As I've previously said, there's no
way to know one way or the other yet if the CIA murdered Hugo Chavez,
the late President of Venezuela.
The U.S. media and government is still
stalking that country, looking for an opening now that things are
somewhat more fluid with Chavez's death.
The Venezuelans just had to kick out a
couple of subversive U.S. imperialist operatives thinly camouflaged
by diplomatic cover. (Diplomatic status is a protective device that
gives operatives immunity for criminal activities in the host
country. Given that coups and subversion and manipulation of internal
politics are routinely run out of U.S. embassies, and the history of
the U.S. imposing and/or supporting murderous fascist regimes,
especially in Latin America, the U.S.' self-declared “our
hemisphere,” Latin nations would be well-advised to close all U.S.
embassies and consulates until the U.S. has changed its stripes and
is no longer a threat to democracy and the well being of the people
of those nations. )
Nicolas Maduro, Chavez's designated
successor, just gave a speech that has provided grist for the U.S.
media's anti-Chavismo mill. NPR's reliably reactionary
Saturday morning “news” host Scott Simon hauled on NPR's current
Latin American correspondent Juan Forero to properly indoctrinate us
on current events in Venezuela.[1] Forero made
sure to call Maduro's speech “rambling,” an adjective bourgeois
propagandists frequently use when discrediting a speech, manifesto,
or any expression of ideas they need to discredit without having to
engage with and refute the actual content. (And they certainly don't
want you to know what was said in detail. They just cherry-pick the
parts good for painting the picture they want to paint, and aren't
even honest about those parts. Cf. how they keep saying Ahmadinejad
“threatened to destroy Israel.” No he didn't. Even a high Israeli
official admitted that was a- ahem- misquote.) Or maybe Forero
just wasn't bright enough to follow Maduro's argument and see the
connection between his points. Then it would seem rambling to him.
Betcha plenty of Venezuelans had no trouble keeping up with him.
Forero mentioned that the U.S. sent a
“low level” rep to Chavez's funeral. Which, Forero failed to
note, is a deliberate insult, and a poke in the eye of the Venezuelan
people, the large majority of whom admired Chavez and are grieved by
his death. (Much was and still is made in the U.S. media about how
“polarizing” Chavez was. Unlike their own leader, Obama, huh?)
Forero noted that it was “shocking”
to hear Maduro “imply” that “the U.S. had a hand in the death”
of Chavez. He skimmed lightly over that point. NPR assumes its
“educated” listeners will dismiss such paranoid ravings out of
hand, I suppose.
Scientific tests are planned to look
for poisons. I would expect these to be futile, unless the CIA used a
radioactive substance with a long enough half-life to have left some
traces after several years. (Aljazeera recently discovered that it
was polonium that Israel used to murder Yasir Arafat. And Putin's
goons killed Alexander Litvinenko in Britain with polonium- which
made have given Mossad or Shin Bet the idea.) If it wasn't a
radioactive substance, all detectable traces may have been eliminated
after the several years that have elapsed since the presumed
introduction into Chavez's body. [2]
What are well established facts are the
following:
It is precisely the main mission of the
CIA to be an “action arm” of the U.S. government that conducts
covert operations- especially the overthrow of unwanted governments,
if necessary by murdering their heads. [3]
The CIA, almost from its formation,
began researching and stockpiling numerous poisons, including
carcinogens, with an emphasis on untraceability.
The CIA is a murderous organization
that instigated the murder of 800,000 people in Indonesia (that
number is from the internal CIA boasting about the operation);
murdered 65,000 people in Vietnam by its own hand under the Phoenix
program (number from a USMC major who participated in the program).
The CIA has instigated coups in Iran
(1953), Guatemala (1954), Chile (1973), and elsewhere that have led
to hundreds of thousands of deaths.
The CIA sent its chief mad scientist,
Sidney Gottlieb, to the Congo with a vial of pathogens with which to
murder Patrice Lumumba (the plan being to somehow get it on his
toothbrush, but ultimately internal enemies kidnapped and murdered
Lumumba). [4]
John Stockwell, formerly the CIA field
officer in charge of their Angola operation in support of Jonas
Savimbi, some years ago attributed a total of 2 million deaths to the
CIA.
