On November 25, 1986, three weeks after the exposé by “Ash Shiraa,” US Attorney General Edwin Meese announced to a stunned nation that profits from the sale of American weapons to Iran were used to buy and ship weapons to the Contra rebels battling against the socialist government of President Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. The covert Reagan administration operation violated at least two laws. The first was breaking a US arms embargo on Iran. The second was a violation of the 1982 congressional Boland Amendment, which prohibited US taxpayers’ funds being used to overthrow the government of Nicaragua. The scandal almost resulted in Congress’s impeachment of Reagan and his vice-president, George H. W. Bush, from office.

Today, in a period of déjà vu, the Donald Trump administration has embarked on a Reaganesque policy of covertly shipping arms to Venezuelan rebels, based in Colombia and Brazil, readying for an insurrection against the government of President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela. At the same time, US covert operators have been caught in the act of mounting operations directed at the governments of Haiti and Nicaragua, both members of the increasingly-shrinking Latin American camp of Maduro allies.

Reprising the role of Reagan, Trump, on February 18 during a speech at Florida International University in Miami, urged Venezuelan military officers to rise up, in a coup d'état, and oust Maduro, who Trump called a "Cuban puppet." Making Trump’s call seem like a repetition of history, the White House recently appointed Elliott Abrams as Trump’s “special envoy” for the forced transition of government in Venezuela from Maduro to Juan Guaido, a “Trump puppet.” In 1991, Abrams, after agreeing to cooperate with Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh, was convicted on two criminal counts of withholding information from Congress. Abrams denied being involved in the illegal solicitation of funds for the Contras. On December 24, 1992, George H. W. Bush issued presidential pardons to Abrams and five of his co-conspirators in the Iran-Contra scandal. Bush had been identified as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in Walsh’s final report.

In retrospect, Abrams, along with bumbling characters like Central Intelligence Agency director William Casey, National Security Adviser Admiral John Poindexter, and Poindexter underling Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North were bound to mess things up for the criminal conspiracy. For example, Abrams solicited an illegal $10 million contribution to the Contras from the Sultan of Brunei. When North later gave Abrams the Swiss bank account number for Lake Resources, a CIA front in Geneva, he gave Abrams the wrong prefix of 368 instead of the actual number 386. Abrams then passed the account number to Brunei. In Brunei, Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah wired $10 million from the Citibank branch in Brunei to the wrong account at Credit Suisse in Geneva. Due to North’s and Abram’s error, a Swiss shipping magnate was suddenly $10 million wealthier. The Swiss businessman promptly re-invested the unintended financial windfall. Swiss authorities refused to identify the lucky winner of Abrams’s and North’s incompetence.

In another example of Iran-Contra déjà vu, the Attorney General who presided over the Bush pardons for the Iran-Contra Six, including Abrams, and the botched prior convictions of Poindexter and North was notorious cover-up artist William Barr, who Trump recently swore in as his Attorney General.

As Trump begins to emulate Reagan in overthrowing progressive governments in Latin America, Abrams’s buffoonery is already at play. On February 3, authorities at Arturo Michelena International Airport in Venezuela seized a Boeing 767 jet, operated by 21Air LLC, said to have been carrying arms to US-backed rebels in Venezuela. The Boeing 767 took off the same day from Miami. During the Contra War escapades of Abrams and his cronies, Florida was a nexus for CIA proprietary airlines shipping weapons to right-wing guerillas in Central and South America. These airlines, which had no congressional or law enforcement oversight, often returned to the United States from their arms cargo runs laden with drugs, mostly cocaine from Colombia.

Included in the secret cargo manifest were 9 assault weapons, including AR-15 rifles, a Micro Draco semi-automatic pistol, and a Colt 7.62 rifle with telescopic sights, in addition to 118 ammunition cartridges and military radio antennas. 21Air LLC's chairman is Adolfo Moreno, who, according to McClatchy News, is linked to Gemini Air Cargo, an airline involved with the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" program during the George W. Bush administration and identified as such in an official report of the Council of Europe. Gemini Air Cargo, before it went out of business in 2008, was based at Dulles International Airport in Virginia, just outside of Washington DC. The Boeing seized by Venezuela was busy the last few months, making runs from Miami International Airport to Valencia and Caracas, Venezuela and Bogota and Medellin, Colombia. 21Air, which is based in Greensboro, North Carolina, claimed to McClatchy that the Boeing 767 had been chartered by another firm called GPS-Air. 21Air operates a sister firm, 21Cargo, Inc. of Doral, Florida. 21Cargo was formerly called Solar Cargo C.A.

Doral is noteworthy as the place of residence for several Venezuelan oligarchs who, after Hugo Chavez came to power in 1999, moved to Florida, taking their money with them, secure from the tax authorities in Caracas.

