A THREAT TO NATIONAL SECURITY

THEY call it a "drug-fighting package" for Colombia. In January, the
"liberal" Clinton administration proposed $1.3 billion be sent to the civil
war-torn South American nation at the request of Colombian president Andres
Pastrana.

Recently, the Senate approved a "scaled-down" $934 million version, which
included the rejection of an amendment "that would have taken $225 million
earmarked for Colombia's military and put it into U.S. drug-treatment
programs," the Boston Globe reported June 22.

The Senate's plan will provide our tax dollars for Colombia to buy
transport helicopters and to train Colombian military personnel -- a
notorious assortment of thugs who have compiled the worst human rights
record in the hemisphere. And to satisfy some of the good Christian folk
back home, there's a little money in the bill to set up several "human
rights programs."

A member of the Republican wing of the Business Party, Illinois Sen.
Richard J. Durbin, recently visited Colombia. "You could see the plants in
every direction, 600 square miles of coca plants. It will be sold right
here," Durbin said, referring to the streets of America.

Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was closer to the truth when he said that
the Colombia aid package was a "close national security interest for our
country." Indeed. The "national interest," as defined by policy-makers and
war planners, comes down to using violence and deceit to maintain a
free-market social order especially favorable for U.S.-based foreign
investors, no matter what the cost to the general population.

As the Boston Globe reported, the "U.S. funding is directed almost solely
at the guerrillas fighting the government, ignoring drug-cultivating areas
in north Colombia controlled mainly by (right wing) paramilitary forces."
In the foreign policy circles, this type of stuff is called "low-intensity
conflict."

You see, according to one of the leading Latin America scholars, Gabriel
Kolko, "the (stark and inequitable) land distribution system in Latin
America, as all knew in 1961, was the origin of social misery for the
peasants who comprised the vast majority of the region. In Colombia, for
example, large landlords helped to write the so-called land reform law to
forestall the re-emergence of the post-1948 peasant upheavals."

These "upheavals" are addressed in a standard text of international
security studies called "Low-Intensity Conflict: The Pattern of Warfare in
the Modern World," edited by Loren Thompson, deputy director of the
National Security Studies Program at Georgetown University. It's a
collection of papers written by military strategists and scholars.

In Thompson's overview, she quotes from a 1985 Joint Chiefs of Staff paper,
which defined "low-intensity conflict (as) a limited politico-military
struggle to achieve political, social, economic or psychological
objectives. It is often protracted and ranges from diplomatic, economic and
psycho-social pressures through terrorism and insurgency. Low-intensity
conflict is generally confined to a geographic area and is often
characterized by constraints on the weaponry, tactics and level of violence."

Then Thompson goes on to discuss how "important" it is to understand that
"low-intensity conflict and special operations are only the most visible
part of a wide array of U.S. government capabilities for coping with
revolutionary violence in the Third World." Most visible? That tells you
something about the level of intellectual integrity (or lack thereof) in
what passes for scholarship in our "meritocracy.

Ahost of other activities ranging from the communications program of the
U.S. Information Agency to the surplus food programs of the Agricultural
Department" are part of this "low-intensity conflict" strategy that came to
maturity under Reagan, "the Great Communicator."

Surplus food programs? Flood the nation with U.S. agribusiness products,
force the peasant farmers to work on a different cash crop (coca or opium
farming) on land owned by an oligarchical elite who run the military -- a
military supported by our tax dollars in the name of "the war on drugs; all
to stop American drug users from getting high (74 percent of whom are
affluent and white)? Our biggest national security threat is internal.

Sean Gonsalves, a former Oakland resident, writes for the Cape Cod Times.