A blog about a criminal enterprise
By Dave Lindorff
Hong Kong — The bipartisan vengeance of the US government and it’s pervasive intelligence apparatus, on display currently in its rabid hounding of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, appears to know no bounds.
But as ugly as the full-court effort to bag Assange, already trapped by US the combined efforts of complicity government in Britain and Sweden and by US economic pressure on the government
By Dave Lindorff
Hong Kong — Here in this ultra-modern city on the coast of southern China, I read in the morning paper that 11 consulates representing most of the nations of Europe, have lodged protests with the city’s chief executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor over a controversial new extradition bill that if passed would allow Hong Kong to extradite suspects to nations with which Hong Kong does not have an extradition deal.
By Dave Lindorff
American media still refer to Juan Guaidó, America’s hand-picked “legitimate leader” or “legitimate president” of Venezuela, as having an “administration.”
The truth is that his “administration” — consisting of advisors and other opposition leaders — are all either arrested and being held by the government, hiding, seeking asylum in various foreign embassies (Spanish, Italian, Brazilian and Argentinian) in the capital of Caracas, or have fled to other countries like Brazil and Colombia.
Guaidó, apparently a government of one, has so far avoided arrest probably because the elected Venezuelan President Maduro doesn’t want to give the US an excuse to try and rescue him, or to launch military actions of some kind against Venezuela as the White House keeps threatening to do.
Clearly, in calling for US military intervention, Guaidó has both demonstrated almost his total lack of backing among the masses of Venezuelan people, as well as his desperation, given Latin American’s visceral resentment of US interventions in their country, all of which have been designed to put autocrats or even military juntas in power, and many of which have openly overthrown popularly elected governments, as in Guatemala, Chile, Brazil, Nicaragua, Haiti, Dominican Republic, and elsewhere.
None of this gets reported in the US. Only recently has the New York Times, always a reliable backer of US imperial policy in Latin America, at least hinted at the possibility that the reason Maduro remains president and that Guaidó’s efforts to oust him are failing for abysmally could be that the Venezuelan people want him to stay president, and do not want a US-backed coup or a US military intervention to replace him.
At this point the huffing and puffing coming from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and especially from the White House National Security Advisor and chief militarist blowhard John Bolton, are looking pretty pathetic, with Bolton trying to sow dissension and distrust by hinting that Maduro “better not trust” his own generals’ loyalty, and by offering rewards to those generals willing to abandon Maduro.
It is an indication of the United States’s declining power and influence in Latin America that few outside the US with its insular mass media believe that the US would or even could successfully invade Venezuela and impose a government on that country of 32 million (a number that keeps declining as the upper middle class and rich flee).
If anything, US sabotage and threats and US backing for a government of the wealthy are probably galvanizing support for Maduro…
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.net/who-knows-who-cares-if-the-media-say-it-enough-it-must-be-true/
Let every crack be a place for seeds to sprout,
Let the forest return to this place!
Let the rocks be done wearing our face,
And may every fractured avenue lead out!
Rome is crumbling.
All of the magic
That will save us is outside of Rome.
Inside the empire
Everything is falling.
It’s a magic-vacuum
That has sucked us in for so long
That we began to believe that every road
Ultimately led nowhere!
If you are
By Dave Lindorff
After days of breathless reporting in the US media about public and military support for Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro collapsing, and about an April 30 coup by presidential poseur Juan Guaidó, we now know the truth: The whole thing was a fraud, staged at the instigation of Washington in hopes that the Venezuelan people and rank-and-file troops would fall for the trick and there was an actual coup.
By Dave Lindorff
The imperialist neocons infesting the Trump administration, and the orange-faced joke of a president himself, may think they can invent their own reality through propaganda, as Bush’s “brain” Karl Rove used to claim about the Bush/Cheney administration, but when it comes to Latin America, they fail to realize how deeply the people of that continent loath and resent the US and its colonial-era Monroe Doctrine.
The failure of the latest coup plotted so carefully in the war rooms of the White House, Pentagon and CIA was pre-ordained as soon as it became clear that Washington’s chosen puppet Juan Gerardo Guaidó Márquez was nothing more than a creation of theirs, meant to do the bidding of the plotters in DC.
By the time Guaidó appeared on a bridge in Caracas flanked by some allegedly defecting troops and by the opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez, whom defecting Venezuelan soldiers had reportedly released from house arrest where he had been sentenced for fomenting violence, Guaidó’s attempt to create a coup by televising a staged one was already collapsing around him.
