coup

Honduras, June 28, 6th anniversary of US-led coup; Honduras resistance is alive and jumping

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By David Swanson
June 23, 2015
Washington’s Blog

June 28 will mark 6 years since the U.S.-backed military coup in Honduras took the people’s government away from them. Thousands of people are still in the streets every week demanding that the wrongful president step down.

“Whoever’s not jumping supports the coup!” is the shout as a sea of people leaps repeatedly into the air. The makers of an amazing new film called Resistencia: The Fight for the Aguan Valley, will be allowing anyone to view it online for free for two weeks. I recommend you do so.

Honduras has not simply turned into the worst home of violent crime. And the people have not simply fled to the U.S. border (much compassion they’d receive there!) — No, thousands and thousands of people in this little nation have taken back their land, occupied it, created communities, and built a future, with or without the coup.

President Manuel Zelaya had said he would help. Oligarchs had seized land, or bought land and then devalued the currency. Miguel Facussé took over palm oil plantations, evicted people from their land, got richer than rich, and allowed cocaine flights from Colombia to land on his plantations with U.S. knowledge.

The U.S. for years had been funding, training, and arming soldiers for the oligarchs of Honduras. The leaders of the 2009 coup that overthrew Zelaya had all trained at the School of the Americas in the United States. The U.S. assisted in the coup and in recognition of the coup government. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were part of and are part of this ongoing crime, and U.S. military supply shipments to Honduras are at record levels now as the military has merged with the police and turned its weaponry against the people.

The coup was followed by phony elections. The people knew to look elsewhere for answers. They looked to themselves. In the Aguan Valley in the north, thousands of families took over thousands of hectares by squatting, building, and farming. And they created communities of such camaraderie that they found themselves saying thanks for the coup.

They faced, and still face, regular attacks by killers on motorcycles, but they have nowhere else to go, and they have made the most of it, creating self-sustaining centers of life in the countryside, replacing palm oil monoculture with farming that cares for the land. The dead in the film are of such a different type from the dead in Hollywood movies, that I wonder if people can really see these dead. I hope so. There is never any police investigation, never any charges brought. The people have lost a lawyer and a journalist as well as numerous of their own; the oligarchs have lost a few guards.

The people have also organized local and national assemblies. The men have learned to include women in positions of power. This popular resistance movement always backed the return of Zelaya, who finally negotiated his return to Honduras in 2011. He returned to a people demanding more democratic participation. He joined their movement and encouraged them to participate in the 2013 elections that they had determined to boycott.

During the meeting in the city at which the decision to participate in the election was made, the police in Aguan burned and bulldozed 90 houses, plus churches, and schools. The tears and the eloquence of the people affected must be watched; I cannot tell them to you.

You should watch the scenes of the people meeting with their ousted president, Zelaya, the rightful president of Honduras, and then watch the scene of President Obama meeting with his usurper in the White House. As Facussé threatens to evict everyone from their land, we see a U.S. State Department official meet with some of the campesinos. They tell him that they are offered land at 14% interest, while the World Bank offers it to the big corporations for 1%. He replies that his only area of work is human rights. So they tell him they have been gassed, imprisoned, tortured, and shot. He replies that he just wants to talk about peace. Or maybe he said “piece” of the action, I don’t know.

The people see the United States as working on behalf of Dole, formerly the Standard Fruit Company, the same people for whom the U.S. military has been overthrowing governments since that of Hawaii in 1893. Is there any good reason anyone should ever buy Dole products?

The struggle, and the movie, goes on — filmed over a period of years. Leaders are forced into exile after murder attempts. The burned and bulldozed buildings are rebuilt. And the November 2013 elections arrive, and are blatantly stolen. Zelaya’s wife runs on the people’s platform against the “law and order” candidate of the military. Observers from the EU and the OAS declare the election legitimate, but individual members of those commissions denounce that conclusion as corrupt and fraudulent. Students lead the protests, and the protests continue to grow.

And the people in the country go right on taking back more of their land and reclaiming it as a source of life rather than death. These people need no aid. They need simply to be allowed to live. All immigrants should be welcomed everywhere by everyone, with no hesitation. Obama should immediately cease deporting children back to a nation he’s helped to ruin. But I think most people would be shocked by how little immigration there would be in the world if the corporations and the killers stopped migrating, and people were allowed to live peacefully and equally in the place they love: their land.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/06/resistance-in-honduras-alive-and-jumping.html

Poroshenko tells Constitutional Court that ousting of ex-President Yanukovich was illegal

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From Macedonia Online — MINA
20 June 2015

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko appealed to the country’s constitutional court, asking the court to recognize the ousting of former President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 as illegitimate.

“I ask the court to acknowledge that the law ‘on the removal of the presidential title from Viktor Yanukovych’ as unconstitutional,” Poroshenko said in a court statement published on the website of the Ukrainian constitutional court.

The current Ukrainian president said the law violates the constitution, according to which the President of Ukraine is protected by law and his title remains with him forever. He also added that by enacting the law in February of 2014, the parliament of Ukraine undermined the constitution.

Now, the amusing fact is that Poroshenko himself actively supported the Euromaidan protests between November 2013 and February 2014 in Kiev that resulted in the overthrow of Yanukovych.

As the current head of Ukraine, who became the president after the illegal coup, Poroshenko’s statement seems strange at best. By admitting that the overthrow of Yanukovych was illegal and stressing that the President of Ukraine should be forever protected by the country’s law, Poroshenko might be insinuating that his own presidency is put in jeopardy.

Otherwise, why would someone else who became the president after the coup all of a sudden defend the former leader of the country? Seems illogical.

Alexei Pushkov, the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Lower House of Russia’s parliament, commented on Poroshenko’s bizarre revelation.

“Here we go, Poroshenko acknowledged the unconstitutional nature of Yanukovych’s removal from power. The EU and PACE both denied it. Now it’s recognized,” Pushkov wrote on his Twitter account.

Last year, Yanukovych became the scapegoat of Ukrainian politics after his government was accused of all the misfortunes in the country. Now, more than a year after the former president was gone, his legacy is still around. Mikheil Saakashvili, the new governor of Ukraine’s Odessa Region, said that in the best case scenario, Ukraine will need 20 more years to reach the economic level of Yanukovych’s government in 2013.

http://macedoniaonline.eu/content/view/27583/53/

Eric Zuesse writes on Global Research (June 23, 2015) — excerpt–

In a remarkable document, which is not posted at the English version of the website of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine, but which is widely reported outside the United States, including Russia, Poroshenko, in Ukrainian (not in English), has petitioned the Constitutional Court of Ukraine (as it is being widely quoted in English):

“I ask the court to acknowledge that the law ‘on the removal of the presidential title from Viktor Yanukovych’ as unconstitutional.”

