With war comes "psyops"--in the leadup to, during and after the war--as we learned with the war on Iraq. Corrupt government leaders want something--say, oil. They mobilize to take it by force. They lie and lie and lie about their true motives, slander the people they are intending to massively slaughter, and blame them for things like "weapons of mass destruction" that don't exist, generally focusing on the demonized, bogeyman leader. (They don't want you to see or imagine the millions of innocents who will die).
We've all been through this, both recently, and some of us through former unjust wars. It is the heavy burden of being an American during the last fifty-some years. And we are seeing it again, today, in the pervasive demonization of Venezuela's democratically elected and popular president, Hugo Chavez.
I want to revisit an incident--or series of incidents--from early 2008, to illustrate the kinds of corpo-fascist 'news' stories that we can expect about Chavez and Venezuela, if I am correct that the US government is planning a second oil war, to be launched from Colombia into Venezuela. I should just say: Don't believe a word you read. But I think this illustration says it better (or louder), and it fills in some elements of the developing war situation.
Our war profiteers have various agents they use in an intense psyops-disinformation campaign like this one. The most obvious disinformation agents are the corpo-fascist media, the US government itself (State Dept., CIA, USAID and other agencies, including the Pentagon), Congresspersons and sometimes the leaders of other countries. This story is about Alvaro Uribe, the very corrupt, fascist leader of Colombia--a leader with close ties to rightwing paramilitary death squads and narco-trafficking--and his accusations that Hugo Chavez, the leftist president of neighboring Venezuela, and also Rafael Correa, the leftist president of neighboring Ecuador, are supporters of the FARC guerillas--an indigenous, leftist guerilla army that has been fighting a 40+ year civil war against the Colombian government.
The situation in Colombia is more like South Vietnam than Iraq. I won't go into the many similarities between Colombia today, and South Vietnam, circa early 1960s, except for two:
1) The extremely corrupt Colombian government--a government with one of the worst human rights record on earth--is propped by $6 BILLION in US taxpayer-funded military aid, much like the South Vietnamese government and military were; and
2) The SILENCE in the US about the Pentagon's dangerous, extremely expensive and war-like buildup of US military bases and forces in Colombia (with no limit on US personnel and 'contractors,' and full diplomatic immunity for both)***, combined with new US military bases in Panama, and one secured by a rightwing coup in Honduras, and the newly reconstituted US 4th Fleet in Caribbean--all of which is hauntingly reminiscent of the silence in the US as US war assets were put in place in Southeast Asia in 1962-64.
This haunting silence--so little being said about these dangerous and expensive war preparations--is an important condition for the kind of psyops-disinformation campaign we are seeing--the creation of a new "enemy" (Hugo Chavez)--intended for US consumption, to keep us blind, stupid and uninformed, and vaguely hostile to the new "enemy," and to soften us up for war--to minimize dissent, to motivate soldiers to kill completely innocent people, and to extract yet more billions from US taxpayers.
There are side motives for demonizing Chavez--for instance, so we won't hear about, oh, universal free medical care in Venezuela--and there are side motives for the US military buildup under the guise of the failed, corrupt, murderous US "war on drugs--war profiteering (and probably drug profiteering). But psyops-disinformation campaigns as big, as long-term and as difficult as this one (trying to demonize a popular democratic leader, with many close friends and allies among Latin America's leaders) indicates a much bigger objective: war itself.
The actions of Alvaro Uribe and the Colombian military that the article below refers to provide one example of our war profiteers' tactic of demonization --using proxy accusers, and then trumpeting their false accusations throughout a willing corpo-fascist press.
The article details some important elements of the story of the "miracle laptop" (later laptopS), which Uribe claimed was recovered from a bombed FARC guerilla campsite and purportedly contained evidence that Hugo Chavez was supporting FARC guerillas in neighboring Colombia. This article does not tell the whole story nor does it take us to end of the this particular story. The "miracle laptop(s)" were ultimately even more thoroughly discredited than in this article, which is in the form of a letter to the news media, signed by professors from ten US universities and other experts.
But it is a good lesson in how to read these stories that are now intensifying to a frenzy of anti-Chavez 'news' items, lately about incidents on the Venezuela/Colombian border--for instance, the Colombian military's recent shooting of two Venezuelan soldiers who were navigating an agreed-upon international river. Once US troops and 'contractors' are introduced into this tense situation, any incident like this can be blown up into the next "Gulf of Tonkin," and the virtually limitless commitment of the US military to Colombia, which the Bushwhack ambassador to Colombia just signed, provides the paper needed for escalation.*** (The agreement is on its way to the US Congress for approval--where Jim DeMint (Puke-SC) has been holding up all of President Obama's appointments in Latin America, ostensibly about Honduras, but also, and perhaps mainly, about the US military buildup in Colombia.)
