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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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March 1st,
2001 - Plan Colombia |
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By Marc Cooper The Nation March 1, 2001 Bogotá - As the United
States becomes ever more deeply enmeshed in Colombia, individual Americans
here, conscious of the threat of kidnapping or guerrilla attack, are rarely
seen in public. Equally difficult to find is any concrete effect of the $2.2
million-a-day US aid program. With the country now into the third year of a
crushing recession, factories remain shuttered while the unemployed sell
tangerines, shoelaces, cookies and bootleg CDs on the clogged streets.
Farmland is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few rural barons,
causing a million recently dispossessed campesinos to crowd into Bogotá's
satellite slums. The country's infrastructure - its roads, schools and
clinics - slowly waste without repair. Indeed, to glimpse any
effect of US aid you have to travel to the grimy southern side of this
capital to a cluster of incongruously gleaming and heavily fortified
buildings that are, in effect, Colombia's Pentagon. Walk into the
marble-floored and track-lit headquarters of Colombia's national
antinarcotics police and the generosity of that aid, as well as the
incestuous relationship between Washington and Colombia's military machine,
are suddenly evident. Outside the door of Commanding Gen. Gustavo Socha's
office, mounted on a tripod, is an oversize photo of a grinning George W.
Bush celebrating his election. Next to it is a full-color promotional
illustration of a US-made Black Hawk attack helicopter. In the general's
waiting room, visitors are attended to by a young, uniformed press officer, a
polished graduate of the recently renamed School of the Americas, run by the
US Army. Also present is an equally young security officer just returned from
an intelligence training course at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. In case there's any doubt
about the level of American involvement here, the office adjoining General
Socha's is occupied by a craggy, Clint Eastwood clone in civilian clothes, a
former US Army colonel. A veteran trainer at the School of the Americas, the
ex-colonel now works with the State Department's Narcotics Affairs Section
and is deployed as full-time adviser to General Socha. Countless other federal drug
and intelligence agents also work in Colombia. In addition there are a couple
of hundred or more US military advisers training three new elite battalions
of the Colombian Army. Dozens of US choppers are also arriving here: one
fleet of "Super Hueys," mostly for the Colombian Army, and a
squadron of top-of-the-line Black Hawks, allocated mostly to Socha's antidrug
troops. Along with them come an unknown number of private contract US pilots
and helicopter technical crews. Another batch of private contract Americans
are here to fly the crop-dusters that spray toxic herbicides over the
coca-rich countryside. Supporting this operation are four new so-called
Forward Operating Locations - US military intelligence outposts - in Ecuador,
Aruba, Curaçao and El Salvador. General Socha, in an
interview, calls the US aid "crucial" to his efforts. "The
value of the American technical assistance, the exchange of know-how, the
electronic intelligence, the exchange of intelligence, cannot be
overestimated," he says. And of course, neither can the helicopters.
"They give us irreplaceable mobility and security for our
operations." All this largesse is paid
for by a two-year, $1.6 billion US aid package shaped by the Clinton
Administration, approved with little Congressional or public debate and wide
bipartisan support, now inherited by the Bush White House. Commonly called
Plan Colombia, its stated goal is to aid the Colombian government in wiping
out half of the 300,000 acres of coca fields in Colombia within five years.