I had previously reported, and here will excerpt, Poroshenko’s having himself admitted prior to 26 February 2014, to the EU’s investigator, and right after the February 22nd overthrow of Yanukovych, that the overthrow was a coup, and that it was even a false-flag operation, in which the snipers, who were dressed as if they were Ukrainian Security Bureau troops, were actually not, and that, as the EU’s investigator put his finding to the EU’s chief of foreign affairs Catherine Ashton:

“the same oligarch [Poroshenko] told that well, all the evidence shows that the people who were killed by snipers, from both sides, among policemen and people from the streets, that they were the same snipers, killing people from both sides … Behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new coalition.”

If the Court grants Poroshenko’s petition, then the appointment of Arseniy Yatsenyuk by the U.S. State Department’s Victoria Nuland on 4 February 2014, which was confirmed by the Ukrainian parliament (or Rada) at the end of the coup on February 26th, and the other appointments which were made, including that of Oleksandr Turchynov to fill in for Yanukovych as caretaker President until one of the junta’s chosen candidates would be ‘elected’ on May 25th of 2014, which ‘election’ Poroshenko won — all of this was illegal.

However, this illegality had already been known. It was already explained in detail on 28 February 2014, that, “Yanukovych’s removal was unconstitutional.” That’s for lawyers; but, now, finally, Ukraine’s Constitutional Court is faced with the shocking predicament of Ukraine’s own President, who won his post as a result of this coup, requesting them to “acknowledge” that it was a coup, much as the founder of the “private CIA” firm Stratfor had even called it, “the most blatant coup in history.” (It was that because the authentic video and other evidence of its having been a Washington job was so massive.)

Also in the news now is that Dmitriy Yarosh‘s Right Sector — the same group that Washington had hired for the coup and for the ethnic cleansing campaign in Ukraine’s former Donbass region — have announced that they will assemble in Kiev on July 3rd to overthrow Petroshenko unless he restarts right now the war against Donbass. The people whom Washington paid to oust Yanukovych are planning to do the same to Poroshenko. There is a struggle inside the Obama Administration about how far they can successfully go with their Ukrainian nazis not formally leading the country.

Washington is having a hard time keeping in line the Ukrainian nazis upon whom Washington’s plan for Ukraine has been based. Ukraine’s nazis are thirsting for Russian blood, and want to slake their thirst faster than the Obama Administration is willing to go along with. Washington’s previous “F—k the EU!” hasn’t worked as well as they had hoped. There is thus increasingly bad blood between the Obama Administration and the Ukrainian enforcers upon whom Obama has been relying.

Basically, Poroshenko now is torn between the EU, on one side, and Ukraine’s well-armed nazis, on the other; and, thus far, the ultimate decider, U.S. President Obama, who has needed cooperation both from Ukraine’s nazis and from the EU, in order for his Ukrainian gambit against Russia to work, is on the fence between those two sides. John Kerry sides with the EU; Victoria Nuland sides with the nazis. But Obama himself hasn’t yet played his hand.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/ukraines-president-poroshenko-says-overthrow-of-yanukovych-was-a-coup/5457631

Why would Bloomberg News completely disappear the February, 2014 Ukraine coup?

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Posted on Global Research, May 27. 2015
By Robert Barsocchini
Washington’s Blog

Bloomberg says in a post today that the “confrontation between Russia and the US” over Ukraine was “provok[ed]” by Putin’s annexation of Crimea:

“…Putin annexed the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea last March, provoking the biggest confrontation between Russia and the U.S. and Europe since the Cold War.”

That’s odd, though, because the reintegration of Crimea into Russia (after a vote in favor – but remember democracy is what we say it is) happened, as Bloomberg says and BBC confirms, in March, 2014, about five months after violent, US-backed protests began in November 2013, and ended in the the elected Ukrainian president, Victor Yanukovych, being driven out of the country by, as BBC put it, “radical groups”, including neo-Nazis: see BBC’s “Neo-Nazi Threat in Ukraine“, Feb. 28, 2014.  (“BBC Newsnight’s Gabriel Gatehouse investigates the links between the new Ukrainian government and Neo-nazis.”  Later articles covering the topic were published by, among many others, Glenn Greenwald, Robert Parry, and even, albeit 8 or 9 months too late to make a difference, NBC)

It’s also strange that BBC would say the following (even in a piece rife with the British state-run outlet’s typical pro-Western spin):

Pro-Russian forces [ie the Russian troops already stationed in Crimea by agreement] took control of Crimea in February.  They moved in after Ukraine’s pro-Moscow president Viktor Yanukovych was ousted after street protests.

So, they reacted to the US-backed overthrow of elected Yanukovych.  To be precise, Russian troops began the process of, in US political-speak, liberating and securing Crimea on “February 23rd, 2014“.

Yet, again oddly, here is Time on February 22nd, 2014:

“Ukraine protesters seize Kiev as President flees”

“Yanukovych fled to the eastern city of Kharkiv where he traditionally has a more solid base of support…”

It is noted in Wikipedia that Yanukovych had “won election in 2010 with strong support in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and southern and eastern Ukraine.”

Here is US historian William Blum, March 7, 2014, on these events:

The Ukrainian insurgents and their Western-power supporters didn’t care who their Ukrainian allies were in carrying out their coup against President Viktor Yanukovych last month … thugs who set policemen on fire head to toe … all manner of extreme right-wingers, including Chechnyan Islamic militants … a deputy of the ultra-right Svoboda Party, part of the new government, who threatens to rebuild Ukraine’s nukes in three to six months. … the snipers firing on the protestors who apparently were not what they appeared to be – A bugged phone conversation between Urmas Paet, the Estonian foreign minister, and EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, reveals Paet saying: “There is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new coalition.” … neo-Nazi protestors in Kiev who have openly denounced Jews, hoisting a banner honoring Stepan Bandera, the infamous Ukrainian nationalist who collaborated with the German Nazis during World War II and whose militias participated in atrocities against Jews and Poles.