Gemini Cargo Logistics Inc., which was affiliated with Gemini Air Cargo, used a Miami address shared with firms linked to 21Air. That address is now used by the Colombian national air carrier, Avianca. Colombian right-wing president Ivan Duque, along with Brazilian far-right neo-Nazi president Jair Bolsonaro, are providing bases and other logistical support for Venezuelan right-wing rebel groups.

The nature of CIA proprietaries is that they use a complex network of fronts and “folding tent” temporary addresses to mask their covert activities. During the Iran-Contra escapades of the CIA, non-descript companies flew unmarked aircraft from small airports in Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and Arizona in support of Contra arms supply operations. Trump has apparently restored these operations in support of right-wing dissidents in Venezuela, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Cuba.

The debacle with the CIA being caught red-handed at Valencia airport was soon followed by another in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Haiti, which has been an ally of Maduro and a recipient of $2 billion in aid from the Venezuelan PetroCaribe Fund, has been under intense pressure from the Trump administration to sever its tied with Maduro’s government. The US responded to Haitian non-committal on recognizing the puppet Guaido government by stepping up “regime change” operations against President Jovenel Moise and Prime Minister Jean-Henry Céant. On February 7, violent protests began in on the streets of Port-au-Prince, Cap Haïtien, Jeremie, Gonaïves, and Jacmel. More suspiciously, the US State Department ordered all non-essential personnel out of the country following the outbreak of the anti-government demonstrations.

On February 17, Haitian police arrested a group of eight heavily-armed men traveling in two cars in the capital of Port-au-Prince. Among the group were five Americans and a Russian (later identified as a Serbian national); a Serbian with at least one Croatian visa stamp in his passport; and a Haitian. The Haitian may be a foreign national employee of the US embassy in Port-au-Prince. The Russian and Serbian may hold permanent residency status in the United States. The Haitian newspaper “Le Nouvelliste” reported that police discovered in the foreigners' cars automatic rifles, 45-caliber and Glock pistols, a large amount of ammunition, drones, and satellite phones. Also found in the vehicles were a telescope, backpacks, bullet-proof vests, and various documents, including a list of names of Haitian citizens. The vehicles bore no license plates and the suspects' passports had no Haitian visa entry stamps. The passports did show extensive travel to other countries prior to being in Haiti. Five Haitian license plates were found in the vehicles.

When arrested by police, the eight men refused to provide identification, insisting that they were on some sort of "government mission." They did not identify the "government" for whom they were working but insisted that they did not have to talk to the police. One of the arresting police officers said one of those arrested told him, "Our boss would call your boss." The Americans arrested all have prior US military service. Apparently, some sort of phone call was made because on February 20, the five Americans were flown from Haiti to Miami, where they were seen being handcuffed by law enforcement agents. The Haitian nation was not among those sent back to the US

Although some of the initial revelations about the Iran-Contra scandal came from the Lebanese magazine, the Nicaraguan Contra aspect of the criminal conspiracy was exposed when a CIA contractor aircraft was shot down over Nicaragua during an air drop mission in support of the rebels. On October 5, 1986, after Abrams’s solicitation of $10 million from the Sultan of Brunei but before the “Ash Shiraa” revelations, a C-123 operated by Corporate Air Services, a subsidiary of Southern Air Transport, was shot down by a Nicaraguan soldier using a Strela-2 shoulder-launched missile.

Corporate Air Services and Southern Air Transport, the latter based in Miami, were both CIA proprietaries. They and other front airlines operated throughout Florida and the southeastern United States. Although the C-123’s pilot and co-pilot, both Cuban-Americans, as well as the Contra radio operator, were killed, there was one survivor. The cargo bay “box kicker,” Eugene Hasenfus, was, like the leader of the American team arrested in Haiti, a former Marine. Two of those arrested in Haiti were former US Navy SEAL officers. Prime Minister Céant called the group “mercenaries.”

Hasenfus, survived due to his wearing a parachute. He was quickly put on trial by Nicaragua and sentenced to 30 years in prison on terrorism and other charges. In December 1986, Hasenfus was pardoned by President Ortega and he returned to the United States. However, the revelation that he was flying covert missions for the CIA out of an air base in El Salvador helped unravel the criminal conspiracy being committed by Abrams, North, Poindexter, Casey, and all their associated cronies.

The seizure of the Boeing 767 and its weapons cargo in Venezuela and the arrest of the well-armed Americans and their colleagues in Haiti may be the initial events, like the revelations of 1986, in exposing another incompetent CIA venture directed by a corrupt White House, one that involves, ironically, the bungling Elliott Abrams, who also failed miserably at overthrowing President Chavez in 2002 while working within the George W. Bush National Security Council.