The CIA has tried an endless number of
times to murder Fidel Castro, with plots including poisons (like the
infamous plan to poison him with thallium in New York by dusting the
inside of his shoes with it- which the U.S. media converted into a
harmless prank to make his beard fall out! In fact it would have
caused an excruciating death taking months- look up the symptoms of
thallium poisoning, something the U.S. media is just too busy to do,
I guess.)
The CIA assassinated John F. Kennedy,
Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and various other
American and foreign citizens over the years.
The CIA has nurtured, trained,
cooperated with, and provided lists of people to torture and murder,
to numerous fascist secret police and military organizations over the
years. These junior CIA's include the Korean CIA (KCIA- now there's a
chip off the old block!), the Shah's SAVAK, all the Latin American
state murder organizations, and others in Asia and Africa.
Now, for all these decades, this
ruthless, murderous organization, one of whose main missions is to
overthrow governments the U.S. doesn't like, has stockpiled poisons,
but it never uses them? Is that what NPR, Forero, and the
entire U.S. propaganda machine wants us to believe? And we're
paranoid nuts if we don't drink their Kool-Aid.
No thanks, guys, I'm not thirsty for
what you're peddling.
Again, I'm not saying the CIA did
murder Chavez. I'm saying it's an entirely rational, reasonable
question to ask and should be investigated insofar as it is possible
to do so.
But I don't think
the answer will mainly lie in science. It will lie in good
counterintelligence that can identify the operatives responsible for
the poisoning. It could have been someone in Chavez's inner circle.
Or maybe a “well-wisher” gave him poisoned food or drink. Or it
could have been in a restaurant he frequents. That would be
relatively easy to arrange, via a kitchen worker or possibly a
waiter. Maybe someone with access to his personal living quarters,
access to things he touches, or wears, or puts in his mouth. (A
toothbrush, cigar, cigarette, favorite drinking glass.) As far as
testing for substances, with hundreds or maybe thousands of
possibilities, the lab work required could be quite extensive. (Hey,
I know, let's ask the CIA what they used! File a FOIA request! They
have to answer those!)
It won't be easy
because it must have been done before the cancer was detected about 2
years ago. And there is the potential for a destructive, paranoiac
witch hunt among the Venezuelans.
What isn't
imaginary (paranoiac) is the murderous hostility of the U.S. to socialistic
regimes like Chavez's and to leaders like him who inspire the poor
masses and politically mobilize them. That is the most dangerous
leader possible to the U.S., the defender and protector of the
world's rich. (They call it “defending freedom and democracy.” It
makes for a better advertising slogan for their empire.)
1] Forero cut his
eyeteeth writing anti-Chavez propaganda for the New York Times.
As moving to NPR is really a step down in the bourgeois media
hierarchy, one wonders if he was facing demotion or worse at the NYT,
although his Chavez-bashing seemed up to NYT propaganda
standards to me. It surely couldn't be because NPR made him an
irresistible offer. Some people simply find working for the NYT
a miserable experience. As the propaganda system is at least as
opaque as the Kremlin, which the U.S. media has always loved to tweak
for its opacity, we almost never learn the real reasons for
media personnel shufflings. I suppose there might be hints in their
trade journals. I have read them on occasion, and find them
thoroughly dishonest, the content mostly shilling and glorification
of executives, the verbiage an impenetrable corporate-like surface
that makes finding any nuggets of information hidden between the
lines slim pickings, at least for an outsider. Unless someone were
paying me to read them, I have better things to do with my time. And
in the larger scheme of things, the motives for the career moves of a
Juan Forero are insignificant, mostly a matter of idle curiosity with
perhaps the potential of providing some slight insight into the
internal mechanics of the U.S. propaganda system.
2] The half lives of different
radioactive elements and their isotopes ranges from tiny fractions of
a second to hundreds of thousands of years, depending on the specific
element. A half life is the amount of time it takes for a given
quantity of radioactive material to lose half its radioactivity. This
is a measure of its decay. The polonium used to murder Arafat was
mostly decayed by the time Aljazeera arranged to test his clothes.
