(from an email to CSN from supporter Robert Thatch)
Before I read your letter to 60 Minutes, I had sent Mike Wallace a letter of my own (text follows). To my great surprise, Mike Wallace phoned me yesterday to defend their piece.
He stated that CBS had talked with Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Washington Office on Latin America before doing their report, and he (Mr. Wallace) felt that the information in the report accurately portrayed the situation in Colombia.
I was too dumbfounded to respond properly, but I did say that his report seemed very supportive of the 3-billion-dollar request, which I felt would only make a bad situation worse.
A CBS producer named Solly Granatsetin was also on the line, and he asked me about one reference in my letter that was unfamiliar to them: the item about Dyncorp and East Inc. (which I got from http://www.prairienet.org/csncu/081998DMN.html). I provided them with that information, so is a possibility that they will follow up, concerning the contracted "private armies" that are proliferating in Colombia.
Here is what I sent (and, mainly, I was surprised to learn that Mr. Wallace had read it!):
Mr. Wallace,
Your report about Colombia on 60 Minutes last night (12/5/99) contained many glaring factual errors, and omitted any references to the real problems of Colombia.
There were glamour shots of President Pastrana and his wife, and of some sharp-looking military units. And then Pastrana whined that many of Colombias best journalists, army officers, and police have been lost to the war with guerrillas. He (and you) neglected to mention the tens of thousands of unarmed, poor farmers that have been tortured and massacred by the military and by the armys hired, trained, equipped and licensed proxies, the paramilitary units.
As the interviewer, you frequently connected the leftist guerrillas with the drug trade, which is a joke to anyone familiar with Colombia. The resistance groups are not nearly as involved in drug production and transportation as are the right-wing groups, specifically the paramilitaries and the army itself.
At one point, your narrative voice-over stated that the right-wing paramilitary groups were organized by landowners to fend off the guerrillas. The truth is exactly the opposite, as you must know.
You stated that a stronger army in Colombia could curtail the drug trade. That is absolute nonsense, since many members of the military high command are involved in drugs.
Pastrana said he does not want American troops in Colombia. What a charade! There are already hundreds of U.S. troops there, some regular military and some contracted. (Dont you remember the surveillance plane that crashed a few weeks ago, killing several American military personnel?)
You should have done some easy research on Colombia, such as calling Amnesty International or the Washington Office on Latin America. You could have contacted Senator Leahy or perhaps Myles Frechette, who was our Ambassador to Colombia for many years. You could have placed one simple phone call to Human Rights Watch. There are dozens of similar organizations and individuals that would have told you that the Colombian government is the most corrupt government in the hemisphere, and it has the worst human rights record in the hemisphere. Those two basic facts were entirely absent from your report.
If you had done some research, what could you have told us about the work of the American contractors, such as Dyncorp and East Inc., in Colombia? Now that would have been interesting.
The fact that you did not do any serious journalistic work for this report causes me to wonder if you were directly or indirectly paid off to do the piece, by someone like General Barry McCaffrey. Otherwise how could you have made such dreadful misstatements?
What you presented was not just wrong. It actively promoted a laundry list of political/military propaganda that is the exact opposit of the truth. In so doing, you contributed to the misery of millions of citizens of Colombia. You committed not only a journalistic faux pas, but a grievous error which will assist in prolonging a terrible social/economic situation, passing it down the children and grandchildren of the current rural peasants of Colombia, if they survive.
Robert L. Thatch