Donahue: The Narco-Terrorist Who Came In from the Cold

December 30, 2004 Please Distribute Widely Dear Colleague, In September of 2002, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft announced, with great fanfare, the indictment and extradition order against Colombian paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso of the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC, in its Spanish initials), on the State Department's list of international terrorist organizations: "Salvatore Mancuso caused the brutal murder of another Colombian drug trafficker as retribution for failing to pay a drug debt," charged Ashcroft. "Today, we see more clearly than ever the interdependence between the terrorists that threaten American lives and the illegal drugs that threaten American potential. As today's indictment reminds us, the lawlessness that breeds terrorism is also a fertile ground for the drug trafficking that supports terrorism. To surrender to either of these threats is to surrender to both.” Earlier this month Mancuso - who, after the mysterious disappearance of paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño earlier this year, became the boss of this narco-terrorist organization - turned himself in to Colombian authorities, as Stewart Tuttle, head of the Political Affairs division of the U.S. Embassy in Bogota looked on. Sean Donahue reports: "Tuttle and his superiors were strangely silent a week later when the government of President Alvaro Uribe announced that it would not extradite Mancuso to the U.S. to face cocaine trafficking and money laundering charges as long as the death squad leader agreed to 'cease all illegal activities' and encourage other paramilitaries to take part in the government’s demobilization process. While the U.S. hasn’t formally dropped its extradition request, neither the U.S. Embassy nor the U.S. State Department has issued a public statement about Uribe’s decision to delay or cancel Mancuso’s handover to U.S. authorities – which is highly unusual to say the least, given that Mancuso is the head of a terrorist organization and is accused of conspiring to smuggle over seventeen tons of cocaine to the U.S. and Europe..." Read more at: http://www.narconews.com/ Once again, the "war on drugs" is enforced selectively. Even when an accused international terrorist is involved in cocaine trafficking, U.S. officials (and their favorite Latin American president Alvaro Uribe of Colombia) let the big fish slip through the net while devoting billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of prison cells to punishing the poor, the voiceless, the little fish... >From somewhere in a country called América, Al Giordano Publisher The Narco News Bulletin http://www.narconews.com/ new email: narconews@gmail.com Narco News is supported by: The Fund for Authentic Journalism P.O. Box 71051 Madison Heights, MI 48071 USA http://www.authenticjournalism.org The Fund receives online donations at this web page: http://www.authenticjournalism.org Apply for your co-publisher's account, here: http://www.narconews.com/copublisher/application.php Subscribe for free alerts of new reports: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/narconews http://groups.yahoo.com/group/narconewsbrasil <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/narconews/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: narconews-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/