Interpol’s Creativity

Since 2002, the Pentagon has been seeking

evidence that intimately relates President Chávez and his government

with the FARC. Top secret documents from the Department of Defense

(that we have desclassified under FOIA) evidence that the Pentagon has

been unable to find proof of a clandestine, subversive relationship

between the Venezuelan government and the FARC. The sources used in

some Pentagon documents that attempt to show such a relationship are

completely unreliable, since they are mass media outlets from Venezuela

and Colombia, such as Globovisión, Caracol, El Universal and El

Nacional – all of whom are aligned with the opposition to Chávez.

When

the Colombian government bombed the FARC camp in Ecuador on March 1,

killing two dozen people in an illegal incursion onto Equatorian

territory that was condemned by the Organization of American States

(OEA) and only supported by the United States (suprise!), it was all

they could do to produce evidence they had been seeking for six years.

Just hours after the illegal invasion and massacre (during which 5

innocent Mexican visiting students were killed), the head of Colombia’s

National Police, General Naranjo, was announcing they had “found” a

“laptop” that belonged to Raul Reyes, the FARC commander killed in the

bombing, and that the computer contained information that showed a link

between President Chávez and several members of his government, and the

handover (or offering) of weapons and money to the FARC. (Now we would

have to ask how the Colombian police found that key information so

quickly amongst the more than 39,000 word files and several million

documents contained on the computers that the INTERPOL report says it

would take 1,000 years to read). All of sudden, evidence was found that

not even the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency or the world’s top

spies could encounter during years of secret missions, agent recruiting

and handling and psychological operations; that Chávez was going to

sell uranium to the FARC to make dirty bombs; that Chávez promised

somewhere between $250-$300 million to the FARC; that he gave them

weapons; and that together they sought to overthrow Uribe’s government

and install a FARC marxist state.

That mysterious machine

contained anything the Empire could ever have dreamed up to bury the

Venezuelan government and declare it over and done with.

But,

there was a big problem: since the machine had been in the hands of the

Colombian government – confessed adversary of its Venezuelan neighbor –

and the “Documents” that evidenced the relationship with President

Chávez were actually just texts written in Word, without signature or

seal, there was little faith in their credibility. How easy it is to

just write a document in Word on some computer and say it was written

by someone else! Word documents don’t have original signature. If they

had found – say – a diary or a journal written by the hand of Raul

Reyes, then the situation would be quite different, but a bunch of

texts in Word? Emails? In today’s world, electronic information is

unreliable. Computers can been manipulated from a remote source. Any

decent hacker or computer techie can enter into a system and alter

whatever, without leaving fingerprints.

So, Colombia did the

intelligent thing. They said – lets let an uninvolved third party

evaluate the computers to determine whether they have been manipulated

or not by us. And that’s when Interpol came along.

The Secretary

General of the International Police (INTERPOL), Ronald Kenneth Noble,

is an ex US Government employee, and he was First Undersecretary of the

Department of Treasury in charge of the Secret Service, the Bureau of

Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Center for Federal Law Enforcement

Training, the Network of Financial Crimes Control and the Office of

Foreign Assets Control (which, by the way, is the entity in charge of

enforcing the blockade against Cuba and the prohibition of US citizens

to travel there). Noble has been Secretary General of INTERPOL for 8

years (two terms), and it was he who was in charge of supervising the

authentication of the “evidence” obtained by the Colombian government

in the FARC camp.

INTERPOL was charged with a pretty limited and

subjective mision, that was to “Examine the user files on the eight

seized FARC computers and to determine whether any of the user files

had been newly created, modified or deleted on or after 1 March 2008.”

INTERPOL did not occupy itself with verifying the origin, accuracy or

source of those files or computers, which means that reasonable doubt

still remains regarding the true authorship of that data. INTERPOL took

for granted that the machines and the evidence pertained to Raul Reyes

and the FARC, which in legal terms prejudices the entire investigation

because it shows that from the beginning, INTERPOL had already taken

the side of the Colombian government.

INTERPOL’s report states

specifically that the scope of their forensic examination was limited

to a) determining the actual data contained in the eight seized FARC

computer exhibits, b) verifying whether the user files had been

modified in any way on or after 1 March 2008, and c) determining

whether Colombian law enforcement authorities had handled and examined

the eight seized FARC computer exhibits in conformity with

internationally recognized principles for handling electronic evidence

by law enforcement.” [Interpol Report, page 7].

Subsequently,

INTERPOL’s report confirms that the “verification of the eight seized

FARC computer exhibits by INTERPOL does not imply the validation of the

accuracy of the user files, the validation of any country’s

interpretation of the user files or the validation of the source of the

user files.” [Interpol Report, page 9].

