Everybody loves war (not really, just sayin')

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/02/02/i-oppose-interventionism-but-but-nothing-stop-being-a-pro-bono-cia-propagandist/

“I Oppose Interventionism, But-” But Nothing. Stop Being A Pro Bono CIA Propagandist.

In a recent interview with The Corbett Report, the Ron Paul Institute‘s Daniel McAdams spoke disdainfully of those ostensibly anti-interventionist libertarians who picked this moment of all times to loudly and aggressively condemn Venezuela’s president Maduro, just as the US power establishment is ramping up its campaign to topple the Venezuelan government.

“All of a sudden now there are millions of Venezuela experts in America, and many of them could not point Venezuela out on a map five days ago,” McAdams said. “And everyone has to have this disclaimer, ‘Well, I know it’s probably worse than North Korea, but the US government shouldn’t get involved.’ It’s cowardice, because once the war starts, they can say ‘Hey I never called for US intervention!’ No, but you’re a conveyor belt for propaganda. You’re a conveyor belt to get the machine ginned up for war. And so you’ve got to stand up and take responsibility.”

McAdams has for years consistently operated in the hub of one of America’s most forceful and effective branches of opposition to US interventionism, and he is absolutely correct here. On both sides of America’s political divide, the primary objections you will see to this administration’s campaign to delegitimize and topple the Venezuelan government are prefaced with a strong condemnation of Maduro followed by some feeble equivocations voicing vague objections to Trump’s actions, if that.

Even more often, what you will see is excuses made for the US government’s aggressive attempts to control who runs Venezuela, followed by some mumbling along the lines of “I don’t want us to go to war, though” dribbling out of the corner of their mouths. Some silly, arbitrary line in the sand saying that Trump’s current ongoing starvation sanctions, CIA covert ops and premeditated campaign to delegitimize and overthrow Venezuela’s government is fine, and hey, maybe arming some right-wing militias via Columbia would be fine too, but don’t send American troops to do the killing or we’ll be a tad upset.

All these wimpy, wishy washy “I oppose US interventionism sorta kinda but not really P.S. fuck Maduro” mouth noises are infuriatingly obnoxious, for a number of reasons. Firstly, someone who claims to be antiwar or anti-interventionist but reserves their objections solely for the most overt forms of warfare is not really antiwar or anti-interventionist, because warfare in modern times is designed to take many less overt forms in order to prevent the kind of attention-grabbing public objections seen over Vietnam and Iraq. A look at what the US empire did to Libya and Syria shows that hundreds of thousands can be killed, millions can be displaced, and humanitarian disasters beyond our ability to imagine can be unleashed without any overt conventional invasion.

Secondly, by wrapping your resistance to US warmongering in loud criticisms of the Venezuelan government and “Go people’s rebellion!” cheerleading, you are functioning as a pro bono propagandist for the CIA and the US State Department, and thereby helping to advance the warmongering agendas of those depraved agencies.

A common refrain is “It’s possible to be opposed to US interventionism while also opposing these tyrannical governments, you know.” But it isn’t. Not really. It’s impossible to oppose US interventionism while also helping to advance its propaganda narratives against targeted governments.

All US-led military agendas begin with propaganda. If the public were allowed to see the reality of war with fresh eyes, they would all instantly recoil in horror and adamantly demand its immediate end. The only reason the US-centralized empire is able to sow death and destruction around the world without this happening is because of propaganda, which is why Americans are the most aggressively propagandized people in the world: the violent agendas of the most powerful military force ever assembled are far too important to be left up to the will of the citizenry.

So before they can launch missiles, planes, and ships, they launch propaganda. They launch mass media psyops. They launch narrative control campaigns to make sure that Americans hate the leader of Targeted Nation X and want the people of Targeted Nation X to have Freedom and Democracy™. Day after day after day, they seed the idea that Targeted Leader X “must go”, until the story has become so thoroughly indoctrinated that it almost looks like the US and its allies have no choice but to intervene with increasingly violent measures.