About 80 percent of the program is strictly military, most of it focused on a
"push" kicked off in early December into southern Colombia's
Putumayo region, where about half the country's coca crop grows. Colombia is now the
third-largest recipient of US aid in the world, after Israel and Egypt. And
it seems likely that more US aid will soon be on the way. Colombian President
Andres Pastrana met with President Bush in Washington in late February and
asked for an ongoing US commitment. American supporters of the
plan point to Colombia as the source of 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in
the United States and about 60 percent of the heroin that flows to the East
Coast. The billion-dollar interest in Colombia, say US officials, can be
summed up in one word: drugs. But critics claim Plan Colombia is a blueprint
for war. They argue that Colombia has a surplus of violence and warfare and
that the last thing it needs is another military-based program, especially
one that embroils the United States in armed conflict with Colombian
guerrillas who have their strongholds in the coca-growing countryside. Indeed, rifle-toting groups
- from the army and police to various guerrilla groups, counterguerrilla
death squads and criminal gangs - are so prevalent in Colombian political life
that most analysts simply lump them together under the deceptively delicate
term "the armed actors." And what a ghastly tragic-opera this
ensemble has produced. The greatly escalated US involvement comes as a
forty-year dirty war between the Colombian government and the continent's
most entrenched guerrilla army spins into a blood frenzy; as an armed
right-wing "paramilitary" force burgeons in size and asserts its
presence by butchering unprecedented numbers of civilian victims; as hundreds
of thousands of rural families are "displaced" by the rampaging
violence; as Colombia becomes the kidnapping capital of the world; as a
national peace process hangs by a thread; and as the worst economic recession
in a half-century ravages the lower and middle classes and drives
unemployment to a stratospheric 20 percent. "No less than a generalized
humanitarian crisis" is how Colombia's semiautonomous national human
rights ombudsman, Eduardo Cifuentes, describes the situation. Against this backdrop, the
US plan to put four-fifths of its mammoth aid program into a Colombian
military buildup seems to many the precise opposite of what is needed. Says
political analyst Carlos De Roux of the Jesuit-run Fundacion Social, "If
you have a patient who is very ill and whose internal organs are inflamed,
you don't just intervene with a scalpel and start tearing away at more flesh
and tissue. Instead, you make a diagnosis of the root causes of the problem
and you begin treatment by stabilizing the patient, not further aggravating him." A Typical Day: 26 Massacred, 10 Missing The tectonic class divide in
Colombian society emerges in this mountainous Andean capital of 6 million as
a near-perfect geographic split. The southern half of the city melts into the
legendary Ciudad Bolivar, a sprawling and violent Casbah-like ghetto whose
inhabitants boast that it's too dangerous even for the army to enter.
Northern Bogotá, meanwhile, flaunts designer boutiques from Hugo Boss to Mont
Blanc, along with Colombia's equivalent of Wall Street. At its edge, it
neatly melds into foothill neighborhoods festooned with elegant high-rise
condos whose rooftops are often shrouded in a gossamer mountain fog. On any
Sunday, take a stroll down Avenida Chile toward the discos, casinos and
outdoor cafes of the northern Zona Rosa and there is a cop, or even a
soldier, on every corner - not to menace, but to protect the social elite
bunkered into this rarefied enclave. For while the war that rips through the
countryside is barely heard here in the capital, its byproducts, especially
pandemic kidnappings, haunt the daily routines of the better-off. It might be
a short-term abduction triggered by stepping into a "taxi" whose
driver, at gunpoint, forces his fare to sign a sheaf of blank checks or
surrender his ATM card and code. Or it could be the real deal - one that
demands the family patrimony as ransom. So, to enter just about any public
building, or even a private apartment house, in Bogotá is to go through the
same security routines as at the jumpiest of international airports: sign in
with armed private security guards, trade a photo ID for a visitor's badge
and, often, pass through a metal detector. Which is precisely the
ritual that precedes a visit with David Buitrago, legal director of Pais
Libre, a nonprofit that fights kidnapping. "Hardly anyone feels safe
here anymore," he says as he pulls out a sheet with the latest tallies.
