Bush regime terrorizes Venezuela
Casey Goodyear - April 17th, 2008If any Venezuelans have learned their lesson from recent history, they may want to go ahead and duck and cover. Two Florida representatives, both Republican, introduced House Resolution 1049 last month, which aims to place Venezuela on the list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Never mind that for the past three winters, Venezuela has given up to 100 million gallons of free heating oil to low-income citizens in the United States. Not one single domestic energy company has such a program.
Supporters of the resolution claim that files and e-mails found on a computer seized from a Columbian revolutionary group link the guerillas directly to Hugo Chavez’s government.
These accusations are thus far largely unsubstantiated, but that hasn’t stopped mainstream news media from reporting it as God’s truth. In addition, they cite Chavez’s friendly relations with Iran as cause for concern, as if goodwill towards potentially dangerous countries is an international crime.
The push to mark Venezuela a terrorism-friendly state makes more sense when we consider that it supplies about 15 percent of our national oil supply. After some disheveled fundamentalists in caves on the other side of the world supposedly toppled two of our biggest, sturdiest buildings, we promptly invaded Afghanistan and built an extremely lucrative oil pipeline. Iraq, with its underground seas of black gold, came next, although we knew from the start that Saddam Hussein had neither ties to Al Qaeda nor weapons of mass destruction.
Furthermore, the Bush administration signed a free trade agreement in 2006 with the Columbian government, in spite of horrific human rights violations by President Alvaro Uribe’s regime. We may be against “state sponsors of terrorism,” but we clearly have no reservations about doing business with oppressors.
Feel free to scream now if you have the urge to do so. Insofar as terrorism is the use of fear and terror to influence people’s behavior, the United States is not a state sponsor of terrorism; we are a state run by terrorists. George Bush himself admitted in a speech late in 2005 that the intelligence used to justify the entire War in Iraq was wrong. Not coincidentally, his richest friends profited the most and sacrificed the least. Now, as he rattles the same, old saber at an even smaller, more peaceful country, the American public still sits idly by in a stupor of fear and entertained distraction.
Our nation doesn’t seem fascist because we don’t have soldiers on our street corners. Instead, we have media and mind control that’s quickly approaching the intensity of George Orwell’s worst nightmares. Open your eyes and look at the reality that we are gearing up to topple not only a democratically elected president, but a philanthropist who directly aided hundreds of thousands of Americans. Try squeezing a grain of humanity a fraction of that size out of our leaders.