CNN once again displaying that trademark cognitive dissonance
This is so blatant I wonder if it was deliberate by the author. “If I mention the CIA trying to remove Maduro in the past, our censorship board requires I call them false rumors. But I can say the CIA helped remove Maduro in January? I can work with that.”
Just a little bit of malicious compliance. The kind a LLM editor wouldn’t catch. As a treat.
I know it’s more likely to be an LLM generated article that just didn’t catch the change in messaging before and after Maduro’s kidnapping, but I think it’s funnier the other way.
Thanks AI?
I thought so too. That’s the exact kind of quick self contradiction I’ve seen in LLM bullshit several times before.
Ehhhhhh.
The fact trump calls everyone domestic terrorists doesn’t mean domestic terrorism won’t ever happen.
(Also, it’d be downright bizzare for the US to launch a well planned operation like this in any country without working CIA contacts etc in said regime/country.)
Was there evidence? Honestly asking.
Something being a reasonably safe bet isn’t evidence, and neither is the CIA having done this before. Years of paranoid delusions (or less generously, lying) isn’t suddenly justified if something finally happens. If there was actual evidence of them doing it sure, but this picture on its own isn’t a gotcha, it’s some “Alex Jones is right 95% of the time” kind of shit.
OK, but it sure dampens the impact of what CNN was saying there.
Going from “he kept going on and on about how X was trying to take him out, but he could never prove it” directly to “fortunately, X was able to take him out” in the very next sentence is… an odd choice.
It’s an odd choice, but it’s factually correct. He didn’t have evidence before, but he sure as hell does now.
Of course, nobody with a brain needed evidence, considering the long history of the CIA doing exactly that everywhere else in Latin America. But liberal media has never been quick to call out the government or their fascist tendencies.
I think it’s pretty clear to all that the US has wanted a regime change in V. Now I suppose we can argue about the legitimacy of such a desire in the first place but this doesn’t matter so much in the first place: the real question is if they were acting on it or not.
I’m no authority on the matter, but it does seem to me that, at the very least, the sanctions were a way to elicit such a change, and that the US has also provided some support to the local opposition.
All in all, the question of how likely is it for the CIA to get involved is a question of if we regard the above as legitimate or not : US libs might find it ludicrous that the CIA would act for regime change because they think the above to be legitimate, while CIA involvement is not, and that the US would never do illegitimate stuff. It’s fair enough I suppose, but it does require some amount of belief.
On the other hand, if you think that any manner of US involvement is illegitimate to begin with, well CIA involvement becomes a much more likely threat. It’s no longer a complete change in paradigm, but just an escalation in what the US is already allowing themselves to do.
In a similar fashion, the historical precedence of CIA regime change being pertinent or not relies on how much you believe the US to have effectively changed. In any case, it’s hardly overly paranoid and delusional to judge that the US might take drastic measures in regards to foreign involvement when they are undeniably involving themselves in the first place.
So the only difference in judging how dangerous the threat lied in how far we believed they were willing to go. And if there’s a threat, it’s hardly lying to say that there’s a threat.
All this doesn’t mean that the CIA hasn’t been used as a boogeyman : Maduro could still have used it as an excuse to do stuff that had nothing to do with US or CIA involvement for example. And if it’s convenient, it’s because, from a certain pov, the threat is quite real. That doesn’t mean that Maduro hasn’t made false claims about the matter either. And that doesn’t mean that his gov. might not have taken actions unjustified in regards of the actual threat they thought existed.
And nothing here requires evidence beyond what was in plain sight. A threat is not an ongoing operation, nor the existence of real plans for an operation, a threat is just the possibility of something “bad” happening : can under certain circumstances the US start making up plans for a CIA regime change in V, can they be willing to give it the green light, and can it succeed? The likelihood of any of these happening determine how much of a threat there was, and the fact that it happened makes a strong case to claim that the likelihood was never zero to begin with.
All I was asking is if there was evidence or not. What we have here is a screenshot of a part of an article with no context which appears to contradict itself that people are circlejerking over. The fact that it happened doesn’t prove that Maduro was right (or wrong) all along. I just take issue with this “meme” being posted as some gotcha crap when it’s deliberately excluding any actual information.
You are 100% correct to be questioning the way everyone here is treating a news article as a gotcha. It could literally just be awkward phrasing.
But to answer your original question, it’s hard to have “evidence” in a “hand holding a smoking gun” way where the CIA are involved - that is kind of the entire point of the CIA - but I cannot imagine that they had zero involvement in Operation Gideon back in 2020, which is the big failed attempt that we do know about. Given that US funded coup attempts clearly were happening, I think it’s pretty reasonable to assume the CIA were the ones delivering the orders, if not signing them (given that Opration Gideon happened during Trump’s first term in office, it’s pretty clear who that was).
If you’re asking if the CIA were involved in the recent extraction, it’s more or less impossible that they weren’t. The kind of boots on the ground foreign intel that they provide would have been essential to pulling off an abduction like that. It would literally stretch credulity to imagine a version of that operation that they didn’t have a hand in.
I agree that none of this qualifies as clear cut proof, but I think it’s also OK to make assumptions when any other read of a situation would be significantly less likely. That’s not jumping to conclusions, it’s just excercising our capacity to reason.
Sure, I agree that it’s definitely reasonable to make those assumptions and that they were almost certainly involved. I’m definitely not arguing with any of that, just the presentation here. I’m not saying there wasn’t evidence, I was genuinely asking because the picture was (intentionally) stripped of any possible context so that we could all feel clever and smug without having to think about anything. Thank you for giving some more history, in any case.
Yeah, no arguments there. As I said, you’re absolutely right to be calling out the way this was presented.
Max Blumenthal at the Grayzone has covered American meddling in Venezuela extensively.
Here he is on Piers Morgan. https://youtu.be/xKpVC7D56JQ
You sure don’t seem to have the least bit of knowledge about Alex Jones… Or anything else.
Just because your paranoid don’t mean there not after you