"In ten years we have gone from 100 kidnappings a year to 3,706 during
the year 2000." That's not only a 16 percent increase over the previous
year but also about 50 percent of all the kidnappings in the world. All the
"armed actors" do it. Usually for money. Last year 75 percent of
abductions were carried out by guerrillas, mostly by the largest of the
insurgent groups, the FARC and the ELN; 10 percent were committed by the
right-wing paramilitaries. "While the paramilitaries kidnap fewer, their
victims most frequently just disappear," Buitrago says dryly. And he
worries that Plan Colombia will make matters worse. "If the plan really
cuts into the drug trade from which all the armed actors profit," he
says, "it might force them to increase kidnappings to make up the
difference." And it's not just the rich who feel threatened. A recent
poll showed that a mind-boggling 43 percent of Colombians fear they could be
kidnapped. "Let's face it," says Buitrago, "Everyone wants to
leave Colombia." Consider three news articles
on the front page of the Bogotá papers on January 19, the day I meet with
Buitrago. One piece reports that a right-wing paramilitary group entered the
northern town of Chengue two days before, rounded up the villagers and beat
twenty-six of them to death with stones and machetes. As sixty homes were set
on fire, the attackers fled with ten other live victims. The article goes on
to say that this is the latest in more than 150 "massacres" by the
paras in the past eighteen months, which have cost more than 1,500 lives. The
leader of these death squads, Carlos Castano, says the news report, is wanted
on twenty-two different warrants but has not been arrested. Another article
reports that Bill Clinton's State Department, with only hours left before the
Bush transition, employed a loophole in the US aid package and
"voluntarily" decided to "skip" having to certify that
the Colombian government has complied with US human rights demands attached
to Plan Colombia legislation - specifically, suppression of the paramilitary
death squads. The third news article reports that Gen. Peter Pace of the
Pentagon's Southern Command has arrived in Bogotá to say that eighteen Super
Hueys have been put into the hands of the Colombian military. The deadlier
Black Hawks, says General Pace, will arrive by July. Clinton's wink at the human
rights certification on the same day as the Chengue massacre should provoke
no special outrage. The bloodshed here is continuous. More than 35,000
Colombians have died in political violence over the past decade. "What
we have in Colombia isn't a civil war," says Ombudsman Cifuentes.
"What we have is a war of the armed actors against civil society." La Violencia President Pastrana was
elected in 1998 on a peace platform, vowing to end a half-century of violence
and war. He spoke boldly of a sort of Colombian Marshall Plan that would seek
foreign assistance to fight corruption, give some depth to Latin America's
oldest formal democracy, reform the justice system, negotiate a settlement
with the leftist guerrillas and, yes, fight the drug trade. He asked for $3.5
billion in foreign support which he would match with $4 billion in Colombian
government funding. Pastrana's election so
stirred the hopes of a war-weary nation that soon after his election,
millions of Colombians came into the streets rallying for peace. At first
blush, the aristocratic, fine-featured President seems an unlikely choice to
play such a historic role. His father, Misael Pastrana, was a lackluster
president in the early 1970s. And Pastrana's Conservative Party is hardly the
voice of the common people. But, then again, Colombia defies nearly all Latin
American stereotypes. It has produced no significant stretch of military rule
nor any sustained populist or nationalist movement of the sort common
elsewhere on the continent. The political left, meanwhile, has been
historically weak. For most of this century,
the Colombian political stage has been so monopolized by two major parties,
the equally ill-named Conservatives and Liberals, that from the mid-1950s
into the 1970s they even governed together with no real opposition.
"Strangely, we have a deep democratic institutionality that coexists
with the most barbaric violence, and the state has a foot in both," says
analyst Carlos de Roux. Bloodletting in Colombia
became more or less a permanent fixture back in 1948 when a popular presidential
candidate was murdered. Mass rioting turned into an era known as La
Violencia, which stretched into the 1960s. At that time, some of the peasant
groups that had armed themselves as self-defense militias became politicized
and, under the leadership of the now-septuagenarian Manuel "Sure
Shot" Marulanda, morphed into the leftist guerrilla group known as the
FARC - today a well-armed force of 18,000 fighters. Other smaller Marxist
insurgencies flowered. The FARC and to a lesser degree the 3,000 member ELN have
through the decades extended their reach over sizable chunks of sparsely
populated Colombian countryside but failed to gain much support elsewhere.
"Be clear on the FARC," says Mauricio Vargas, an editor and
columnist at Gabriel García Márquez's weekly, Cambio. "They are not your
Che Guevara, Comandante Marcos sort of romantic guerrilla force." That's an understatement.
While originally rooted in Marxism, the FARC has moved into criminal
activity. Its base of operations in southern Colombia overlaps some of the
richest coca-growing regions in the world. For some time now, the FARC has
harvested rich revenues by levying a "tax" on the coca-growers, in
return for which the FARC protects the growers from attack. Recently, there
is growing evidence that the guerrillas have gone deeper into the coca trade,
expanding into processing and edging into trafficking and sales. Colombia's - and President
Pastrana's - dilemma is this: Poverty and social inequality produce not only
coca plantations and violence but also dogged guerrilla armies. And
eventually they all become intertwined. How to undo this Gordian knot? Talking Peace - Planning War President Pastrana met with
US officials in 1999, showing them his comprehensive national reconstruction
plan and asking them to fund a significant part of it. He came out of those
meetings with a $1.5 billion opening commitment. But in those same meetings,
the Plan Colombia playbook got radically redrafted. The Marshall Plan aspect
of the blueprint was pushed aside. Shoved to the top were a militarized drug
war and an El Salvador-like counterinsurgency plan. "Maybe the rewritten
Plan Colombia is the price Pastrana had to pay the US to be able to proceed
with the peace process," speculates Carlos de Roux. Pastrana pushed ahead with
his peace initiative, meeting with the FARC's Marulanda and even granting the
guerrillas a temporary demilitarized zone to be used as a staging area for
negotiations. But because the talks produced no cease-fire, the fighting has
intensified as all sides escalate in order to win bargaining advantages.
