I don't believe that these midnight extraditions, in which the U.S. embassy colluded with Uribe to get these death squad witnesses out of Colombia (and out of the reach of Colombian prosecutors) were intended solely to protect Uribe. The question is, why does the U.S. government give a rat's ass about Uribe?
The U.S. government seems to be protecting this mob boss even now. The Obama administration--or rather Leon Panetta, acting on behalf of Bush Sr., in my opinion--removed Uribe from power in 2010 but landed him on a silk cushion, with academic sinecures at Harvard and Georgetown, appointment to a prestigious international legal commission, protection against being required to testify in death squad cases filed in the U.S. and other protections (very probably including help in getting Uribe's spy chief, Maria Hurtado, out of Colombia and asylum in the U.S. client state of Panama--she, too, is wanted for questioning by Colombian prosecutors).
Uribe has a long history of murdering his way to power, and was therefore the perfect candidate for mob boss...er, president...of Colombia, during the Bush Junta. But what was he doing for them? That is the key question. There are obvious things, such as murdering trade unionists and brutally displacing 5 MILLION peasant farmers from their lands, as prep for U.S. "free trade for the rich"; also, being a conduit for $7 BILLION in U.S. taxpayers' money to war profiteers including private military contractors (Blackwater, for instance, was operating in Colombia).
This report points to something further--something I've suggested before, and continue to suspect--that Uribe's main mandate, as a Bush Cartel 'made man,' was to consolidate the cocaine trade into fewer hands and better direct its trillion+ dollar revenue stream to certain beneficiaries (among them, U.S. banksters). (I was going to mention the CIA as a beneficiary but I think that cocaine revenues might have been a point of conflict (among several) in the war between the Bush Junta and the CIA--i.e., the Bush Junta may have been encroaching on this source of CIA funds. I think Panetta was brought in, first as CIA Director and now at the Pentagon, to end this war, which, of course, had also to do with the fake WMD excuse for invading Iraq, with the Rumsfeld/Cheney intention to nuke Iran and with the outing of the CIA's anti-WMD program worldwide).
The conflict now, I think, is between the war profiteers who were the witting or unwitting tools of the consolidation of the cocaine trade--in either case, hugely profiting from the wars in Colombia--who want this money stream (both 'licit' and illicit; both the military boondoggle and cocaine money) to continue--and Big Pharma, which wants to monopolize the herbal and recreational drug trade through legalization. Santos (vetted and approved by Panetta) wants to end the wars and legalize drugs.
As this revelation and article indicate, the war among the drug lords in Colombia goes back a ways--at least to the murder of Pablo Escobar. (The Castaño brothers murdered Escobar and took over his drug operations; then Uribe murdered the Castaño brothers). It also suggests that Uribe was the winner of that war, or rather the winner of Round #1 of that war. There were more drug operations to attack and absorb, both big and small, among the smaller ones (in my opinion), the FARC and also the very small players--the 5 million peasant farmers, who maybe grew a few coca leaves for local use, along with food for their families and communities, and who may have supplemented poverty incomes by selling coca leaves to cocaine operations. For this, Uribe used the U.S. "war on drugs" billions from the Bush Junta and also their political/legal support and cover. (One witness in the Colombian prosecutors' investigation said that there was an American liaison between the U.S. embassy and Uribe's spy agency, DAS--the one that was not only spying on judges and prosecutors but was also, reportedly, drawing up hit lists of trade unionists and others for the death squads.)
I'm trying to understand current Obama administration behind-the-scenes policy on these matters, which, I believe is controlled by Panetta with possibly the first priority being protection of Bush Jr. and his junta regarding their use of 'made man'/Colombia mob boss Uribe. The Bush Junta ties to Uribe and the horrible bloodshed and social disruption of a mob boss running Colombia, with boffo cash from U.S. taxpayers and political support from the U.S. government, has put the U.S. government--including its various military arms (public and private), and its drug agencies (DEA, FBI, AFT, et al), and, of course, the State Department, etc.--and its transglobal corporate rulers--into really bad odor in Latin America, especially South America, where leftist governments have been elected in most countries.