And who could forget the pictures of Victoria Nuland and John McCain meeting with Ukrainian neo-Nazi and extremist leaders who use terms like “cleanse” and “kike”, or Nuland’s bragging to Chevron that the US had put billions and billions of dollars into these events, highly reminiscent of the US investment in overthrowing Iran’s democracy in 1953 after Iran nationalized its oil.

To the untrained eye, it would certainly seem that, in “liberating” Crimea, Russia was, very understandably, reacting to the above-mentioned series of events (not to mention the encroachment of a hostile, US-led, nuclear military alliance, NATO…).

So why would Bloomberg publish a piece that says the confrontation between Russia and the US was provoked by the annexation of Crimea, when it was provoked by a US-backed overthrow (one of about 60) of an elected president, who had strong ties to the highly ethnic-Russian east (including Crimea)?

We cannot credibly postulate that the Bloomberg author is unaware of the events prior to the “annexation of Crimea”, so we are forced to assume that he has a desire to paint Russia as the aggressor in the West/East standoff, as do so many working for the Western information systems.

This time, he has taken the easy way out by just pretending that nothing happened before Crimea, but other Western outlets have risen to the challenge, with impressive results.

When forced to acknowledge events that show the West as current aggressor in the (now perhaps winding down) West/East conflict, Western outlets have done what they do best: spin crackpot conspiracy theories about how everyone is trying to destroy the “free world” (the US happens to imprison more of its own people than any country in history, but in the free world we are smart enough to know that doesn’t count).

The New York Times, for example, attempted to explain the events that provoked Russia’s actions in Crimea (the US-backed protests and violent overthrow of an elected leader), by claiming Putin orchestrated all of that, too.

Robert Parry reports on the Times’ fanciful effort:

Is the New York Times really suggesting that Putin pulled the strings on the likes of Merkel and Nuland, secretly organized neo-Nazi brigades, and ruthlessly deployed these thugs to Kiev to provoke violence and overthrow Yanukovych, all while pretending to try to save Yanukovych’s government – all so Putin could advance some dastardly plot to conquer Europe?

…the Times’ narrative is something that would make even the most dedicated “conspiracy theorist” blush. Yet, the Times not only asserts this crazy conspiracy theory but calls it “incontrovertible.”

True to form, another times article recently proclaimed:

In all likelihood no one in the Kremlin actually ordered the killing [of Nemtsov]… The Kremlin has recently created a loose army of avengers who believe they are acting in the country’s best interests, without receiving any explicit instructions.

If someone in the US were to insist that Obama or Bush created a “loose army of avengers” who went around killing people “without receiving any explicit instructions”, he or she would be told to take off the tinfoil hat, leave mom’s basement, and get a job.

But when discussing the dark, ruthless, senseless forces of pure evil outside of our huddling “free world”, we are *free* to boldly rewrite history in our favor, concoct wild-eyed conspiracy theories to our hearts’ content, and use our new and improved histories and our nut-job theories to promote mass-violence against the bad people conspiring against “our freedoms”, and then kill millions of them.

Follow author Robert Barsocchini on Twitter @_DirtyTruths

http://www.globalresearch.ca/why-would-bloomberg-news-completely-disappear-the-february-2014-ukraine-coup/5452150

Greece: Fascists at the gate

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By Conn M. Hallinan
From Dispatches From The Edge, March 20, 2015

When some 70 members of the neo-Nazi organization Golden Dawn go on trial sometime this spring, there will be more than street thugs and fascist ideologues in the docket, but a tangled web of influence that is likely to engulf Greece’s police, national security agency, wealthy oligarchs, and mainstream political parties. While Golden Dawn—with its holocaust denial, its swastikas, and Hitler salutes—makes it look like it inhabits the fringe, in fact the organization has roots deep in the heart of Greece’s political culture.

Which is precisely what makes it so dangerous.

Golden Dawn’s penchant for violence is what led to the charge that it is a criminal organization. It is accused of several murders, as well as attacks on immigrants, leftists, and trade unionists. Raids have uncovered weapon caches. Investigators have also turned up information suggesting that the organization is closely tied to wealthy shipping owners, as well as the National Intelligence Service (EYP) and municipal police departments.

Several lawyers associated with two victims of violence by Party members—a 27-year old Pakistani immigrant stabbed to death last year, and an Afghan immigrant stabbed in 2011— charge that a high level EYP official responsible for surveillance of Golden Dawn has links to the organization. The revelations forced Dimos Kouzilos, director of EYP’s third counter-intelligence division, to resign last September.

There were several warning flags about Kouzilos when he was appointed to head the intelligence division by rightwing New Democracy Prime Minister Antonis Samaras. Kouzilos is a relative of a Golden Dawn Parliament member, who is the Party’s connection to the shipping industry. Kouzilos is also close to a group of police officers in Nikea, who are currently under investigation for ties to Golden Dawn. Investigators charge that the Nikea police refused to take complaints from refugees and immigrants beaten by Party members, and the police Chief, Dimitris Giovandis, tipped off Golden Dawn about surveillance of the Party.

In handing over the results of their investigation, the lawyers said the “We believe that this information provides an overview of the long-term penetration ands activities of the Nazi criminal gang with the EYP and the police.” A report by the Office of Internal Investigation documents 130 cases where Golden Dawn worked with police.

It should hardly come as a surprise that there are close ties between the extreme right and Greek security forces. The current left-right split goes back to 1944 when the British tried to drive out the Communist Party—the backbone of the Greek resistance movement against the Nazi occupation. The split eventually led to the 1946-49 civil war when Communists and leftists fought royalists and former German collaborationists for power. However, the West saw the civil war through the eyes of the then budding Cold War, and, at Britain’s request, the U.S. pitched in on the side of the right to defeat the left. In the process of that intervention—then called the Truman Doctrine—U.S. intelligence services established close ties with the Greek military.

Those ties continued over the years that followed and were tightened once Greece joined NATO in 1952. The charge that the U.S. encouraged the 1967 fascist coup against the Greek government has never been proven, but many of the “colonels” that initiated the overthrow had close ties to the CIA and the U.S. military.

Golden Dawn was founded by some of the key people who ruled during the 1967-74 junta, and Greek dictator Georgios Papadopoulos, the leader of the “colonels” who led the 1967 coup, groomed the Party’s founder and current leader, Nikos Michaloliakos. Papadopoulos was a Nazi collaborator and served with the German “security battalions” that executed 130,000 Greek civilians during WW II. Papadopoulos was trained by the U.S. Army and recruited by the CIA. Indeed, he was the first CIA employee to govern a European country.