In short order, troops and officers who had supported Guaidó began entering foreign embassies like Brazil’s and Chile’s and Spain’s, seeking asylum, while others claimed they had been tricked into going to Guaido’s “coup event” and fled when they realized what they were being made a part of. Opposition leader Lopez, meanwhile, recognizing that the attempt to manufacture a coup through faked reporting of one underway had failed, quickly slipped away from Guaido’s side and, calling on his family to meet him, sought asylum in the Chilean embassy (he later moved with them to the nicer and perhaps safer quarters of the Spanish embassy).
This latest charade, which included the apparently false claim that dissident soldiers had captured an airbase outside Caracas, harks back to the 2002 coup, which was actually a much more serious attempt to kidnap and oust the popular elected president Hugo Chavez. That time, while many top generals backed the coup, the enlisted ranks backed Chavez and forced the generals to back down — but not before the Bush/Cheney administration had already hastily recognized the coup leaders as the new government, showing their hand as being behind that assault on Venezuelan democracy…
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.net/its-looking-like-another-failed-coup-attempt-by-the-us-and-its-puppet-guaido-in-venezuela/
|
By Dave Lindorff The arrest by British Metropolitan Police of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, dragged The arrest by British Metropolitan Police of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, dragged unceremonially out of the Ecuadoran Embassy in London on a charge of failure to appear for a court hearing on an expired (and trumped-up) accusation in Sweden of sexual assault, is a grave and terrible threat to independent journalism and to the US Constitution’s First Amendment promise of freedom of the press. Make no mistake. This arrest, made at the UK government’s insistence, for “failure to appear” in court for a no longer required hearing on an expired Swedish extradition request to “question him” about a bogus charge of sexual assault, is all a gigantic fraud. At the same time as the arrest was made, and that the Ecuadorian government shamelessly invited UK police into their Embassy to arrest and remove Assange, London Police revealed what has long been known by Assange and his attorneys: that behind it all is the US government, which has for nine years had a secret sealed indictment waiting, an indictment charging Assange with a conspiracy with Army veteran Chelsea Manning to steal and disseminate classified US military documents related to conduct of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. A US warrant requesting Assange’s extradition from the UK to the US was also reportedly issued in 2017. As Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept, who worked with Assange and Wikileaks in reporting on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to help Snowden escape US arrest and win asylum in Russia, tweeted early this morning, “If you’re cheering Assange’s arrest based on a US extradition request, your allies in your celebration are the most extremist elements of the Trump administration, whose primary and explicit goal is to criminalize reporting on classified docs & punish (Wikileaks) for exposing war crimes. Indeed, the specific documents that Assange and Manning released (the latter, released in 2016 from a 32-year military court-martial sentence for disclosing classified military and diplomatic documents after having her sentence commuted by President Barack Obama, but currently in prison again for refusing to testify to a Grand Jury investigating Assange and Wikileaks), exposed grave war crimes by US forces in those two wars. Since Assange seven years ago accepted an asylum offer from Ecuador and its then president Rafael Correa to avoid being extradited by to the US, jumping bail and escaping into the safety of the Ecuadorian Embassy, a shameless campaign by the US government and a complicit mainstream US and UK media to denigrate him, portray him as a sex offender, and deny that he is a journalism, has been underway. As well, during his seven years holed up in the tiny Ecuadorian Embassy, which is actually just one floor of an apartment building in a swanky part of London, the US brought intense pressure, including economic threats, against Ecuador trying to get the little Latin American nation to revoke the asylum offer granted to Assange by Correa…
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappenineg!, the uncompromised, collectively run six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.net/london-police-grab-wikileaks-founder-from-ecuador-embassy-admit-us-seeks-his-extradition/
New TCBH! poem: ‘Patriarchy — how it ends’The kings, One hundred years apart For paving stones And are buried and so on.
Political cartoonist Ron Cobb memorialized Phil Ochs in April 1967 Remembering the Loss of a Great and Irreplaceable Political TroubadourBy Dave Lindorff
The harried and still getting-the-hang-of-things staff of the Los Angeles Vanguard were frantically pasting up the boards of the pages to deliver to the printer to put out the ninth issue of their new left-alternative weekly on time when political cartoonist Ron Cobb walked in the door looking downcast. https://thiscantbehappening.net/exposing-washingtons-obsession-with-nuclear-supremacy-and-its-decline-as-a-military-power/By Ron Ridenour Losing Military Supremacy: The myopia of American strategic planning Author: Andrei Martyanov Clarity Press, Atlanta 2018 When I first heard of Andrei Martyanov, I was skeptical about his intentions. Born in Baku, Azerbaijan, USSR, 1963, he became a naval officer and expert on Russian military and naval issues. He took part in conflicts in the Caucasus. In mid-1990s, he |