Government forces, badly hurt by the guerrillas from 1997 to 1999, have gone
on the offensive. The FARC has also ratcheted up its forced recruitment, its
drug involvement and its kidnapping for ransom. Not only has the United
States been lukewarm to the peace talks - many Colombians have also soured on
their prospects. To the revulsion of millions, the FARC used the
demilitarized zone to hold kidnapped hostages. Meanwhile, it allowed coca
cultivation, while its attacks on civilian areas rose. The FARC formally
froze the peace talks in November, demanding that President Pastrana take
effective action against the right-wing paramilitaries if he wanted to renew
the negotiations. Which brings us to the
latest set of "armed actors," the paramilitaries, at least 11,000
well-armed troops financed by the wealthiest coca barons and committed to
exterminating the leftist guerrillas and their supporters. From their
stronghold in the north, the paras have started branching out nationwide and
are locked into a particularly bloody struggle with the guerrillas to secure
access to the Pacific Coast - a key to maintaining the coca trade. "In
the past few years the Colombian military has gotten out of directly waging
the dirty war, and at the same time there has been a commensurate rise of the
size and ferocity of the paramilitaries," says Andrew Miller of Amnesty
International. "And it is amply documented that even if independently
financed, the paramilitaries work hand in hand with the government
forces." Even the US government, at some level or another, will concede
that last point. In February Pastrana managed
to get the stalled peace talks restarted by making a commitment to crack down
on the paramilitaries. But the FARC also bears responsibility for the
situation: Its behavior has been so outrageous that it has allowed the
paramilitaries to pose as heroes to an ever more frightened and disillusioned
urban population. Fumigating the Poor Sensitive to charges that
Plan Colombia will only stoke the fires of this internal conflict, the
Colombian government's point man on the issue, National Security Adviser
Gonzalo de Francisco, strains to emphasize the least bellicose aspects of the
operation. During an extended interview in the elegant Narino Presidential
Palace, the soft-spoken 40-year-old political scientist makes his best case.
"Coca has feet, it moves around," he says. So, yes, he says, there
is a military component to eradication. But aerial fumigation is not to be
"indiscriminate," he says. "Forced eradication is like
chemotherapy," he says. "If we continue forced eradication for five
more years we will kill the patient." So while forcible fumigation will
be escalated against the big-time growers, for the first time in a serious
way, de Francisco says, the Colombian government will strive to negotiate
contracts with impoverished coca farmers under which they will agree to
manually destroy their crops. In return, the government will give each family
up to $2,000 in subsidies and technical assistance to grow substitute crops
like rice, corn and fruit. (De Francisco says that Washington is providing
$16 million specifically for these purposes - about 1 percent of its
Colombian aid package.) The average coca farmer makes about $1,000 a month,
but de Francisco argues that while a campesino might make less growing corn
or rice, he has a moral and legal obligation to stop growing coca. "Coca
will be leaving Putumayo," he affirms, while agreeing that as many as
10,000 rural residents might be "displaced." But de Francisco's critics
contend that as much as 75 percent of the illicit crops are on tiny plots
owned by poor farmers who have little other chance of economic survival. Only
a minority are large "industrial" sites. "Plan Colombia is
absurd and dangerous because it believes it can fumigate poverty," says
political science professor José Cuesta. Cuesta, a former M-19 guerrilla, is
now a leader of the Citizens' Network for Peace in Colombia. "The coca
crops are nothing but a concrete response to the ravages caused by
unrestrained free-market economic policies." Even the coca pickers, he
says, are increasingly the urban poor looking to survive. "If the
government were serious about drugs, it would forget about the campesinos and
attack the industrial and financial centers that most profit from
trafficking," says Cuesta. "This wouldn't be called Plan Colombia.
