Post puts Colombian human rights abuses into murkyness territory

The Post finally ran an extensive article Thursday looking at the matter of a plan to allow U.S. military forces on several Colombian military bases ("U.S.-Colombia Deal Prompts Questions"). But reporters Juan Forero and Mary Beth Sheridan drop this line:

In Washington, Sens. Christopher J. Dodd and Patrick J. Leahy, senior Democrats who help shape policy on Latin America, asked Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in a letter why they had not been consulted about the plan and wondered why the Obama administration was deepening its ties with a military they accuse of human rights abuses.

Human rights abuses by the Colombian military are now not a fact, but just something that Senators Dodd and Leahy allege?

Just a couple of months ago, the Post's formulation on this was different (Forero, 06/29/09):

On Monday, Uribe again arrives at the White House. But this time he will encounter an administration pushing to expand its alliances in Latin America and increasingly worried about Colombia's dismal human rights record, Colombia experts say.

There was no caveat there, no "what they call Colombia's dismal human rights record." And that's the way this should be reported.

What's particularly ironic here is that the Post has done some good reporting over the years on abuses by the Colombian military. One particularly notable piece was Forero's "Colombian Troops Kill Farmers, Pass Off Bodies as Rebels'" in March 2008.

For an update on where things stand with the Colombian military, see what Human Rights Watch said in June:

In recent years there has been a substantial rise in the number of extrajudicial killings of civilians attributed to the Colombian Army. As documented by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, many human rights organizations, and most recently, the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions, army members, under pressure to show results, take civilians from their homes or workplaces, kill them, and then dress them up as combatants killed in action to increase their body count.

...

The UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions visited Colombia in June. In preliminary findings, he noted that "[t]he sheer number of cases, their geographic spread, and the diversity of military units implicated, indicate that these killings were carried out in a more or less systematic fashion by significant elements within the military." He pointed out that the Colombian military justice system contributes to the problem by obstructing the transfer of human rights cases to the ordinary justice system. His final report will address these and other issues, including possible incentives to members of the military that contribute to the killings.

The executions, which the Special Rapporteur described as "cold-blooded, premeditated murder of innocent civilians for profit," stand out as one of the most serious abusive practices by state agents we have documented in Latin America in recent years.

I hope the Post's terminology in Thursday's article was just a one-time misstep, and will not be repeated again as long as the Colombian military continues to be a clear human rights abuser.