Hostage rescue is ‘great news’ for McCain in Colombia

The timing of the rescue, which occurred while McCain was in Colombia, was in many ways a fortuitous turn of events for a presidential candidate who is using a three-day trip to South America and Mexico to try to show that he is a more agile foreign policy hand than his Democratic competitor, Barack Obama. Although the timing of the rescue was a coincidence and McCain’s trip to Colombia had nothing to do with it, the event nonetheless put him in the middle of classified talks about covert operations with the head of another government.

McCain said that he and his travelling companions—Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Joseph I Lieberman of Connecticut—had been informed by Uribe on Tuesday evening in Cartagena that the Colombian government planned to try on Wednesday to rescue a number of hostages, including the Americans, Thomas Howes, Marc Gonsalves and Keith Stansell. All three were military contractors who were abducted in 2003 in Colombia when their plane went down.

The talks about the planned rescue, which Lieberman described as detailed, delayed the start of a news conference on Tuesday that McCain held with Uribe outside the presidential retreat in Cartagena. In the news conference, McCain gave no hint of what he had just learned, although he mentioned the American hostages and praised Uribe’s efforts to battle FARC.

“I thank you for the success you have achieved at great sacrifice on the part of Colombian citizens in trying to eliminate the flow of drugs and the struggle against the FARC and other paramilitary groups that have caused so much difficulty for the Colombian people,” McCain said at the news conference. “And I also want to urge you to continue your efforts, as I know you will, to free those people who are being held by the FARC. Our thoughts and prayers will always go out to the three American citizens who have been held captive for a number of years.”