| Well explained Chas, THANK YOU! On Aug 6, 2024, at 1:20 PM, Chas Freeman via Salon <salon@listserve.com> wrote: Michael: There is no Committee imprimatur implied by anything published on the listserv. I post many items with which I disagree because they represent viewpoints or information that would not otherwise be available for consideration by readers, who I am confident can make up their own minds about the situations they relate to.. That said, the U.S. government has been openly conducting information warfare and subsidizing efforts to oust the chavista regime in Venezuela for many years. These regime change efforts characteristically have included gross interference in the election processes there, as pioneered in Italy and France after World War II, as well as sanctions designed to cripple the Venezuelan economy. One does not have to have any regard at all for Maduro or to doubt that he is entirely capable of cooking electoral results to his advantage (in the ways you cite) to suspect that this election and its results were not an exception to these entrenched U.S. policies. If half of the things reported in the article happened, Maduro was far from alone in distorting the election results. It seems appropriate to call the attention of those on the salon list to the fact that our official narrative -- like the Venezuelan government's -- is questionable. There can be no doubt that the USG has been "orchestrating a campaign" to discredit Maduro and this election. This effort to skew the elections in favor of the candidate we favored was conducted in the name of "democracy." Was it effective? I am inclined to believe that Maduro lost the vote but our own determined contributions to ensure the installation of a more congenial government in Caracas democracy in Venezuela make it impossible to be sure what the outcome actually was. I do not think it is inappropriate that many of the groups opposed to the Maduro regime have been paid for by the USG and U.S. civil society. We bar foreign governments from doing the same here because we consider such activities improper when they affect us. As for the destruction of the Venezuelan economy and the impoverishment of its citizens, surely the sanctions we imposed explicitly to achieve these ends have played a part along with the ineptitude of the government in Caracas? Chas On Tue, Aug 6, 2024 at 1:47 PM Michael Telson <mltelson@aol.com> wrote:
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