When you help advance those propaganda narratives, you are actively facilitating the first steps of war in a very real way. It’s the same as if you personally picked up a rifle and began picking people off; the only difference is that you’re participating in an earlier stage of the bloodshed rather than a later one. The people are just as dead in the end as if you personally had killed them with your own hands, you just helped with an earlier part of the mechanizations of war rather than a later one. Hell, the one firing the bullets is arguably in a more moral position, because at least they’re putting something on the line and reckoning sincerely with the reality of what they’re doing. The one hiding behind a keyboard and acting as a pro bono war propagandist while inserting “…but I oppose direct interventionism” at the end is vastly more cowardly and dishonest. In the end, the one with the gun is just delivering the bullet that was put in the mail by the propagandist.

Over and over and over I run into this stupid herd mentality while arguing about this stuff online where people (seemingly deliberately) conflate the notion of Venezuelans sorting out Venezuelan affairs with US interventionism. I’ll be clearly and explicitly condemning US interventionism, and some foam-brained Trump supporter will come up to me saying “I don’t understand, Caitlin! Why don’t you support the Venezuelan people??”

That phrase, “the Venezuelan people,” incidentally, is exclusively used in propaganda articles to refer to those who support regime change in Venezuela, as documented here by Fair.org’s Alan MacLeod. Like the people who support their government aren’t Venezuelan people.

And I don’t mean to just single out Trump supporters here; they’re just the ones who are more vocally gung-ho for this particular intervention. For the last two years I’ve had Democrats up in my face all the time calling me a “genocide denier” and an “Assad apologist” for opposing the Syrian war propaganda and demanding to know why I hate the Syrian people. The rest of the time I’m being asked why I don’t support the Iranian people by Republicans and why I love Putin by Democrats. This mind virus is totally bipartisan.

It is unlikely that the US war machine is gearing up for an all-out invasion of Venezuela as its Plan A. That’s not its MO. First we’re likely to see continually tightening starvation sanctions, more narrative control, more CIA covert operations, and the arming of oppositional militias within Venezuela. If that doesn’t work we can perhaps expect to see some drone warfare and a coalition being formed, with ground troops sent in only if these other measures fail to rip the country apart by themselves, and only if our rulers can manufacture consent for it. The time to begin disrupting that consent-manufacturing apparatus is now, not later.

The only thing keeping the public from using its numbers to force an end to imperialist warmongering is that most people lack a deep understanding of how horrific and widespread it is, and the only thing preventing them from developing that understanding is propaganda. By regurgitating the propaganda narratives being spouted by neoconservative death cultists like Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and Elliott Abrams, you are helping them pave the road to acts of mass slaughter as sure as if you were perpetrating it yourself.

If you wouldn’t go to a country and start killing everyone between you and its leader personally, stop helping to construct the narrative framework that is being set up to accomplish exactly that. The most powerful thing in our society is narrative. Please treat it with an appropriate level of respect.





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Posted on RetroBBS

Just one example for me is remembering the U.S. invasion of Panama. All the cheering Panamanians in the streets waving American flags, so grateful. This was after the fact (invasion), but it helps keep people in agreement (see, we did a good thing)

All you really need afterward is a desk covered with porn (stock photo) to show once you catch whomever.

https://fair.org/home/the-venezuelan-people-are-whoever-agrees-with-donald-trump/

Alan MacLeod
The ‘Venezuelan People’ Are Whoever Agrees With Donald Trump

 NYT: The Venezuelan People Are Feeling Hopeful

Headline over a letter published in the New York Times (1/24/19)

The latest bizarre episode in the Trump presidency is currently playing out in Venezuela. Just weeks after President Nicolás Maduro’s inauguration, Trump officially recognized Juan Guaidó, the 35-year-old head of the National Assembly—a man who has never even run for president—as the rightful head of state. A White House statement (1/29/19) announced, “President Trump stands with the people of Venezuela as they demand democracy, human rights and prosperity denied to them by Maduro,” noting that the “people” had “courageously spoken out,” and that the US would pursue increased sanctions on the country.

More alarmingly still, Trump has continually threatened a military intervention in Venezuela (New York Times, 8/12/17), and his National Security Advisor John Bolton allowed himself to be filmed with a notepad that read, “5,000 troops to Colombia” (CNN, 1/29/19).

Before any troops are sent anywhere, we should ask ourselves, who exactly does Trump mean by “the people of Venezuela”? A recent local poll shows that 86 percent of Venezuelans oppose military intervention, while 81 percent already disagree with the current US sanctions.

