The corporate media would have you believe that Venezuela is a dictatorship on the verge of political and economic collapse; a country where human rights crusaders and anti-government, democracy-seeking activists are routinely rounded up and thrown in jail. Indeed, the picture from both private media in Venezuela, as well as the mainstream press in the U.S., is one of a corrupt and tyrannical government desperately trying to maintain its grip on power while the opposition seeks much-needed reforms. In fact, the opposite is true.

The sad reality of Venezuela is that it is the Bolivarian Revolution that is being undermined, targeted, and destabilized. It is the Socialist Party, its leftist supporters (and critics), Chavista activists and journalists, and assorted forces on the Left that are being victimized by an opposition whose singular goal is power. This opposition, now in the majority in the National Assembly, uses the sacrosanct terminology of “freedom,” “democracy,” and “human rights” to conceal the inescapable fact that it has committed, and continues to commit, grave crimes against the people of Venezuela in the service of its iniquitous agenda, shaped and guided, as always, by its patrons in the United States.

This so-called opposition – little more than the political manifestation of the former ruling elites of Venezuela – wants nothing less than the total reversal of the gains of the Bolivarian Revolution, the end of Chavismo, and the return of Venezuela to its former status as oil colony and wholly owned subsidiary of the United States. And how are these repugnant goals being achieved? Economic destabilization, street violence and politically motivated assassinations, and psychological warfare are just some of the potent weapons being employed....

http://www.globalresearch.ca/venezuelas-opposition-attacking-its-own-people/5520783

Firedoglake

BONNER: Reagan said we send a message to Moscow through Central America; fore-front of american FP

WATCH:


Shadowproof’s Kevin Gosztola and journalist Raymond Bonner discuss his book Weakness and Deceit, chronicling the Reagan Administration’s disastrous intervention in El Salvador in the name of fighting communism...

https://t.co/qksEKCrD1S

Entertainment Weekly ?@EW Apr 9

'All the President’s Men' and 4 other movies that brought Watergate to life on screen: http://bit.ly/1N0XyVI

@MotherJones Apr 8

Benghazi Committee Passes 700-Day Milestone http://mojo.ly/1oJh25E

The "Save the Contras" posters were part of short-lived fund-raising campaign by college Republicans in 1985. It came to a halt after "Save the Children," which it was mimicking, complained. [Congress' Iran Contra Depositions, v. 22, 855]

In late 1983, Duane Clarridge, the agent in charge of the covert war, admitted in a closed briefing of the House Intelligence Committee staff that the contras had killed “civilians and Sandinista officials in the provinces, as well as heads of cooperatives, nurses, doctors, and judges.” “After all,” Clarridge reportedly reasoned, “this is a war.” ...

@trevortimm 7 hours ago

Trevor Timm Retweeted Jason Leopold

Duane R. Clarridge, Pardoned CIA Criminal, Who Created Terror Networks And Admitted To A War Crime, Dies at 83

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/11/us/duane-r-clarridge-brash-spy-who-fought-terror-dies-at-83.html

Taking their cue from the President, House Republicans threatened to block continued funding for the inquiry unless the Democrats agreed that Bush had not gone to Paris. Although Bush’s alibi for the key weekend of Oct. 18-19, 1980, was shaky, with details from his Secret Service logs withheld and with supposedly corroborating witnesses contradicting each other, the Democrats agreed to give Bush what he wanted.

After letting Bush off the hook on Paris, the inquiry stumbled along inconclusively with the White House withholding key documents and keeping some key witnesses, such as Bush’s former national security adviser Donald Gregg, out of reach.

Perhaps more importantly, the Casey-Madrid information from Beach’s memo was never shared with Congress, according to House Task Force Chairman Lee Hamilton, who I interviewed about the missing material in 2013.

Whatever interest Congress had in the October Surprise case faded even more after Bush lost the 1992 election to Bill Clinton. There was a palpable sense around Official Washington that it would be wrong to pile on the defeated President. The thinking was that Bush (and Reagan) should be allowed to ride off into the sunset with their legacies intact.

