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The Predictable Intellectual Whores at CSIS Study Colombia
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
[The Center for Strategic and International Studies in Georgetown has
long been a right-wing bastion crawling with scholar-agents eager to do
the US Government's bidding. For years it was officially affiliated with
Georgetown University -- a Catholic, CIA-infested pro-military
institution. CSIS is now supposedly operated as an independent
think-tank. They're still doing the same old job, however, and COHA
says that their upcoming report on Colombia will be long on pro-US
imperial analysis and woefully short on real scholarship. Just what the
Bush regime -- so allergic to reality -- ordered, bought, and paid for
through the White House Trade Office. -NY Transfer]
Council on Hemispheric Affairs - Jan 8, 2008
http://www.coha.org/2008/01/08/brazil%e2%80%99s-legislators-react-to-chavez%e2%80%99s-failed-effort-to-obtain-the-release-of-several-farc-political-prisoners/
CSIS Predictable Colombia Project
COHA will shortly release an overview of what it sees as possible
conceptual shortcomings in the Center for Strategic and International
Studies (CSIS) November 2007 report entitled Back from the Brink:
Evaluating Progress in Colombia, 1999-2007. In its assessment of the
CSIS research project, contracted with the White House Trade Office,
COHA researchers argue that the organizations account of Colombian
realities had to nicely satisfy the Bush administrations expectations,
and therefore its convictions may have preceded its research. Whatever
the truth of this assertion may be, the CSIS document certainly
projects the wrong signal when it comes to avoiding all appearances of
any conflict of interest, as well as the possibility of performing
tethered research for the organizations White House client. The
administrations trade office " the reports principal sponsor "
certainly was counting on a highly favorable finding in order to
buttress its intense campaign for a positive U.S. Congressional vote on
the embattled pending free trade pact with Colombia. Unfortunately,
there never was much of a prospect that the CSIS study would surprise
many people by not turning in an anticipated result.
With the participation of a former senior State Department official,
Peter DeShazo, who heads CSIS Americas Program and is one of the
authors of the report, and who was not a known maverick on Latin
American free trade matters, there wasnt much prospect that the
research project would provide any damning anti-free trade ammunition
to its enemies.
Characteristically, CSIS has been relatively predictable when it comes
to a hardline approach regarding Colombia, and seldom has expressed any
non-orthodox findings about the country that would be resented by
Colombian military and or would cast Bogotas current drug and national
security policy in a negative light, no matter how much stress its
overlooking of the countrys problems has placed on its human rights
observance. The fact is that when it comes to CSIS, the Bush
administration had long received for free the same kind of tendentious
politically correct research for which it was now prepared to pay, and
the enthusiasm on the part of Colombian officials over the CSIS
document is both comprehensible and lamentable.
*
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