Letter to the Guardian Regarding its Venezuela Coverage

[Judi Lynn]

Letter to the Guardian Regarding its Venezuela Coverage
By Various, August 1st 2011

Dear Guardian editors:

We, the undersigned, ask why the Guardian ignored one of Venezuela’s most serious human rights problems – the assassination of hundreds of peasant activists since 2001 by gunmen hired by wealthy land owners.

On June 8, VenezuelaAnalysis.com reported a 10,000 person march on the National Assembly to demand justice for the victims ("Venezuelan Peasant Organisations March to Demand Justice for Murders").

The Guardian's Caracas-based correspondent, Rory Carroll, reported none of this and has disregarded this grave human rights issue for years.

The Guardian has recently published articles about Chavez going bald ("Hugo Chávez expects to go bald after chemotherapy in Cuba") and about his "conspiracy theories" surrounding the death of Simon Bolivar ("Hugo Chávez claims Simon Bolívar was murdered not backed by science").

Peasants have clearly been targeted in order to defeat the Chavez government's efforts to remedy the gross inequities in land distribution across Venezuela. The victims of this violence, and the truth, deserve better.

Sincerely,
Noam Chomsky, MIT
Cont'd

More:
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/6394

[Peace Patriot]

1. I'm glad Chomsky's on this. Rory Carroll really did him dirt and needs to be fired by Guardian.

Carroll interviewed Chomsky about Chavez and then wrote an article using quotes from the interview very selectively and twisting and distorting what Chomsky had said to change Chomsky's meaning, from reasonable, thoughtful criticism to an attack on Chavez along rightwing propaganda lines. Among other things, Chomsky said he needed to be more careful who he granted interviews to. He accused Carroll of grave distortion. The Guardian then printed the interview in full, and comparing the two--interview and article--you can clearly see what Carroll did.

Chomsky didn't say this but I'm saying it: Carroll is a Murdoch-style RW hit man. I have not seen a single article by him that did not contain lies and distortions about the Latin American left. He does not belong at the Guardian. He belongs at the "News of the World"--that is, he doesn't belong in journalism at all. He is a black spot on the Guardian's credibility.

The Guardian is the ONLY remaining reliable major news source in the entirety of the western world. We can't even trust the BBC any more (downsized, corporatized). And yet the Guardian reporting on the leftist democracy movement that has swept most of South America and parts of Central America might as well be from the Wall Street Urinal or the New York Slimes. It is dismaying and it gives me the willies as to U.S./U.K. planning for Oil War IV. Has the Guardian been issued "parameters" in the "Great Game" (U.S./U.K. corporate/war profiteer domination of the world)? ('You can take down Murdoch but don't touch our war profiteering and its propaganda arm on Latin America'?) Are they self-censoring--setting up their own "parameters," fully aware of Carroll's depredations? Half aware? Unaware? Not up on Latin America themselves and don't realize how bad his reporting is? Too caught up in U.S./U.K. corruption to notice?

I was at puzzled at first and ultimately appalled at the fall of the New York Slimes on Iraq (with its Pentagon-embedded 'reporter' Judith Miller). Then came Slimin' Romero, their "ace" on Latin America. I don't know who he is embedded with, but the trio--Romero at the Slimes, O'Grady at the Urinal, Carroll at the Guardian--is a 'home run' for somebody, and propaganda machines like this are not set up for no reason. They are expensive operations, and they are connected to other expensive operations with ultimate goals of mayhem, murder, war and war profiteering. Iraq gave us a great lesson on the methods and purpose of this kind of propaganda campaign. Just think of the careful planning and interconnected operations that went into manufacturing and funneling the bald-faced lies about Iraq WMDs, through various dirty organizations to Rumsfeld's "Office of Special Plans" through Judith Miller to the pages of the New York Slimes. And what was its goal? A million dead. Billions gone missing. Trillions to bloated military 'contractors.' British Petroleum, et al, rake in the oil profits.

So I am VERY SENSITIVE to this kind of thing, as we all should be. What is the GOAL of this Romero-O'Grady-Carroll propaganda machine which continually slanders the leftist leaders in Latin America who control huge oil reserves that are strategically located, as to U.S. military bases, in countries (Venezuela, Ecuador) that are not as big and powerful nor as corporate-friendly as Brazil?