Abrams escaped being charged with more serious crimes by Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh because he cut a last-minute deal with federal prosecutors. Trump, who has made no secret of his disdain for cooperating federal witnesses, would have normally called Abrams a “rat,” a gangster term meaning informant. The man who helped engineer the pardons for Abrams and his five convicted friends was none other than Bush’s Attorney General, William Barr, who has just been sworn in as Trump’s Attorney General. Trump, who is always decrying the presence of the “deep state” that thwarts his very move, has become the chief guardian of that entity.

During a recent hearing of the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, newly-minted congresswoman Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, reminded her colleagues and the world about the sordid background of Abrams.

Omar zeroed in on Abrams’s criminal history:

“Mr. Abrams, in 1991 you pleaded guilty to two counts of withholding information from Congress regarding the Iran-Contra affair, for which you were later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush. I fail to understand why members of this committee or the American people should find any testimony you give today to be truthful.”

Abrams, as is the nature of neocons, refused to respond to Omar and cited her comments as “personal attacks.”

Abrams’s and his fellow criminals’ use of mercenaries and “death squads” to conduct secret wars in Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala during the Ronald Reagan administration in the 1980s has made a re-entrance under Trump. Abrams was brought on board by neocons like National Security Adviser John Bolton, Vice President Mike Pence, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to oversee a US military build-up in Colombia, said to be 5000 US troops, to support Venezuelan paramilitary and military efforts to topple President Nicolas Maduro. Abrams and Bolton are also believed to have retained the services of another unindicted conspirator in the Iran-contra affair, Michael Ledeen, a colleague of the disgraced and convicted former Trump National Security Adviser, retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn. Ledeen and Flynn co-authored a book titled, “The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and its Allies.” The book contains nothing more than the standard neocon tripe one might expect from the likes of Ledeen.

An official investigation of the Iran-contra scandal by the late Republican Senator John Tower of Texas concluded that Abrams’s and Ledeen’s friend, Iranian-Jewish middleman Manucher Ghorbanifar, a long-time Mossad asset and well-known prevaricator, was extremely instrumental in establishing the back-channel arms deals with Iran. Ghorbanifar has long been on the CIA "burn list" as an untrustworthy charlatan, along with others in the Middle East of similar sketchy credentials, including the Iraq’s Ahmad Chalabi, Syria’s Farid “Frank” Ghadry, and Lebanon’s Samir “Sami” Geagea. These individuals, however, were warmly embraced by neocons like Abrams and his associates.

Abrams, whose links with Israeli intelligence has always been a point of consternation with US counter-intelligence officials, is part of an old cabal of right-wing anti-Soviet Democrats who coalesced around Senator Henry Jackson in the 1970s. Along with Abrams, this group of war hawks included Richard Perle, Frank Gaffney, William Kristol, Douglas Feith, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Abram Shulsky, and Paul Wolfowitz. Later, this group would have its fingerprints on major US foreign policy debacles, ranging from Nicaragua and Grenada to Lebanon, Iraq, and Libya. Later, in December 2000, these neocons managed to convince president-elect George W. Bush of the need to “democratize” the Middle East. That policy would later bring not democracy but disaster to the Arab Middle East and North Africa.

Abrams and his cronies will not stop with Venezuela. They have old scores to settle with Nicaraguan President Ortega. The initiation of “regime change” operations in Nicaragua, supported by the CIA and the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) in Miami, have been ongoing for more than a year.

The Trump administration has already achieved a regime change victory of sorts in El Salvador. Nayib Bukele, the former mayor of San Salvador, who was expelled from the formerly-ruling left-wing Farabundo Marti National Liberation (FMLN) party and joined the right-wing GANA party, was recently elected president of El Salvador. Bukele has quickly re-aligned his country’s policies with those of the Trump administration. Bukele has referred to President Maduro of Venezuela as a “dictator.” He has also criticized the former FMLN government’s recognition of China and severance of diplomatic ties with Taiwan. It will be interesting to see how a sycophant like Bukele will politically survive as Trump continues to call hapless asylum-seeking migrants from his country, who seek residency in the United States, “rapists, gang monsters, murderers, and drug smugglers.”

Another country heading for a US-installed “banana republic” dictator is Haiti. President Jovenal Moise has seen rioting in the streets of Port-au-Prince as the US State Department removed all “non-essential” personnel from the country. Moise, whose country has received $2 billion in oil relief from Venezuela, to help offset rising fuel prices, has continued to support the Maduro government. However, at the US-run and neo-colonial artifice, the Organization of American States (OAS), Moise’s envoys have been under tremendous pressure to cut ties with Venezuela and recognize the US puppet Juan Guaido as Venezuelan president. Moise’s refusal to do so resulted in armed gangs hitting the streets of Port-au-Prince demanding Moise’s resignation. It is the same neocon “regime change” playbook being used in Venezuela and Nicaragua.