So, INTERPOL only

examined and verified whether the data contained on the computers had

been created, modified or deleted after March 1 when it was publicly in

the hands of the Colombian government. And although in their own

report, INTERPOL concludes that access to the machines between March 1

and March 3 by the Grupo Investigativo de Delitos Informáticos of the

Colombian Judicial Police (DIJIN) “did not conform to internationally

recognized principles for handling electronic evidence by law

enforcement” [Page 31], Secretary General Noble justifies that

violation and the modifications made by the DIJIN as part of the

difficulties encountered by those law enforcement who “are first on the

scene”.

INTERPOL says its role was “exclusively technical” yet

Secretary General Noble began his press conference on May 15 with a

very partialized political discourse in favor of the Colombian

government and condemning the FARC as drugtraffickers and terrorists.

When asked by a journalist from TELESUR whether he could confirm the

source of the evidence, Noble blurted our “I can say with certainty

that the computers came from a FARC terrorist camp…” The journalist

asked if they belonged to any person in particular, and Noble responded

“yes, the now dead Reyes…”

If we return to page 9 of the

INTERPOL report we can clearly read the statement: “the verification of

the eight seized FARC computer exhibits by INTERPOL does not imply the

validation of the accuracy of the user files, the validation of any

country’s interpretation of the user files or the validation of the

source of the user files.”

So, how did Mr. Noble know the computers belonged to Raul Reyes if INTERPOL did not analyze their origen?

In

the end, INTERPOL can say that technically those computers were not

modified or altered after March 1, but that tells us nothing concrete

that could serve as legal evidence in a court of law. We don’t know the

source of those machines. We don’t know who created the documents, text

and data on those computers. There is no way whatsoever to authenticate

the information contained on the thousands of Word documents and emails

on those computers. They could be stories, wishes, dreams, prayers or

fantasies. What they are not is actual hard core proof of a crime.

And

as no surprise, the US government has expressed its “concern” over the

INTERPOL report and the “ties between the Venezuelan government and the

FARC.” (The US government is always “concerned” when it comes to

Venezuela. First, Ambassador Donna Hrinak expressed her “concern” over

President Chávez’s statements criticizing the US bombing in Afghanistan

in October 2001, and months later came the coup d’etat against Chávez.

Then it was Ambassador Charles Shapiro who expressed his “concern”

about the political crises and the divisions in the country and soon

after we had the economic sabotage of the oil industry in December

2002. Later we had Ambassador William Brownfield saying he was

“concerned” about the increase in drug transit and the threat to

freedom of expression, and we had street violence, an increase in

funding to the opposition, and the White House certified Venezuela as a

nation “not cooperating” with counterdrug measures and the war on

terror. And now what?)

First, the spokesperson for the

Department of State, Sean McCormack stated on May 16 that “this is a

motive of concern for us. It’s a concern for the people of Colombia and

the government of Colombia…Right now our intelligence community is

analyzing the INTERPOL report…You don’t have to look far beyond the

many news reports that we have seen recently based on the information

found in those laptops and other information…” (Right, when the news

media says something in sync with Washington’s foreign policy, it’s

pointed to as a valid source, but when they criticize Bush’s policies

on Irak or discover inconsistencies with the administration, then they

say the media are biased and unrealiable).

The next day, the

normally low profile (for now) US Ambassador in Venezuela, Patrick

Duddy, appeared on Globovisión declaring that “elements of concern”

exist in the documents found on Raul Reyes’ laptop and that “we respect

what Interpol has presented and we remind you that there is already a

ton of material that has come out in the press and there are elements

of conern, but also there is a lot of information and the agencies that

have access to it will analyze it.” Of course his statement is

identical to that of the Department of State, and that’s no coincidence

– that’s because the embassies all receive a “Western Hemisphere Press

Guidance” sheet telling them exactly what to say!

So, the next

step will be when the CIA, the Pentagon and other official Washington

representatives “certify” the information on the computers and launch

all kinds of additional accusations towards Venezuela – now with

“proof”, even if invented. Wasn’t the power point presentation that

Colin Powell so assuredly presented before the UN Security Council

regarding the weapons of mass destruction in Irak considered “proof”?

So, now we have laptops with non-authenticatible documents that will be

used as “evidence” to place Venezuela on the state sponsors of terror

list or worse, justify some kind of military incursion onto Venezuela

territory to safeguard the world from terrorists.

The Fourth

Fleet of the Navy has already been activated, something not seen since

World War II, and will be patrolling and coordinating military activity

in the Latin American region. Last month, SOUTHCOM launched Operation

Enduring Freedom – Caribbean and Central America – which deployed an

elite batallon of National Guard and navy ships into the region to

prepare strategies to detect and defend against terrorist threats in

the region.

In the end, INTERPOL achieved what Washington hasn’t

been able to do for years: invent the way to “validate” some kind of

bogus evidence against Venezuela that will jusfity US aggressions and

possibly the next military intervention.