Interesting, though, that it was Brazil's leftist president, Lula da Silva, who said that the Bushwhack reconstitution of the U.S. 4th Fleet in the Caribbean (mothballed since WW II) presented "a threat to Brazil's oil." Everybody south of the border knew that it was a threat to Venezuela's. Brazil then proposed that South America create a "common defense." (The Bush Junta had placed 'sanctions' on Venezuela preventing them from buying parts for military aircraft they had purchased from the U.S.) Brazil has refused to play the U.S. "divide and conquer" game.

I think we saw the leading edge of a war plan, with the "miracle laptop" propaganda scheme out of Colombia--an alleged FARC guerilla computer that Bush pal Alvaro Uribe wildly claimed contained "proof" that Venezuela's and Ecuador's presidents are "terrorist lovers," paid money to the FARC, got money from the FARC, were helping the FARC obtain a "dirty bomb," etc., etc. The "miracle laptop" has now been firmly established as bogus. Even the Colombian Supreme Court has rejected it as reliable evidence. And the perps may have actually compromised its provenance on purpose, because its crap contents were never intended for scrutiny, any more than the phony WMDs in Iraq. It looks suspiciously like they were intended to accomplish a big enough, dazzling enough, short term propaganda hit to trigger a war.

THAT war plan--if, indeed, war was the goal of the intense propaganda--failed, for several reasons--among them, solid leadership, unity, information sharing and political savvy among the new leftist leaders of the region. A war seemed all set up, with an initial (and very bloody) bombing/raid against the FARC just inside Ecuador's border (where the "miracle laptop" was allegedly found--unscratched in the rubble of 500 lb U.S. "smart bombs")--a U.S./Colombia bombing/raid that brought Venezuelan and Ecuadoran military battalions to their borders, in alarm at the attack--U.S. forces arrayed in an arc around Venezuela's oil coast (on the Caribbean) and its northern oil provinces (bordering Colombia), and the Colombian military and its "Black Eagle" death squads causing murder and mayhem along the border between Colombia and Venezuela, to the north, and along Colombia's border with Ecuador to the south. (Half a million Colombians were fleeing across these borders into Venezuela and Ecuador to avoid this murder and mayhem, and the "Black Eagles" crossed over the border into Venezuela and were found in the very area where Uribe claimed--using the "miracle laptop" and other manufactured "evidence"--that the FARC were operating in Venezuela. No FARC there, but the "Black Eagles" were caught there, setting up a criminal organization and terrorizing people.)

Other reasons for the failure or truncation of this apparent U.S./Colombia war plan probably include the internal war that was simultaneously going on between Rumsfeld's Pentagon and the CIA, over Rumsfeld-Cheney outings of CIA agents and Iraq/Iran WMD intel, and between the military brass and Rumsfeld/Cheney over their intention to nuke Iran. The Bush Junta was fracturing so badly that Daddy Bush had to come to the rescue, with his "Iraq Study Group" (of which Leon Panetta was a member).

The upshot of this is that Rumsfeld had already been ousted from the Pentagon when this Venezuela-Ecuador plan unfolded. (It actually started with Uribe's request to Chavez to negotiate with the FARC on hostage releases--a plan to lure Chavez into contact with the FARC, and which Rumsfeld commented on--i.e., lied about--in an op-ed in the Washington Post, on 12/1/07, the very day that the first Chavez-negotiated hostages were released. They were attacked with rocket fire by the Colombian military, on their way to their freedom.) Also, the banksters were preparing their final looting of the U.S. treasury and that took precedence once it was clear that the Bushwhack crowd were going to be pulled into the background for a while. They got away with billions of dollars for future use, from the bankster op alone.

South American oil (and oil profits) turned out to be not so easy to steal, though the Bushwhacks had been trying since at least the 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela. South America showed amazing new solidarity in resisting such schemes. There was another later that year--Bolivia, Sept '08, simultaneous with the bankster heist--not directly about oil, but about weakening the new solidarity in South America by toppling Evo Morales, the first Indigenous president of Bolivia. The Bushwhacks funded/supported white separatist rioters and murderers right out of the U.S. embassy. Morales threw the U.S. ambassador out of Bolivia. And then South America came together in their new organization UNASUR, with solid, well-organized, formal resistance to U.S. interference and domination. It was a wonder to behold, I must say--that UNASUR meeting--as is the whole story of U.S. aggression vs successful resistance, from 2002 (the Venezuelans were first) through 2008 (new leftist leaders all over the map, everybody involved), and continuing through Brazil's active resistance to the U.S. coup in Honduras and its aftermath (Zelaya's return to Honduras; constitutional reform permitted), which has had solid support throughout the region.