There will be similar attempts to replace pro-Maduro governments in his remaining allies in the region. These include Suriname, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.

Abrams was also brought in as an adviser on Middle East policy in the George W. Bush administration. The carnage of Iraq is a stark testament to his record. In 2005, it was reported that two key Bush White House officials – Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliot Abrams – gave a “wink and a nod” for the assassinations by Israeli-paid operatives of three key Lebanese political figures seeking a rapprochement with Syria and Lebanese Hezbollah – Member of Parliament Elie Hobeika, former Lebanese Communist Party chief George Hawi, and former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

In 2008, a United Nations panel headed by former Canadian prosecutor Daniel Bellemare later concluded Hariri was assassinated by a "criminal network" and not by either Syrian and Lebanese intelligence or Lebanese Hezbollah as proffered by Abrams and his friends in Washington.

Representative Omar was spot on in questioning why Abrams, whose name is as disgraced as his two fellow conspirators – Oliver North and John Poindexter – whose criminal convictions were overturned on appeal, is working for the Trump administration on Venezuela. The answer is that the neocons, who can sense, like raptors, Trump’s political weakness, have filled the vacuum left by top-level vacancies in the administration.

Two executives at the company that chartered the U.S. plane that was caught smuggling weapons into Venezuela last week have been tied to an air cargo company that aided the CIA in the rendition of alleged terrorists to “black site” centers for interrogation. The troubling revelation comes as Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has rejected a U.S. “humanitarian aid” convoy over concerns that it could contain weapons meant to arm the country’s U.S.-backed opposition.

Last Tuesday, Venezuelan authorities announced that 19 rifles, 118 ammo magazines, 90 radios and six iPhones had been smuggled into the country via a U.S. plane that had originated in Miami. The authorities blamed the United States government for the illicit cargo, accusing it of seeking to arm U.S.-funded opposition groups in the country in order to topple the current Maduro-led government.

A subsequent investigation into the plane responsible for the weapons caché conducted by McClatchyDC received very little media attention despite the fact that it uncovered information clearly showing that the plane responsible for the shipment had been making an unusually high number of trips to Venezuela and neighboring Colombia over the past few weeks.

Steffan Watkins, an Ottawa-based analyst, told McClatchy in a telephone interview that the plane, which is operated by U.S. air cargo company 21 Air, had been “flying between Philadelphia and Miami and all over the place, but all continental U.S.” during all of last year. However, Watkins noted that “all of a sudden in January, things changed” when the plane began making trips to Colombia and Venezuela on a daily basis, sometimes multiple times a day.

According to Watkins’ analysis, this single plane had conducted 40 round-trip flights from Miami International Airport to Caracas and Valencia — where the smuggled weapons had been discovered — in Venezuela, as well as to Bogota and Medellin in Colombia in just the past month.

Publicly available flight radar information shows that the plane, although it has not returned to Venezuela since the discovery of its illicit cargo, has continued to travel to Medellin, Colombia, as recently as this past Monday.

Multiple CIA ties

In addition to the dramatic and abrupt change in flight patterns that occurred just weeks before U.S. Vice President Mike Pence prompted Venezuelan opposition member Juan Guaidó to declare himself “interim president,” a subsequent McClatchy follow-up investigation also uncovered the fact that two top executives at the company that owns the plane in question had previously worked with a company connected to controversial CIA “black sites.”

Indeed, the chairman and majority owner of 21 Air, Adolfo Moreno, and 21 Air’s director of quality control, Michael Steinke, both have “either coincidental or direct ties” to Gemini Air Cargo, a company previously named by Amnesty International as one of the air charter services involved in a CIA rendition program. In this CIA program, individuals suspected of terrorism were abducted by the intelligence agency and then taken abroad to third-country secret “black sites” where torture, officially termed “enhanced interrogation,” was regularly performed.

Steinke worked for Gemini Air Cargo from 1996 to 1997, according to a 2016 Department of Transportation document cited by McClatchy. Moreno, although he did not work for Gemini, registered two separate business at a Miami address that was later registered to Gemini Air Cargo while the CIA rendition program was active. McClatchy noted that the first business Moreno registered at the location was incorporated in 1987 while the second was created in 2001. Gemini Cargo Logistics, a subsidiary of Gemini Air Cargo, was subsequently registered at that same location in 2005.

