Magic Laptops Of Death Aren’t What They Used To Be

Or- Dead men tell no tales, but laptops can sing any tune the authorities want.

So...the Magic Laptop of Death procured via a cross border raid into Ecuador by Colombian 'special' forces, CIA ahem, (just to distinguish it for the Magic Laptop of Death the Bush regime procured which according to them show Iran has a super top secret nuclear weapons program that the 16 US intelligence agencies found no evidence of, ahem) hey wait a minute...seeing any common threads here. Anyways, the Magic Laptop of Death that was meant to be full of emails tying deceased (as in they whacked him & 25 others in the raid/ambush, most in their pj's) FARC leader Raúl Reyes to the Empire's public enemy Number 1, a Mr Huge Chávez along with various other nemeses of Washington & Uribe. Well, the thing is...um how shall I put this...Captain Ronald Hayden Coy Cortiz an anti-terrorism investigator of the Colombian police said under oath before the prosecution lawyers-

"We haven't seen any e-mails, I haven't found them so far. They found a large number of e-mail addresses, but Reyes kept these in a Word document and other Microsoft documents," the investigator said in his testimony.
Coy Cortiz made the statements in the investigation of an Ecuadorean politician with alleged ties to the guerrillas. Several journalists and politicians are accused of having ties to the guerrillas.

Reyes was killed on March 1st, so there's been plenty of time to find any emails on a laptop, even the shittiest IT support could manage that. So...that leaves the supporters of the Magic Laptop of Death super incrimination device a bit...fucked?

BoRev- (click for links) Yeah, so...this raises some questions, like--Christ where to begin?--what exactly were the "huge caches of Emails" the Colombians leaked to the Economist last March, that formed the basis for their big hyperventilating profile thingy here? And what was the "leaked Email" that Guardian reporter Rory Carroll intercepted in May, showing that the FARC might be about to secure money from the Venezuelans? And then what were the "dozens of e-mails in the rebel computers" that were shown to narcissist-retardist Miami Herald columnist Andres Oppenheimer last July? And what were the emails that Human Rights Watch said "raised serious questions about Venezuela's relationship with the Colombian guerrillas"?

I guess the thing is when you get away with WMD lies about the most serious thing on Earth- a war, faking up shit on the odd laptop comes pretty easy as does slavish reporting on it by sympathetic hacks. Otto @ Inca Kola News who led the way on this also noted the suspiciously shiny newness of the 3 procured laptops-

It does remind me of the pristine condition of those laptops, as shown by Colombia to the world in May. That's the official police photo above....I mean, just look at it. There's not a scratch on those machines. Don't you find that slightly weird for three pieces of computer equipment carried round the jungle by a bunch of terrorists? Don't you find it weird after Reyes and his cohorts had the crap bombed out of them by several bombing runs and then commandos piling in to give them lesde grace a few minutes later? And then there was this story uncovered by Daniel Denvir....the one about how the photos that Colombia leaked as from the FARC machines were proven to be Colombia intelligence snaps.

So will our news organs apologise (Carroll *cough*), mea culpas all round or as Otto says-

I find it amazing that yesterday's revelation (no other word will do) there were no e-mails on the Raul Reyes FARC laptop computer hasn't made any headlines this morning. I've just checked on Google and nobody's running this story outside of fringe media in the Spanish language.

Surely you remember how world publications up to and including The Economist told us about the "huge caches of e-mails" that implicated the world and his wife (most notably Chávez, but natch natch and thrice natch, yeah?). In fact that Economist note is shown to be a very large crock, as it makes constant references to e-mails that (and get this very clear) do not exist.

This is, of course, precisely why the media won't be dwelling much on this story. The news that the "thousands of e-mails" they used to whack those nasty lefty people over the head with do not exist is rather embarrassing. So in true style, the story will be ignored and spiked in newsrooms around the world. Not a single apology, not a single correction.

More background from The Real News Network back in May, who were somewhat more diligent in their reporting-

Xposted @ Ten Percent