Venezuelan Congress committee attributes Al Qaeda's threats to the United States

[struggle4progress]

Caracas, Thursday February 15 , 2007

Lawmaker Saúl Ortega, chair of the National Assembly Committee on Foreign Affairs, Thursday attributed to the United States the threats Al Qaeda launched on Wednesday to strike oil facilities worldwide, including premises in Venezuela.

According to Ortega, such reports are a US "terrorist maneuver" aimed at intimidating the nations that are at odds with Washington and having an excuse for likely interventions.

He added that the alleged threat was not launched directly by the terrorist group, but through a translation reportedly made by US intelligence agencies under the Central Intelligence Agency ...

Further, Ortega claimed that the US is likely making attempts at making the world believe that US security is at stake because of a possible disruption in oil supplies following Al Qaeda's threat against Venezuela. Consequently, Washington could order a pre-emptive military intervention of Venezuela.

http://english.eluniversal.com/2007/02/15/en_pol_art_15A835799.shtml

[Missy M]

1. Sounds like something the CIA would do.....

I wouldn't be surprised.

[redqueen]

2. Heh.

Can't fool 'em twice, eh Georgie?

[Poll_Blind]

3. CIA cover for black ops? Cause al-Quada don't give a shit about...

...Venezuela, it's oil, it's food, it's culture, the number of spider monkeys who have been trained to open beer bottles at various tourist resorts...anything.

  Even in the truest sense of al-Qaeda, a loose confederation of other, smaller terrorist entities and groups, nobody among them would pop up on my radar as being remotely interested in punishing Venezuela for anything.

  This really and truly sounds like utter cat shit.

PB

[Igel]

4. There was logic in the translation.

Not behind the translation, but in the text.

US relies crucially on imported oil. Want to do severe harm to the US, cut off the oil.

I surmise that they noticed the price spikes that resulted from Katrina and the militants in SE Nigeria; moreover, it's a takeoff on what insurgents have done in Iraq--diminish oil production, yielding a shortfall in gasoline and fuel for electricity generating facilities, and thereby weaken the government.

Doesn't mean it's authentic--even though more than one copy of the magazine has popped up, after a two-year hiatus. (It used to be you could get copies on-line, too.)

[Poll_Blind]

6. I had to research this a bit to make clearer an image...

...or rather a pastiche I got internally when thinking about al-Qaeda attacking Venezuela. Currently Venezuela is the number 4 supplier of oil to the U.S., fourth from the top, but the oil it produces mostly "heavy crude" which is very poor quality, costs quite a bit to refine (the Venezuelans only are making bank now on their oil because the price of light crude is over...$43 or $53 dollars a barrel. I think $53 is the right number, but it could be $43).

  The Venezuelans don't have a very good product and not every U.S. refinery can even process it. Now, the three above Venezuela on the list are Saudi Arabia, Canada & Mexico, in that order, if I recall correctly. The thing that strikes me as odd, I guess, is that if you want to hurt the U.S., oil-wise, attacking the reserves in Saudi Arabia, Canada and Mexico would cause much more of a disruption, especially attacks in Saudi where each attack fills the dual use of both impeding the supply to the U.S. but also works to destabilize the Saudi Royals.

  The complicity between the Saudi Royals and the United States, militarily, has always been gripe #1 on Osama's list, above all other things. Osama is basically a very rich kid who used scads and scads of money to combine disparate terrorist organizations into "al-Quaeda". Anyway, al-Quaeda without bin-Laden is not al-Quaeda, it's a bunch of splinter groups that would fall apart without his cash as a draw.

  Anyway, going off of those things I...I just can't see why the hell al-Quaeda would be interested in Venezuela. They're far enough down on the list and their exports to the U.S. so generally un-delictable (by our oil industry's standards) that attacking them would make as much sense as us going after Iraq for 9/11. Correction, it would make more sense than that, but not much by my current reckoning.

  It seems odd that Venezuela is the biggest thorn in the side of the U.S. right now outside of Iran and all of a sudden intel turns up that al-Quaeda is making a point of saying they could attack them. The U.S. has just pulled too many tricks, assassinations and other disgusting things in South America (see the Latino forum where there is a great thread about the history of U.S. dirty tricks), and given the manipulation of intel previously for our administration's own diabolical ends, not to think that this is a set-up.

  I'm sure Venezuela lacks some of the security that Saudi, Canada and probably Mexico have but...seems strange to try to disrupt the U.S. oil supply signifigantly by attacking a small country with a substandard product on the other side of the planet.

PB

[Peace Patriot]

5. Sounds like the Bush Junta has been unable to enlist any of the South

American countries in their plots against Chavez--the leftist (majorityist) democracies have turned a deaf ear and support Chavez (Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay)--and, among the others, several of which have huge grass roots leftist movements in progress (Peru, Paraguay), even Colombia seems to have caught the "Latin America for Latin Americans" fever (Uribe has so far refused to join in anti-Chavez plots).

So-o-o-o, they have to think up a different strategy for getting Venezuela's oil out of the hands of the Venezuelan people and into their own. What better way than to, first, unleash so-called intelligence that Al Qaeda is targeting US oil SOURCES, to be followed by funding/organizing terrorist operations to make the intelligence come true--to try to destabilize Venezuela, and provide an excuse for intervention.

Another good reason to not have an honest, professional counter-proliferation network at the CIA. Hadn't thought of THIS one. But it makes sense. Criminy, do they have terrorist plots in motion all over the world? Is THAT "the plan" that we can only see the tips of vanishing icebergs of--here and there around the planet? Strategic terrorist attacks to grab control of all of earth's resources? Is that what the missing billions have been for? Is that what the torture, and renditions, and "enemy combatant" prisons all over the planet have been for--to torture, silence and kill whistleblowers about who Al Qaeda really is?

Is this what Rumsfeld is doing--still at his desk, on the payroll, at the Pentagon? The Grand Plan.