21 Air has denied any responsibility for the weapons shipment discovered onboard the plane it operates, instead blaming a contractor known as GPS-Air for the illicit cargo. A GPS-Air manager, Cesar Meneses, told McClatchy that the weapons shipment had been “fabricated” by the Maduro-led government to paint his government as the victim. Meneses also stated that “the cargo doesn’t belong to 21 Air and it doesn’t belong to GPS-Air” and that it had been provided by third parties, whose identities Meneses declined to disclose.

Contras redux?

The revelation that the company that operates the plane caught smuggling weapons into Venezuela has connections to past controversial CIA programs is unlikely to surprise many observers, given the CIA’s decades-long history of funneling weapons to U.S.-backed opposition fighters in Latin America, Southeast Asia and other conflict areas around the globe.

One of the best-known examples of the CIA using airliners to smuggle weapons to a U.S.-backed paramilitary group occurred during the 1980s in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal, in which the Reagan administration delivered weapons to the Contra rebels in order to topple the left-leaning Sandinista movement. Many of those weapons had been hidden on flights claiming to be carrying “humanitarian aid” into Nicaragua.

The parallels between aspects of the Contra scandal and the current situation in Venezuela are striking, particularly given the recent “outrage” voiced by mainstream media and prominent U.S. politicians over Maduro’s refusal to allow U.S. “humanitarian aid” into the country. Maduro had explained his rejection of the aid as partially stemming from the concern that it could contain weapons or other supplies aimed at creating an armed opposition force, like the “rebel” force that was armed by the CIA in Syria in 2011.

Though the media has written off Maduro’s concern as unfounded, that is hardly the case in light of the fact that the Trump administration’s recently named special envoy in charge of the administration’s Venezuela policy, Elliott Abrams, had been instrumental in delivering weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras, including hiding those weapons in “humanitarian aid” shipments. In subsequent testimony after the scandal broke in the 1980s, Abrams himself admitted to funneling weapons to the Contras in exactly this way.

With the recently uncovered illicit weapons shipment from the U.S. to Venezuela now linked to companies that have previously worked with the CIA in covert operations, Maduro’s response to the “humanitarian aid” controversy is even more justified. Unfortunately for him, the U.S.-backed “interim president,” Juan Guaidó, announced on Monday that his parallel government had received the first “external” source of “humanitarian aid” into the country, but would not disclose its source, its specific contents, nor how it had entered the country.

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Photo: MintPress News

On January 23rd, 2019 Venezuela’s opposition leader Juan Guaidó declared himself acting president, and called on the armed forces to disobey the government. Very few had ever heard of this man — he had never actually run for president. Guaidó is the head of Venezuela’s national assembly; a position very similar to speaker of the house.

Within minutes of this declaration U.S. president Donald Trump took to twitter and recognized Guaidó as interim president of Venezuela; writing off the administration of Nicolas Maduro as “illegitimate”. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo followed by urging Venezuela’s military to “restore democracy”, affirming that the US would back Mr Guaidó in his attempts to establish a government. They also promised 20 million dollars in “humanitarian” aid. To put this into context, Trump is on record saying he was “Not Going to Rule Out a Military Option“ in Venezuela.

This is roughly the equivalent of Nancy Pelosi or Mitch Mcconnell declaring themselves president, calling on the military to overthrow Trump, and having China pledge to fund and assist the effort.

Now if you happen to be in the camp that wouldn’t actually mind seeing Donald Trump forcibly removed from office, I would encourage you to imagine replacing Trump’s name with Obama, Bush, Merkel or Macron.

You know there have been a lot of protests in France, and the Yellow Vests have demanded that Macron step down… Why don’t we restore democracy in Paris?

If Donald Trump can decide on a whim which leaders are legitimate, and which will be deposed-by-tweet, what kind of precedent does that set? And who’s next? The grand irony here, is that the exact same media outlets who blasted Trump as a “illegitimate president whose election is tainted by fraud”, are now calling his regime change ambitions in Venezuela “bold”. Not only have they refused to criticize the move, but in fact they’re hailing this as a “potential foreign policy victory” and “a political win at home”.

Let’s get this straight. Trump is an illegitimate president and should be removed from office (because of Russian interference), but you’re perfectly comfortable with that same illegitimate president toppling foreign governments via twitter?

Though support for Guaidó was quickly parroted by Washington’s most dependable allies, and lauded by virtually every western media outlet, the Venezuelan military responded by condemning the coup, and reconfirmed their loyalty to Maduro.

Russia, China and Turkey also issued statements condemning U.S. meddling, and warned against further interference. By January 25th, reports were flowing in that as many as 400 Russian military contractors were already on the ground. (Well that escalated quickly.)

