraw from the process. Uribe then ordered them transferred from the ranch in northern Colombia where the negotiations had taken place to maximum-security prisons.
The original plan hatched between Uribe and the AUC leaders began to unravel as animosity between the government and the paramilitaries intensified. Demobilized paramilitary leaders soon began revealing ties between the militia and elected officials allied with the country’s president. The para-politics scandal has not only undermined the legitimacy of the Colombian government, it has also hurt Uribe’s efforts to sign free trade agreements with the United States and Canada.
With the paramilitary leaders safely ensconced in maximum-security prisons, there was no need to secretly whisk them out of the country in the middle of the night. Even if they were still managing their illegal activities from within their prisons cells—and they likely were—the Uribe administration could have allowed the AUC leaders to complete their testimonies before announcing its intention to extradite them. However, to do so would have ensured that Uribe and his political allies would have become further enmeshed in the para-politics investigation.
The most effective way of silencing the paramilitary leaders was to extradite them to the United States where they will stand trial on drug trafficking charges. Meanwhile, their human rights abuses and links to Colombian officials will be considered irrelevant to the cases against them and so will remain secret. In all likelihood, as has occurred with FARC guerrilla leader Simón Trinidad since he was extradited to the United States, the paramilitary leaders will be kept in seclusion making it impossible for them to make public any new evidence that could prove uncomfortable for Uribe and his political allies. Furthermore, the Bush administration is more than happy to oblige Uribe efforts to thwart justice given that the Colombian leader is Washington’s closest ally in Latin America.
President Uribe likely knew that any prior announcement of his intention to extradite the paramilitary leaders would have resulted in a significant backlash from the political opposition, criminal investigators and human rights organizations, all of who would demand that he allow the testimonies to continue. With some of the most prominent paramilitary leaders, including AUC chief Salvatore Mancuso, now in US prisons, it will prove much more difficult for prosecutors to effectively investigate the links between politicians and the right-wing death squads. Claudia Lopez, an independent investigator, acknowledged this new reality when she declared, “They’ve taken away all the witnesses.”

http://www.colombiajournal.org/colombia282.htm

Photos Allegedly From FARC PC Undermine Colombian Credibility

May 23rd 2008, by Daniel Denvir - NACLA

A series of photos allegedly found on the laptops of Raúl Reyes, the FARC leader killed when the Colombian government bombed and raided a FARC encampment across the Ecuadoran border, appear to have actually been taken by Colombian intelligence agents—or by allied police or intelligence agents—in Quito, Ecuador. The photos were supplied to the Bogota daily El Tiempo by an anonymous Colombian intelligence source on Monday March 3, just two days after the raid on the encampment.
Credible doubts about the provenance of the photos are potentially explosive, as they suggest that a piece of evidence that the Colombian government claimed originated from the FARC laptops actually came from another source, and also because they indicate the presence of Colombian intelligence in Quito. In the attack’s aftermath, Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa initiated a major shakeup of the country’s armed forces following allegations of significant CIA and other foreign-intelligence penetration.
The photos, taken down about a week after they were uploaded, briefly formed part of a broad and systematic media campaign on the part of the Colombian government to link the Ecuadoran and Venezuelan governments to the FARC. The campaign has been waged through a combination of public denunciations and anonymous leaks to news outlets in Colombia, the United States, and Spain.
The photos were taken inside and outside of Quito’s Casa de Cultura arts and convention center during the international conference of the Continental Bolivarian Coordinating Committee (CCB) the week before the attack. The CCB is a small left-wing organization with ties to the FARC and chapters throughout Latin America.
The photos, which now appear to be intelligence photos, were included in a Web gallery on El Tiempo’s Web site of photos purportedly found on Reyes’s laptop. When I came across the photos my first question was “Why would the FARC take intelligence photos of their supposed allies?”
The individuals photographed include two Basque separatists: Batasuna representative Iñak Bil de San Vicente and Askapena representative Walter Wendelin. (Batasuna is the political arm of the armed Basque nationalist separatist group ETA. Askapena is a support organization for Basque prisoners.) Also captured in the photos are Carlos Casanueva, a member of the Chilean Communist Party’s Central Committee; Lucía Morett, a visiting Mexican student who was injured in the attack (four other Mexican students were killed); Venezuelan Communist Party deputy and Central Committee secretary general Oscar Figuera; Chilean Communist Youth member Manuel Olate, who, along with fellow Chilean Valeska López, visited the FARC encampment just before it was bombed; an unnamed Italian CCB delegate; and at least five other unidentified people.
After weeks of contradictory and incomplete answers from El Tiempo, I traveled from Quito to their Bogotá office to ask some questions in person. El Tiempo reporters had at first confirmed that the photos were from the FARC laptops and were unsure of why they were removed from El Tiempo’s Web site. El Tiempo Justice editor Jhon Torres then told me that they were not from the laptop and that a retraction had been issued. (I was unable to find a retraction in any of El Tiempo’s March or April archives. Journalistic ethics require news outlets to issue corrections if doubts emerge as to the validity of evidence used to support an article.)
In an interview this past Tuesday, Torres told me that the photos were removed from the Web site because of doubts that they were really found on the FARC laptops. According to Torres, however, their intelligence source has not changed his claim that the photos are from the laptops.
Torres also claimed that all of the people captured in the CCB photos were also in photos found on Reyes’ laptops. I was unable to confirm this through a review of photos that have been released, and Torres was unable to provide me with photos confirming this statement.
Torres played down the notion that the Colombian government purposely leaked false information, hypothesizing the photos’ inclusion to be an accidental “infection” and characterizing their intelligence source as a lone actor rather than part of a media campaign orchestrated by the Colombian government.
Torres also confirmed that El Tiempo has not issued any retractions regarding the photos—contradicting his earlier statement—saying that they simply removed them from the Web site. This even though the paper ran a story on March 7 titled “Trace of ETA in Reyes’ PC,” including the photo of Batasuna members Walter Wendelin and Iñak Gil at the CCB conference. The article does not mention that the photo was taken at the conference, and it is possible that El Tiempo was unaware of this fact. The rest of the photos were only posted as part of the Web gallery and were not used in the newspaper’s print edition. Torres acknowledged that, “perhaps we could have done a better job clarifying our opinions of the photos.”
I am still reporting this story. Further information will be posted on the NACLA Web site.

Daniel Denvir is an independent journalist in Quito, Ecuador and an editor at the forthcoming journal Caterwaul Quarterly ( http://www.caterwaulquarterly.com ). Denvir is a 2008 recipient of NACLA's Samuel Chavkin Investigative Journalism Grant.

Source:

NACLA

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/3483

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com

Umm I don't get it??? Whats so bad about Interpol? I know the new album isn't that good but like whats the big deal??? Anyway isn't the bassist half colombian so like whats the biggie about being in colombia too????? you guys are weird.