Colombia's Military Shot Thousands of Civilians Instead of FARC, Intentionally

Apparently, this is not news to anyone in South America, but it's the first I heard of this insane practice

Colombia: New Evidence Against Ex-Army Chief, Says HRW

Posted By: Editoron, Santiago Times

Attorney General Should Move Ahead with Prosecution

Washington, DC – Previously unpublished evidence strongly suggests that a former top commander of Colombia’s military did not take reasonable steps to stop or punish hundreds of illegal killings, Human Rights Watch said today. The Colombian Attorney General Néstor Humberto Martínez Neira should revive the stalled prosecution of the general, Mario Montoya Uribe.

Colombian Attorney General
Néstor Humberto Martínez Neira

Montoya has been under investigation since at least 2015 for “false positive” killings throughout the country when he was the army commander between February 2006 and November 2008, a period during which these killings peaked. The thousands of false positive killings, committed systematically by soldiers throughout the country to boost enemy body counts in the war, began in 2002. In March 2016, Montoya was summoned to a hearing where prosecutors were set to charge him, but he has yet to be charged.

“Montoya led the Colombian army while it engaged in one of worst episodes of mass atrocity in the Western Hemisphere in recent years” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “The case against him is a test on how far Attorney General Martínez is willing to go to prosecute those most responsible for these killings.”

Montoya was summoned to a hearing where prosecutors were set to charge him in March 2016, but the Attorney General’s Office cancelled the hearing. In November, lawyers representing victims asked the Attorney General’s Office to set a date for a new hearing, media reports said, but no date has been set and Montoya has not been charged. Later that month, the prosecutor in charge of the case reportedly replied to victims’ lawyers that his office was still reviewing the evidence against Montoya. However, lawyers with detailed knowledge of the case told Human Rights Watch that authorities within the Attorney General’s Office have apparently decided to stall the prosecution.

In October 2016, Human Rights Watch had access to hundreds of pages of transcribed testimony provided by six current and retired army generals to prosecutors in closed hearings carried out between August 2015 and January 2016. The testimony strongly suggests that General Montoya knew, or at the very least had information available to know, about false positive killings under his command, and did not take measures he could have taken to stop them.

General Mario Montoya Uribe

Montoya is one of at least 14 generals currently under investigation for their alleged roles in false positive killings. Others include Luis Roberto Pico Hernández, who commanded one of the seven divisions of the army during Montoya’s time, and Juan Pablo Rodríguez Barragán, the current commander of the Colombian armed forces.

If these guys killed thousands of civilians just to make it look like they were accomplishing something, how easily would they kill the AG if he attempts to convict them of these horrible crimes, especially while one is still in charge of the Armed Forces? At the very least, he has to go. 


Recent agreement with FARC could save Generals

Human Rights Watch is concerned that the prosecution against Montoya and others could be jeopardized because many false positive cases could be tried before the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, an ad hoc judicial system created by the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) as part of their peace talks.

During the almost three years Montoya commanded the army, extrajudicial killings in Colombia reached unprecedented levels. Prosecutor’s office data shows that at least 2,500 civilians were allegedly killed during that period, most of them by army troops. In 2006 and 2007, for example, more than one in every three reported combat killings could be extrajudicial executions by the army, according to the office of the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights in Colombia. Montoya resigned in November 2008, right after false positives were unveiled in the “Soacha scandal” – involving army killings of young men and teenage boys from the Bogotá suburb of Soacha.

The testimony Human Rights Watch reviewed strongly suggests that General Montoya failed to take steps to prevent the false positive killings. Gen. Jorge Arturo Salgado Restrepo, who currently commands one of the nine army divisions and is himself under investigation, told prosecutors that General Montoya should have known of false positive killings and did not take reasonable steps to prevent or punish these crimes.

Similarly, Gen. Gustavo Matamoros Camacho, who was Montoya’s chief of operations, told prosecutors that he warned Montoya about irregularities in the reported combat deaths in 2008 that might have indicated illegal killings, but Montoya did not take any action to address them.