It would be called Plan United States." De Roux fears the current
actions could drive the farmers deeper into the arms of the FARC. "Until
now the farmers have not supported the guerrillas but merely accommodated
them," he says. "This military push might cement the bond. Worse,
it could push the FARC and the coca growers deeper into the jungle, and it
could encourage the FARC to become a full-blown cartel." Already
Ecuadorean farmers living near the southern Colombian border are reporting
that they have been offered money by Colombian drug traffickers to begin coca
production. Meanwhile, the indigenous
population of the targeted southern region is already paying an elevated
price. Right-wing paramilitaries have recently expanded in that area and are
challenging the FARC not only for territorial control but also for collection
of the coca "tax." The Indian communities have been caught in the
crossfire and have lost much of their traditional leadership in the
bloodshed. The FARC has also escalated its forced recruitment of teenagers
from indigenous families. Add to that the stepped-up government spraying, and
"for the indigenous this is a catastrophe," says a government
anthropologist who requested anonymity. "Much of the land there is unfit
for anything but coca. And the government is wiping out the traditional and
even the nontraditional crops." The national human rights ombudsman's
office has highlighted several cases involving Cofan Indians who had their
food crops, medicinal plants, fish harvesting tanks and grazing fields
sprayed with herbicides. An Associated Press correspondent who traveled to
Putumayo reported that most of the fumigation he saw had hit the smallest of
crops, many an acre or less. This directly contradicts the government claim
to be targeting the "industrial" crops. None of this has deterred
the Colombian Army from claiming at least partial victory in mid-February. An
official army press release said that eradication efforts were running ahead
of schedule and had been "carried out without any incident to date with
any farmers or settlers." This bluster might be just that - face-saving
public relations. A few weeks after the push began, six regional governors
protested the forced eradication and military approach of Plan Colombia,
doubtlessly contributing to the otherwise unexplained decision to halt the
spraying temporarily. Echoes of Vietnam Perhaps after the meeting
between Pastrana and Bush, we'll have a better idea of what the new
Administration's Colombia policy will be. Someone in Washington is going to
have to decide how much more it wants to invest in Colombia, how much of that
aid should continue to be military and just how much, if at all, Pastrana's
parallel peace efforts will be supported. Or, on the contrary, what kind of
appetite Washington has for being more explicitly entwined not so much in a
drug war as in counterinsurgency. The line between the two is already
considerably blurred by Plan Colombia. "It's ambiguous," says a US
Embassy official. "Anyone involved in any phase of drug production no
matter what hat he is wearing is now a legitimate target." There's no question that a
significant part of the American political class would just as soon see
Pastrana shut down the peace talks. "If the FARC does not start showing
some real good faith real soon, it is indeed time to pull the plug [on the
peace process]," says Republican Congressman Benjamin Gilman.
"Pastrana should then go ahead and shut down the guerrilla zone and send
in the troops." This sort of talk rattles some Colombian analysts.