Golden Dawn’s adherence to Hitler, the symbols of Nazism, and the “Fuehrer principle”—investing the Party’s leader with absolute authority—is, in part, what has gotten the organization into trouble. According to an investigation by Greek Supreme Court Deputy Prosecutor Haralambos Vourliotis, Golden Dawn is split into two wings, a political wing responsible for the Party’s legal face and an operational wing for “carrying out attacks on those deemed enemies of the party.” Michaloiakos oversees both wings.

Prosecutors will try to demonstrate that attacks and murders are not the actions of individuals who happen to be members of Golden Dawn, because independent actions are a contradiction to the “Fuehrer principle.” Many of the attacks have featured leading members of Golden Dawn and, on occasion, members of Parliament. Indeed, since the leadership and core of the Party were jailed last September, attacks on non-Greeks and leftists have fallen off.

There is a cozy relationship between Golden Dawn and some business people as well, with the Party serving as sort of “Thugs-R-Us” organization. Investigators charge that shortly after two Party MPs visited the shipyards at Piraeus, a Golden Dawn gang attacked Communists who were supporting union workers. Golden Dawn also tried to set up a company union that would have resulted in lower pay and fewer benefits for shipyard workers. In return, shipping owners donated 240,000 Euros to Golden Dawn.

Investigators charge that the Party also raises funds through protection rackets, money laundering and blackmail.

Journalist Dimitris Psarras, who has researched and written about Golden Dawn for decades, argues that the Party is successful not because it plays on the economic crisis, but because for years the government—both socialists and conservatives—mainstream parties, and the justice system have turned a blind eye to Golden Dawn’s growing use of force. It was the murder of Greek anti-fascist rapper/poet Pavlos Fyssas that forced the authorities to finally move on the organization. Killing North Africans was one thing, killing a Greek quite another.

Instead of challenging Golden Dawn in the last election, the New Democracy Party railed against “Marxists,” “communists” and—pulling a page from the 1946-49 civil war—“bandits.” Even the center parties, like the Greek Socialist Party (PASOK) and the new Potami Party, condemned both “left and right” as though the two were equivalent.

Golden Dawn did see its voter base shrink from the 426,025 it won in 2012, to 388,000 in the January election that brought left party Syriza to power. But then Golden Dawn is less interested in numbers than it is in wielding violence. According to Psarras, the Party’s agenda is “to create a climate of civil war, a divide where people have to choose between leftists and rightists.” 

Some of the mainstream parties have eased Golden Dawn’s path by adopting the Party’s attacks on Middle East and African immigrants and Muslims, albeit at a less incendiary level. But, as Psarras points out, “Research in political science has long since showed that wherever conservative European parties adopt elements of far-right rhetoric and policy during pre-election periods, the upshot is the strengthening of the extreme far right parties.”

That certainly was the case in last year’s European Parliamentary elections, when center and right parties in France and Great Britain refused to challenge the racism and Islamophobia of rightwing parties, only to see the latter make strong showings.

According to the Supreme Court’s Vourliotis, Golden Dawn believes that “Those who do not belong to the popular community of the race are subhuman. In this category belong foreign immigrants, Roma, those who disagree with their ideas and even people with mental problems.” The Party dismisses the Holocaust: “There were no crematoria, it’s a lie. Or gas chambers,” Michaloliakos said in a 2012 national TV interview. Some 60,000 members of Greece’s Jewish population were transported and murdered in the death camps during World War II. 

The trial is scheduled for April 20 but might delayed. Golden Dawn members, including Michaloliakos and many members of Parliament, were released Mar. 18 because they can only be held for 18 months in pre-trial detention. The Party, with its ties in the business community and its “wink of the eye” relationship to New Democracy—that mainstream center right party apparently printed Golden Dawn’s election brochures—has considerable resources to fight the charges. Golden Dawn has hired more than 100 attorneys.

If convicted, Golden Dawn members could face up to 20 years in prison, but there is not a great deal of faith among the anti-fascist forces in the justice system. The courts have remained mute in the face of Golden Dawn’s increasing use of violence, and some magistrates have been accused of being sympathetic to the organization. Golden Dawn is charged with being a criminal organization, murder, assault, and illegal weapons possession under Article 187.

Thanasis Kampagiannis of “Jail Golden Dawn” warns that the Party will not vanish on its own. “Many are under the impression that if we stop talking about Golden Dawn the problem will somehow disappear. That is not the case. The economic crisis has burnished the organization, but there are other causes that have contributed to its existence and prominence, such as the intensification of state repression and the institutionalization of racism by the dominant parties.”

But courts are political entities and respond to popular movements. Anti-fascists are calling on the Greeks and the international community to stay in the streets and demand that Golden Dawn be brought to justice. Germans missed that opportunity with the Nazi Party and paid a terrible price for it.

Thanks to Kia Mistilis, journalist, photographer and editor, for providing material for this column

https://dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com/

Brzezinski says U.S. must send troops and weapons to stop Russia

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Note: This hearing before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee was held January 21, 2015. The link to the C-Span recording and transcript is here:http://www.c-span.org/video/?323887-1/hearing-national-security-threats

From Global Research, March 8, 2015
By Eric Zuesse

Zbigniew Brzezinski, U.S. President Obama’s friend and advisor on Russia, is a born Polish aristocrat who has hated Russia his whole life but who hid that hatred until after the communist Soviet Union collapsed and he then publicly came out as hating and fearing specifically Russia — the nation, its people, and their culture. In 1998, he wrote The Grand Chessboard, arguing for an unchallengeable U.S. empire over the whole world, and for the defeat of Russia as the prerequisite to enabling that stand-alone global American empire to reign over the planet.

He now has told the U.S. Congress (on February 6th but not reported until March 6th, when the German Economic News found the clip) that Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin “seized” Crimea and that Putin will probably try to do the same to Estonia and Latvia, unless the U.S. immediately supplies weapons and troops to those countries and to Ukraine. Here is his stunning testimony (click on the link under it, to hear it, but the key part is quoted in print below):

Screen Shot 2015-03-06 at 9.40.20 AM

http://deutsche-wirtschafts-nachrichten.de/2015/03/06/brzezinski-rede-vor-dem-us-kongress-russland-wird-angreifen/
[Note: the above link has only a short section which is also repeated. See this C-SPAN link for the complete hearing and transcript http://www.c-span.org/video/?323887-1/hearing-national-security-threats%5D

“I wonder how many people in this room or this very important senatorial committee really anticipated that one day Putin would land military personnel in Crimea and seize it. I think if anybody said that’s what he is going to do, he or she would be labeled as a warmonger. He did it. And he got away with it. I think he’s also drawing lessons from that. And I’ll tell you what my horror, night-dream, is: that one day, I literally mean one day, he just seizes Riga, and Talinn. Latvia and Estonia. It would literally take him one day. There is no way they could resist. And then we will say, how horrible, how shocking, how outrageous, but of course we can’t do anything about it. It’s happened. We aren’t going to assemble a fleet in the Baltic, and then engage in amphibious landings, and then storm ashore, like in Normandy, to take it back. We have to respond in some larger fashion perhaps, but then there will be voices that this will plunge us into a nuclear war.”