The testimony adds to other evidence implicating Montoya that Human Rights Watch and others have already released. In 2009, the army’s inspector-general told the US Embassy that a main factor behind false positives was Montoya’s “constant pressure for combat kills,” and said that he was among the officers who were “involved in” or “tacitly condoned” the crimes, according to an embassy cable. In 2015, a Colombian journalist released an interview of a former soldier and paramilitary who suggested that General Montoya actively furthered false positive killings.

In the June 2015 report, “On their Watch: Evidence of Senior Army Officer’s Responsibility for False Positive Killings in Colombia,” Human Rights Watch presented convincing evidence suggesting that numerous senior officials, including General Montoya, bear criminal responsibility for false positive killings. Evidence against Montoya in the report includes the testimony of one high-ranking army officer who told prosecutors that Montoya knew of the executions when he was the army’s top commander, and the testimony of Lt. Col. González del Río, who said that when Montoya was the army’s top commander, he pressured subordinate commanders to increase body counts, punished them for failing to do so, and was the principal “motivator” for false positives.

“The evidence against Montoya piles up only to gather dust in a drawer somewhere in the Attorney General’s Office,” Vivanco said. “It is about time Colombian authorities move forward with this case.”

Montoya is being investigated for “homicide of protected people,” meaning civilians, which is a crime committed during conflict. Since the Special Jurisdiction for Peace will hear cases of crimes that were “directly or indirectly related” to the armed conflict, it is possible that it would handle his case.

The justice portion of the peace deal dictates that the Special Jurisdiction will rely upon a narrow definition of command responsibility – the rule that establishes when superior officers can be held responsible for crimes committed by their subordinates – that does not conform with international law. The definition could require authorities to prove commanders actually knew about and had control over the actions of their subordinates at the time they committed the crimes.

Such a narrow definition of command responsibility would mean that commanders who were not present at a crime scene to exercise control over their troops’ actions at the time, but had effective control over the troops implicated in abuses and should have known about their actions, could escape accountability, although they bear criminal responsibility for their troops under international humanitarian law.

Under international law, a superior is criminally liable when he knew or should have known that subordinates under his effective control were committing a crime, but failed to take the necessary and reasonable steps to prevent or punish the acts.

“Montoya’s case could end up being a paradigmatic example of how the deliberate ambiguities in the justice agreement could be misused to let senior army generals off the hook and to deny the many victims justice,” Vivanco said.

Almost 1,000 Cars Torched Around France on New Year's Eve

 But government insists it 'went particularly well'

A car on fire in Paris CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES

Henry Samuel, Paris, Telegraph 

Vandals in France torched 945 parked cars over New Year's Eve in an arson rampage that has become a sinister annual "tradition" and amid a row over whether the government had sought to play down the figures.

According to the French interior ministry, the total of 945, which included cars that were either "totally destroyed" or "more lightly affected", amounted to a 17 per cent rise compared to last year.

Despite this, New Year's Eve "went off without any major incident", the interior ministry insisted in a statement, adding that there were only "a few troubles with public order",

In fact, police arrested 454 people over the night, 301 of whom were taken into custody. 

I guess the word 'few' has many definitions.

On Sunday, the ministry had chosen to release a much lower figure of 650 cars torched, as this only indicated the number of vehicles "set on fire" and not those engulfed in the ensuing flames.

So if you set one car on fire and the car next to it burns, it doesn't count; it's a freebee!

The lower figure enabled it to claim: "Once again this year, the overall  number of vehicles burned demonstrates that, however intolerable, the phenomenon is contained". By this calculation, the rise, it said, was only 48 cars.

But the the lower figure prompted the far-right Front National to denounce what it called the government's "extremely hazy security record".