That same day Pompeo announced that Elliott Abrams — the man who oversaw regime change wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador, was deeply involved in the Iran Contra scandal, and who was an architect of both the Iraq war and the 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela (which culminated in the kidnapping of Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez) — would be in charge of the effort to “restore democracy and prosperity to their country”.

So why do you suppose Washington really wants regime change in Venezuela? You’d have to be pretty naive to buy the “democracy and prosperity” drivel.

The Trump administration slams Maduro as authoritarian, while cuddling up to Mohammad Bin Salman, a mass murdering dictator known to dismember reporters he doesn’t like.

They talk about how the Venezuelan economy is in shambles, but by their own admission (and according to the U.N.) U.S. sanctions have played a significant role in creating that situation.

Might the real motive have something to do with the fact that Venezuela is sitting on the world’s largest proven oil reserves, and that Western oil companies were kicked out of the country in 2007?

Let’s ask Donald Trump:

“With respect to Libya… I’m interested in Libya if we take the oil. If we don’t take the oil no interest. We have to have… Look, if we have wars, we have to win the war. What we do is take over the country and hand the keys to people who don’t like us. I’ll tell you what… Iraq, 100% Iran takes over Iraq after we leave, and what really happens with Iraq is they want the oil fields. And I have it on very good authority that Iran probably won’t even be shooting a bullet because they are getting along better with the Iraqi leaders better than we are. After all of those lives, and after all of the money we spent. And if that’s going to happen we take the oil.”

Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez nationalized the oil industry and used the proceeds to fund his socialist vision for the country. Now you could make the case that this vision was flawed, and horribly mismanaged, however he had strong public support for this mandate; so much support in fact, that when U.S. backed coup plotters kidnapped Hugo Chavez in 2002 crowds took to the streets en mass and he was quickly reinstated.

Which brings us back to Juan Guaidó. There’s not much information available on Mr. Guaidó, but if you look up the man who tapped him to lead the opposition party Voluntad Popular you’ll find Washington’s fingerprints all over the place. Leopoldo Lopez, the founder of Voluntad Popular, orchestrated the protests in 2002 that led up to the kidnapping of Hugo Chavez.

It’s no secret that the U.S. has been funding Voluntad Popular for years. In fact you can still find documents on state.gov which admit to routing at least 5 million dollars to “support political competition-building efforts”. Nor is it a secret that U.S. officials met with coup plotters in 2018. But if there were any doubt that Guaidó is Washington’s puppet, Mike Pence’s call the day before the coup assuring U.S. support should lay that to rest.

“But Maduro’s a bad leader!”

Compared to who? Which paragon of good governance will we refer to as the model? Trump? Theresa May? Angel Merkel? Macron? Take your time.

This isn’t democracy, it’s a neo-colonial power grab. Juan Guaidó never ran for the office he claimed, and the fact that he directly colluded with a foreign nation to overthrow the man who was elected president marks him as a traitor.

Juan Guaidó is a puppet. If installed, he will serve the interests who bought his ticket. Venezuela’s oil industry will be privatized, and the profits will be sucked out of the country by western corporations.

What’s happening in Venezuela right now is a replay of the 1973 U.S. backed coup in Chile, where the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, was overthrown, and replaced with the military dictatorship of Pinochet. Pinochet murdered over 3000 political opponents during his rule, and tortured over 30,000, but he was friendly to American business interests so Washington looked the other way.

One could make the case that Maduro is incompetent. One could make the case that his economic theories are trash. (The same can be said for the haircuts in suits calling for his removal.) But the reality of the matter is that unless you happen to be a Venezuelan citizen, how Venezuela is governed is actually none of your business.

Given how things turned out in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine you’d think people would get the hint. When it comes to spreading democracy, you suck. U.S. regime change operations have left nothing but chaos, death and destruction in their wake. If you want to make the world a better place, maybe, just maybe, you should start at home.

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In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory, a hot new issue – raised by President Obama in an international setting on Thursday and touted on The New York Times’ front page on Friday – is the problem of “fake news” being disseminated on the Internet.

Major Internet companies, such as Google and Facebook, are being urged to censor such articles and to punish alleged violators. Also, teams of supposedly “responsible” news providers and technology giants are being assembled to police this alleged problem and decide what is true and what is not.

As a journalist for more than four decades, I take seriously the profession’s responsibility to verify information as much as possible before publishing it – and as editor of Consortiumnews.com, I insist that our writers (and to the extent possible, outside commenters) back up what they say.

I personally hate “conspiracy theories” in which people speculate about a topic without real evidence and often in defiance of actual evidence. I believe in traditional journalistic standards of cross-checking data and applying common sense.

So, I am surely no fan of Internet hoaxes and baseless accusations. Yet, I also recognize that mainstream U.S. news outlets have made horrendous and wholesale factual errors, too, such as reporting in 2002-03 that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program (The New York Times) and was hiding stockpiles of WMD (many TV and print outlets, including The Washington Post).