He continues there by saying that we must pour weapons and troops into the nations that surround Russia, in order to avoid a nuclear conflict: deterrence, he argues, is the way to peace; anything else than our sending in troops and weapons now would be weakness and would invite World War III.

He says that American troops must be prepositioned in these countries immediately, because otherwise Putin will think that America won’t respond to a Russian attack against those countries.

The most serious falsehoods in his remarkable testimony are three, and they’ll be taken up here in succession: Continue reading →

Support Venezuela — interview with John Pilger:

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Posted on Information Clearing House
By John Pilger and Michael Albert
February 16, 2015 “ICH” – “ZNet” –

Albert: Why would the U.S. want Venezuela’s government overthrown?

Pilger: There are straightforward principles and dynamics at work here. Washington wants to get rid of the Venezuelan government because it is independent of US designs for the region and because Venezuela has the greatest proven oil reserves in the world and uses its oil revenue to improve the quality of ordinary lives. Venezuela remains a source of inspiration for social reform in a continent ravaged by an historically rapacious U.S. An Oxfam report once famously described the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua as ‘the threat of a good example’. That has been true in Venezuela since Hugo Chavez won his first election. The ‘threat’ of Venezuela is greater, of course, because it is not tiny and weak; it is rich and influential and regarded as such by China. The remarkable change in fortunes for millions of people in Latin America is at the heart of U.S. hostility. The U.S. has been the undeclared enemy of social progress in Latin America for two centuries. It doesn’t matter who has been in the White House: Barack Obama or Teddy Roosevelt; the US will not tolerate countries with governments and cultures that put the needs of their own people first and refuse to promote or succumb to U.S. demands and pressures. A reformist social democracy with a capitalist base – such as Venezuela – is not excused by the rulers of the world. What is inexcusable is Venezuela’s political independence; only complete deference is acceptable. The ‘survival’ of Chavista Venezuela is a testament to the support of ordinary Venezuelans for their elected government – that was clear to me when I was last there. Venezuela’s weakness is that the political ‘opposition’ — those I would call the ‘East Caracas Mob’ – represent powerful interests who have been allowed to retain critical economic power. Only when that power is diminished will Venezuela shake off the constant menace of foreign-backed, often criminal subversion. No society should have to deal with that, year in, year out.

What methods has the U.S. already used and would you anticipate their using to unseat the Bolivarians? 

There are the usual crop of quislings and spies; they come and go with their media theatre of fake revelations, but the principal enemy is the media. You may recall the Venezuelan admiral who was one of the coup-plotters against Chavez in 2002, boasting during his brief tenure in power, ‘Our secret weapon was the media’. The Venezuelan media, especially television, were active participants in that coup, lying that supporters of the government were firing into a crowd of protestors from a bridge. False images and headlines went around the world. The New York Times joined in, welcoming the overthrow of a democratic ‘anti-American’ government; it usually does. Something similar happened in Caracas last year when vicious right-wing mobs were lauded as ‘peaceful protestors’ who were being ‘repressed’. This was undoubtedly the start of a Washington-backed ‘colour revolution’ openly backed by the likes of the National Endowment for Democracy – a user-friendly CIA clone. It was uncannily like the coup that Washington successfully staged in Ukraine last year. As in Kiev, in Venezuela the ‘peaceful protestors’ set fire to government buildings and deployed snipers and were lauded by western politicians and the western media. The strategy is almost certainly to push the Maduro government to the right and so alienate its popular base. Depicting the government as dictatorial and incompetent has long been an article of bad faith among journalists and broadcasters in Venezuela and in the US, the UK and Europe. One recent US ‘story’ was that of a ‘US scientist jailed for trying to help Venezuela build bombs’. The implication was that Venezuela was harbouring ‘nuclear terrorists’. In fact, the disgruntled nuclear physicist had no connection whatsoever with Venezuela.

All this is reminiscent of the unrelenting attacks on Chávez, each with that peculiar malice reserved for dissenters from the west’s ‘one true way’. In 2006, Britain’s Channel 4 News effectively accused the Venezuelan president of plotting to make nuclear weapons with Iran, an absurd fantasy. The Washington correspondent, Jonathan Rugman, sneered at policies to eradicate poverty and presented Chávez as a sinister buffoon, while allowing Donald Rumsfeld, a war criminal, to liken Chavez to Hitler, unchallenged. The BBC is no different. Researchers at the University of the West of England in the UK studied the BBC’s systematic bias in reporting Venezuela over a ten-year period. They looked at 304 BBC reports and found that only three of these referred to any of the positive policies of the government. For the BBC, Venezuela’s democratic initiatives, human rights legislation, food programmes, healthcare initiatives and poverty reduction programmes did not exist. Mission Robinson, the greatest literacy programme in human history, received barely a passing mention. This virulent censorship by omission complements outright fabrications such as accusations that the Venezuelan government are a bunch of drug-dealers. None of this is new; look at the way Cuba has been misrepresented – and assaulted – over the years. Reporters Without Borders has just issued its worldwide ranking of nations based on their claims to a free press. The U.S. is ranked 49th, behind Malta, Niger, Burkino Faso and El Salvador.

Why might now be a prime time, internationally, for pushing toward a coup? If the primary problem is Venezuela being an example that could spread, is the emergence of a receptive audience for that example in Europe adding to the U.S. response?

It’s important to understand that Washington is ruled by true extremists, once known inside the Beltway as ‘the crazies’. This has been true since before 9/11. A few are outright fascists. Asserting US dominance is their undisguised game and, as the events in Ukraine demonstrate, they are prepared to risk a nuclear war with Russia. These people should be the common enemy of all sane human beings. In Venezuela, they want a coup so that they can roll-back of some of the world’s most important social reforms – such as in Bolivia and Ecuador. They’ve already crushed the hopes of ordinary people in Honduras. The current conspiracy between the US and Saudi Arabia to lower the price of oil is meant to achieve something more spectacular in Venezuela, and Russia.

