by Dreams End » Tue Aug 15, 2006 11:22 am
Not only did Ortega play a major role in the coup against Chavez...he was booted out of Costa Rica for saying he was going to go back and do it again. <br><br>Not only that, his whole effort was funded by rich elites, hiding behind a gloss of working class movement, and the CIA. Hardly comparable.<br><br>In case you weren't joking when you posted that...a little more info:<br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr><br>A report would appear two days later in the daily Panamá América newspaper that shed light on how oil union boss Carlos Ortega, the number-two coup organizer (among the Venezuelans involved) second only to oilman-turned-dictator-for-a-day Pedro Carmona, became head of the oil union and consequently of Venezuela's equivalent of the AFL-CIO.<br><br>Translated by The Narco News Bulletin:<br><br> "Months ago, we warned that the U.S. government had put a plan in march to topple Venezuela's president Hugo Chávez. Working with agents of the CIA and with members of the military group that the Pentagon maintains in Caracas to supervise U.S. arms sales in the region, the strategies from the Potomac joined forces with the opponents of the president. Bankers, businessmen and politicians donated funds to creat the marches and protest that detonated the crisis. Money from the opposition served to influence union elections and the control of the petroleum workers union, the most important in Venezuela…"<br><br>Narco News has learned that the CIA headquarters for organizing, distributing said cash, and engineering the attempted coup d'etat, was the office known as the MIL GROUP. That's the name by which the US Military Liason staff in Embassies - "usually a repository for fixers and grafters pitching Department of Defense sponsored weapons sales to third world satrapies," as one source colorfully explained to Narco News - had, according to another well-placed source, greatly increased its staff size in the weeks prior to the attempted coup.<br><br>We presume the increase in personnel - or individuals posing as personnel at the MIL GROUP - was not due to a sudden desire by Washington to sell more arms to the Chavez government.<br><br>Former National Security Agency officer Wayne Madsen, writing with Richard M. Bennett, reveal that the U.S. participation in the failed coup attempt was not only financial, but military. Reporting from the National Press Building in Washington, they have just blown the roof off of U.S. government denials of involvement in the coup with this Intelligence Report:<br><br> Under the cover of the COMPTUEX and a Joint Task Force Exercise (JTFEX) training exercises in the Caribbean the US Navy provided signals intelligence and communications jamming support to the Venezuelan military. Particular focus by US Navy SIGINT vessels was on communications to and from the Cuban, Libyan, Iranian, and Iraqi diplomatic missions in Caracas. All four countries had expressed support for Chavez and the plans for US military and intelligence support for the coup d'etat were brought upto date following President Bush's visit to Peru and El Salvador in March 2002. The National Security Agency (NSA) supported the coup using personnel attached to the US Southern Command's Joint Interagency Task Force East (JIATF-E) in Key West, Florida. NSA's Spanish-language linguists and signals interception operators in Key West; Sabana Seca on Puerto Rico and the Regional Security Operating Centre (RSOC) in Medina, Texas also assisted in providing communications intelligence to US military and national command authorities on the progress of the coup d'etat.<br><br> From eastern Colombia, CIA and US contract military personnel, ostensibly used for counter-narcotics operations, stood by to provide logistics support for the leading members of the coup. Their activities were centred at the Marandua airfield and along the border with Venezuela. Patrol aircraft operating from the US Forward Operating Location (FOL) in Manta, Ecuador also provided intelligence support for the military move against Chavez. Additional USN vessels on a training exercise in the Outer Range of the US Navy's Southern Puerto Rican Operating Area also stood by in the event the coup against Chavez faltered, thus requiring a military evacuation of US citizens in Venezuela. The ships included the aircraft carrier USS George Washington and the destroyers USS Barry, Laboon, Mahan, and Arthur W. Radford. Some of the latter vessels reportedly had NSA Direct Support Units aboard to provide additional signals intelligence support to US Special Operations and intelligence personnel deployed on the ground in close co-operation with the Venezuelan Army and along the Colombian side of the border.<br><br>The polemic in recent weeks in which the Narco-State government of Colombia (again, with NY Timesman Juan Forero as its press agent) accused the Chávez government of Venezuela of harboring Colombian rebels now seems particularly hypocritical given the confirmation that Colombian territory was used by US forces in the failed coup attempt. Also note that the cover for the anti-democracy military operation was "counter-narcotics operations" that "provide logistics support for the leading members of the coup."<br><br>In sum: the effort by US tax dollars to prop up Carlos Ortega as head of the oil union was intended, long ago, to provide a "working class" gloss for the Revolt of the Spoiled Brats. The oligarchy could not stand the fact that, for the first time, Venezuela had become a true democracy for the majority of its people who elected Chavez. Nor could it handle the reality that it was now seen by the Venezuelan majority for what it was: an oligarchy. So the corrupt union boss was brought in to provide a false image of class diversity.<br><br>Then the real expense to U.S. taxpayers (something especially timely to reflect upon on this date of April 15th) came in the form of a massive US military and intelligence operation.<br><br>But back to Thursday, for a moment: With the five TV chains running free advertisements every ten minutes urging the citizenry to join the march, the 40,000 member oil workers union, the National Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and the Catholic Church hierarchy pulling out all the stops to create the illusion of a popular revolt, they only got between 50,000 and 150,000 people into the streets of Caracas to protest against Chavez. (Caracas has more than two million citizens and Venezuela, 24 million.)<br><br>The demonstration, purportedly in support of the business-backed oil workers strike, was initially advertised to march to the state oil agency's offices.<br>But once the leaders - with the help of the TV stations (upset with Chavez, as we reported on Saturday, over having to pay taxes like any other business for the first time in their history) - had the crowd assembled, they switched the parade route and marched their own lambs to a pre-plotted slaughter.<br><br>The march - puny in size compared to the multitudes that would take to the streets to oppose the Coup in coming days - was detoured by the coup plotters to head to the presidential palace known as Miraflores, where several thousand supporters of the Chavez government were already assembled.<br><br>As universally reported by the English-language media - including the Four Horsemen of Simulation; AP, Reuters, the NY Times and CNN - shots were fired, between 10 and 30 people died, and another 100 or so wounded. The question of where those shots came from looms explosively.<br><br>Eyewitness in Caracas Greg Wilpert reported on Friday in an article for commondreams.org - and linked immediately by Narco News - that the majority of killed and wounded were Chavez supporters. Wilpert has subsequently reported that, now that the Constitutional government of Chavez is restored, he expects the list of martyrs to finally be released (interesting, how the coup never released the names of the dead), and the list will show that the majority of those killed were Chavez supporters. Wilpert also comments that he expects videotapes to be released in the coming days that show the true culprits behind the shooting provocation: an extreme anti-Chavez group titled "Bandera Roja."<br><br>But AP, Reuters, the NY Times, CNN and many other English-language media sources reported, without sourcing their claim, that the shots came from the Chávez government. They repeated that unsubstantiated speculation as fact over and over and over again. And White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer claimed that Chavez "ordered" the shootings. All of this will come out in the wash in the coming days. Suffice to say, the mainstream media got the story wrong, intentionally wrong, to blame violent acts by Chávez opponents on Chávez.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.narconews.com/threedays.html">www.narconews.com/threedays.html</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><br> <p></p><i></i>