Nevertheless, it appears that the media have decided that “the people” want regime change, after all. PBS NewsHour (1/30/19) interviewed one Venezuelan resident of New York City who claimed he spoke for the entire population: “I—not only I—but 30 million people support the US circumstance,” meaning Washington’s attempt to replace the government. The New York Times (1/24/19) published a letter from someone in Boston using the phrase “the Venezuelan people” and “us” interchangeably, claiming Guaidó is “what we need” and that we are “feeling hopeful.”

On MSNBC (1/30/19), reporter Mariana Atencio declared matter-of-factly: “This is a battle right now between legitimacy and power. Guaidó has the legitimacy, but Maduro has the guns, meaning the power.”
WaPo: Democrats should stand for democracy in Venezuela — and democratic values in America

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy and Obama adviser Ben Rhodes (Washington Post, 1/29/19) praised Trump’s “statement demanding democracy for the people of Venezuela and calling for the removal of President Nicolás Maduro.”

A Washington Post op-ed (1/29/19) declared that we should provide more support for “the Venezuelan people” who are demonstrating in the streets by working with the UN Human Rights Council to “tighten the sanctions” on Maduro, presenting a picture of the US leading a unified world against a dictatorship oppressing its people.

But in reality, the UN Human Rights Council has formally condemned the sanctions, noting they “disproportionately affect the poor and most vulnerable”; it called on all member states to break them, and even began discussing reparations the US should pay to Venezuela. A UN rapporteur who visited the country described Trump’s actions as possible “crimes against humanity” (London Independent, 1/27/19). This has not been reported by the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN or any other US national media outlet.

Ignoring all this relevant information, the Post (1/29/19) noted that the emergence of Guaidó has brought hope to the “Venezuelan people” (or “long-suffering Venezuelans”) for the “restoration of their democracy.” This is despite the fact that more than 80 percent of Venezuelans have never heard of Guaidó, and that the body he leads, the National Assembly, has an over 70 percent disapproval rating (roughly the same as the disapproval rating for Maduro).

There has been a great deal of coverage (CNBC, 1/23/19; New York Times, 1/23/19; Fox News, 1/23/19) of the “Venezuelan people” protesting for Guaidó, but very little of the counter-protests in support of the government that complicate the picture. This continues a longstanding media policy of treating “the Venezuelan people” as a term that exclusively means “anyone who agrees with US policy.”

In a study of over 500 articles over a 16-year period published this week (Race & Class, 1/25/19), I found that terms like the “Venezuelan people” or “civil society” were used exclusively to refer to opposition groups in alignment with (and funded by) the US government. US intentions and actions in the country were consistently presented as democratic, regardless of their nature.

The US supported the opposition’s 2002 coup attempt to remove Maduro’s elected predecessor, President Hugo Chávez. White House press secretary Ari Fleischer framed the events as “the Venezuelan people rising up to defend democracy” (Washington Post, 4/13/02) and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stated that “Chávez’s policies are not working for the Venezuelan people” (New York Times, 4/15/02).  Media followed the government’s lead, with the London Times publishing an opinion piece (4/13/02) lauding “the people of Venezuela” for “mobilizing” against the government, while the Miami Herald (4/15/02) quoted an observer declaring that Chávez’s restoration meant that “the Venezuelan people have been betrayed.”

When acknowledged to exist at all, government supporters were consistently dehumanized as “thugs” (Washington Post, 3/29/14) or “gangs” (London Times, 4/12/14). The New York Times referred to the working-class counter-protesters that saved democracy in 2002 as “armed thugs” (4/15/02), “Dobermans” (4/12/02) or “furious mobs of Chávez supporters marching violently through the capital looting stores in poor areas” (4/16/02). (The latter article described the coup supporters as engaging in “a week of peaceful marches.”)

During a 2014 US-supported opposition attempt to violently overthrow the government, the Washington Post editorial board (3/29/14) implied the country was calling for foreign intervention:

    Venezuelans despair at the lack of international interest in the political crisis that is rocking their country. Since anti-government protests began early last month, at least 34 people have been killed, most of them opposition supporters gunned down by security forces or government-backed gangs.

Referring to the same event, the Miami Herald (2/26/14) published an op-ed headlined “The Fight Is Between Nicolás Maduro and the Venezuelan People.”