What do you think the best approach might be to warding off u.s. machinations, and those of domestic Venezuelan elites as well, for the Bolivarians?

The majority people of Venezuela, and their government, need to tell the world the truth about the attacks on their country. There is a stirring across the world, and many people are listening. They don’t want perpetual instability, perpetual poverty, perpetual war, perpetual rule by the few. And they identify the principal enemy; look at the international polling surveys that ask which country presents the greatest danger to humanity. The majority of people overwhelmingly point to the U.S., and to its numerous campaigns of terror and subversion.

What do you think is the immediate responsibility of leftists outside Venezuela, and particularly in the U.S.?

That begs a question: who are these ‘leftists’? Are they the millions of liberal North Americans seduced by the specious rise of Obama and silenced by his criminalising of freedom of information and dissent? Are they those who believe what they are told by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the BBC? It’s an important question. ‘Leftist’ has never been a more disputed and misappropriated term. My sense is that people who live on the edge and struggle against US-backed forces in Latin America understood the true meaning of the word, just as they identify a common enemy. If we share their principles, and a modicum of their courage, we should take direct action in our own countries, starting, I would suggest, with the propagandists in the media. Yes, it’s our responsibility, and it has never been more urgent.

 

Click for Spanish, German, Dutch, Danish, French, translation- Note- Translation may take a moment to load.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41011.htm

‘Almost all’ opposition leaders knew about Venezuelan coup plot by U.S.; UK and Canada also involved

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Articles from Telesur

February 15, 2015:

President Maduro during the televised press conference Feb. 14, 2015.President Maduro during the televised press conference Feb. 14, 2015 Photo: VTV

Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro added that a U.S. Embassy advisor drafted the script that the coup plotters read in video they planned to air.

In a televised address Saturday night, Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro revealed new information on the foiled coup attempt against his government, including accusations that the country’s opposition leaders were aware of the plans.

“Almost all of the MUD leaders knew about this plan, this ambush, almost all of them, including the four-time losing candidate,” said the Venezuelan leader, referring to opposition presidential candidate, Henrique Capriles Radonski.

“I’m not saying all of them were actively involved. But it was a rumor circulating amongst them, that something was about to happen,” Maduro explained.

Maduro also said that those detained have confessed to the plot and have provided new information which authorities are investigating.

In addition to attempting to bribe officials and politicians with cash and visas to enter the United States, the Venezuelan president expanded on the role played by the U.S. Embassy in the country, saying that the script read by coup plotters in a video they planned to air once the plan had been initiated was crafted by an advisor at the Embassy.

Maduro called on U.S. president Barack Obama to stop his officials from meddling in Venezuelan affairs.

“In your name, they are organizing coup plots against democratically-elected government, such as Venezuela,” Maduro said.

According to Venezuelan intelligence and testimonies, the coup was set have taken place on Feb. 12, one day after opposition leaders Leopoldo Lopez, Maria Corina Machada and Antonio Ledezma published a “Transition” program which outlined measures including the privatization of oil, deregulation of the economy and agreements with International Monetary Fund..

The plan included targetted assassinations and bombing a series of targets – including teleSUR’s headquarters in Caracas – while opposition activists staged violent protests in the streets to mark one year since the start of opposition-led protests that claimed 43 lives.

February 14, 2015
Evidence Reveals Canada, UK Involvement in Venezuela Coup Plot

Evidence presented on Venezuelan TV showed a video of the coup plotters, as well as the 10-year U.S. visa granted to one of the accused.
By Telesur
February 14, 2015 “ICH” – “Telesur” – The president of Venezuela’s national assembly, Diosdado Cabello, presented further evidence of the  right-wing plot to overthrow the Bolivarian government Friday evening.

Cabello presented evidence of the foiled plans, including a video showing members of the military prior to recording a message announcing that the military no longer recognized the government.

The video, which was set to be aired after planned attacks had been carried out, was to have been televised by a station in Venezuela or Miami.

Cabello also showed a 10-year U.S. visa given to one of the detained, days before the plan was to be implemented.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Hzyiv3r1VI

Cabello also said that a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and a member of the U.K. diplomatic core in Venezuela, had been involved in plans, including seeking information on airport capacity in case of emergencies.

According to Venezuelan intelligence, the computers seized to military detractors revealed maps from the places where the opposition was plotting to carry out attacks, including the  Miraflores presidential palace, and the headquarters of teleSUR in Caracas.

Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro announced Thursday that the government had thwarted a coup attempt which was being coordinated by Venezuela’s right-wing opposition with the support of the U.S. government.

During the televised presentation, Cabello pointed to a recent interview given by U.S. president Barack Obama, in which he stated that “American leadership at times entails twisting the arms of states which don’t do what we need them to do.”

The plans were to take place exactly one year after opposition-led acts of violence rocked the country, claiming 43 lives and billions in damage.

On Wednesday, opposition leaders Leopoldo Lopez, Maria Corina Machado and Antonio Ledezma released a “transition plan” which involved privatization of the country’s oil, deregulation of the economy and accords with “international financial institutions” including the International Monetary Fund.

La nueva Televisión del Sur C.A.

Click for Spanish, German, Dutch, Danish, French, translation- Note- Translation may take a moment to load.

http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Almost-All-Opposition-Leaders-Knew-About-Venezuelan-Coup-Plot-20150215-0006.html

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40990.htm

The Paet-Ashton transcript and the snipers at Maidan

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Excerpt from annotated transcript below:

It is, and actually the only politician the people from civilian society mentioned positively was Poroshenko, so that he had some so to say trust among all these Maidan people and civilian society; and  second, what was quite disturbing, the same oligarch [Poroshenko] told that well, all the evidence shows that the people who were killed by snipers, from both sides, among policemen and people from the streets, that they were the same snipers, killing people from both sides.
Well, that’s yes, …
So that and then she [Dr. Olga Bolgomets] also showed me some photos, she said that as medical doctor, she can, you know, say that it’s the same handwriting, the same type of bullets, and it’s really disturbing that now the new coalition that they don’t want to investigate, what exactly happened; so that now there is stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new coalition.
I think that we do want to investigate.  I mean I didn’t pick that up, that’s interesting. Gosh?
So that it was in this instance disturbing that if it’s us now to live its own life very powerfully, then it already discreditates from the very beginning also this new coalition.

