[News] US State Department publishes, then deletes sadistic Venezuela hit list boasting of economic ruin

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/05/06/us-state-department-publishes-then-deletes-sadistic-venezuela-hit-list-boasting-of-economic-ruin/?fbclid=IwAR16qDw27SjCbNtNxJ4gnNhe1YHcryXzqRW2C7f5GMRwlp2certxGTNUY-s 



  US State Department publishes, then deletes sadistic Venezuela hit
  list boasting of economic ruin

Anya Parampil - May 6, 2019
------------------------------------------------------------------------


        The Grayzone has obtained a list of “key outcomes” on Venezuela
        deleted out of apparent embarrassment by the State Department.
        It boasts of wrecking the nation’s economy, destabilizing its
        military, and puppeteering its political opposition.


        By Anya Parampil

On April 24, six days before self-proclaimed Venezuelan “interim 
president” Juan Guaido’s attempt to violently overthrow Venezuela’s 
democratically elected government alongside a handful of military 
defectors, the U.S. State Department published a fact sheet that boasted 
of Washington’s central role in the ongoing coup attempt. After 
realizing the incriminating nature of its error, the State Department 
quickly acted to remove the page.

The Grayzone has obtained a full copy of the expunged report 
<https://thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/US-Department-of-State-Venezuela-actions.pdf>. 
The deleted page puts to bed any claims of Guaido’s independence from 
Washington, as the State Department emphasizes the fact that he 
“announced his interim presidency… in January” at the the top of a 
section dedicated to breaking down “key outcomes” of U.S. efforts with 
regard to Venezuela.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs 
Kimberly Breier recently took to Twitter 
<https://twitter.com/WHAAsstSecty/status/1123692018780262401> to claim 
that “since he became acting president, Juan Guaido has given tangible 
results to the people of Venezuela.” Her tweet was accompanied with an 
infographic detailing alleged accomplishments of the powerless coup 
administration based on data compiled by the legally defunct National 
Assembly, the only governing body actually controlled by Guaido.

But the Venezuela fact sheet posted and then deleted days earlier by the 
State Department told a dramatically different story.

/Read the entire expunged fact sheet here 
<https://thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/US-Department-of-State-Venezuela-actions.pdf> 
[PDF] and at the end of this article./


      The State Department’s economic hit list

Entitled “U.S. Actions on Venezuela,” the document boasted that U.S. 
policy had effectively prevented the Venezuelan government from 
participating in the international market and has led to the freezing of 
its overseas assets. It read like a sadistic celebration of Washington’s 
retribution against the Venezuelan population as a whole, the kind of 
collective punishment which is illegal according to Article 33 of the 
Geneva Conventions.

The State Department gloated in the deleted fact sheet that its policy 
had ensured that the Maduro government “cannot rely on the U.S. 
financial system” to conduct business, noting “key outcomes” of U.S. 
actions include the fact that “roughly $3.2 billion of Venezuela’s 
overseas are frozen.” It went on to boast that “Venezuela’s oil 
production fell to 736,000 barrels per day in March… substantially 
reducing” government revenue.

“If I were the State Department I wouldn’t brag about causing a cut in 
oil production to 763,000 barrels per day — which is a 36 percent drop, 
in just the two months of February and March this year,” Mark Weisbrot, 
Co-Director at the Center For Economic and Policy Research, told The 
Grayzone. “This means even more premature deaths than the tens of 
thousands that resulted from sanctions last year.”

Weisbrot recently co-authored a bracing report 
<http://cepr.net/publications/reports/economic-sanctions-as-collective-punishment-the-case-of-venezuela> 
which found that 40,000 Venezuelans died between 2017 and 2018 as a 
direct result of U.S. sanctions. The State Department patted itself on 
the back for announcing its preparedness “to provide an additional $20 
million in initial humanitarian assistance” to Venezuela, however, the 
CEPR report concluded that Trump Administration sanctions implemented in 
August 2017 resulted in “a loss of $6 billion in oil revenue over the 
ensuing year” alone.

While the State Department praised the opposition for “providing medical 
and hygiene attention to over 6,000” Venezuelans, those numbers dwarf in 
comparison to the 300,000 people CEPR “estimated to be at risk because 
of lack of access to medicines or treatment… [including] 80,000 people 
with HIV who have not had antiretroviral treatment since 2017, 16,000 
people who need dialysis, 16,000 people with cancer, and 4 million with 
diabetes and hypertension.”

In other words, the supposed “Venezuela Crisis Response Assistance” 
touted by the State Department is not even a band-aid over the gaping 
wound that US unilateral coercive measures have inflicted on the country.

In Weisbrot’s view, the “policy” and “outcomes” promoted by the State 
Department in the disappeared document will merely lead to “more cuts in 
imports of medicine, food, medical equipment, and inputs necessary to 
maintain water, health, and sanitation infrastructure.”

Having denied the Venezuelan government the ability to provide for its 
own population, the U.S. has essentially promised that thousands more 
deaths will occur.

The State Department did not respond to The Grayzone’s request for a 
comment on the fact sheet it deleted.


      “A list of confessions”

In a recent interview with The Grayzone 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxGPEhfkzKM>, Venezuela’s ambassador to 
the United Nations Samuel Moncada characterized the deleted State 
Department fact sheet as “a list of confessions.”

“Imagine if any other country says… it’s proud of saying that we are 
destroying the economy of our neighbor; we are proud that we destroyed 
the political system of our neighbor; we are proud that they are 
suffering. They are saying we are waging war against Venezuela,” Moncada 
emphasized.

The ambassador went on to accuse the U.S. of engaging in “bullying” 
rather than international diplomacy.

The State Department’s own fact sheet appears to support this 
accusation, as it asserts “diplomatic pressure resulted in fewer markets 
for Venezuelan gold.” The document further highlighted U.S. actions that 
have supposedly led “more than 1,000 members of the military [to 
recognize] Juan Guaido as interim President” and defect to Colombia, as 
well as stranding “an estimated 25 crude oil tankers with 12 million 
barrels” off Venezuela’s coast.

“They [say] it’s our ‘key’ achievements,” Moncada commented. “They are 
saying that they are causing trouble in our military and inducing a 
military coup, [which] so far they haven’t achieved, but they are 
working towards.”

“If any other person says that themselves,” the ambassador concluded, 
“and you take that confession to court, they would be in prison.”

The State Department’s fact sheet even frames recent decisions by the 
Organization of American States, Lima Group, Inter-American Development 
Bank, and European Union to either recognize or support Guaido’s shadow 
administration as a U.S. achievement, highlighting Washington’s outsized 
influence within each of these supposedly international governing 
bodies. The decision to mention the E.U. and Lima Group is particularly 
noteworthy considering the United States is not a member of either 
organization.

“They are so far out of any normal parameters of decency, morality, 
legality, reason, that really they are dangerous,” Moncada said of the 
Trump administration. “They are a real threat to international peace, 
and they are a real threat to my people.”

US Department of State Deleted Venezuela Hit List 
<https://www.scribd.com/document/408821784/US-Department-of-State-Deleted-Venezuela-Hit-List#from_embed> 
by Max Blumenthal 
<https://www.scribd.com/user/31516247/Max-Blumenthal#from_embed> on Scribd


Anya Parampil is a Washington, DC based journalist. She previously 
hosted a daily progressive afternoon news program called In Question on 
RT America. She has produced and reported several documentaries, 
including on the ground reports from the Korean peninsula and Palestine.

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20190506/c1eb570a/attachment.htm>