The claims by the fascist government in Columbia, the Bush regime, the "Keating Five" McCain campaign, and the corporate media that the FARC hostages were released through trickery and this all just happened to take place in time for McCain's visit to that country were fishy from the start. Any decent bullshit detector should have been going off the charts.

It turns out the whole story was a bunch of bullshit.

FARC was paid millions of dollars to release the hostages. (The Australian 7/4/08)

LEADERS of the Colombian FARC rebel movement were paid millions of dollars to free Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt and 14 other hostages, Swiss radio has said, quoting "a reliable source".
The 15 hostages released Wednesday by the Colombian army "were in reality ransomed for a high price, and the whole operation afterwards was a set-up," the radio's French-language channel said.

Saying the US, which had three of its citizens among those freed, was behind the deal, it put the price of the ransom at some 20 million dollars.

The radio said its source was "close to the events, reliable and tested many times in recent years.'

The Bush regime and its corrupt cronies in Columbia staged the whole thing to help McCain's campaign, and it sounds like they used our taxdollars to pay off FARC.