Providing for Consideration of H.R. 2218 Empowering Parents Through Quality Charter Schools Act, and Providing for Consideration of H.R. 1892, Intelligence Authorization Act ofr Fiscal Year 2012
Floor Speech
Mr. McGOVERN. I thank the gentleman for yielding.
Mr. Speaker, I would like to talk just for a couple of minutes about a serious matter that relates to the Intelligence bill that we will later consider.
For the past decade, Colombia's intelligence agency, the Department of Administrative Security, or the DAS, has engaged in illegal activities. Created to investigate organized crime, insurgents, and drug traffickers, the DAS instead provided paramilitary death squads with the names of trade unionists to be murdered and carried out illegal surveillance on journalists, human rights defenders, political opposition leaders, and Supreme Court judges. American cash, equipment, and training to help shut down drug trafficking may have been used for spy operations, smear campaigns, and threats against civil society leaders in Colombia. Several U.S. agencies aided the DAS--the State Department, Pentagon, DEA, CIA, and DIA--even as scandal after scandal after scandal became publicly known. It was only in April, 2010, when U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield suspended U.S. aid to the DAS, diverting those resources to the Colombian National Police.
Yesterday, Congresswoman Schakowsky and I sent a letter to the Secretaries of State and Defense, the U.S. Attorney General, and the CIA Director, asking them to provide Congress with a comprehensive report on all forms of U.S. aid to the DAS and to tell us what the DAS used the aid for. It's not too much to ask, Mr. Speaker. There has been a shocking lack of oversight over all the U.S. aid that poured into the DAS over the past decade. Getting to the bottom of this is what oversight is all about. Colombia appears to be doing its part. The Attorney General is carrying out an aggressive investigation and series of prosecutions. Six former high-ranking intelligence officials have confessed to crimes. More than a dozen other operatives are on trial, with more still under investigation. President Santos has promised to dismantle the DAS and replace it with a new intelligence agency. But in the meantime, the old structures still remain. Witnesses cooperating with the Attorney General find themselves and their families threatened, and human rights defenders even now are still under surveillance.
Mr. Speaker, I'm sure that U.S. intentions were good, but I also believe the DAS was generally up to no good. I find it impossible to understand how the State Department and Embassy officials can say with certainty that absolutely no U.S. aid funding was ever used by the DAS for criminal purposes. Congress must insist on safeguards to ensure that no funding, equipment, training, or intelligence-sharing with any Colombian intelligence agency is used for illegal surveillance or criminal activities now and in the future.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has expired.
Mr. POLIS. I yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.
Mr. McGOVERN. The administration or Congress must prohibit any further funding for the DAS, including aid in the pipeline, until the Attorney General has completed all investigations and prosecutions, finds out who ordered these illegal activities, and President Santos has completely dismantled the current agency. I ask the committee chairman and ranking member to guarantee the Members of this House that no further aid will be provided to the DAS, and if that prohibition is not explicitly in this bill, that they will work with the Senate to include it in the final conference report.
[From the Los Angeles Times, Sept. 2, 2011.]
Colombia's Spreading Scandal
The U.S. provided nearly $6 billion as part of Plan Colombia, an anti-narcotics and counterinsurgency program. But did the money also pay for human rights abuses?
The United States has long considered Colombia its strongest ally in Latin America. Over the last eight years it has provided the Colombian government with nearly $6 billion as part of Plan Colombia, an ambitious anti-narcotics and counterinsurgency program that has often been held up as a model of cooperation.
But recent reports in the Washington Post suggest that U.S. assistance intended to combat drugs and terrorism was diverted to Colombian intelligence officials, who used it instead to spy on judges, journalists, politicians and union leaders.
The Post also reported that the United States was aware of the spying, including illicit wiretapping. Whether that is true is unclear. State Department officials say no one at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota knew about the wiretaps. And President Juan Manuel Santos, who took office last year after the spying controversy erupted, has also denied that the United States had any role in the growing scandal.