"The new interior minister Bruno Le Roux…(initially) didn't communicate the number of vehicles burned and considers that the number of cars directly set on fire to be 'contained' while even this constitutes a signifiant rise of 8 per cent," the FN said in a statement.

Le Monde, the national daily newspaper, also accused the ministry of muddying the waters.

The government responded that the figures released were the "most pertinent and the most coherent". 

"There is absolutely no attempt at hiding anything," said Pierre Henry Brandet, an interior ministry spokesman.

"You have to look at the trend over several years, and what is significant is that there has been a significant drop over five years,"he said.

But, M Brandet, it doesn't help if the drop came as a result of how you count the number of cars. Is that method of counting consistent through the years? Statistics are meaningless otherwise.

Mr Brandet conceded, however, that the figure was still too high, adding: "These incidents are not tolerable and the perpetrators must be found and answer for their acts before justice."

Over New Year, a fire fighter in the eastern department of Ain was hurt while trying to extinguish one car. 

In Nice, where security has been extremely tight since the deadly Bastille Day truck attack of last year, two police officers were hurt when revellers threw "projectiles" at them. 

Bruno le Roux, the interior minister, said that no attack on security would not be tolerated. 

"I regret that once again there were too many instances of security forces being hit with objects, or faced with attacks or insults," he said.

But he thanked the tens of thousands of police and firefighters, adding that they "allowed December 31st to go off particularly well". 

With France under a state of emergency since a spate of terror attacks, some 90,000 security forces were out in its streets on New Year's Eve to police mass gatherings such on Paris' famed Champs-Elysées, where half a million revellers convened.

French domestic intelligence agents also reportedly swooped on a string of individuals ahead of festivities who they suspected might have been tempted to wreak violence.

The custom of setting vehicles alight on New Year’s Eve is said to have kicked off around Strasbourg, eastern France in the 1990s, in the the city’s deprived, high-immigrant districts.

It quickly caught on among disaffected youths in cities across the country, and is seen by some as a litmus test of general social unrest.

The most notorious spate of car burnings in recent years was seen in the 2005 riots when hundreds of vehicles were torched.

As stated above, the 'tradition' began in mainly Muslim areas. Who knows how many Muslims were involved in this year's event but it is safe to say many. Of course, the police or government will never tell us, they don't want you blaming Muslims for doing what they do.

Meanwhile, France is in a state of emergency; 90,000 police or military were on the streets; nearly a thousand cars burnt; police were attacked; several hundred people were arrested; and the government declares it a good night! Good grief!

Former French president Nicholas Sarkozy briefly abandoned issuing a breakdown of New Year's Eve car burnings in 2010-11 amid fears this was sparking copycat actions, but it has since been re-instated.

Harvard Neurosurgeon Visits Heaven - ABC News

Skeptics, I dare you to watch this. This video is about a Harvard educated neurosurgeon. What he reveals should cause you to question what you believe if you have any interest in the truth.

It is right to be skeptical of his experience; it could have been a dream or an hallucination, although we tend to know when something is a dream or an hallucination. But meeting his deceased sister whom he had never seen before, makes this experience very difficult to refute by any open-minded person.

God is real! Heaven is real! Hell is real! Your only purpose in this life is to choose God and Heaven and get ready for it. 

Jesus said, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no-one comes to the Father but by Me!"

Asylum Seekers Scam German Aid for Millions by Applying with up to 12 Fake IDs

So, hundreds of asylum seekers are so grateful to Germany for rescuing them from the horrors of war, or just living in an Islamic country, that they immediately set about scamming the German people out of tens of millions of euros by taking advantage of their own generosity. Nice people!

© Yannis Behrakis / Reuters

A special commission in the northern German city of Braunschweig will investigate over 300 cases of fraud committed by asylum applicants, who gamed the welfare system by using multiple IDs to claim benefits – and that may just be the tip of the iceberg.

The estimated total loss of taxpayer money in the state of Lower Saxony alone has been put at three to five million euros ($3.2-5.3 million), Regional German broadcaster NDR reported.