So, even as more incriminating evidence arrived at the House task force in December 1992 and in January 1993 – including testimony from French intelligence chief Alexander deMarenches’s biographer confirming the Paris meeting and a report from Russia’s duma revealing that Soviet intelligence had monitored the Republican-Iranian contacts in 1980 – it was all cast aside. The task force simply decided there was “no credible evidence” to support the October Surprise allegations.

Trusting the Suspect

Beyond the disinclination of Hamilton and his investigators to aggressively pursue important leads, they operated with the naïve notion that President Bush, who was a prime suspect in the October Surprise case, would compile and turn over evidence that would prove his guilt and seal his political fate. Power at that level simply doesn’t work that way.

After discovering the Beach memo, I emailed a copy to Hamilton and discussed it with him by phone. The retired Indiana Democratic congressman responded that his task force was never informed that the White House had confirmation of Casey’s trip to Madrid.

“We found no evidence to confirm Casey’s trip to Madrid,” Hamilton told me. “The [Bush-41] White House did not notify us that he did make the trip. Should they have passed that on to us? They should have because they knew we were interested in that.”

Asked if knowledge that Casey had traveled to Madrid might have changed the task force’s dismissive October Surprise conclusion, Hamilton said yes, because the question of the Madrid trip was key to the task force’s investigation.

“If the White House knew that Casey was there, they certainly should have shared it with us,” Hamilton said. Hamilton added that “you have to rely on people” in authority to comply with information requests.

Therein, of course, lay [font color=darkred]the failure of the October Surprise investigation[/font]. Hamilton and his team were counting on President Bush and his team to bring all the evidence together in one place and then share it with Congress, when they were more likely to burn it...

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/04/06/bush-41s-october-surprise-denials/

Another prime example of why the long-documented US position that "Latin America is our backyard" is so offensive and being rejected.

Cascadiance posted about a documentary that just knocked my socks off. We read about these things, we document them, we know it happens, but this documentary provides an inside look of the process.


In 2002, among the many creepy roles of James Carville was his work as strategist at Greenberg Carville Shrum (GCS), when the political consultancy firm he had helped to found went to work to help Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (nicknamed “Goni”) win the hotly contested presidency of Bolivia. Although they thought the man to beat was Manfred Reyes Villa, the mayor of Cochabamba, certainly the one who most worried Washington was the indigenous leader, Evo Morales...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/110814562

Watching season 3 of Leverage on dvd. In the commentary on the season finale the producer mentions that the documentary Our Brand Is Crisis served as inspiration for that episode.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/110830449#post3

...Hitz acknowledged that cocaine smugglers played a significant early role in the Nicaraguan contra movement and that the CIA intervened to block an image-threatening 1984 federal investigation into a San Francisco-based drug ring with suspected ties to the contras, the so-called “[font color=darkred]Frogman Case[/font].”...

CIA Drug Asset

Along the Southern Front, in [font color=blue]Costa Rica[/font], the drug evidence centered on the forces of Eden Pastora, another leading contra commander...

https://consortiumnews.com/2006/120906.html

@UPROXX

Yes, O.J. Simpson really made a 1994 NBC pilot titled [font color=darkred]Frogmen[/font] that was locked away forever http://uproxx.it/1UeS3Vm
11:13 PM - 15 Mar 2016

The seventh episode of The People V. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story focused mainly on the infamous bloody glove moment at the trial, where Christopher Darden directed Simpson to try it on only to have the plan backfire when the glove appeared too tight. It was an important moment in the trial, and therefore an important moment in the series, but it was completely overshadowed — for me, at least — by a brief discussion Marcia Clark had with Christopher Darden’s friends about O.J. Simpson’s starring role in a scrapped 1994 NBC pilot titled [font color=darkred]Frogmen[/font].

Yes, Frogmen was a real thing. It was described at the time as a kind of A-Team-esque series about beach bum former Navy SEALs. If you read that sentence and thought, “Well that sounds like an incredible television show,” there’s a good reason for that: It sounds like an incredible television show. From a 2000 Los Angeles Times article about the pilot:

The premise centers on a team of Navy SEALs who, as described in the pilot, “take on special assignments for the government and private sector.”

Simpson plays their leader, John “Bullfrog” Burke, who goes to [font color=blue]Costa Rica[/font] with four fellow ex-SEALs ...

http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?p=592779#p592779

http://uproxx.com/tv/oj-simpson-frogmen/