President Maduro is unpopular, with approval ratings consistently below 30 per cent. Yet 31 per cent of the entire electorate voted for him in 2018, a higher percentage than Trump or Obama received in 2016 and 2012, respectively. (No one realistically maintains that Henri Falcón—the leading opposition candidate, who was hampered by widespread boycotting—actually got more votes in the election than Maduro.)

Venezuela certainly does need radical change, but erasing the voices and even existence of the people, as the media has done, will only hinder public understanding of the issue and hamper reconciliation.
--
Posted on RetroBBS

turns out it is not single companies, but all the tech giants that freak out when you even go close to the subject. since when was sex a bad thing ? at the same time, they partly tolerate the disgusting group of people who think hitler has the right idea. fitting somehow....

here is the article, it is worth reading:

https://www.engadget.com/2019/01/31/sex-censorship-killed-internet-fosta-sesta/

How sex censorship killed the internet we love
Can’t even read it for the articles anymore.
Violet Blue, @violetblue
01.31.19 in Sex

When was the last time you thought of the internet as a weird and wonderful place?

I can feel my anxiety climbing as I try to find current news stories about sex. Google News shows one lonely result for "porn," an article that is 26 days old. I log out of everything and try different browsers because this can't be right.

I pop over to Yahoo News and try the same searches, exhaling relief to see 892 news articles for "porn" from outlets ranging from Associated Press to Rolling Stone. They're there. It's just that Google's 2018 algorithm upgrade filters out news with the word "porn" in it. Like articles about porn performer suicide, tips for revenge porn victims, parents who oppose porn website age-verification (turns out, today's parents are more afraid of data collection than their kids watching porn).

Stories with the word "porn" in them are important because they're about censorship, sexual health, business trends, sex work, politics, gender and women. They're about people.

But not for the world's most popular search engine. Google's war on sex took root in 2011 when Google Plus launched with a strict no-sex policy. In 2013, the company enacted a porn purge across Blogger, and Android's Google Keyboard was updated to exclude more than1,400 "inappropriate" words, like "lovemaking," "condom," and "STI." In 2014 Google Play banned sex-themed apps, and an algorithm change in Search destroyed organic results for sex websites. That same year Google made changes to its AdWords policies to prohibit sex-related advertising.

When Google launched in 1998, Nerve was one of the internet's leading websites. It was an online magazine about sex with articles and featured erotic artists, busy personals, packed forums. It published terrific sex books by writers and photographers, and had a wildly popular free blogging service (one of the first). From 1997 through the early '00s, Nerve was the fun, exciting, sex-positive place to be and hang out, bursting with creative communities, optimism, and hope that a vital future was being explored.

For many, Nerve represented a new era in which we could finally, freely talk about sex, gender, orientation, sex culture -- and exchange ideas. Thanks to Nerve's "literate smut" tagline and ethos, private acts of creation could make tortured people feel valid and whole. People don't make sites like Nerve anymore. No one can.
When was the last time the internet made you feel good?

I can feel my anxiety climbing as I search for art and photography. I am looking for black erotic art, because this kind of visibility matters to me. Like the millions of people who enjoyed Tumblr, I do not want the stereotypes and advertising assault of commercial porn 'tube' sites, which performers say profit unfairly off their hard work.

We used to have a living, breathing museum-of-sex culture online. But in December 2018, Tumblr banned and removed adult content from its service. Estimated loss: at least 12.5 million blogs.

When Tumblr started in 2007, it made people feel like the battle to defend erotic art as socially and sexually valid was won, and the necessity of sexual communities was cemented. We found out so much, like that transgender people had hot sex and great erotic art too, and this was ... just incredibly cool.

When Tumblr erased millions of sex blogs and communities overnight, many lamented that without the website they would've been lost and suicidal trying to figure out their sexuality. When I worked the sex crisis call lines in 2005, before Tumblr, our most common call was from teens in abstinence-only education states who did not know how to prevent sexual disease, infections, injuries or pregnancy — and youth who were terrified they weren't "normal."

The kids we spoke to were afraid and alone. At the call center, we sometimes doubled as a suicide crisis line (the office next to ours was, in fact, the suicide hotline). I can tell you for a fact that Tumblr helped a generation of frightened, isolated kids trying to figure out their sexual identity. Now Tumblr is a sex-free haven for white nationalists and Nazis.

