.
El Tiempo reports this evening, in a dispatch from Sergio Masseri, the Washington correspondent, that US forces worked for years in trying to rescue the kidnapped Americans from FARC.  The participation included special forces from the 7th Special Forces Group and the Green Berets (are they the same? maybe, I don’t know.)
.
.

.
.
CNN reported last night that Colombia's military used Red Cross symbols during Ingrid Betancourt's rescue. The report appears have been published at about 10 PM last night.

The story reports about a video that an unidentified military man was trying to sell to CNN. CNN did not buy the video but the video was shown to them.  Symbols of the Red Cross could be seen, but since they do not have the video they are not swearing by it.  They may have used the logo of an humanitarian NGO from Spain also.

If the report is true, the use of Red Cross symbols qualifies as a war crime according to the Geneva Conventions.

The linky:CNN Report
.
.

Since the move by the US House of Representatives to table consideration of the Colombian Free Trade Agreement (since renamed "Colombian Trade Promotion,") many things have happened as the paramilitary regime of Alvaro Uribe reacts to the bad news.  The bulk of the reaction has been to say that the Democrats acted  because of the presidential primaries, (1) or in other words, because of political-electoral reasons.  

Besides the direct attack on Obama by Uribe, (2)  who called Obama ignorant of the situation in Colombia, and the macabre bean-counting argument with the victims of paramilitary violence that Uribe displayed saying "oh, last year there were only 29 unionists dead, a  number of them were not really trade unionists but only members of unions, or teachers affiliated to the unions" etc., which has been parroted repeatedly in the press, the regimes’ Wurlitzer has been working at full speed to try and counteract what they perceive as the result of the work of Colombian traitors, communists and terrorists who have unduly influenced the malleable and naïve minds of the Democratic leadership in the American Congress.  

Today at 6:45 AM Alvaro Uribe’s government extradited to the United States 14 leaders of the paramilitaries (AUC, Autodefensas Campesinas de Colombia = Peasant Self-defense Forces), which together account for thousands of Colombian dead and disappeared, including a murderous campaign against trade unionists, and for land expropriation and drug trafficking, in the dirty war waged by Colombia’s oligarchy against all left-leaning opposition, under the guise of combating the FARC, and with the support and encouragement of Uribe’s government and Armed Forces. Of course these paramilitary forces, regardless of their name, had nothing to do with protecting peasants; instead, they account for close to 4 million peasants whose lands were illegally expropriated and that were displaced to Colombia’s main cities to add to the rolls of the poor and destitute that abound in Colombia.  While in jail, the paramilitary leaders continued to manage their criminal enterprises, as well as to command their criminal organizations, who, after supposedly demobilizing, reappeared under new names to continue with their murderous activities.

.
Alvaro Uribe, current occupant of the presidential palace in Colombia, who was elected with the substantial help of the paramilitary death squads he helped create and which he promoted and defended when he was governor of  the province of Antioquia, is feeling the heat in the ongoing "para-politics" scandal, which has more than 60 Colombian congressmen/women under investigation or in jail for their involvement with the paramilitary death squads in corrupting the electoral process and in attempting to take over every political institution in Colombia.
.

.
El Tiempo, the Spanish-owned newspaper that more often than not acts as the house organ of the Colombian Presidency, reports that Alvaro Uribe "laments... that senator Obama... ignores the efforts made by Colombia," in declarations given in response to Obama’s announcement that he will continue opposing the Free Trade Agreement with Colombia (the one that Bush intends to ram through in the current session of Congress,) on the basis of the continuing violence against trade unionists in Colombia.

Fist off, I want to thank Kossacks who in the past have recommended one of my diaries (not many, and mere attempts at motivating discussion and providing a different point of view.) Among them: tmo, tikkun, Tuffy, Bob Love, Cecrops Tangaroa, smintheus, marchmoon, roses, Ignacio Magaloni, Steven D, HK, JaciCee, Vereker, joefromdundee, BrooklynJohnny, SarahLee, qw3rty, justCal, PhilK, wu ming, jackspace, RabidNation, mkfarkus, JuliaAnn, rflowers, Deward Hastings, stagemom, Iranaqamuk, One Pissed Off Liberal, maracatu, goldnata.  Several others have also pumped up my comments. Thanks to them all.

Second: I want to blatantly pimp out (or pimp up?) my recent diary entitled "Did the US carry out the Ecuador attack?" which may have been lost in the onslaught of electoral diaries of Friday, at the offset of this holiday weekend. The diary is at  http://www.dailykos.com/...

[Updated to correct some typos....]

According to a report appearing at the website of El Espectador (an independent newspaper in Colombia), [about]an investigation by officers of the Ecuadorian air force, 10 high-technology bombs did the job in the attack to the FARC encampment on March 1st, 2008.  None of the bombs used can be carried by Colombian planes.  For the sake of providing this information to this website’s readers, following is my translation of the report (found at http://www.elespectador.com/...    ), and the Spanish text (with misspellings included).  Apologies are offered beforehand for any defects in the use of the English language.

[Updated to add [about] above]
[Updated to take out Spanish language text, since it is available via link.]

The comments below were written to post in response to an editorial in the NYT today entitled "Take a deep breath." Up to 6:15 PM Thursday 128 comments had been posted.  When I posted my comment I did not see that the character limit was 5000 characters, so the last part of the comment was cut.  I post the full comment below for the sake of discussion in this forum.

[Update to fix the tags as per suggestion....]

The New York Times, via the Associated Press, reported at 1:08 PM today that the California Attorney General's office (Bill Lockyer, a democrat) is "aggressively" investigating letters received by some Latinos in Southern California, warning them that "it is a crime for immigrants to vote ...they could be jailed or deported if they go to the polls..."

As Benny Diaz (a candidate running for City Council in Garden Grove, CA, and whose wife received one of the letters) said, it is an attempt to make Latinos afraid to vote.

As we all know, and as the report states, all that is required to vote in the US is being a citizen, regardless of whether the voter is a native or a foreign-born citizen.  Luckily for Latinos in California (and no doubt elsewhere in the US) there are institutions (like the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, mentioned in the report) that are constantly watching over these naked attempts to take advantage of the perceived low educational level and lack of familiarity with the American government system among Latinos.