Initial Points on Bombing of Venezuela and Abduction of Maduro and His Wife...

Chavez overcame this...Illegal, baseless...Impeach Trump...Usonia, not America...William Blum's list...Palestine...UN...Noriega...Media Mind Readers...

• Zei Squirrel notes that in 2002 “the US regime orchestrated a coup in Venezuela, and Chavez was kidnapped and taken away by helicopter to be executed by CIA-Mossad agents. But the Venezuelan masses came out onto the streets demanding their president, and quickly overthrew the fascist coup regime and forced Chavez’ return. This was all captured in the brilliant documentary ‘The Revolution Will not be Televised’.” (I had some involvement in this I hope to write about sometime.)

  

• I put out a news release this morning quoting World Beyond War: “The United Nations Charter makes it a crime to threaten war and a crime to wage war except in defense or by U.N. authorization, neither of which is the case here, and neither of which has even been alleged here. The alleged shortcomings of a government provide no legal basis for a foreign government to attempt to overthrow it. The illegal drug trade, even where real, provides no legal basis for waging war or committing murder. U.S. President Donald Trump’s claims about the illegal drug trade regarding both Venezuela and over 100 people thus far killed in boats with U.S. missiles from drones are without evidence and widely considered not even plausible.” See full statement and link to more resources.

• Obviously this is impeachable and if anyone in Congress actually wants to stop it they should initiate a principled bi-partisan impeachment.

• The importance of shifting from calling things of the USA “Usonian” rather than “American” as I recently wrote become all the more important.

• Hard not to think of all the countries the US government has overthrown since World War II — see list by the late William Blum which I set up after his death in 2019:

  Iran 1953
  Guatemala 1954
  British Guiana 1953-64
  Iraq 1963
  North Vietnam 1945-73
  Cambodia 1955-70
  Laos 1958, 1959, 1960
  Ecuador 1960-63
  Congo 1960
  Brazil 1962-64
  Dominican Republic 1963
  Bolivia 1964
  Indonesia 1965
  Ghana 1966
  Chile 1964-73
  Greece 1967
  Bolivia 1971
  Australia 1973-75
  Portugal 1974-76
  Jamaica 1976-80
  Seychelles 1979-81
  Chad 1981-82
  Grenada 1983
  Fiji 1987
  Nicaragua 1981-90
  Panama 1989
  Bulgaria 1990
  Albania 1991
  Afghanistan 1980s
  Yugoslavia 1999-2000
  Ecuador 2000
  Afghanistan 2001
  Venezuela 2002
  Iraq 2003
  Haiti 2004
  Honduras 2009
  Libya 2011
  Ukraine 2014

• Venezuela, as I’ve noted in 2014, considered using the Genocide Convention to go after Israel. They were interested in going beyond rhetoric. They were apparently dissuaded from this by the Abbas gang which purports to represent Palestine at the UN. In contrast, I suspect that the Russian, Chinese governments et al will now not go beyond more rhetoric.

• Venezuela hasn’t been able to vote at the UN because of the insane US sanctions.

• Another case of interesting timing in several respects, including, as my colleague Hollie notes, it’s 35 years to the day that the US ousted and kidnapped Noriega, which seems designed to highlight the drug pretexts in both cases (FAIR reporting on Noriega might prove useful). It is also five years to the day from when Trump assassinated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani.

• I rarely watch Al Jazeera anymore, but I tuned in for a bit this morning and heard their White House correspondent (Alan Fisher) claim that Trump saw Venezuela as a threat. No. He might have claimed that. There’s no basis for such a ridiculous claim. Fisher responded that such distinctions are “semantic”. Semantics is supposed to be his job, see my piece below from 2004:

Media Mind-Readers

Pretending to know official motives is not journalism

As the U.S. government pressured the U.N. Security Council in October 2002 to endorse an invasion of Iraq, NBC anchor Tom Brokaw reported (10/17/02): “In Washington, administration officials worry that the continuing U.N. debate will only embolden Saddam if the language of the resolution is loaded with ambiguities.”

By talking about the officials’ “worry,” Brokaw was reporting not simply on what they said, but on their alleged internal state of mind. It’s a chronic problem in the media: The beliefs, motivations and intentions of certain preferred sources—usually U.S. government officials—are described matter-of-factly by the press, as though reporters had the ability to read the sources’ minds.

During the same period of the Brokaw report, for example, CBS’s Bill Plante stated (9/18/02): “The president is very concerned that allowing [the inspectors] back in without a tough new U.N. resolution would be meaningless.” And U.S. News & World Report wrote (9/30/02): “Bush administration officials worry that if Saddam does allow [inspectors] into Iraq, he will be able to bully and hoodwink them into declaring Iraq free of illegal weapons.”

By “reporting” the alleged thoughts and emotions of policymakers, such accounts put the sincerity of official motives off-limits for discussion. If it’s a fact that administration officials “worry” and are “very concerned” that Saddam Hussein would take advantage of the inspectors’ return, on what grounds can one argue that the officials might have a different agenda from the one they express?

Other possible reasons officials might have for wanting a “tough” U.N. resolution or for opposing inspections are more difficult to argue after the public has been thus “informed.”

“Governments lie,” as I.F. Stone was fond of reminding journalism students. But in the professional press, administration officials’ declarations of their intentions are taken at face value, as when CNN’s Dana Bash said on American Morning (6/10/04): “Democratic reforms in the broader Middle East . . . topped the White House agenda over the last several days.” The White House agenda is what the White House says it is—“democratic reforms”; the language tells us so.

AP (3/15/02) wrote that “the main missions of Vice President Dick Cheney’s trip—stopping Iraq, stopping terrorism and stopping Mideast violence—will come together during his Saturday talks in Saudi Arabia.” What Cheney says he is doing is what he is doing: “stopping Iraq” (from what?), “stopping terrorism” (not inflaming or instigating it) and “stopping Mideast violence” (not provoking or practicing it).

Even when the professed motives of officials are questioned, more idealistic reasons can be offered in their place. According to E.J. Dionne (Washington Post, 6/22/04), the administration “believed that knocking Saddam out of power could open the way for democracy in the Middle East and for a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

But they found “little support among Americans for such a war. So rather than rest their case for war against Saddam on their real, perfectly defensible reasons, they argued it was a proper reaction to the terrorist attacks.” Poor officials, forced to lie because their true goals were too high-minded for the country.

Where ESP fails

While the media often seem to conflate stated goals with actual goals when covering a figure they seem sympathetic to, the same outlets cover leaders at odds with Washington in a decidedly different manner.

For example, AP (1/13/04) claimed that “privately, Bush administration officials worry that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is working with Cuba to oppose pro-American democracies in the region.” The report also stated that “the United States wants to kick corrupt nations out of the Organization of American States.” Here, U.S. worries and desires are presented as facts.

By way of contrast, an AP report (6/4/04) informed us that “Chavez said he hoped the prospect of a democratic vote would deter future attempts to overthrow his leftist government.” Note: not “Chavez hoped.”

Media seem to have, and encourage their readers to share, a direct line into the thinking of U.S. officials that they lack when it comes to others, whose statements are to be regarded critically.

But media ought to be engaging the assertions of all politicians in a similarly critical way. It’s easy enough to write, for example, “The administration says/claims/alleges it wants democracy in the Middle East,” and then to describe the actual policies and their impact as factually as possible, presenting evidence and a wide variety of viewpoints.

That is, it should be easy—if the oft-stated goals of journalists are indeed their actual goals.