And, mainstream outlets getting such life-and-death stories wrong was not just a one-off affair around the Iraq invasion. At least since the 1980s, The New York Times has misreported or glossed over many international issues that put the United States and its allies in a negative light.

For instance, the Times not only missed the Nicaraguan Contra cocaine scandal, but actively covered up the Reagan administration’s role in the wrongdoing through the 1980s and much of the 1990s.

The Times lagged badly, too, on investigating the secret operations that became known as the Iran-Contra Affair. The Times’ gullibility in the face of official denials was an obstacle for those of us digging into that constitutional crisis and other abuses by the Reagan administration. [For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “New York Times: Apologist for Power.”]

In that same era, The Washington Post performed no better. Leonard Downie, its executive editor at the time of the Contra-cocaine scandal, has continued to reject the reality of Ronald Reagan’s beloved Contras trafficking in cocaine despite the 1998 findings of CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz that, in fact, many Contras were neck-deep in the cocaine trade and the Reagan administration covered up their criminality for geopolitical reasons.

More recently, during the mad dash to invade Iraq in 2002-03, the Post’s editorial-page editor Fred Hiatt wrote repeatedly as flat fact that Iraq was hiding WMD and mocked the few dissenting voices that challenged the “group think.”

Yet, Hiatt suffered no accountability for his falsehoods and is still the Post’s editorial-page editor, still peddling dubious examples of Washington’s conventional wisdom.

Ministry of Truth

So, who are the “responsible” journalists who should be anointed to regulate what the world’s public gets to see and hear? For that Orwellian task, a kind of Ministry of Truth has been set up by Google, called the First Draft Coalition, which touts itself as a collection of 30 major news and technology companies, including the Times and Post, tackling “fake news” and creating a platform to decide which stories are questionable and which ones aren’t.

Formed in June 2015 and funded by Google News Lab, the First Draft Coalition’s founding members included Bellingcat, an online “citizen journalism” site that has gotten many of its highest profile stories wrong and is now associated with NATO’s favorite think tank, the Atlantic Council.

Despite Bellingcat’s checkered record and its conflicts of interest through the Atlantic Council, major Western news outlets, including the Times and Post, have embraced Bellingcat, apparently because its articles always seem to mesh neatly with U.S. and European propaganda on Syria and Ukraine.

Two of Bellingcat’s (or its founder Eliot Higgins’s) biggest errors were misplacing the firing location of the suspected Syrian rocket carrying sarin gas on Aug. 21, 2013, and directing an Australian news crew to the wrong site for the so-called getaway Buk video after the July 17, 2014 shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.

But like many news outlets that support establishment “group thinks,” Bellingcat wins widespread praise and official endorsements, such as from the international MH-17 investigation that was largely controlled by Ukraine’s unsavory intelligence agency, the SBU and that accepted Bellingcat’s dubious MH-17 evidence blaming the Russians.

If such a Ministry of Truth had existed in the mid-1980s, it might well have denounced the investigative reporting on the Contra-cocaine scandal since that was initially deemed untrue. And if “Minitrue” were around in 2002-03, it almost surely would have decried the handful of people who were warning against the “group think” on Iraq’s WMD.

Power and Reality

While it’s undeniable that some false or dubious stories get pushed during the heat of a political campaign and in wartime – and journalists have a role in fact-checking as best they can – there is potentially a greater danger when media insiders arrogate to themselves the power to dismiss contrary evidence as unacceptable, especially given their own history of publishing stories that turned out to be dubious if not entirely false.

It’s even more dangerous when these self-appointed arbiters of truth combine forces with powerful Internet search engines and social media companies to essentially silence dissenting opinions and contrary facts by making them very difficult for the public to locate.

Arguably even worse is when politicians – whether President-elect Donald Trump or Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan or President Obama – get into the business of judging what is true and what is false.

On Thursday, an impassioned President Obama voiced his annoyance with “fake news” twice in his joint news conference in Berlin with German Chancellor Angela Merkel — “because in an age where there’s so much active misinformation and it’s packaged very well and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television. … If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect.”

Let that phrase sink in for a moment: “We won’t know what to protect”? Is President Obama suggesting that it is the U.S. government’s role to “protect” certain information and, by implication, leave contrary information “unprotected,” i.e. open to censorship?

On Friday, a New York Times front-page article took Facebook to task, in particular, writing: “for years, the social network did little to clamp down on the false news.”

The Times added, in a complimentary way, “Now Facebook, Google and others have begun to take steps to curb the trend, but some outside the United States say the move is too late.”

