More on the CIA documents regarding the Venezuelan coup

After a few days of circulation on the internet, major U.S. media now take up the story. From the New York Times:

In a senior intelligence executive brief dated April 6 - one of several documents obtained by Jeremy Bigwood, a freelance investigative reporter in Washington and posted on at ...venezuelafoia.info/, ... a pro-Chávez Web site - the C.I.A. said that "disgruntled senior officers and a group of radical junior officers are stepping up efforts to organize a coup against President Chávez, possibly as early as this month." Those intelligence briefs are typically read by as many as 200 officials in the Bush administration.

The same brief said the plot would single out Mr. Chávez and 10 senior officials for arrest. It went on to say that the plotters would try to "exploit unrest stemming from opposition demonstrations slated for later this month" or from strikes staged by white-collar workers at the state oil company. Two days later, another brief stated flatly: "Disgruntled officers are planning a coup."

The documents do not show that the United States backed the coup, as Mr. Chávez has charged. Instead, the documents show that American officials issued "repeated warnings that the United States will not support any extraconstitutional moves to oust Chávez."

New York Times article

I like how the Times calls venezuelafoia.info ("foia" stands for Freedom of Information Act) "a pro-Chávez Web site". This is something you get from the opposition. They always talk about "pro-Chávez" news sites, if reporting is not anti-Chávez. By this standard, the Times would be a "pro-Bush" website. As would most of our supposedly independent media.

[Q]uestions remain over how much the United States told Mr. Chávez. A 95-page report produced after the coup by the State Department's inspector general on the American role during the Venezuelan crisis devoted only one sentence to warnings the United States made to Mr. Chávez about a possible plot.

The C.I.A. said that its role was not to provide information to the Venezuelans. Speaking by phone from Washington, a spokeswoman said the agency's responsibility was to ascertain what was transpiring in Venezuela, make an educated prediction on what could happen and then pass the information to the State Department.

Technically, that would be true, wouldn't it? I mean, especially if you were hoping to see the person in question overthrown. And particularly if you were funding opposition to that person.

When violence erupted on April 11, antigovernment television stations blamed Mr. Chávez, and military officers announced that they were withdrawing support for the president. It has since become clear that supporters of both the government and the opposition were responsible for the violence, but chaos reigned in the hours after the shootings.

"You add all that together and it certainly appeared that the government had used excessive force," said the senior American diplomat, explaining Washington's tough reaction toward Mr. Chávez.

And if you were to actually look at the documentation - TV and film documentary which is available - you would be aware that it only "appeared" that the government had used excessive force because that is the way the opposition media intended it to appear.

Venezuelan ambassador to Washington, Bernardo Alvarez, said that the declassified documents show that the United States was not operating in an information vacuum.

"What comes to my attention is that the opposition would take advantage after generating violence, as the C.I.A. documents show," he said. "And that after that the White House would accuse the Venezuelan government of what the opposition is actually responsible for."

If this interests you, there is much more in the Times article. Interestingly enough, if you make your way through the entire thing, which begins in a defense of the U.S.' claims, and lessens as it goes, you will come to the final paragraph (the Times understands that most people are only going to read headlines and one or two paragraphs):

Using the freedom of information act, Eva Golinger, a Long Island attorney who maintains venezuelafoia.com and contracted Mr. Bigwood to secure the CIA documents, has obtained reams of documents from the National Endowment for Democracy [NED], a nonprofit agency financed by the United States government, that show that $2.2 million was spent from 2000 to 2003 to train or finance anti-Chávez parties and organizations.