"It's not very reassuring that we are the only regional headache for the
US," says Roberto Pombo, editor of García Márquez's Cambio. "If we
have a couple of hundred advisers here and one day the FARC kills three of
them and that happens on a day when the US President is in trouble on some
domestic issue, what happens to us? Ask the Libyans under Reagan, or the
Sudanese under Clinton." Adds Mauricio Vargas, "The US is already
up to its ears in Colombia. Everything's already here except the
troops." There are already American "contract" teams in
Colombia, one of which was fired upon in late February when it went into a
guerrilla zone to rescue a downed helicopter crew. But is Plan Colombia really
a prelude to a new Vietnam? It's unlikely that the Bush Administration is about
to send thousands of US troops into the crossfire between the FARC and the
paramilitaries. But there are, nevertheless, historical parallels beyond the
obvious imagery of blanketing foreign jungles with defoliants. Once again, US
power is being projected abroad to achieve its own objectives at a punishing
social cost to a country we're "assisting." And as in Vietnam, even
the US objectives are muddled and elusive. All available evidence shows that
drug use is never reduced by attacking the source but only by reducing the
demand. Plan Colombia, at best, will only disperse drug production from
Colombia to some neighboring location, and it will do nothing to reduce drug
use in the United States - except perhaps to spike the price of cocaine and
make the trade that much more profitable. One US Embassy official
essentially confirms the gap between what seemed to be Pastrana's original
vision of Plan Colombia and its reality today. "The US and Colombia have
different priorities," the official says. "Colombia has peace as a
priority. We have narcotics." Eternal War? The US strategy has little
regional support. "Panama does not want to get involved in the internal
problems of Colombia. We've been shying away from that in every way,"
Panama's Ambassador to the United States, Guillermo Ford, told the press. Nor
are Europeans enamored of Plan Colombia. In early February the European
Parliament, concerned about human rights and the rise of the paramilitaries,
voted 474 to 1 to oppose it. Unfortunately, there's little
echo of that peace constituency in the US Congress. Senator Paul Wellstone
has waged an unsuccessful battle to redirect US policy toward domestic drug
treatment programs. But, he says, "I have hope, because across the
country I see people more engaged in this issue." Only a comprehensive and
negotiated settlement can stop the cycle of violence in Colombia. Such a
settlement would include a program of manual eradication bolstered by deep
reform that would incorporate and demilitarize the armed actors. The peace
process undertaken by Pastrana and the FARC - and recently joined by the ELN
- is the first step in that process. But for now, the staccato
crackling of automatic weapons and the beating of chopper blades are still
louder than the voices of dialogue and reconciliation. "If you pick your
head up against the military, you can get it blown off by the
paramilitaries," says a discouraged Mauricio Vargas. "And if you
are on the left, where can you go? You are squeezed between a government and
a guerrilla army, neither of which you can support. All the conditions here
are ripe for eternal war." And yet at times an
astounding number of Colombians - as many as 10 million on one occasion in
1999 - have rallied for peace. On the evening of January 25, as talks between
the government and the FARC seemed hopelessly stalled and the pundits were
preparing the peace movement's obituary, some 10,000 to 15,000 Colombians
once again came out to defy the odds. Brought together by the umbrella group
Paz Colombia, they gathered in front of the Bogotá bullring to stage a
lantern-lit march. The procession snaked its way through downtown, led by a
contingent of jugglers, leaping acrobats and costumed stilt walkers passing
out candies and candles to onlookers. From human rights activists to striking
trade unionists, from students to well-dressed middle-class professionals,
the crowd was a mix not only of class but of ideology. Internal refugees
displaced by the death squads marched alongside those pushed from their homes
by the guerrillas. The wives of slain and kidnapped policemen locked arms
with the mothers of young men "disappeared" by the security forces.
The crowd sang out its chants, "Plan Colombia - Plan for War" and
"Not one more body, not one more peso for war!" No one in that demonstration
better embodied the complex forces that underlie war - and peace - in
Colombia than 45-year-old Nubia Sanchez. Originally from San Vicente de
Caguan, Sanchez said she fled the area after it was ceded to guerrillas in
the peace talks and the FARC began forced recruitment of 13- and
14-year-olds. And yet she marched that night to demand not only that the
peace talks continue but that the government renew the agreement to let the
guerrillas continue to control the area from where she fled. "My
personal situation is not important," she said as she held the candle
lantern to her chest. "Dialogue is the only way to get to peace." At Simon Bolivar Plaza, as
mounted police and a helmeted riot squad gazed on from the shadows cast by
colonial-era lamps, the marchers swarmed around a statue honoring the
"Liberator of the Americas." When the organizers set free a barrage
of white helium-filled balloons, the marchers lifted their lanterns and
cheered. One could imagine that someone standing on one of the mountain peaks
behind the city and peering down into the dark Andean night would discern a
distant flicker of light - and of hope. About Marc Cooper Marc Cooper is a Nation
contributing editor and a contibutor to The Notion. He is a visiting professor
of journalism and associate director of the Institute for Justice and
Journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. His books include Pinochet
and Me: A Chilean Anti-Memoir and Roll Over Che Guevara: Travels of a Radical
Reporter. His work has been recognized by the Society of Professional
Journalists, PEN America and the California Associated Press TV and Radio
Association. External link: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20010319/cooper |