At a White House briefing on April 17, 2002, just days after President Hugo Ch\u00e1vez fell victim to an unusually-brief coup, a senior administration official told reporters, ”The United States did not know that there was going to be an attempt of this kind to overthrow — or to get Ch\u00e1vez out of power.”<\/p>\n
As the New York Times reported today, it turns out the administration was lying<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Central Intelligence Agency was aware that dissident military officers and opposition figures in Venezuela were planning a coup against President Hugo Ch\u00e1vez in 2002, newly declassified intelligence documents show. But immediately after the overthrow, the Bush administration blamed Mr. Ch\u00e1vez, a left-leaning populist, for his own downfall and denied knowing about the threats.<\/p>\n Long irritated by Mr. Ch\u00e1vez’s ties to Fidel Castro and his blistering anti-American attacks, the Bush administration provided the Venezuelan government in Caracas with few hard details of the looming plot, although American officials say they broadly talked to Mr. Ch\u00e1vez about opposition plans.<\/p>\n Mr. Ch\u00e1vez was removed from power on April 12, 2002, after 18 people died in a spate of gunfire during a huge antigovernment protest. Taken into custody by dissident military officers, Mr. Ch\u00e1vez was spirited out of Caracas while an interim government led by Pedro Carmona, a Caracas businessman, took power.<\/p>\n The new government dissolved Congress and the Supreme Court and hunted down Mr. Ch\u00e1vez’s ministers. But Mr. Ch\u00e1vez returned to power on April 14, riding the crest of a popular uprising against the coup plotters.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Other than Iraq and North Korea, I’d say Venezuela is right up there among Bush’s biggest foreign policy debacles. Remember, these guys’ strength<\/i> is foreign policy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At a White House briefing on April 17, 2002, just days after President Hugo Ch\u00e1vez fell victim to an unusually-brief coup, a senior administration official told reporters, ”The United States did not know that there was going to be an attempt of this kind to overthrow — or to get Ch\u00e1vez out of power.” As […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nFor all the talk about spreading democracy around the globe, the Bush administration knew a democratically-elected president was about to be overthrown in a coup, but they sat on the information. Then, when the entire world was issuing formal statements against the overthrow of the Ch\u00e1vez government, the Bush administration was only democracy on earth to express support for the coup. Two days later, when the coup was reversed and Ch\u00e1vez returned to power, Bush looked like an idiot<\/a> and a hypocrite. And now we learn that the administration was lying about what they knew all along.<\/p>\n