The corrupt Palestinian Authority, run by U.S.-Israeli stooge Mahmoud
Abbas, has dragged its feet for years on investigating the Arafat
murder, and even now is stalling, taking months after the Aljazeera
expose to allow Arafat's corpse to be checked for polonium. But I
think the case for murder by polonium has already been proven, having
been found on what Arafat wore around when he died.
It may be that radioactive substances
with shorter half lives may be suitable for murder, which would leave
a shorter time frame in which to detect them. Different radioactive
elements emit different types of damaging particles, in different
intensities. These particles have different penetrative abilities, so
would impact the body differently. They also lodge in different parts
of the body, if they lodge in at all. Some are lethal in tiny
amounts, and rapidly so. Many radioactive elements would give you
cancer years or decades after you were poisoned. A millionth of a
gram of plutonium, inhaled into and lodged in the lung, would
reliably give you lung cancer.
You'd have to ask the Russian and
Israeli assassins why they chose polonium, and a form of polonium
only produced by nuclear reactors, which absolutely rules out
“natural” exposure. They apparently wanted a quick and sure
result, and assumed no one would think to look for polonium. (From
now on, I guess people will look! Or should, anyway, depending on the
symptoms.)
3] Covert of course means
secret. To maintain secrecy, the cooperation of the propaganda
system is essential. The propaganda system cooperates first and
foremost by calling the CIA a “spy” organization (yes indeed, it
spies, in order to carry out its subversive and violent activities,
and to manipulate and control others) that mainly is about “gathering
intelligence.” (Probably 99% of U.S. “intelligence” is
“gathered” these days by technical means- by the NSA, for
example, and by spy satellites, drones, and so forth.) The CIA has
often liked to project this ridiculous image of itself as a bunch of
scholars who just like to study things. One of their
favorite images they foisted on the public- with the eager
cooperation of media and book publishing accomplices- were photos of
the murderous fascist Allen Dulles smoking a pipe. One of the first
CIA directors and part of the cabal that murdered JFK in 1963, Dulles
was a Wall Street lawyer along with his brother, Secretary of State
John Foster Dulles. These two hatched the fascist coup in Guatemala,
that destroy that country's future down to the present day, under
Eisenhower's authority. And before that the coup that ended democracy
in Iran. And after that, the Bay of Pigs invasion was arranged and
handed off to JFK. JFK was lied to and told that there would be a
mass uprising in Cuba once the fascist Cubans landed. None other than
JFK assassin E. Howard Hunt scoffed at this idea, saying the CIA
never believed any such thing. So the CIA deliberated lied to JFK to
trap him into the plan, the idea being that he'd be forced to send in
the U.S. military after the Cubans. That didn't work. Eventually that
was a main reason the CIA, with the complicity of the military,
Dallas PD, and after the fact if not before, the U.S. media, bumped
him off. The U.S. media mainly because it would be ideologically
intolerable and a grave threat to the legitimacy and “stability”
of their system to admit that a coup had occurred in the U.S.
Oswald, a low-level CIA asset, was to
be the fall guy. He was made to look like a “Castro agent,”
apparently with the idea that the assassination would be blamed on
Castro, and the most extreme fascists would get their wish, a U.S.
invasion of Cuba. That part of the plan didn't work. Oh well. At
least they got the Vietnam War they wanted as a consolation prize.
4] In
Lumumba's stead the U.S. got a “friendly” (to Western “interests”
i.e. Western capital and business) military
dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko.
As usual with these types, he was a mega-thief who did nothing to
develop the economy of the Congo or the lives of the people he
misruled. Between him and elite Western corporations and
banks, billions were drained from the Congo, with nothing to show for
the people, the country, or the future. Now the Congo is a perpetual
battle ground for various gangster “rebel groups,” some backed by
venal neighboring governments, looking to loot the natural resources.
Eventually a wasteland will be left behind, with no infrastructure or
modern economy.
Megalomaniac Mobutu left behind nothing
for his country but bad memories, not even the name he egotistically
pasted on it, “Zaire.”
Oops! I digress! I better get back on
topic! If Juan Forero ever gets hold of this, he'll tag me for
“rambling” for sure!