In the majority of cases, the scheme was employed by Sudanese refugees who were applying for benefits within the social welfare system, the head of the newly established investigative commission, Joern Memenga, said, as cited by Deutsche Welle.

The scammers allegedly took advantage of the extreme workload the civil servants who were registering the applications were under in the summer of 2015, at the peak of the European migrant crisis.

“At that point, we wanted to avoid one thing – homelessness,” Memenga said, adding that in some cases the same employees had registered more than one alias per applicant.

The welfare claimants would simply change their appearance to receive additional documents from unsuspecting social service workers. The not so sophisticated con met few road bumps, as the refugees did not have to give their fingerprints and, since they had no documents, were identified only from photographs.

“Sometimes just growing a beard, or putting on a pair of glasses, having shorter hair, but always different surnames,” Memenga said, as cited by DPA.

The system was also susceptible to rigging because the civil servants did not have time to sift through all of the applications processed at other municipalities in Lower Saxony, so the same asylum seeker could collect money from different places.

Eventually, one of the employees noticed that some of men in the photos look strikingly similar and sounded the alarm, reporting his suspicions to the police, regional broadcaster NRP, which broke the story, reported.

In one of the most extreme cases uncovered so far, one man was able to bamboozle the state to the tune of tens of thousands of euros using twelve fake identities.

“Our crassest case has twelve alias-personalities. Damage: 45,000 euros, at least,” Memenga said, as cited by NRP.

Pursuant to the Asylum Seekers Act, every asylum seeker is entitled to €135 of so-called pocket money and €216 per month to cover basic needs, if the asylum seekers are not on complete state provision.

“Excluding the cost of electricity, you reach about 320 to 350 euros per alias identity and person,” Memenga said. It is estimated that a ‘refugee’ with three to four identities could have drained an extra 5,000 to 10,000 euros from the state coffers.

So, 5-10 thousand euros divided into 3-5 million euros = 400 to 800 criminals. That's just in Lower Saxony! Since it seems to be mostly from the Sudanese migrants, it likely cannot be applied equally across Germany, but it is probably safe to assume that the number of migrants stealing from the good people of Germany numbers in the thousands, and probably several thousand. That would put the loss to German welfare well into the tens of millions of Euros.

No legal recourse?

Though the fraud has now been exposed, the suspects may not face charges due to legal difficulties, as in most cases they used fake names and addresses.

“Without a place of residence, no legal hearing and no service of an accusation [is possible],” Julia Meyer of Braunschweig public prosecutor’s office told NRP.

“By the time their cover is blown, they have mostly moved on already,” Meyaer added, as cited by DPA.

This is what happens when compassion pushes aside any form of common sense. It is the women and children of Sudan/South Sudan who are being raped and murdered. It should have been women and children who were allowed into the Europe. But instead, most migrants were young single men, probably some of whom are among the rapists and murderers of women and children. Compassion can be easily misplaced and abused!

"Welcome to Germany you poor soul. Here, take may car; take my house too! You already have three? No problem, now you have four!" 

Last year, Germany received almost three times fewer asylum seekers than in 2015. Some 350,000 asylum seekers entered the country in 2016, while 890,000 people crossed into Germany the year before. The German government spent some €559 million on integration courses for migrants in 2016 alone, and the sum is set to increase to over €600 million next year.

The Great Climate Change Hoax - Historical Climate Sciencist

Canadian historical climate scientist explains the great 'Climate Change' hoax. Dr. Tim Ball, whom I have met in my office, if I remember correctly, gives the history of the hoax that has swept the world. He explains the role of super environmentalist, Maurice Strong in taking the attitudes of the Club of Rome to the UN and thence to the world. 

Btw, if you live in Ontario, you have Maurice Strong to thank, along with your Premier, for your astonishingly high hydro bills.

