June 27, 2019, Strategic Culture Foundation https://www.strategic-culture.org
(Russia) https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/06/27/cia-finances-another-group-of-fraudsters-venezuelan-opposition/
Wayne Madsen*
Once again, the Central Intelligence
Agency has been caught financing a group of grifters and fraudsters at the
expense of the American taxpayers. In the latest case, just another in the
agency’s 72-year history, the Trump administration-appointed ad hoc board of
CITGO, the US subsidiary of the state-owned Venezuelan oil company, PDVSA,
stands accused of steering $70 million of escrowed funds, earmarked for PDVSA’s
fiscal year 2020 bond, to the pockets of CIA-supported officials of the
Venezuelan opposition “Popular Will” party headed by the so-called “interim
president” of Venezuela, Juan Guaidó.
In addition to Guaidó, who is
accused by the legitimate Venezuelan government of money laundering, treason,
and corruption, other Popular Will leaders under investigation by both the
Venezuelan Attorney General and the US Justice Department include Carlos
Vecchio, Guaidó’s envoy in Washington; Rossana Barrera and Kevin Rojas,
Guaidó’s emissaries in Cucuta, a Colombian-Venezuelan border town; Sergio
Vargara, Barrera’s brother-in-law and a Member of the Venezuelan Congress;
Guaidó’s “ambassador” to Colombia, Humberto Calderon Berti, opposition
businessman Miguel Sabal; and Guaidó’s chief of staff, Roberto Marrero. Over
two dozen other Popular Will leaders are also under investigation for fraud
involving money earmarked by the Trump administration, particularly Iran-Contra
scandal felon and current Trump special envoy for regime change in Venezuela,
Elliot Abrams.
Barrera and Rojas are accused of
spending money given to the Popular Will by the US Agency for International
Development (USAID), a longtime CIA financial pass-through,
for “humanitarian
relief” for alleged massive numbers of Venezuelan refugees in Colombia. The
Popular Will grifters reportedly used the aid money, including that which was
raised by Virgin Group’s billionaire founder and obvious CIA dupe Richard
Branson, for expensive hotels, fancy restaurants, nightclubs, prostitutes, and
clothing.
It comes as little surprise that
Abrams, with his history of “sticky fingers” around US and foreign assistance
money, has played a hand in the Venezuelan opposition fraud. As Assistant
Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs during the Ronald Reagan
administration Abrams was involved in the illegal raising of funds for the
CIA-supported right-wing Contras fighting against the socialist Sandinista
government of Nicaragua. In 1991, facing a felony perjury conviction for lying
to Congress, Abrams pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts of withholding
information to Congress about his fundraising activities for the Contras. In
1992, Abrams and other Iran-Contra criminals were pardoned by President George
H. W. Bush, one of the unindicted Iran-Contra co-conspirators. Abrams surfaced
again in 2001 in the George W. Bush administration. He was involved in the
abortive 2002 CIA coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as well as in
cooking US intelligence to justify the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Abrams’s involvement in any US
covert activities in always an indication of massive fraud. Abrams’s backing of
Guaidó and his operatives and recent reports of fraud are not much different
than the notorious Republican Party neo-con’s sordid record with such Contra
leaders as Adolfo Calero, the president of the Nicaraguan Democratic Forces
(FDN); Arturo Cruz; Alfonso Robelo; Edén Pastora; and Enrique Bermúdez.
CIA funds directed to the Contras
for the purchase of weapons soon found their way into the hands of Colombian
drug lords, including Pablo Escobar and Carlos Lehder of the Medellin Cartel.
An elaborate scheme was worked out that saw the Contras buying, with CIA funds,
weapons and cocaine, with the former ending up in the hands of the Medellin
Cartel and the latter being shipped to the United States with a very handsome
financial return. Everyone made out nicely, including Contra leaders who spent
much of their time in Miami donating funds to Republican coffers through the
offices of top Cuban-American leaders like Jorge Mas Canosa. Establishing the
Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) in 1981 at the urging of Reagan
administration officials, including national security adviser Richard Allen and
Abrams, Mas Canosa soon became a major asset for both the CIA and the
Republican Party.
