Editor's Note: Howard Friel's razor sharp dissection pulls up the carpet hiding the cockroaches nested by the New York Times, National Endowment for Democracy (NED), International Republican Institute (IRI), the US State Deparment, the US Congress and the Oval Office itself. Also, we are compelled to point out neither, Christopher Marquis nor anyone else at the NYT investigated the dirty work of NED. Rather, they were forced to publish it after Eva Golinger, US-Venezuelan attorney first revealed NED funding of the 2002 coup through her painstaking research using the resistant Freedom of Information Act.
- Axis of Logic
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U.S.
Senator John McCain, center, speaks as Democratic senator from the
state of Connecticut, Chris Murphy, second left, and Opposition leader
Oleh Tyahnybok, right, stand around him during a Pro-European Union
rally in Independence Square in Kiev, Ukraine, Sunday, Dec. 15, 2013.
(AP) |
On April 11, 2002, the democratically elected
president of Venezuela was overthrown by a group of military officers
who installed a prominent Venezuelan businessman as president. The Bush
administration announced that day that it supported the coup. Two days
later, on April 13, the lead editorial in the New York Times announced that it also supported the coup, claiming that it was a victory for “Venezuelan democracy”:
With yesterday’s resignation of President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan
democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator. Mr. Chávez, a
ruinous demagogue, stepped down after the military intervened and handed
power to a respected business leader, Pedro Carmona…. Rightly,
[Chávez’s] removal was a purely Venezuelan affair.
Since nearly every state in Latin America, from Mexico to Chile,
denounced the coup and criticized the Bush administration for supporting
it, the Times’ editorial backing the coup was to the right of
every official statement given by every government throughout the
Western hemisphere.
The Times’ editorial also accepted the claim made by
Venezuelan military plotters and the Bush administration that Chávez had
resigned. However, when Chávez returned to power on April 14
— after only three days and following mass protests and a counter-coup
to reinstall the elected president — it was clear that Chávez had not
resigned, and that the Times’ April 13
editorial, in addition to supporting a military coup, had misreported
an important fact pertaining to the status of the elected Venezuelan
president.
In a tight spot due to the quick reversal, the Times’ editorial page withdrew its support for the coup in an April 16 editorial, and reversed its claim that Chávez had resigned:
In his three years in office, Mr. Chávez has been such a divisive and
demagogic leader that his forced departure last week drew applause at
home and in Washington. That reaction, which we shared, overlooked the
undemocratic manner in which he was removed. Forcibly unseating a
democratically elected leader, no matter how badly he has performed, is
never something to cheer.
Thus, the Times’ changed “yesterday’s resignation of President Hugo Chávez” (the April 13 editorial) to “forcibly unseating a democratically elected leader” (the April 16
editorial), and changed “democracy is no longer threatened” thanks to
the coup to “we … overlooked the undemocratic manner in which [Chávez]
was removed.”
The claim in the April 13
editorial that “[Chávez’s] removal was a purely Venezuelan affair” is
also of interest, given the long history of U.S. interventionism in
Latin America. In fact, an April 16 front-page story by Christopher Marquis in the Times reported
that “senior members of the Bush administration met several times in
recent months with leaders of a coalition that ousted the Venezuelan
president, Hugo Chávez, for two days last weekend, and agreed with them
that he should be removed from office.”
The next day, April 17, Marquis reported that
“a senior [Bush] administration official [Otto Reich] was in contact
with the man [Pedro Carmona] who succeeded Mr. Chávez on the very day he
took office,” and that “Mr. Carmona, who heads Venezuela’s largest
business association, was one of numerous critics of Mr. Chávez to call
on [Bush] administration officials in recent weeks. Officials from the
White House, State Department and Pentagon, among others, were hosts to a
stream of Chávez opponents, some of them seeking help in removing him
from office.”
And on April 25, Marquis reported:
“In the past year, the United States channeled hundreds of thousands of
dollars in grants to American and Venezuelan groups opposed to
President Hugo Chávez, including the labor groups whose protests led to
the Venezuelan president’s brief ouster this month.”
The assertion by the Times that Carmona was “a respected
business leader” was a flattering description of someone who had just
come to power without any constitutional authority as a result of a
military coup that had overthrown the elected president. Moreover, the
editorial page published this benign portrait of the illicitly installed
president of Venezuela in its April 13 editorial; that is, after Carmona had “dissolve[ed] the National Assembly and fire[d] all members of the Supreme Court” at 5:45 p.m. the previous day, according to an account of events published by the Times.
So many Venezuelans were offended by Carmona’s behavior that “the
respected business leader” was driven from power almost before the ink
had dried on the Times’ April 13 editorial, and fled the country a short time later.
Furthermore, the “senior administration official” who “was in
contact” with Carmona “on the very day he took office” as the new
Venezuelan president, as reported on April 17 in the Times, was Otto Reich, who, in the 1980s, ran a secret propaganda operation
inside the United States — the Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD) — in
support of the Reagan administration’s efforts to overthrow the
Sandinista government in Nicaragua. A government investigation declared
that Reich’s domestic propaganda operation was illegal under U.S. law,
and the U.S. Congress reportedly closed it down. (After his engagement
in the illegal OPD campaign inside the United States, Reich became U.S.
ambassador to Venezuela from 1986 to 1989.)