That will do little to quell questions about U.S. involvement, given Plan Colombia's troubled past. A United Nations human rights investigator concluded last year that a large number of Colombian military units were involved in shooting innocent young men and falsely identifying them as rebels in an effort to boost body counts. The extrajudicial killings were alleged to have been carried out by army units that had been vetted by the U.S. State Department and cleared to receive U.S. funding.
And last year, then-U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield announced that all assistance to Colombia's Department of Administrative Security was being suspended indefinitely following disclosures in the Colombian media that indicated widespread spying abuses. Since then, Colombian authorities have arrested 28 officials, including former President Alvaro Uribe's chief of staff, in connection with the scandal.
Colombia's government has vowed to dismantle the intelligence agency, and the Santos administration and attorney general have been courageous in investigating the scandal. Now it's up to the United States to move quickly to determine how much aid was provided to the agency and what it was used for. The U.S. must show the same resolve as Colombia has in ferreting out the truth.
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CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES,
Washington, DC, September 7, 2011.
Hon. HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON,
Secretary of State, Department of State, Washington, DC.
Hon. LEON E. PANETTA,
Secretary of Defense, Department of Defense, Washington, DC.
ERIC H. HOLDER, Jr.,
U.S. Attorney General, Department of Justice, Washington, DC.
General DAVID H. PETRAEUS,
Director, Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, DC.
DEAR SECRETARY CLINTON, SECRETARY PANETTA, ATTORNEY GENERAL HOLDER AND DIRECTOR PETRAEUS, We write to request a comprehensive accounting of U.S. assistance to the Colombian government's Department of Administrative Security (DAS) during the period of August 7, 2002 to August 7, 2010. Specifically, we request a full accounting of all funds, training, lethal and non-lethal equipment, intelligence- and information-sharing, technical assistance, facilities construction and any other aid provided to the DAS, its officials, its employees or any of its contractors during this period, whether in Colombia, the U.S., or at other facilities. We further request the information indicate any such aid or information provided to the National and International Observations Group of the DAS.
As you know, the Colombian Attorney General's Office is undertaking an aggressive investigation and series of prosecutions of illegal activities carried out by the DAS during these years. Six former high-ranking intelligence officials have confessed to crimes and more than a dozen other agency operatives are on trial, and several more are under investigation by the Attorney General or by a special legislative commission of the Colombian Congress.
These investigations have revealed a vast illegal network of surveillance of nearly all sectors of civil society, including human rights defenders, political party leaders, journalists and members of the Colombian Supreme Court engaged in investigations of elected officials with alleged ties to paramilitary groups or who engaged in corrupt practices. These illegal operations were also connected to threats received by many of the individuals under surveillance, and in some cases the DAS shared information with paramilitary and other violent actors that resulted in the assassinations of trade unionists and other rights defenders.
Recent articles in the Washington Post (8/21/11) assert that U.S. aid may be implicated in these abuses of power. We are concerned that former President Álvaro Uribe has made public statements claiming the reporters who wrote these articles are terrorist sympathizers (simpatizantes del terrorismo), going so far as to characterize one reporter as a terrorist ally (ocultador del terrorismo), language that increases the level of threat under which journalists work in Colombia. We strongly urge you to make clear to the former president that such statements are unacceptable and ask that he retract them.
We believe it is important to set the record straight in a clear and transparent manner by providing Congress with a comprehensive report on all forms of U.S. assistance to the DAS. We also believe it is important to provide Congress with this information in as rapid a manner as possible, but assuredly prior to when Congress begins debate on the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.
To the maximum extent possible, the information included in this comprehensive report should be provided in an unclassified format; if necessary, a classified annex should be made available for review by all Members of Congress. We further ask that you inquire and coordinate with your counterparts in other departments and agencies that might have been working with the DAS (e.g. Treasury/Internal Revenue Service) to ensure that the report is indeed comprehensive.
Thank you for your serious attention to this request. We look forward to your timely response and the receipt of this comprehensive report regarding all forms of U.S. support for the DAS over the past decade.
Sincerely,
James P. McGovern,
Member of Congress.
Janice D. Schakowsky,
Member of Congress.
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