In Colombia: Military Crimes Point to a Growing Problem

We gotta get out of this place.....if it's the last thing we ever do

In Colombia: Military Crimes Point to a Growing Problem:

"Last Monday, the U.S. military announced that three members of the 101st Airborne Division had been charged with murder and obstruction of justice in the May 9 shooting deaths of three Iraqi prisoners. According to CNN, they allegedly threatened a fellow soldier who witnessed the shootings, telling him they would kill him if he talked.

As investigations progress into this case, Haditha, and other alleged killings -- such as that of a pregnant Iraqi woman and a disabled man -- it is instructive to look to Colombia, where U.S.-trained and -supported troops are also facing allegations of rampages outside the law.
Little attention has been paid internationally to a May 22 massacre in which a Colombian Army group killed 10 members of an elite counter-drug police unit. This police unit, trained by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, had captured about 200 traffickers over the years. The killings were initially described as a case of friendly fire, but the Colombian Prosecutor General's Office recently charged that it was a massacre committed by members of the armed forces doing a 'favor' for drug traffickers.

And the other week the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights asked the Colombian Attorney General's Office to investigate 37 cases of apparent extrajudicial killings. The armed forces presented the majority of the cases as guerrillas killed in combat during 2005-06, when really, according to the United Nations, the armed forces seem to be killing civilians and sometimes dressing the dead in rebel military uniforms to justify their deaths. "