You won't learn any of this, of course, from Rory Carroll, LatAm "correspondent" for the Guardian. It's a very big "black hole" in the Guardian. No light can get out.

The Bush Junta's war plans and other crudities helped fuel an historic leftist democracy movement which has changed the political landscape of Latin America. Latin Americans have tasted independence based on cooperation and social justice, and they are not going back. Yet the U.S./corporate media propaganda machine grinds on, churning out negative story after negative story about Chavez and Correa in particular.

There was a violent insurrection by factions of the police and military in Ecuador, in 2010, with no visible U.S. fingerprints but with suspicious ties to RW U.S. allies in Ecuador. Correa survived, but clearly Ecuador has been targeted for destabilization efforts, and, of course, as the Correa government works to restore stability, the corpo-fascist press started running stories about how Correa, too, is a "dictator." (Recently, they've been using Indigenous unrest (environmental protests) for the this purpose--as if Chevron-Texaco's RW pals would protect Indigenous lands from that "dictator" Correa.) (It's just laughable.)

Is this propaganda machine just proceeding with mindless momentum, or is it part of a new and subtler Obama/Clinton/Panetta strategy, perhaps a better set-up for this oil war, the way Bill Clinton set up Iraq for the Bushwhacks, or with other goals?

The craving for oil and its profits are the drivers of U.S. foreign policy, as we know. Obama is continuing the set up of Iran (also a difficult "nut" for a war/oil profiteers to crack). And the precedent of presidential war by fiat--without even bothering with formalities like lying to Congress--has now been established, with Libya.

If the U.S. is going to proceed with mere political subversion, not outright war, to re-colonize South America (and keep and extend control in Central America), it has a lot of long term, subtle work to do. For one thing, they really need to sneak in the corporate-run 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines (the ultimate control here). Most countries still have paper ballots--the most visible, easy to monitor system--because they can't afford the expensive conversion to electronics. Nice irony! As the leftist governments make these countries more prosperous, they could become more vulnerable to e-voting glitz. (That's part of what happened here.) I've read that this has already begun in Brazil, a country where the leftist government has quite dramatically created prosperity. It's still a limited Diebold incursion, as far as I know. Venezuela--another country that has benefited greatly by leftist-created prosperity--has used electronic voting for a while but with OPEN SOURCE code (public code) and a 55% audit (more than adequate). Venezuela could lose transparency if some kind of "privatization" scheme got slipped in. I haven't heard of any, but, considering the 'TRADE SECRET' voting machine coup d'tat here--which I would have considered unthinkable a decade ago--anything is possible. (The Chavistas lose the next election--and they did suffer legislative losses recently--and the RW "privatizes" the voting system and makes even more gains next time, with e-fraud.)

I mention this issue because it is vitally important, and because Clinton's State Department has been involved in two fraudulent elections--in Honduras and Haiti--and is obviously intent on putting a "democratic" gloss on U.S. corporate/war profiteer control. By far the sneakiest way to do this is a corporate-run 'TRADE SECRET' voting system. This Clinton strategy (controlled, fraudulent elections) points to an overall strategy short-of war, but, as we know here, it can also be a key control mechanism for instigating war that most people oppose, including, for instance, in Honduras' case, securing and expanding U.S. military presence in the country, for, say, war against its neighbor Nicaragua (--the 1980s all over again). Mel Zelaya wanted to convert the U.S. air base in Honduras to a much-needed commercial airport. The coup stopped that plan and now the Pentagon is building more bases in Honduras. Most Latin Americans hate having the U.S. military in their country. I imagine this is true of most Hondurans. This is one use of fraudulent elections, and, with 'TRADE SECRET' control of the election results, you might even convince people that other voters voted for candidates and policies that are plainly not in the interest of most Hondurans. This is exactly what has happened here--people thinking that other voters voted for this Scumbag Congress, for instance, or for Bush-Cheney in 2004 (with war lies exposed, torture exposed, plans to loot Social Security exposed, trillion dollar deficit, tax cuts for the rich, etc.) 'The country's gone wacko rightwing, don't you know?' Not.

Again, what is the GOAL (or goals?) of this Romero-O'Grady-Carroll & brethren propaganda mill against the Left in Latin America? (It ain't just those three. It's the entirety of the western press, including the Associated Pukes, Rotters and all the rest). The corporate/war profiteer rulers can't always have the war they want, when they want it (as Rumsfeld/Cheney found out, re Iran--and likely found out re Venezuela/Ecuador, in different circumstances). (One evidence that the latter was a war plan is that Rumsfeld held onto aspects of it, all the way to 12/1/07 at least, a year after he was ousted.)