Posted on Fort Russ
By Eric Zuesse, 3 Feb. 2015

Here is a complete transcript of the extraordinarily revealing phone conversation, that occurred on 26 February 2014, in which the foreign-affairs chief of the European Union, Catherine Ashton, was informed by her investigator, Urmas Paet, into his findings regarding what had been the cause of the violence that brought down the Ukrainian Government of President Viktor Yanukovych — whether it was Yanukovych himself, or the people who had opposed Yanukovych and who had supported Ukraine’s joining the EU (which Yanukovych had finally decided not to do). 
This conversation makes absolutely clear that the EU had not participated in bringing down Yanukovych and was shocked to learn that Yanukovych had not been behind the violence on that historic occasion, which had occurred only days prior.
This conversation goes by so fast so that a transcript of it is really necessary, in order for one to be able to absorb the full import of what’s happening and being revealed in it. Consequently, what now follows will be the transcript of this entire astounding phone call, with explanatory notes added in brackets by myself, for the reader’s comprehension of what was being referred to by these officials, in this phone-call that shows the truly astonishing extent of U.S. President Barack Obama’s depravity — a depravity that clearly shocked these EU officials, even while they seemed to have been resigned to it. (Subsequently, they went along with it, with only weak ongoing resistance to it.)
Estonia’s Foreign Minister Urmas Paet phones the EU’s foreign-affairs chief Catherine Ashton, to report on the findings of his February 25th inquiry for the EU, into the situation in Ukraine right after the coup that had just overthrown Ukraine’s democratically elected (in 2010) President Viktor Yanukovych:

Continue reading →

Ukraine: How can this happen? Here is how.

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By Eric Zuesse
Posted on Global Research, February 17, 2015
—————————————————————–
How can this happen?

http://fortruss.blogspot.com/2015/02/ukrainian-soldiers-break-into-house.html

Here is how:

http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/ukraines-land-agency-give-land-to-soldiers-in-the-east-for-free-352100.html

Screen Shot 2015-02-15 at 6.48.31 PM

So: Ukraine’s troops are permitted to steal whatever they want from the residents in Donbass, the rebelling region. The particular victim here lives in an apartment, and so all that Ukraine’s troops can take from him are his belongings.

He’s lucky they didn’t shoot him (if they didn’t).

The cover story in the 4 August 2014 issue of TIME was: “In Russia, Crime Without Punishment: Vladimir Putin backs the rebels …”

Screen Shot 2015-02-15 at 6.56.26 PM

Would a more-honest news-report have been titled, “In America, Crime Without Punishment: Barack Obama institutes ethnic cleansing in southeast Ukraine”?

Or, perhaps: “Crime Without Punishment: TIME magazine lies about Russia and Ukraine”?

Either way: How can such things as this happen?

Well, both things did — the ethnic cleansing did and does, and the cover-up of it and of its source did and does.

And that’s the biggest uncovered news-story of our time: both the ongoing crime, and its ongoing cover-up.

The present news-report is being distributed to virtually all U.S. ‘news’ media for publication, so that readers of all which do publish it (which can be determined by a google-search of this news-report’s headline) can come to know, from all that do not (show there), which ‘news’ media (other than TIME) are co-conspirators with Obama, in deceiving the American public into hiding reality so as to encourage further movement toward a nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia — a nuclear war in which America (and definitely not Russia) was the instigator. (Even the founder of the “private CIA” firm Stratfor acknowledges that the February 2014 overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovuch, which started this, was “the most blatant coup in history” — and it was run from the U.S. White House. It precipitated, as a purely defensive measure by Russia, Russia’s accepting Crimea’s bid to rejoin Russia: Crimea had been since 1783 the base for Russia’s crucial Black Sea fleet, which Obama wanted to kick out of there.)

Any news-media that issue this news-report are honest, because the news-report itself is (and none of them is being charged anything to publish it; so, expense is not involved here). Any that don’t issue it, each reader can judge — and nobody has to wait for a nuclear war in order to do so; the ‘news’ media can be judged right now, because this coup occurred a year ago, and yet still it has not been reported in the U.S. as having been a coup (this overthrow was supposedly instead a result of ‘the democratic Maidan demonstrations’ that were actually used merely as a cover for it).

Furthermore, the present reporter offers to all other journalists the full text of the only thorough investigation that was ever done regarding the overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych, a rigorous scientific analysis of all of the existing evidence. It concludes exactly as did the European Union’s investigator when he first reported on 26 February 2014 that it had been a coup, which had been perpetrated by “someone” allied with the EU (presumably by the U.S. White House); it shocked Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign-affairs chief, when she learned it from him. This lengthy subsequent independent investigation into the matter is by far the most thorough examination that exists of the event, and it is titled, “The ‘Snipers’ Massacre’ on the Maidan in Ukraine.” Its author is University of Ottawa political scientist, Dr. Ivan Katchanovski. Any ‘news’ medium that decides not to publish the present news report about this American international atrocity, and that also does not at least request from me (or from Dr. Katchanovski) that full investigative report by Katchanovski about how this ethnic cleansing started, is clearly not interested in reporting the truth, regarding what is actually the most important international-affairs news-story of the past year, since the February 2014 coup, at least — the only matter that could very possibly end up producing World War III. (Obama wanted a proxy war against Russia to soften them up for the real thing; and the result is all of this bloodshed in Ukraine during and since that coup a year ago.) So: nobody can say that the reason it’s not being reported is that it’s not important news (now become history) to report. It was, and (unfortunately) still is.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

Venezuela foils Washington’s coup plot

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Another coup plot by the United States government, with a sitting president and vice president leading it.

Posted on Global Research, February 14, 2015
By Stephen Lendman

On February 12, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced Obama’s plot to kill him, oust his government, and seize power forcefully was thwarted. More on this below.

Throughout his tenure, Obama waged war on humanity. It continues against free people everywhere.

His deplorable record might make some despots blush. He viciously targets fundamental freedoms at home and abroad.

Governs under a police state apparatus. Unilaterally decides who lives, dies, stays free or is imprisoned.

He continues waging war on Afghanistan after pledging to end it during his first year in office.

No end of conflict looms. Permanent war and occupation is planned. Afghanistan is a wasteland of dystopian misery.

Obama ravaged and destroyed Libya. Turning North Africa’s most developed country into an out-of-control cauldron of violence. Its people stripped of all social benefits and rights Gaddafi provided.