In 1997, Ann Powers wrote an essay called "In Defense of Nasty Art." It took progressives to task for not defending rap music because it was "obscene" and sexually graphic. Powers puts it mildly when she states, "Their apprehension makes the fight to preserve freedom of expression seem hollow." This is an old problem. So it's no surprise that the same websites forbidding, banning, and blocking "sexually suggestive" art content also claim to care about free speech.

Like Facebook. Artnet wrote last March that Facebook's brutal art censorship includes the Venus of Willendorf, Gustave Courbet's The Origin of the World, "the banning of Gerhard Richter's blurred rendering of a nude descending a staircase, Evelyne Axell's pop art painting of a woman licking an ice cream cone, and Danish Modernist Edvard Eriksen's beloved, more than 100-year-old public sculpture The Little Mermaid."

    So we tried to post the photo of this potato on Instagram. AND IT GOT CENSORED

    Hey @instagram Since when potatoes are not allowed on your platform?? #Instagram #censorship #potatoban pic.twitter.com/q15WAFNCiR
    — Sex School (@SexSchoolHub) January 26, 2019

The erasure of erotic art, to me, represents a crisis point of culture, of democracy. Art effects the greatest change and empowerment when it's transgressive, scandalous, nude, erotic. Visibility matters. Art is where minds are opened, ideas challenged, viewpoints explored, where people who hate have a chance to be changed, even if for a minute.
When was the last time the internet gave you hope?


I can feel my anxiety climbing as I look for the voices of adult performers and sex workers online. The silence is so overwhelming it's suffocating. In 2018, an estimated 42 million sex workers worldwide were evicted from the open internet and essentially went into hiding with the passage of FOSTA-SESTA.

The censorship wave was unprecedented in internet history. Twitter, Facebook, and all major web service providers immediately changed their rules to tightly police what was posted and messaged about sexual content, by anyone. Entire online communities were kicked off services like Cloudflare (55,000 users of Switter), and hundreds of thousands were disappeared by the shuttering of safety forums and advertising-screening services. Reddit removed entire communities overnight. Recently, YouTube banned videos where people simply talk to sex workers.

The voices erased are the voices of women. Of gay and straight men, transgender people, the voices of people of color. These populations make up the majority of sex workers. So in America, FOSTA is analogous to how the World Health Organization is categorized as "pornography" in web filters used in Kuwait and the UAE.

The law legalized sex censorship online. FOSTA was pushed by Sheryl Sandberg and Facebook — who used their support of FOSTA to appease Sen. John Thune (R-South Dakota). Thune pushes the false narrative that Facebook censors conservatives and previously said he wanted to regulate the company. FOSTA falsely states that consensual adult sex work is the same as sex trafficking, and was opposed by the Department of Justice, the ACLU, the EFF, numerous online free-speech organizations and actual sex-trafficking organizations.

FOSTA claimed to stop sex trafficking and has utterly backfired. San Francisco just released its 2018 crime statistics. The only violent crime that increased in San Francisco in 2018 was "human trafficking" — up by an astonishing 170%. These are not sex-worker arrests, which fall under a "vice" subcategory.

Before FOSTA, the voices of sex workers were readily available. Anyone could ask sex workers who they are, why they make the choices they do and what actual sex workers think about doing sex work.

It was an incredible moment because before free blogging and social-media sites, the only way we heard the voices of sex workers and porn performers was through media outlets that portrayed them as broken rape victims -- or sex-trafficked children. Adults having consensual sex for entertainment were not given a voice unless it validated a narrative of sin, of pain, of regret.

Now all the women (and LGBTQ, PoC) who could speak truth to any of this have been driven underground, silenced by algorithms, bans, and FOSTA-empowered 4chan troll brigades.
When was the last time you felt free on the internet?

I can feel my anxiety climbing as I type. Starbucks is filtering its WiFi with a secret porn blacklist. Patreon, Cloudflare, PayPal, Facebook, Instagram, and Square will eject you for getting near a sex business, linking to perceived sex sites, letting the wrong people use your online business.

Facebook recently banned sexual slang; YouTube bans users for sex ed or LGBTQ content because it might be about sex; Twitter has a mysterious sex-shadowban that no one can get a straight answer on. Tumblr can't tell a potato from a boob. Guides on sexual self-censoring are popular — and necessary. Google Drive scans your files and deletes what it believes to be explicit content. Apple just straight-up hates sex.

