Posted on 04/06/2005 5:22:37 PM PDT by Flavius
CARACAS, Venezuela -- A new book dealing with the U.S. role that led to the unsuccessful coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez hits bookstores as ties between the two countries remain poor.
In "The Chavez Code: Deciphering the intervention of the United States in Venezuela" (Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, pp. 330, $16.96), Venezuelan-American lawyer Eva Golinger presents official and classified CIA and U.S. State Department documents, which she claims show the United States participated in the failed coup attempt against Chavez April 11-12, 2002. During those 48 hours, a coalition of military officials and businessmen, headed by the industrialist Pedro Carmona temporarily removed Chavez, a democratically elected leader, from power.
Golinger obtained documents using the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, and says the documents are evidence and irrefutable proof of the Bush administration's participation not only in the planning that led to the failed coup, but its subsequent complicity in the national oil strike of December 2002 and the August 2004 recall referendum, which attempted to remove Chavez from power. Both attempts failed.
Golinger, a New York-based lawyer who specializes in international law, human rights and immigration, writes of how the United States planned to precipitate violence during an opposition march during which many people were killed and wounded in days preceding the military coup; she also covers the subsequent arrest of Chavez and an alleged "dirty war " campaign, including covert attacks on international organizations in order further to isolate the Venezuelan government. She does not, however, refer to Chavez's claims that Washington is trying to kill him, a charge the United States has dismissed.
Golinger's investigation took more than a year, during which she compiled more than 4,000 FOIA documents. She said her work reconstructed the way in which Washington was involved, in different levels and stages, "in a very subtle, sophisticated and complex way" in Venezuelan politics over the past several years.
In addition to the failed coup, the writer covers other U.S. operations in Venezuela, including the alleged financing of Venezuelan non-governmental organizations and opposition groups by the U.S. Congress through the National Endowment for Democracy and State Department initiatives channeled through the U.S. Agency for International Development, which established a "transition office" in the U.S. Embassy in Caracas to assist the "construction of democracy in Venezuela." In many of the documents she cites, names, dates and other data have been blacked out.
Golinger told Tiempos del Mundo that since 2001 more than $20 million has been handed to more than 15 Venezuelan political organizations and parties, some of which, she said, participated in the failed coup. Among the organizations receiving U.S. funding are Sumate, Cedice, Leadership and Vision, CTV, Justice First, Project Venezuela, Partnership Justice and Fedecamas, the last a company directed by Carmona.
Documents presented by Golinger indicate that payment to these groups occurred both during and after the recall referendum to prepare the ground for a "government after Chavez." The information on these subsidies from the NED and USAID to Sumate was enough to get the group's directors accused of "conspiracy" and "treason to the motherland" by Chavez's government. In addition, the publishing of the documents has allowed Chavez to renew his attacks against the Bush administration.
The book, which has appeared in Cuba and went on sale in Venezuela on March 21, will be available in the United States in the next few weeks. The FOIA documents consulted for the book can be seen on the Web site venezuelafoia.info though many of the links are still under construction.
The publication of the book is hardly likely to improve relations between Caracas and Washington, either in the short or long term.
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(Pedro F. Frisneda is a writer with Tiempos del Mundo)
fifth' col'umn
1. a group of people who act traitorously and subversively out of a secret sympathy with an enemy of their country.
2. (originally) Franco sympathizers in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War: so called in allusion to a statement in 1936 that the insurgents had four columns marching on Madrid and a fifth column of sympathizers in the city ready to rise and betray it.
"We fight only for what will ultimately destroy us."
"We fight even harder for what will destroy you."
The sound of a barking moonbat is eerily similar to the distant snorting whinny of the first horse of the apocalypse"
If this is true, which I doubt, the problem is that it didn't suceed. We must try harder and do better next time.
The Tyrannicide and the Catholic Church.'
There is nothing improper about the commentaries made by the Evangelical preacher, Pat Robertson, referring to the possible tyrannicide of the Venezuelan dictator, Hugo Chavez.
Tyrannicide has been sanctioned as morally compatible with the teachings of the Catholic Church, based on the social doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas. Chavez has reaffirmed his intentions of establishing in Venezuela a genocidal regime following the Cuban model and the commands of Fidel Castro.
What are we going to wait for?, Allow Chavez to surpass Castro’s dreadful record of 20,000 shot by firing squads, and for more than half million of Venezuelans to suffer political imprisonment as the Cubans have suffered in Castro’s dungeons inside the Island prison of Cuba.
Chavez, like Hitler, was elected democratically only to become a dictator later. Castro kept well hidden his aims of establishing a Stalinist regimen in Cuba until he consolidated this power over the Cuban people. But, as Hitler exposed his diabolic plan in “Mein Kamp”, Chavez has no only openly and publicly bragged about his plans of imposing a communist regimen following the Cuban model, but he has put Venezuela under Castro’s control using his thugs and repressive apparatus to keep subjugated the people of Venezuela.
If Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Chavez’s life had been terminated, how many lives would have been saved and how much suffering humanity would have been spared.
In fact, tyrannicide is so justified that His Holiness Pius XII gave his approval for the plot by a group from the German’s army intelligence service planning to kill Hitler.
For St. Thomas Aquinas, tyrannicide is to opt for the lesser of two evils. Pacifism is a morally correct personal option, but is an option that is morally unaceptable for the state. A person might choose not to resist an aggression to the extreme of loosing his life, but a government has the duty to defend his people.
A pacifist might loose his life without offering resistance; but he cannot impassible allow in his presence the murder of an innocent person. Those are basic principles of Catholic teachings that are being ignored in the middle of the assault of the totalitarian correct ideological movement where political correct positions prevail even though they might be morally incorrect options.
My view, precisely.
There is a reason for that:
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