Dr. Ball has paid a high price for daring to tell the truth as he has been sued 3 times, mostly in efforts to just shut him up. A current suit is being used by Ball to attempt to get the IPCC's lead scientist to release his computer coding by which he has determined that CO2 causes global warming. The IPCC scientist managed to get his code recognized as 'intellectual property', which makes it impossible for other scientists to test his theory. Such testing is the very basis of scientific theory. 

Dare I mention my theory of 'astro-turfing' yet again? Listen for hints of the IPCC and others creating the 'artificial grass-roots movement' that has driven the world crazy.

It's a pod-cast so there is no visual and it is nearly 55 minutes which would normally keep me from listening to it. But after only a few minutes I was caught-up in the interview and listened to the whole thing. I learned a great deal from it and if you are interested in the great climate change hoax, I encourage you to listen to it as well.

podcast 54:43

NPR's Deplorable Reporting Covers Up the Ethnic Cleansing of Jews in Holy Land

Jewish family: Hebron, 1928.

Daniel Pomerantz, Honest Reporting

In its article, “7 Things To Know About Israeli Settlements,” National Public Radio manages to demonstrate just how little its writers know about settlements, Israel and how to practice journalism.

Our critique of this article is not about settlements, but about basic journalistic standards.

Ethnic Cleansing in the West Bank

Reporters Greg Myre and Larry Kaplow begin by claiming:

When Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Six-Day War, no Israeli citizens lived in the territory.

This stunning lack of context ignores that Jews had indeed lived in Hebron, Bethlehem and many other towns in the land historically called “Judea and Samaria,” until 19 years earlier – when Jordanian forces (with the help of local Palestinians) expelled or killed all of the indigenous Jews, and then re-named the entire area “The West Bank.”

The only reason the population of the West Bank was entirely Palestinian by 1967 was because they expelled the indigenous Jews in 1948.

Thousands of photographs from the 19th century confirm that Jews were in the land, and at that time, few, if any, Palestinians were.

Doesn’t the ethnic cleansing of an entire indigenous Jewish population deserve a mention from NPR?

Kaplow and Myre further distort history in the very same sentence by saying “Israel captured the West Bank…” yet covering up the reason why: Jordan had turned those lands into a launching point for a massive assault against Israel, with the intent to destroy the entire country.

Israel was forced to capture the West Bank in order to prevent Jordan’s advance, save Israel’s very existence, and save all the Jews in Israel from the same fate suffered by those Jews referenced above: total and complete ethnic cleansing.

Again, not even a mention?

Ethnic Cleansing in Jerusalem

In an encore of ignorance, Kaplow and Myre claim:

Shortly after the 1967 war, Israel annexed East Jerusalem, which is part of the West Bank and had a population that was then entirely Palestinian.

First of all, there was never any such entity as “East Jerusalem.” Jerusalem was one united city for several thousand years until Jordan invaded its eastern part in 1948. At that point, Jordan’s military (with the assistance of local Palestinians) expelled or killed all the Jews living in the areas it captured. Again: total and complete ethnic cleansing.

It was around 1948 when the expulsion of the Jews from across Middle East and North African Islam, went into high gear and more than 800,000 Jews were driven from those countries. The West Bank and east Jerusalem being under the authority of Jordan at the time would have been included in that massive attempt at ethnic cleansing. Have you ever heard of this before?

Kaplow and Myre also cover up from their readers that the area they call “East Jerusalem” includes the Temple Mount (the holiest site in Judaism) along with its famous Western Wall, the Old City, and Jerusalem’s ancient Jewish Quarter.

Yet all the authors have to say is “…a population that was then entirely Palestinian.”

HonestReporting interviewed Jewish refugees from the Jordanian invasion of Jerusalem, in order to paint a more complete picture of Jerusalem’s recent history.

Journalistic Failures

Kaplow and Myre indulge in a number of other misleading falsehoods, such as the claim:

While the Israelis tend to speak of East Jerusalem and the West Bank as two separate entities, the Palestinians regard them as a single body — the occupied West Bank.