Click here to read the complete article

The video is on youtube, here's a transcript.

Nicholas Maduro's Video Appeal to the American People Not to Start Another War - Full Transcript
Nicholas Maduro 16 hours ago | 700 words 1,143 40


Transcript:

I am Nicholas Maduro, constitutional President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

I want to send a message to the people of the United States to warn you about the media, about the psychological war being waged in the international and especially in the US media, against Venezuela.

This campaign has been prepared to justify a coup d'etat in Venezuela that has been organized, financed and actively supported by the Trump Administration. Everybody  knows that a brutal campaign of false images, of manipulated images, of faked images, has been started.

Do not believe everything they say on the US television! I'm telling you from the heart - they could not make up a lie that Venezuela and Maduro have massive weapons of mass destruction, so they had no excuse to invade us.

So now, they invent other lies and fake news every day, to justify aggression against our country.

I call on your conscience, I call you to solidarity, I call you to an awakening to the truth.

Let’s not allow another war like Vietnam. If the government of the United States intends to intervene with us they will have a much worse Vietnam than you can imagine.

We do not want violence. We will resist it. We are a peaceful people, proud of our history and of Simon Bolivar and Hugo Chavez.

Venezuela has a solid democracy. We have our own problems as any other country, and we will solve them by ourselves. Our people deserve respect.

In our country there is the largest certified oil reserves in the world. And the eyes of those who lead the empire in the United States are on our oil, and they want to put their hands on it as they did in Iraq and Libya. That wealth belongs to us. We are now certifying the world's first gold reserves, we have the fourth largest gas reserves in the world. We are a country of great resources both natural and energetic. This is the truth and this explains the constant attacks against Venezuela.

That's why I appeal to your conscience, to solidarity with us. Don’t let Donald Trump and the group of extremists around him like John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, the CIA and Mike Pence impose their lies and their coup against Venezuela. Support the people of Venezuela in their struggle for democracy.

I have confidence in you, American citizen. Here in Venezuela you have a brother. I am an admirer of the history of the United States. I know your country well. I have driven through Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, and Washington. I know your country’s width and breadth. I want to have relations of respect, closeness and cooperation with all of the United States. The United States is a great country, and it is much bigger than Donald Trump.

I want to have good relationships and solve our problems through peaceful diplomacy. I only ask for respect for Venezuela and I need your support to avoid a war like Vietnam.

I ask for peace and I ask for respect for my people. I am sure that we are going to continue on this historical path because we are on the just historical path, we are in the right place in history.

Thank you very much.

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Posted on RetroBBS

Indiana boy, 13, arrested after telling Siri he wanted to shoot up a school

First thought is that Apple (Siri) reported the "threat", but read the article and that's not the case:

A teenage boy in Indiana was charged with intimidation after he
told Apple's assistant Siri that he had planned a school
shooting and then posted a screenshot of the response online.

The 13-year-old middle school student was being held at the
Porter County Juvenile Detention Center, and investigators do
not believe the boy had access to weapons, according to the
Valparaiso Police Department.

Valparaiso Police said in a statement on Thursday that the boy
allegedly told Siri, "I am going to shoot up a school."

The digital assistant then created a list of several Valparaiso
schools nearby.

However, the student made no direct threat to a specific person,
school or school system.

"The threat is not believed to be credible at this time;
however, these types of communications are taken very seriously
by the Valparaiso Police Department and our community," the
Valparaiso Police Department said in its statement. "We continue
to work with the Valparaiso Community Schools to ensure the
safety of the students and staff."

He allegedly posted the screenshot on Thursday.

The incident was reported to police in nearby Chesterton by the
boy's social media contacts.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/indiana-boy-13-arrested-after-telling-
siri-he-wanted-to-shoot-up
--
Posted on Rocksolid Light.

and here come some weapons, with love from langley...

https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/latin-america/article225949200.html



Venezuelan authorities say a U.S.-owned air freight company delivered a crate of assault weapons earlier this week to the international airport in Valencia to be used in “terrorist actions” against the embattled government of Nicolás Maduro.

An air freight company, 21 Air LLC, based in Greensboro, N.C., operates the Boeing 767 aircraft that the Venezuelans allege was used in the arms transfer. The flight originated in Miami on Feb 3.

