The New York Times, March 31, 2000, Friday, Late Edition - Final
House Passes Bill To Help Colombia Fight Drug Trade
By ERIC SCHMITT
After two days of debate, the House today approved a $12.7 billion
emergency spending bill whose centerpiece commits the United States to
train and equip Colombia's security forces to combat drug traffickers in a
country where the narcotics trade and guerrilla insurgency have blurred.
Not since the Central American civil wars of the 1980's has the United
States tried to throw such political, diplomatic and military backing
behind a crucial Latin American ally threatened by insurgency.
The bipartisan House vote today, 263 to 146, approved an emergency package
that also includes money for the Pentagon to pay for the peacekeeping
mission in Kosovo, and for flood disaster relief in North Carolina.
But most significantly, the House has cast judgment on a plan backed by the
Clinton administration to spend $1.7 billion during two years to help
Colombia and other Andean countries, despite critics' complaints that the
anti-drug plan is ill-conceived and could drag the United States into an
open-ended conflict that has already cost tens of thousands of lives during
the past 40 years.
"This program will strengthen democratic government, the rule of law,
economic stability and human rights in that beleaguered country," said
Barry R. McCaffrey, the White House drug policy director.
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New York Times, April 18, 2000, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final
Colonel Says He Used Cash From Wife's Drug Smuggling
By ALAN FEUER
A United States Army officer who once oversaw the government's antidrug
wars in Colombia admitted yesterday that he had paid his household bills
with thousands of dollars he knew his wife had received from smuggling
heroin from Bogota to Manhattan and Queens.
The officer, Col. James C. Hiett, made his admission in Federal District
Court in Brooklyn while pleading guilty to failing to report that he knew
that his wife, Laurie Anne Hiett, had been laundering the profits of her
drug smuggling. In January, Mrs. Hiett admitted that she had sent six
packages of heroin wrapped in brown paper through diplomatic mail.
With his chin held high and back straight, Colonel Hiett stood before Judge
Edward R. Korman and said crisply and quietly that his wife had given him
$25,000 last April after traveling twice between Colombia and New York
City. But he insisted that he did not know the money had come from drug
smuggling until Army investigators told him.
"As a result of my conversations with the Army investigators, I then knew
that the cash my wife had previously given me came from drug trafficking,"
he said. "I then took steps to dissipate this cash by paying bills as
possible, and depositing some of the cash in our accounts."
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Louis Proyect
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