There are many goals short of outright war--softening up countries for various kinds of takeover/domination, looting social programs, destroying local food security (for U.S. Big Ag dumping and Burger King), forcing farmers to use GMO seeds, corporate land grabs, deregulation (esp. mining, logging, oil exploitation), slave labor, destroying labor unions, inflicting ruinous "first world" loans with the World Bank/IMF, brainwashing poor people so that they do the work of their corporate masters, etc. These and other assaults have been inflicted on Latin American countries without an overt war, although the U.S. 'war on drugs' has been very useful (for instance, for murdering trade unionists and other grass roots leftist activists, and driving 5 million peasant farmers from their lands, in Colombia, as prep for U.S. "free trade for the rich," or fostering fascist/militaristic politics in Mexico with "war on drugs" funding and creating a murderous "drug war" that needn't have been). (The U.S. "war on drugs" has also been immensely useful at getting the U.S. military and other U.S. operatives installed in LatAm countries. When Morales threw the U.S. ambassador out of Bolivia he also threw the DEA out, for colluding with the white separatists.)

One additional problem the U.S. has in LatAm is covering up the trail of its protected operatives, such as Alvaro Uribe, and U.S. involvement in attendant crimes. There is a coverup in progress on Uribe/Bush Junta crimes in Colombia (which include vast, illegal, domestic spying and rampant murder). Colombian prosecutors are getting very close to Uribe, a Bush Cartel "made man." I'm not sure what level of protection he has but he may go down. The din of anti-Left propaganda from "journalists" like Romero-O'Grady-Carroll could be flak cover for that situation. (Dwell obsessively on the relatively minor flaws or mistakes of popular leftist leaders like Chavez and Correa and ignore the grievous crime and corruption in the U.S. client state of Colombia.)

I've pointed, in all of the above, to the issues that need investigation--something the Guardian does well, and something we cannot expect from any other major news source in the western world. (We have some outlets for investigative journalism but not many--less than handful (New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones...)--and the corporate media ignores such articles.) It may not be fair to expect the Guardian to cover this, especially since it is mostly a U.S./LatAm problem. Brit and Canadian corps are invested, and England has a vested interest in the Falklands off Argentina. They marshaled their military to retain the Falklands. (It is very much an oil issue.) Big banks/investors also profit through the World Bank/IMF and other such institutions. Still, it's mostly our problem, and U.S. journalism has utterly failed us, on this and so much else.

But the least the Guardian could do is NOT contribute to the problem with Rory Carroll's venomous propaganda.

Chomsky mentions that Carroll covers trivia (Chavez's baldness from chemo) while failing to cover the assassinations of hundreds of peasant farmers, the recent protests about it and the Chavez government's efforts to provide peasant farmers with land--and the RW agenda behind the murders and oppression. But Carroll does much worse than writing trivia. And he does much worse than failing to cover important events. He is a liar and propagandist for the right and for the corporate/war profiteer forces behind the right. He should be working for the USAID or for Reporters Without Scruples, not the Guardian.

[Judi Lynn]

3. So glad you've mentioned the multi-tasking these dregs accomplish for their right-wing owners.

Not only do they constantly savage, and misrepresent their target leftists, they lie about events, dropping their loads of crapola in the giant craters where the truth was in their narratives. Only those who take the time to look beyond their ravings know what the score is, what the real stories are, in spite of their efforts.

One more name for the heap of human failures you've mentioned who pose as authentic journalists. Good old Jackson Diehl, for the Washington Post.
http://rojrej.com.nyud.net:8090/data/upimages/jackson-diehl.jpg

Yecccch, Diehl. His one obsession is Hugo Chavez. He probably spends time posting here on Venezuela threads. Very cranky, crabby loser. Abnormal.

[roody]

2. kick---too late to rec

Thank you PP for so much information.

[joshcryer]

4. 25 or so a year, or nearly a thousandth Venezuela's murder rate...

...*sigh*.

The left continues to marginalize itself by failing to target their critique adequately.

Of course, I'll be slandered as right wing, and so on and so forth, but Roy Carrol isn't particularly defensible.

But neither is Chomsky.

[CJvR]

5. Sure...

...it would be nice if the Guardian was on the case rather then covering president weirdo, but it would be even nicer if the Venezuelan authorities who's job it is to deal with that sort of crap were doing their job so that the Guardian could focus on the prez with a clear conscience.