During a hearing this session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, panel member Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) accused the Biden administration of having a record of appeasing terrorists and terrorist organizations, and in support of this grandiose assertion, he cited a redesignation of a Colombian group known as the FARC, which had been formally identified in the U.S. as a foreign terrorist group.
Cruz was speaking with Samantha Power, who leads the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Senator questioned what he characterized as support at that agency for a reorientation of this government’s approach towards that group.
Power explained that, in short, the move had nothing to do with appeasing terrorists, instead relating to — as she recalled it — an effort to essentially assist some of those basically victimized by the group through their recruitment processes by making it easier to reenter life outside of the organization’s activities. The U.S. government is not turning a rhetorical blind eye to the organization’s actions, though like with Republican fearmongering about sanctuary cities, it’s not as though they’ll stop trying to expand things into something they’re not.
“Let me say what we’re in the middle of in Colombia,” Power said. “We’re in the middle of trying to support the peace process — the peace process that culminated in a peace, but the implementation of a peace. And we have worked for decades in the most under-developed areas from which the FARC recruited over so many years in agriculture, in livelihood support, and in transitioning people from growing things that are not in anybody’s interest for them to be growing… We do work in trying to ensure that soldiers who’ve gone back to their communities have an alternative source of livelihood so they don’t pick up guns again.” Republicans will probably keep imagining threats supposedly fostered by Biden, though.
Check out the hearing below:
