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When I think of all the rightwing crapola we had to endure from that Rumsfeldian 'black op,' I just wanna...
:puke:
And it wasn't confined to the mental anguish of distant bloggers beset with RW trolls trumpeting Rumsfeldian lies. As I recall, there were arrests of leftists in Panama (was it? maybe Costa Rica? Maybe both?), harassment, confiscation of belongings, riflings through papers and computers, accusations, handcuffs, detention...
Which brings me to the point of it all. If they were trying to build a genuine case that Hugo Chavez and Rafael Correa were "terrorist lovers," why did they so compromise the "miracle laptop" (the first one--later, laptopS) that even Interpol (whose head at the time was a lying bastard, who falsely summarized the Interpol report) said that it could never be used in a court of law? Seems like, having "rescued" the item without a scratch on it, from that bombed out campsite, they would be pretty careful about its provenance, legal-wise. Instead, they opened it, altered thousands of files, and let it languish in military hands for three days, during which time anything could have happened to it, THEN gave it to Interpol. And they didn't even come up with manufactured evidence that had any credibility. It was laughable stuff (as Greg Palast brilliantly pointed out).
They deliberately compromised the provenance. They didn't come up with anything useful to them in any kind of legal proceeding (like the ones Uribe tried to get up, at the OAS and the World Court).
So, what was it FOR?
I have to conclude that it was for the Associated Pukes & brethren to write slanderous headlines about these leftist presidents that would never be retracted, of course, but would continue to RESONATE with the IMPRESSION that these democratically elected, popular presidents were somehow outlaws, not legitimate, planning or engaging in aggression against other countries, were somehow responsible for the dreadful RIGHTWING violence and murders in Colombia, were "the problem" (not Uribe, not Rumsfeld, not their frakking death squads and their out-of-control, $7 BILLION U.S.-funded Colombian military)--somehow all the trouble that people hear tell of in Colombia was Hugo Chavez's and Rafael Correa's fault, not the fault of the real perps. And besides cover for murdering labor leaders, human rights workers, teachers, community activists, peasant farmers, journalists and others, and throwing 5 MILLION peasant farmers off their lands, with state terror, and probably using U.S. "war on drugs" money to consolidate the cocaine trade and direct its profits, they also gained "talking points" for their next oil war, when they think the time is ripe for that Big Board plan.
It's not enough to say that it was "all propaganda." Propaganda of this kind has goals., as we found out to our grief in Iraq. And it wouldn't have been useful as propaganda without the complicity of the corpo-fascist press.
That is the most dismaying thing of all. Powerful rightwing bastards will murder and steal, so long as we let them. But how can we do anything about it, with such scumbag news media? Hell, most people in the U.S. don't even know about the 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines here--also because of scumbag corporate 'journalists.'
They let themselves be used, and they've probably developed mindsets in which they don't even have to be told. If something fits the "Hugo = bad, terrorist, dictator" template they've absorbed, they print it--without thought, without investigation, and very often without even the slightest effort to consult the target, to get a challenging quote or to include anything that would question the "talking point."
The thing that most strikes me, however, about the "miracle laptop," was the circumstances surrounding its production by Uribe, circumstances that I think were a set-up for another oil war. The plot begins with Uribe's request to Chavez to contact the FARC and negotiate hostage releases (circa late 2007/early 2008). It is clear now that Uribe never intended for Chavez to be successful--it was a trap, intended to hand him a diplomatic disaster with dead hostages--and when he was, indeed, successful (probably because of that phone call he made to the Colombian military--the one that Uribe used as an excuse to withdraw his request at the last minute)--Uribe/Rumsfeld had to find another way to get at him. This was soon followed by the bombing/raid on Reyes' hostage release camp just inside Ecuador's border. In one fell swoop, they ended all hope for peace in Colombia's 70 year civil war, got rid of the chief hostage and peace negotiator (and 25 other sleeping people), and got Ecuadoran and Venezuelan battalions to the Colombian border in defensive reaction to this attack over the boarder into Ecuador.
THANK GOD the coolest heads on the Left prevailed because they were drawing Ecuador and Venezuela right into a hot war--one that likely would have destroyed both democracies. (This is the event that prompted Lula da Silva to call Chavez "the great peacemaker"). (Correa was a brand new president, in office only for a year, at that point, in a country that previously had seen governments fall every other week--very unstable situation; and Correa is young with a bit of a "hot" Latin temper. He might have been drawn in.) (The female leftist leaders at that time--Michelle Batchelet of Chile and Cristina Fernandez of Argentina--apparently had a discussion about the dangers of male "macho" in that inflamed situation.)