The Morales government, for instance, threw the DEA and the U.S. ambassador out of Bolivia, in 2008, which means that U.S. transglobals will not get easy access to Bolivia's lithium. (The DEA and the U.S. ambassador were colluding with white separatists to tear Bolivia apart.) The Correa government threw the U.S. military base--ostensibly a "war on drugs" base--out of Ecuador (2009), which has forced U.S. private military contractor, Dyncorp, to look for other venues. The Chavez government also rejected the U.S. "war on drugs," early on, and has had to contend with Uribe sending "Black Eagles" (read, AUC) operatives across the border into Venezuela where they were setting up drug/crime networks, and all sorts of Uribe treachery and sabotage. The Chavez government, of course, controls the biggest oil reserves on earth and totally pissed off Exxon Mobil by insisting on fairness in the oil contracts. The U.S. "war on drugs" is, of course, a tool for destabilizing and overthrowing governments that offend U.S. transglobals--and this includes the reverse U.S./Bush Junta "war on drugs"--their "war for drugs." None of these countries approve of cocaine trafficking and all have been more successful at big drug busts since they kicked the U.S. out. (Morales--head of the coca leaf farmers' union--legalized the coca leaf but not cocaine.)
Also, the entire continent got in an uproar when the U.S./Colombia bombed a FARC guerilla peace negotiation camp just inside Ecuador's border, nearly starting a shooting war between the U.S./Colombia and Ecuador/Venezuela in early 2008. These kind of activities by the Bush Junta, fronted by Uribe, are among the reasons why many governments--for instance, Brazil and Argentina--are suspicious of, or actively reject, U.S. policy and its formulators--U.S. transglobal corporations, U.S. war profiteers, U.S. banksters, Wall Street, the U.S.-dominated World Bank/IMF, et al. The Bush Junta, in a sense, made it all perfectly clear. The entirety of U.S. policy--including its enforcement arm, the U.S. "war on drugs"--was a criminal operation, out to loot, plunder, murder, dominate and destroy.
Panetta, I think, was tasked with cleaning all this up (detaching U.S. policy from Uribe's crime organization) while covering Junior's trail and while serving the interests listed above. It's a tricky business, for sure. Most of it is invisible to us (who pay for it). We have to guess. These are my educated guesses, and they help explain the ambiguity and the contradictions in the Obama administration's visible policies and actions.
For instance, why on earth would they protect Uribe? He is a HUGE liability in dealing with the new leftist political landscape in South America. And, are certain of their actions indicative of their desire to jettison him--say, of a slow-moving, careful plan to do so--for instance, their granting Colombian prosecutors access to the witnesses who were buried in the U.S. federal prison system--and, of course, their vetting and approval of Santos to replace Uribe? (Note: Uribe hates Santos.) And, is the Bush Cartel on the Big Pharma side of the current, behind-the-scenes dispute about legalization? Uribe virulently opposes legalization likely because he is profiting, big time, from the illicit revenue stream and represents criminal forces who want that to continue. Is he stuck in the past, while the Bush Cartel has "moved on" to the new profiteering plan--legalization?
Obama also opposes legalization, on the surface--in public statements--and is certainly arresting, harassing, confiscating and in every way trying to shut down the medical marijuana clinics in California--but is this punitive activity a preliminary to legalization and Big Pharma's plan to monopolize the trade--as evidenced by Santos publicly supporting legalization? Santos is a rightwinger and very much into U.S. "free trade for the rich." Is Uribe and allied war profiteers, here and there, an obstacle to Big Pharma's plan? If so, how to get rid of him without blowing the lid off the "Pandora's Box" of crimes that the U.S./Bush Junta committed in Colombia and Latin America?
Tricky.
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