Chavez, Cancer, and the CIA

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!