John Hinderaker posts the possibility that Nancy Pelosi was indirectly contacting the FARC for a hostages-for-terrorists swap. Hindreaker states,
If this report is correct, Nancy Pelosi was carrying on her own foreign policy in opposition to that of the United States, trying to work with the socialist Hugo Chavez and the Communist FARC terrorists to undermine America’s ally, Colombia. In normal times, this would be unthinkable. Given the crazed state of today’s Democratic party, I’m not so sure.
Considering that this information was found in the FARC computers and that Nancy has been known to carry out her own brand of Hermes scarf diplomacy, this is not mere speculation on John’s (or Mary O’Grady‘s) part.
Colombian president Alvaro Uribe is well aware of Nancy’s duplicity and has called her bluff at least once.
Complicit also with the FARC are many of the NGOs – so much so that the FARC didn’t question that an NGO would facilitate the helicopter used by the Colombian army to carry out the rescue.
The spotlight rightly belongs to the former hostages. Flopping Aces has the video of Marc Gonsalves speaking at yesterday’s press conference:
Gonsalves said,
“I have seen how even their own gorillas commit suicide in a desperate attempt to escape the slavery that the FARC had condemned them to.
The majority of the FARC forces are children and young adults. They come from extreme poverty and have very little or no education. Many of them can’t even read. So they’re usually tricked into joining the FARC and they’re brainwashed into believing that their cause is a just cause.”
Keith Stansell proposed marriage last May to his girlfriend while he was still a captive, through another hostage who was released earlier,
But in a hopeful twist to Colombia’s bleak kidnapping saga, Stansell, 43, grasped on the recent release of a fellow hostage, Colombia’s former lawmaker Luis Eladio Perez, to carry the marriage proposal to his girlfriend.
Medina met the lawmaker at an airport, amid a throng of well-wishers, soon after his release. She had approached him for any scrap of information about her hostage boyfriend.
Instead, Perez plucked a flower from a bouquet he was holding and handed it to her. He proposed on Stansell’s behalf.
“The tears came out of me… and he hugged me,” recalled Medina, 36, a petite brunette who lives in Bogota and met Stansell on the job, as an air hostess. “I was sleepwalking, with the rose.”
She said yes.
Thomas Howes has reunited with his family
The Americans, including Marc Gonsalves and Keith Stansell, were taken hostage after their light aircraft crashed in the jungle on a counternarcotics operation. A fourth contractor, Tom Janis, was killed by the FARC shortly after the crash, the company said.
I believe Keith Stansell is the man in the video I translated who said to the reporter,
“Tell my family, my family, the whole world.”
The FARC is still holding 700 innocent people hostage. Ingrid Betancourt is exhorting Uribe to “rectify [his] radical, extremist, vocabulary of hate.” Undoubtedly suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, Betancourt would do well instead to insist that the FARC release all their hostages or suffer the consequences of their horrible crimes.
(special thanks to Larwyn and VCrisis)
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Two reports from Europe explaining what “really” happened. One that it was a cover for a ransom payment and the whole thing was staged for the cameras. The other that the helicopters were hijacked by the Colombians with a Swiss and French diplomat on board who were negotiating in good faith with the FARC. But either way the US and the Israelis were involved because McCain was coincidentally in Colombia and the other that there is always a Jew involved.
Of course the former explanantion seems at best a fantasy while the latter fails because no one seems to be able to find these two diplomats. Continuing a suggestion earlier I simply will point out that the July Surprise is obviously Bush’s fault and if it isn’t it should be.