The CANF would also serve as a
convenient CIA money laundering artifice to assist in financing right-wing
terrorist groups in Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Colombia, and other
Latin American nations. The CANF remains a potent political force, one that
benefits right-wing politicians in Florida and Latin America, including
Florida’s two Republican Senators, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, both fanatical
supporters of Guaidó.
In 1992, the CIA helped launch
another massive fraud when it helped form the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an
Iraqi opposition group led by one of Abrams’s neo-con friends, Ahmad Chalabi.
More at home in swank London clubs than in Iraqi Kurdish areas where the CIA
was planning for the overthrow of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, Chalabi was also
involved in the defrauding of Jordan’s Petra Bank, which collapsed in 1989.
Chalabi eventually ensured that bogus intelligence from Iraqi-German fabulist
Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, a discredited one-time Western intelligence source
derisively codenamed “Curveball” by the CIA for his untrustworthiness, ended up
on President George W. Bush’s desk, courtesy of con-artists like Abrams, a
National Security Council official. Chalabi became Iraq’s Oil Minister in the
puppet US government established in Baghdad following the US invasion. Chalabi
almost immediately came under investigation for counterfeiting Iraqi currency,
grand theft of Iraqi national and private assets, and espionage on behalf of
Iran.
Abrams and his neo-con cabal were
also instrumental in launching the career of another CIA fraudster, General
Khalifa Haftar, a defector from the army of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi.
Safely ensconced by the CIA in northern Virginia in 1990, Haftar, who became a
US citizen, was involved in several CIA-supported putsches aimed at
overthrowing Qaddafi. In 2011, at the outset of the revolt against Qaddafi, the
CIA inserted Haftar into eastern Libya, where he eventually became a virtual
warlord, governing his army’s occupied territory from Tobruk with the
assistance of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, and the
Abu Dhabi-based mercenaries led by Erik Prince, the founder of the CIA’s former
favorite mercenary firm, Blackwater, and brother of Donald Trump’s Education
Secretary, Betsy DeVos. Haftar is also reportedly enriching himself and his
family by pocketing revenue from Libyan oil sales in territory his forces
control.
The CIA’s history of support for con-artists
and grifters like Guaidó, Calero, Mas Canosa, Chalabi, and Haftar expands to a
virtual “rogues’ gallery” of ne’er-do-wells, scoundrels, and other worthies.
General Lon Nol was the CIA’s choice to take over Cambodia after the 1970
military coup against Prince Norodom Sihanouk. According to a May 26, 1970 TOP
SECRET/SENSITIVE/EYES ONLY memorandum from US national security adviser Henry
Kissinger to President Richard Nixon, Lon Nol was summed up as “emotional and
not very realistic.” However, that is the sort of person the CIA has always
chosen to embrace, with the neo-cons being among those who have avidly
championed such political riff-raff in Congress and the mass media. Lon Nol
believed himself to be an authentic Mon-Khmer “holy warrior” with mystical
powers. “Black Papa,” which Lon Nol preferred his followers to call him, died
in Fullerton, California in 1985, still on the dole of the CIA.
After the 1975 fall of Saigon to the
North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces, CIA asset and South Vietnamese prime
minister and vice president Nguyen Cao Ky eventually settled in Westminster,
California, not far from Lon Nol. Instead of insisting on being revered as a
demi-god, Ky was more practical than Lon Nol; he ran a liquor store. The CIA’s
former head of the anti-Communist Hmong Army in Laos, General Vang Pao, was
arrested in California in 2007 for illegally attempting to overthrow the Pathet
Lao-led government in Laos. CIA pressure eventually led the US government in
2009 to drop all the conspiracy charges against Vang Pao. Certain elements in
the CIA were concerned about what Vang Pao might have said, under oath, during
a full trial about his role with the CIA is smuggling opium from the Golden
Triangle in Southeast Asia via the auspices of CIA proprietary airlines like
Air America.
Juan Guaidó and his gang are merely
following in a long line of CIA crooks and criminals who conduct their illegal
affairs with a wink and a nod from Langley and a sizeable financial cut for
neo-cons like Abrams, Kissinger, John Bolton, and the other members of that
nefarious political clique. Trump often decries the “Deep State” as covertly
working to undermine him. It appears that Trump and his friends are doing quite nicely, courtesy of his feared
“Deep State.”
*Wayne Madsen: Investigative
journalist, author and syndicated columnist. A member of the Society of
Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the National Press Club
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