And it was THEN--when all their efforts to slander, embarrass and topple the leftist presidents of Ecuador and Venezuela had failed, and their first war plan had failed, that the "miracle laptop" suddenly appeared, well after the bombing/raid, with Uribe playing coy with the laptop itself and simply issuing statements about its alleged contents--quite wild statements (like, Chavez and Correa were helping the FARC to get a "dirty bomb"). To those of us who had followed this story, the phoniness of it was apparent early on. But, as with Bush and the non-existent WMDs in Iraq, the corporate media not only did not examine these allegations, they perpetuated them--a process that Rumsfeld/Uribe were counting on.
What was the point of carrying on this media war against Chavez and Correa? i think 'cover" was a big part of it, as I said--throwing out flak to distract from their crimes. This was/is especially true of Uribe, who may not have the secure "made man" status of a Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld (and whose second in command on Uribe's massive, illegal, domestic spying was just arrested in Colombia). But, bigger than that, I think, is Rumsfeld's manic tenacity on the World Oil War.
I think Rumsfeld was ousted, by Daddy Bush, Leon Panetta (member of Daddy Bush's "Iraq Study Group") and the U.S. military brass, in late 2006, because he would not give up on nuking/invading Iran, and they thought it too risky. He had already been frustrated on extending the Iraq War to Iran immediately after the invasion of Iraq (what the Plame outings and David Kelly's murder may have been all about). The man was Oil Mad, and it's not as if the Pentagon, U.S. oil corps and other players are not--they more than likely have his plan to get control of Venezuela's and Ecuador's oil still around, though maybe in reserve. But there ARE other considerations, which saner power players like Daddy Bush would assess. For instance, the danger of China and Russia coming into it, on Iran's side. In South America, there are the other South American countries to consider--most of them leftist allies of Venezuela and Ecuador--and people inspired by real democracy to overcome and control.
I also think Panetta (like Daddy Bush) is good at the slower, subtler methods of subversion, for instance, methods that can build upon propaganda such as Uribe/Rumsfeld generated, but not be so overt, and not be so fixated on military conquest. During Panetta's couple of years at the CIA, we saw the crazy, coup-prone rightwing gain victories in Venezuela's legislative elections, in stark contradiction to Venezuelans' positive views of their country, their government, their well-being and their future prospects, in several different surveys--Venezuela being a country that was recently designated "THE most equal in Latin America" on income distribution (by a UN economic commission), and we've seen a serious effort to destabilize Ecuador and topple the government, by factions within the military and police forces (which the Bush Junta had worked on infiltrating), but with no discernible U.S. fingerprints in the event, though toppling that government would greatly serve Chevron's and U.S. war profiteer interests. (The Honduran coup pre-dated Panetta's tenure at the CIA. I think that was of Bush junta design, sprung on Obama only six months into his administration, though Panetta may well have had a hand in the State Department hijinks of trying to make the coup look democratic.)
In short, other methods are being tried (by which to serve U.S. corporate/war profiteer interests) and could conceivably succeed. The U.S. is a bit overstretched on the Oil War at the moment. But use of the U.S. war machine to get access to more oil is by no means off the table. Thus, all this propaganda effort against Chavez and Correa--the "miracle laptop," et al--still "resonating" in the public's mind and added to continuing and newly initiated lies and bullshit could be built up into "war fever" as necessary.
But the REALITY of the "miracle laptop"--that it is bogus, that it had no more substance than the WMDs in Iraq--goes the way of all history, in the corporate media, into its "river of forgetfulness." Will they ever ask why Rumsfeld seemed to have his finger in this matter a year after his resignation from the Pentagon? No. (Rumsfeld's involvement is in plain sight--in a Rumsfeld op-ed in the WaPo on the very day of the first Chavez-negotiated hostage releases--the released hostages who were met with Colombian military rocket attacks--12/1/07.) Will they ever notice how similar the "miracle laptop" is to other productions of Rumsfeld's "Office of Special Plans"? No. Will they ever ask why this lying crapola was perpetrated? No. They will never ask about these or a million other important things that could aid their readers and news "consumers" in actually understanding their government and its foreign policy and its wars. More than anything other than the 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines, the scumbaggism of the corporate media has been a lethal blow to our democracy from which it may not ever recover.
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