The Boeing 767 has made dozens of flights between Miami International Airport and destinations in Colombia and Venezuela since Jan. 11, a flight tracking service shows, often returning to Miami for only a few hours before flying again to South America.

The discovery of the weapons occurred Tuesday — two days after the flight landed briefly in Valencia, Venezuela’s third-largest city — as tax authorities and other inspectors conducted a routine inspection of cargo that came off the flight, according to a statement by the Carabobo state governor’s office.

A senior Venezuelan security official, Bolivarian National Guard Gen. Endes Palencia Ortiz, who is the nation’s vice minister of citizen security, said authorities found 19 assault weapons, 118 ammunition cartridges, and 90 military-grade radio antennas, among other items.

“This materiel was destined for criminal groups and terrorist actions in the country, financed by the fascist extreme right and the government of the United States,” Palencia Ortiz was quoted as saying.

The freight company, begun five years ago, operates two cargo planes, a Boeing 747 and a Boeing 767, according to the 21 Air website. The Boeing 767, a 32-year-old aircraft once flown by the now defunct Brazilian carrier Varig, carries the registration N-881-YV and is the aircraft that landed in Valencia on Feb. 3.

The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent through its website. The cellular phone of the company’s chief executive, Michael Mendez, had a recording Thursday afternoon that said it could not accept calls.

An Ottawa-based analyst of unusual ship and plane movements, Steffan Watkins, drew attention to the frequent flights of the 21 Air cargo plane in a series of tweets Thursday.

“All year, they were flying between Philadelphia and Miami and all over the place, but all continental U.S.,” Watkins said in a telephone interview. “Then all of a sudden in January, things changed.”

That’s when the cargo plane began flying to destinations in Colombia and Venezuela on a daily basis, and sometimes multiple times a day, Watkins said. The plane has made close to 40 round-trip flights from Miami International Airport to Caracas and Valencia in Venezuela, and Bogota and Medellin in Colombia since Jan. 11.

The most recent tracking of the aircraft showed it arrived from Medellin into Miami airport after midnight Thursday.

The air cargo company’s website says that the Boeing 767 has a payload capacity of 42 tons.

The aircraft in question has passed through many hands since Varig took delivery of it in 1987. In 2004, it was passed to GE Capital Aviation Services, a leasing company that is part of the General Electric conglomerate, according to an operator history on the planespotters.net website. Tampa Cargo, Avianca Cargo and Dynamic Airways later controlled the aircraft until 21 Air received it in 2014.

The provenance of the alleged weaponry was not apparent. And questions about who the arms shipment was destined for, if the Venezuelan version of events is true, only mounted. Delivery at a commercial airport would indicate that somebody with authority there would have had a hand.

Venezuelan authorities displayed the weaponry that they said was delivered by the 21 Air cargo plane on open-air tables draped in red cloth. Some of the rifles included stands for long-range targeting. The shipment included 15 AR-15 assault weapons, a Micro Draco semi-automatic pistol with a jumbo magazine, a Colt 7.62 rifle and two telescopic sights, the governor’s statement said.

Valencia was a former manufacturing and economic hub before the collapse of the nation’s economy.

Flight records from the tracking site flightradar24.com, monitored by Watkins, indicate that the 21 Air cargo plane flew at least four times to Valencia from Miami and another four times to Caracas from Miami since Jan. 11. In many cases, the flights would head on to Bogota or Medellin before returning to Miami.

If some U.S. entity were attempting to provide arms to a Venezuelan resistance movement, it would be taking a familiar page from the history books.

The CIA operated a dummy airline, known as Air America, from the early 1950s until the mid 1970s for air operations in Southeast Asia, including air-dropping weapons to friendly forces.

More than a decade later, Sandinista soldiers shot down a cargo plane taking weapons to the U.S.-backed contra rebels fighting the Nicaraguan government. A U.S. Marine veteran, Eugene Hasenfus, survived the 1986 crash, and later told reporters that he was working for the CIA, paving the way for his release and return to the United States.

Curiously, one of the figures in the Reagan administration instrumental in delivering support to the contras, former assistant secretary of state Elliott Abrams, was named by President Donald Trump late last month as his special envoy overseeing policy toward Venezuela.

Washington Bureau reporter Alex Daugherty contributed to this report.


Posted on def4



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