Info-War

This new alarm about “fake news” comes amid the U.S. government’s “information war” against Russia regarding the Syrian and Ukraine conflicts. Obama’s State Department insists that it is presenting the truth about these conflicts while Russia’s RT channel is a fount of disinformation. Yet, the State Department’s propaganda officials have frequently made false or unsupported claims themselves.

On Wednesday, there was the unseemly scene of State Department spokesman John Kirby refusing to answer reasonable questions from a Russian journalist affiliated with RT.

The RT journalist asked Kirby to identify the hospitals and clinics in Syria that he was claiming had been hit by Russian and Syrian airstrikes. You might assume that a truth-teller would have welcomed the opportunity to provide more details that could then be checked and verified.

But instead Kirby berated the RT journalist and tried to turn the rest of the State Department press corps against her.

QUESTION: Don’t you think it is important to give a specific list of hospitals that you’re accusing Russia of hitting? Those are grave accusations.

KIRBY: I’m not making those accusations. I’m telling you we’ve seen reports from credible aid organizations that five hospitals and a clinic —

QUESTION: Which hospital —

KIRBY: At least one clinic —

QUESTION: In what cities at least?

KIRBY: You can go look at the information that many of the Syrian relief agencies are putting out there publicly. We’re getting our information from them too. These reports —

QUESTION: But you are citing those reports without giving any specifics.

KIRBY: Because we believe these agencies are credible and because we have other sources of information that back up what we’re seeing from some of these reports. And you know what? Why don’t [you] ask … Here’s a good question. Why don’t you ask your defense ministry … what they’re doing and see if you can get…”

QUESTION: If you give a specific list —

KIRBY: No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

QUESTION: If you give a specific list of hospitals —

KIRBY: No, no, no.

QUESTION: My colleagues who are listening hopefully would be able to go and ask Russian officials about a specific list of hospitals that you’re accusing Russia of …”

KIRBY: You work for Russia Today, right? Isn’t that your agency?

QUESTION: That is correct. Yes.

KIRBY: And so why shouldn’t you ask your government the same kinds of questions that you’re standing here asking me? Ask them about their military activities. Get them to tell you what they’re – or to deny what they’re doing.

QUESTION: When I ask for specifics, it seems your response is why are you here? Well, you are leveling that accusation.

KIRBY: No, ma’am.

QUESTION: And if you give specifics, my colleagues would be able to ask Russian officials.

As Kirby continued to berate the RT journalist and stonewall her request for specifics, an American reporter intervened and objected to Kirby’s use of the phrase “‘your defense minister’ and things like that. I mean, she’s a journalist just like the rest of are, so it’s – she’s asking pointed questions, but they’re not …”

Kirby then insisted that since RT was “a state-owned” outlet that its journalists should not be put “on the same level with the rest of you who are representing independent media outlets.” (But the reality is that Voice of America, BBC and many other Western outlets are financed by governments or have ideological benefactors.)

Public Diplomacy

Kirby’s hostility toward legitimate questions being raised about U.S. or U.S.-allied assertions has become typical of Obama’s State Department, which doesn’t seem to want any challenges to its presentation of reality.

For instance, during the early phase of the Ukraine crisis in 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry called RT a “propaganda bullhorn” and Richard Stengel, Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, issued a “DipNote” saying RT should be ostracized as a source of disinformation.

But Stengel’s complaint revealed a stunning ignorance about the circumstances surrounding the February 2014 putsch that overthrew Ukraine’s elected President Viktor Yanukovych.

For instance, Stengel cited RT’s “ludicrous assertion” about the U.S. investing $5 billion to promote “regime change” in Ukraine. Stengel apparently wasn’t aware that Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland had cited the $5 billion figure in support of Ukraine’s “European aspirations” during a public speechto U.S. and Ukrainian business leaders on Dec. 13, 2013.

At the time, Nuland was a leading proponent of “regime change” in Ukraine, personally cheering on the Maidan demonstrators and even passing out cookies. In an intercepted, obscenity-laced phone call with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, Nuland said her choice to lead Ukraine was Arseniy “Yats is the guy” Yatsenyuk, who ended up as Prime Minister after the coup.

So, was Stengel a purveyor of “fake news” when he was accusing RT of disseminating fake news or was he just assembling some propaganda points for his underlings to repeat to a gullible Western news media? Or was he just ill-informed?

Both democracy and journalism can be messy businesses – and credibility is something that must be earned over time by building a reputation for reliability. There is no “gold seal” from the Establishment that makes you trustworthy.

It’s simply important to do one’s best to inform the American people and the world’s public as accurately as possible. Awarding trust is best left to individual readers who must be the ultimate judges of what’s real and what’s fake.

consortiumnews.com