In fact, Palestinians do not typically use the term “occupied West Bank,” but rather “occupied Palestine,” which they clearly define as being all of Israel.

When discussing Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza NPR selectively omitted the thousands of rockets fired at Israel from the Strip. Kaplow and Myre also criticize Israel’s military presence in the West Bank but fail to acknowledge that Palestinian terrorism forces Israel to maintain that military presence.

A journalist may explore complex topics and present varying viewpoints, but journalistic ethics do not allow the omission of critical context nor the distortion of objective historical facts, as Kaplow and Myre have done here.

NPR has covered up the massive scale ethnic cleansing of Jews in their own historic homeland. The result is not only offensive to the Israeli victims of these attacks and misleading to NPR readers, but also an embarrassment to the very profession of journalism.

NPR's reporting is typical of the antisemitic attitude that permeates most western media and is somewhat responsible for the growing anti-Jewish attitude that could well result in another Jewish holocaust within 100 years of the previous. Such a thing should be impossible but it is becoming more and more likely everyday to the great shame of humanity.

Of All the Stars that Fell in 2016, This One Hero Went Almost Unnoticed

Heroic Girl Saved 150 Lives By Pretending To Be

A Single Mom During WWII

Her bravery will never be forgotten

by  Briana Rauch

On December 11, 2016, Marion Pritchard passed away. You might never have heard of Pritchard, but she was responsible for saving a whole lot of people back during World War II. Born in the Netherlands in 1920, Pritchard was 19 when the Nazi invasion began. She joined up with the resistance and worked tirelessly to save as many children as she possibly could.

Pritchard’s original name was Marion van Binsbergen, and she was born in the city of Amsterdam.

When Pritchared was 19, the Germans arrived in the Netherlands and seized control of her hometown.

With her fiery temperament and brave spirit, Marion immediately joined up with the resistance. Shortly afterwards, she found herself in prison, where she would remain for a year and a half.

Pritchard was eventually released and, in 1942, she saw something that shocked her to the core.

“It was a beautiful spring morning, and it was a street I had known since I had been born, and all of a sudden you see little kids picked up by their pigtails or by a leg and thrown over the side of a truck. You stop, but you can’t believe it.”

Pritchard just happened to be passing by at the exact moment a home for Jewish kids was being raided and destroyed. The children were being tossed into a truck to be taken away.

Pritchard was devastated by what she saw and made a vow to save as many people, especially children, as she possibly could.

She then proceeded to volunteer for so-called “missions of disgrace”, in which non-Jewish resistance members would take-in Jewish children and pretend to be their mothers, preventing them from being taken away by the Nazis.

As Pritchard was young and single, she was able to perform these sorts of missions very successfully. She had no Jewish background and was able to save dozens of kids.

The image left shows Pritchard caring for a young girl named Erica Polak. Polak eventually arrived in the United States, where she became a psychologist. She knows that she owes her life to Pritchard’s bravery.

By the end of the war, it is believed that Pritchard was able to save a grand total of about 150 people.

Most of the missions passed without any problems, but on one occasion, Pritchard was forced to kill someone in order to save a family of Jews that were hiding in her home.

In the years following the war, Pritchard met and married an American soldier, Aaron Pritchard. Together, they built a new life for themselves in the United States.

YouTube / Raoul Wallenberg Medal and Lecture

The couple lived in Vermont, where Pritchard pursued a career as a psychoanalyst, continuing to use her skills to help people in need.

In 1981 her efforts were officially recognized by Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial. Pritchard was given the title of “righteous among the nations” and received several awards for her courage.

As stated at the beginning of this article, Pritchard died in December of 2016, but her memory lives on, along with her three children, eight grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

Pritchard was a true hero and her story should be known to all, so please SHARE it around to spread the word!

RIP Marion! May Our Lord Jesus Christ forgive you and bless you in Eternity.