When the following letter (which warns the media about this psyop) was written, Uribe had been leaking pieces of purported documents from the purported FARC laptop(s) over days and weeks, circa March-April 2008, tidbit by tidbit, trying to damn Chavez (and also Chavez ally, the president of Ecuador). Uribe had also, about six months before all this, publicly asked Hugo Chavez to negotiate with the FARC guerrillas for the release of hostages. Chavez got a total of six hostages released--at the beginning of which Donald Rumsfeld published an op-ed in the Washington Post, stating that Chavez's help with the hostages was "not welcome in Colombia." The op-ed was entitled "The Smart Way to Defeat Tyrants Like Chavez," and on the weekend of its publication, 12/1/07, the Colombian military sent rocket fire at the locations of the first two hostages to be released (to Chavez), driving them back into the jungle on a 20 mile hike (never reported by the controlled press here). Chavez got them out later by a different route. The hostage release effort soon shifted to Ecuador.
The FARC leader, who was trying to negotiate a peaceful settlement of Colombia's long civil war, set up a hostage release camp just inside Ecuador's border. French, Swiss and Spanish envoys traveled to Ecuador to receive high profile hostage Ingrid Betancourt, whose release was imminent. The US/Colombia then bombed the FARC camp--using ten 500 lb US "smart bombs" (according to the Ecuadoran military)--blowing the FARC negotiator and 24 other sleeping people to smithereens. This is the camp from which Colombia supposedly obtained the "miracle laptop(s)" (and why they are called "miracle laptop(s)).
The letter refers to Chavez's hostage negotiations in an important point of the letter. Chavez's contacts with the FARC dramatically increased during this period, but Uribe, who had asked him to make the contacts, then tried to use that fact to claim that Chavez is a supporter of the FARC. The letter points out this treachery. (Note: Both countries adjacent to Colombia--Venezuela and Ecuador--have to have some contacts with the FARC; it is a long standing guerrilla army, which has been an ad hoc government in some regions of Colombia; the point here is that contact is not unusual, but Uribe was claiming much more, and was using the frequency of Chavez contacts during the hostage negotiation period as evidence against him.)
One more point about the letter: Colombia had enlisted Interpol to examine the laptop (--I think it was just one laptop at that point). But Interpol deliberately did not employ Spanish translators, because they wanted nothing to do with the content of the laptop, and had nothing to say about it. Further, there was a three day lapse in custody of the laptop--with many files opened during that period--and Interpol issued a disclaimer with their report, that the evidence could not be used in a court of law. Their only conclusion was to verify (and no one knows how they did it) that the computer belonged to the dead FARC negotiator. (Interpol has subsequently refused to have any more dealings with the Colombian government.)
The professors and other experts who wrote this letter--and other people--were awaiting the imminent release of this Interpol report.
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An Open Letter to the Media: Interpol Analysis of FARC Laptop Authenticity Will Not “Prove” Links Between Venezuela, Rebels
Colombian interpretation of documents discredited by analysts, OAS Secretary General
April 27, 2008
Later this month, the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) will publicly determine the "authenticity" of laptops recovered from a rebel encampment in Ecuador after a March 1 raid on the camp by the Colombian government. Based on previous press coverage of the incursion and the documents, we are concerned that the media take extreme care in interpreting the Interpol findings. In the first round of media coverage of the event, significant problems of inconsistency surfaced precisely as a result of the gap between Colombia's exaggerations and what the documents actually say.
Even if the laptops are found to have belonged to members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), there is no evidence that the publicly available documents support any of the extreme claims by the Colombian government that Venezuela and Ecuador had any sort of financial relationship with the rebels. In fact, independent analyses of the documents indicate that the Colombian government has substantially exaggerated their contents, perhaps for political purposes. Any media coverage of the Interpol findings must make clear that many of the Colombian allegations have already been largely discredited.
The Colombian interpretation has already proven so weak that OAS Secretary General Jose Miguel Insulza, testifying before the House Subcommittee on Western Hemispheric Affairs on April 10, stated unequivocally that there is "no evidence" linking Venezuela to the Colombian rebels, yet Insulza's statement has gone virtually unreported in the English language press.