Also, on April 25, two weeks after the short-lived military coup against Chávez in Venezuela, Marquis reported:
“In the past year, the United States channeled hundreds of thousands of
dollars in grants to American and Venezuelan groups opposed to
President Hugo Chávez, including the labor groups whose protests led to
the Venezuelan president’s brief ouster this month. The funds were
provided by the National Endowment for Democracy, a nonprofit agency
created and financed by Congress. As conditions deteriorated in
Venezuela and Mr. Chávez clashed with various business, labor and media
groups, the endowment stepped up its assistance, quadrupling its budget
for Venezuela to more than $877,000.” |
In a report
issued by the State Department’s inspector general (as requested by
Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd), Clark Kent Irvin, the
department’s IG at the time, found that the National Endowment for
Democracy, through the American Center for International Labor
Solidarity — one of four core NED grantees — awarded $150,000 to a group
called the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers to “promote democratic
reforms at all levels of government.” In his April 25 piece, Marquis reported:
“The Confederation of Venezuelan Workers led the work stoppages that
galvanized the opposition to Mr. Chávez. The union’s leader, Carlos
Ortega, worked closely with Pedro Carmona Estanga, the businessman who
briefly took over from Mr. Chávez, in challenging the government.”
Irvin also reported
that the NED had awarded $340,000 to the International Republican
Institute (IRI) — another core grantee — to “encourage[e] the
development of democratic structures and practices” in Venezuela, and
“to develop … civil society groups and individual citizens that
demonstrate a willingness to interact with political parties in planned
activities.”
On April 12, 2002, the day after what seemed at that moment to be a
successful coup in Venezuela, the head of the IRI, George Folsom, issued
a public statement supporting the coup: “Last night, led by every
sector of civil society, the Venezuelan people rose up to defend
democracy in their country.... The [International Republican] Institute
has served as a bridge between the nation’s political parties and all
civil society groups to help forge a new democratic future, based on
accountability, rule of law and sound democratic institutions. We stand
ready to continue our partnership with the courageous Venezuelan
people.”
On April 25, the Times reported
that “in an interview, Mr. Folsom said discussions at the Institute on
Venezuela involved finding ways to remove Mr. Chávez by constitutional
means only.” This claim that NED-funded groups sought to remove Chávez
from power — but only “by constitutional means” and “legal means” — was
prominently featured in Irvin’s IG report without challenge, despite substantial evidence gathered by Irvin himself in the very same report of a U.S.-engineered coup.
Pursuant to this brief case study, subtract Venezuela, add Ukraine,
and the coup in Kiev of February 2014 — from the perspective of
NED-financed groups in Ukraine – looks pretty much like the coup in
Caracas of 2002. For example, according to an NED document,
the NED awarded $3.3 million in grants to a number of organizations in
Ukraine for 2012. This included $380,000 to the International Republican
Institute, the same NED core grantee that was involved in “finding ways
to remove Mr. Chávez [from power] by constitutional means only.”
Furthermore, the chairman
of the board today of the International Republican Institute is Senator
John McCain. In a visit to Ukraine in February (last month), McCain
gave a speech
in Kiev, during which he said: “We have to side with the protesters and
the power has to be dispersed from the hands of (Ukrainian president
Viktor) Yanukovych.” What was that supposed to mean, if not a call of
support, issued on Ukrainian soil, from the chairman of the
International Republican Institute for the overthrow of the elected
president of Ukraine? Imagine a high-ranking official from another
country, in a speech in Washington, D.C., calling for the overthrow of
an elected American president? And if McCain was willing to issue such
statements in public, what was he willing to say privately in any
discussions with the IRI?
In a truly mad encore on March 14, courtesy of the op-ed page of the New York Times,
McCain advocated “sanctioning Russian officials, isolating Russia
internationally, and increasing NATO’s military presence and exercises
on its eastern frontier,” in addition to “boycotting the Group of 8
summit meeting in Sochi and convening the Group of 7 elsewhere.” The Times’ opinion-page assisted McCain’s belligerence by adding the subtitle: “John McCain on Responding to Russia’s Aggression.”
Neither the Times nor McCain mentioned that the senator from
Arizona, who a month earlier appeared to call for the ouster of
Ukraine’s president, is chair of the NED-funded Republican International
Institute, which admitted in 2002 that it was involved in the overthrow
of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, and which is currently the recipient of
hundreds of thousands of dollars of NED funds for its operations in
Ukraine, whatever those might be.
In short, the essence of the NED enterprise itself almost certainly
violates the customary international law norm of non-intervention, given
its overall interventionist orientation, which features the
neo-liberalization of foreign countries and the destabilization and
overthrow of foreign governments.
Finally, who in the United States oversees the NED? Not President
Obama, who shows no intention of checking even the publicly known
outrages of the NSA and CIA, let alone the mostly unknown ones of the
NED. Not the Democrats or Republicans in Congress, who in 1983 created the NED “to promote democracy” abroad. Not the federal judiciary, needless to say. And not the press; surely not the New York Times, which, without
Christopher Marquis, who died of AIDS in 2005, hasn’t employed anyone
since who has shown an interest in shedding any light on the activities
of the NED, certainly not in Venezuela and Ukraine today.
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Source: Common Dreams
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