In June 2009, he orchestrated Honduran President Manuel Zelaya’s ouster. A US supported fascist despot replaced him.

After Haiti’s devastating January 2010 earthquake, Obama militarized the country, plunders it freely, exploits its people ruthlessly, orchestrated rigged elections, and prohibits democratic governance.

In September 2010, his attempt to topple Ecuador’s Rafael Correa failed. In 2012, he orchestrated Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo’s ouster by rigged parliamentary impeachment.

In February 2011, he manipulated Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak’s removal. So-called Arab spring was more mirage than real.

In July 2013, Mohamed Morsi’s toppling followed. Obama’s dirty hands conspired with Egypt’s General Abdul Fatah al-Sisi to install junta rule.

In February 2014, He ousted Ukraine’s democratically elected government. Put neo-Nazi putschists in charge.

Uses them to wage war on their own people. So-called February 12 Minsk resolution is pure fantasy.

No end of conflict looms. Peace is a convenient illusion. So is democracy. America tolerates none at home or abroad.

Throughout Chavez’s tenure as Venezuela’s president, Washington went all-out to oust him. Obama succeeded by killing him.

He wants fascist rule replacing Maduro. Bolivarian social justice ended. Predatory capitalism replacing it.

He’s waging relentless economic and political war. A previous article discussed Maduro accusing Vice President Joe Biden of directing efforts to oust him.

Likely kill him. On February 2, he said, “(t)he northern imperial power has entered a dangerous phase of desperation, going to talk to the continent’s governments to announce the overthrow of my government. And I accuse Vice-president Joe Biden of this” plot.

“There are US diplomats in Venezuela contracting military officials to betray their country, looking to influence socialist political leaders, public opinion leaders and entrepreneurs to provoke a coup.”

He called Washington’s plot no ordinary crisis. He appealed to Venezuelans to remain on high alert against “a bloody coup underway” against everything Bolivarianism represents.

In a televised Thursday address, he announced a US-instigated foiled coup plot.

Saying “(i)t is the government of the United States that is behind the plans of destabilization and coups against Venezuela. I have come here to denounce it.”

“We have dismantled a coup attempt against democracy, against the stability of our homeland.”

“It was an attempt to use a group of officials from the air force to provoke a violent act, an attack.”

Civilians and military members were involved. They were arrested. They remain detained.

They’re connected to four Venezuelan air force generals involved in a 2014 plot to oust Maduro. A State Department spokesperson declined to comment.

Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez said “Bolivarian Armed Forces remain resolute in their democratic beliefs and reject coup schemes that threaten the peace of the republic.”

National Assembly President Diosdado Cabello explained details of Obama’s plot.

Scheduled on the anniversary of the start of last year’s US-orchestrated street violence. Plans included killing people during marches and demonstrations.

Using a Tucano jet aircraft to bomb strategic targets, including:

  • the Miraflores (presidential palace);
  • military intelligence headquarters;
  • defense and justice ministries;
  • Caracas municipality building;
  • public prosecutor’s office;
  • TeleSUR building;
  • National Electoral Council (CNE); and
  • central Caracas’ Metro station Zona Rental;

Installing “transitional” governance would follow. Opposition legislator Julio Borges was accused of choosing locations to be attacked.

Caracas Mayor Jorge Rodriquez said “he’ll have to explain if he was planning this map of attack targets…”

(A)mong them was the (western area of Caracas) La Cadelaria where the opposition always wins elections…”

(W)hat were they going to say to the people who came out of their houses because they were going to be bombed…”

(W)hen they were going to bomb the international channel, TeleSUR?”

Cabello said authorities seized grenades, military and Sebin (intelligence) uniforms, and a video coup plot declaration by masked military officials displaying deadly AR15 rifles.

Automatic versions can fire 800 rounds per minute. Semi-automatic ones are widely available in America. Venezuelan civilians are prohibited from owning them.

“Venezuela has a very violent sector of the opposition that doesn’t hesitate to plan actions that could mean dozens of deaths or the assassination of the president,” said Rodriguez.

Cabello said Borges and opposition leader Antonio Ledezma planned to announce the coup publicly.

Sign it. Then have corporate controlled anti-Bolivarian national media publish it.

Maduro said one suspect arrested was under surveillance since last year’s street violence. He and others continued plotting to oust Venezuela’s government.

With considerable help from Washington. A four-stage plan was hatched. Including economic and political war.

Inventing a nonexistent humanitarian crisis. A political coup. Followed by a military one installing transitional governance.

Maduro said the plot was discovered after military officials approached to participate reported the scheme to civilian authorities.

On Thursday, Maduro urged Venezuelans to remain on alert. Prepare to counter US-directed fascist attempts to seize power forcefully, he said.

Families of victims of last year’s fascist street violence want everyone to know hard truths about what happened.

Washington’s orchestrated right-wing rampage left 43 dead. Hundreds of others injured. A deadly repeat looms.

Obama wants Venezuela looking like Ukraine. He wants its democratic governance destroyed. Its valued energy resources plundered. Its people exploited.

Venezuelans want the whole world to know what happened last year. What’s planned against their country.

According to a committee representing families of victims of last year’s violence, perpetrators blamed government authorities for their crimes.

Hard truths were “silenced or distorted by some media and politicians, as well as by certain international human rights organizations, which portray the intellectual and material authors of the violence as the victims of state power, forgetting those who really suffered the consequences of the call to violence.”

“That’s why, we have decided to demand that the events be investigated and the truth determined, about who was intellectually and materially responsible for these human rights violations, and what their real motivations were,” they said.

“Above all, that they be punished accordingly. We are convinced that there won’t be justice until the truth of what happened is known by everyone, inside and outside our country.”

The day after Maduro’s April 2013 election, opposition candidate Henrique Capriles called on supporters to rage (arrechera) in the streets.

Weeks of violence, deaths and destruction followed selectively in middle and upscale neighborhoods. The vast majority of Venezuelans opposed it. They still do.

Obama continues going all-out to crush Bolivarianism once and for all. To return Venezuela to its bad old days. To restore dark side rule. Millions of Venezuelans are a bulwark against him.

Obama’s failed scheme is Washington’s latest attempt to replace Venezuelan democracy with fascist rule.

Expect more of the same ahead. Expect Obama to keep menacing humanity throughout his remaining months in office.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net . His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.” http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network. It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/venezuela-foils-obamas-coup-plot/5431160