Analysts cite three primary flaws in the Colombian government's charges linking Venezuela and the FARC:
The "Dossier": The notion that the Venezuelan government provided—or intended to provide—$300 million to the FARC is based exclusively on this passage from a letter sent to the FARC secretariat from Raul Reyes:
"With relation to the 300, which from now on we will call "dossier," efforts are now going forward at the instructions of the boss to the cripple which I will explain in a separate note"
There is no clear description of what the "300" represents. While the Colombians claim it is a reference to three hundred million dollars, it could just as easily refer to three hundred dollars or even three hundred hostages. Note that this letter was dated December 23, 2007—two weeks before the first wave of FARC hostage releases.
The Contact: To believe that Hugo Chavez was providing material support to the FARC—beyond his role as a hostage negotiator—one must accept the premise that the person referred in the FARC documents under the code name "Angel" is indeed Hugo Chavez. Yet the documents reference both "Angel" and "Chavez"—sometimes in the same paragraph. It appears that the documents are referring to two different people.
The Timing: The most extensive evaluation of the available documents has been done by Adam Isacson of the Center for International Policy. In addition to the concerns above, Isacson concluded that the uptick in communication between the Venezuelan government and the FARC coincided almost exclusively with the timeframe in which Chavez had been invited to mediate hostage negotiations.
As Isacson put it, "When considered in chronological order, the guerrilla communications regarding Hugo Chávez and Venezuela appear to reveal a relationship that was cordial but distant until the fall of 2007," exactly the time that negotiations began.
Note too that other laptop-related Colombian allegations have already been proven false or dubious. Notably, claims that the FARC were conspiring to build a "dirty bomb" were publicly dismissed by the U.S. government as well as terrorism experts throughout the region. Also Colombia's allegations that a photo found in the laptops showed a meeting between FARC leaders and an Ecuadorian cabinet official were also proved to be false.
The discussion here is about state support of terrorism, and in the current political climate the stakes could not be higher. Given the sensitivity and potential implications for peace within hemisphere, it is crucial that the media exercise a more critical eye in its reporting than has been demonstrated to date. Any fair-minded coverage of the upcoming Interpol announcement would make clear that the authentication of the laptops does not mean the validation of the Colombian interpretation of their contents, and should make note both of the independent analyses of the documents and the statement from the OAS Secretary General.
Sincerely,
Charles Bergquist, University of Washington, Seattle
Larry Birns, Council on Hemispheric Affairs
Amy Chazkel, Queens College, City University of New York
Avi Chomsky, Salem State College
Luis Duno Gottberg , Florida Atlantic University
James Early, TransAfrica Forum Board of Directors and Institute for Policy Studies Board of Directors
Samuel Farber, Brooklyn College, City University of New York
Sujatha Fernandes, Queens College, City University of New York
Lesley Gill, American University
Greg Grandin, New York University
Daniel Hellinger, Webster University
Forrest Hylton, New York University
Diane Nelson, Duke University
Jocelyn Olcott, Duke University
Diana Paton, University of Newcastle, UK
Fred Rosen, North American Congress on Latin America
T.M Scruggs, University of Iowa
Sinclair Thomson, New York University
Miguel Tinker Salas, Pomona College
Mark Weisbrot, Center for Economic and Policy Research
John Womack, Harvard University
For instance, The Washington Post claimed in a 5 March editorial that "Chávez had recently given the group $300 million" (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/06/AR2008030604091_2.html ); days later, the New York Times reported that "Colombian officials have said that information seized in the raid shows that the Venezuelan government may have channeled about $300 million to the FARC.' (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B04E1DF1638F937A25750C0A96E9C8B63&scp=3&sq=colombia+300+FARC&st=nyt)." See our discussion in this letter below of the source of this erroneous interpretation.
"OAS chief to US Congress: no Venezuela-terrorist link," AFP, March 10, 2008. http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5ipNXwHOq34tlujMqpPj9OZVXwznw
"$300 Million from Chavez to FARC a Fake," by Greg Palast, TomPaine.Com http://www.gregpalast.com/300-million-from-chavez-to-farc-a-fake/
See "About those FARC Documents..." by Adam Isacson, Center for International Policy http://www.cipcol.org/?p=556 and "A Fairy Tale from a Guerilla Laptop," by Adam Isacson, Center for International Policy http://www.cipcol.org/?p=555
"About those FARC Documents..." by Adam Isacson, Center for International Policy http://www.cipcol.org/?p=556
"Colombia links uranium to FARC rebels," by Chris Kraul, Los Angeles Times, March 27, 2008. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-dirtybomb27mar27,1,5981373.story
"Unraveling the ‘New' FARC Announcement," Inter Press Service, April 4, 2008 http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41870
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This letter's url:
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/17352
(see the original for embedded links)
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For more info on the dramatic US military buildup in Colombia, see
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=405x26700
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