FBI Claims it Doesn’t Have to Share Records with Justice Dept. Inspector General
By Noel Brinkerhoff and Steve Straehley | AllGov | June 29, 2015
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has continued to stonewall requests by the Department of Justice’s inspector general for records pertaining to multiple investigations by the internal watchdog.
The FBI has contended since 2010 that the IG’s office lacks the legal authority to see documents related to certain matters, including grand juries, Title III electronic surveillances and Fair Credit Reporting Act information.
FBI officials also claim they don’t have to share documents related to two investigations of alleged whistleblower retaliation, or those pertaining to an IG review of the FBI’s use of telephonic metadata collected under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, according to the Project on Government Oversight.
The IG said in a report “delaying or denying access to agency documents imperils an IG’s independence and impedes our ability to provide the effective and independent oversight that saves taxpayers money and improves the operations of the federal government.”
“Actions that limit, condition, or delay access have profoundly negative consequences for our work: they make us less effective, encourage other agencies to take similar actions in the future, and erode the morale of the dedicated professionals that make up our staffs,” the report stated.
And it might become even more difficult for the inspector general to get information from the FBI. The 2016 Justice Department budget proposal does not include the section that now forces the Bureau to cooperate with requests from the IG.
Inspector General Michael Horowitz said such a move “could lead the FBI to believe that its conduct has been sanctioned and could cause other department components to conclude that it is acceptable to ignore the Appropriations Act and clear requirements of the IG Act and raise legal objections to the OIG’s access to certain records necessary to perform our important oversight function.”
To Learn More:
Watchdog Barks for Access to FBI Records (by Michael Smallberg, Project on Government Oversight)
Justice Watchdog Continues to Clash with FBI Over Access to Documents (by Charles Clark, Government Executive )
180 Day Report to Congress on the Impact of Section 218 of the Department of Justice Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2015 (Department of Justice Inspector General) (pdf)
Justice Dept. Report Details Clashes between FBI and Organized Crime Drug Task Force (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov )
Baltimore Police Called Out For Making Up ‘Gang Violence’ Stories To Scare Public
By Reagan Ali and S. Wooten | Counter Current News | June 27, 2015
Remember when the Baltimore Police Department was telling all of these stories about “Bloods” and “Crips” uniting to “destroy” the city and its “heroic” police force?
Now city leaders are coming forward and calling out the police for these claims. Last Thursday several leaders publicly questioned the Baltimore Police Department as to why they issued a public warning the morning of Freddie Gray’s funeral. That warning claimed that police officers were being targeted by a united Blood-Crip alliance that would not rest until every Baltimore officer was dead.
Instead of allowing the community to mourn the untimely death of Freddie Gray, the Baltimore City Police hijacked the attention and painted themselves as the victims.
Now, months later, it is coming out that the whole thing was invented. The police made it all up. They didn’t have a shred of credible evidence to support the claims they were making.
In fact, much the opposite was true. Bloods, Crips and other gangs were uniting to protect the community, to stop looting and violence and pledging to end fighting between their circles.
Instead of praising this cessation of violence between these gangs, the police announced on April 27 that a “credible threat” from the Bloods, Crips and Black Guerrilla Family had made it clear that these “criminal” forces had united to target officers.
According to documentation and supporting interviews obtained by The Baltimore Sun, the police made it all up.
“I knew all along it was a bunch of baloney,” City Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young told the Sun. “They owe the council and the public an explanation for why they put this false information out there.”
The Sun reports that “the police warning was circulated in a news release at 11:27 a.m. on the day of Gray’s funeral, two days after protests over his death turned violent.”
As well, police were busy spreading rumors of teenagers engaging in a “purge”. That referred to the widespread, chaotic violence in the movie by the same name.
It was only after police spread these rumors far and wide that the violence actually started, according to the Sun.
“Within hours, the city descended into a night of rioting and looting.”
The police are standing by their claims, saying that there was a real “threat” that was “imminent and consistent with previous threats.” They just don’t have any proof or documentation of the source of these “credible threats.”
City Councilman Brandon Scott told police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts as well as other leaders in the department, that the FBI has discredited these “threats.”
He wrote in an email Thursday that “it is extremely unacceptable and put the lives of citizens, officers and others in danger.”
“Falsifying a threat of this magnitude during a highly tense time should result in the strongest penalty possible,” Scott added. “If we are going to repair our city, this kind of behavior cannot be tolerated.”
Shayne Buchwald, a spokeswoman for the FBI added that agents interviewed their gang sources and they could not come up with a single source that corroborated what the Baltimore police claimed.
City Councilman Nick Mosby said that the Police Department’s warning about this alleged “threat” was “problematic at best.”
“When you put out incendiary statements like that, and you don’t have credible information, that’s a problem,” Mosby explained. “The lack of communication, and communication that was not factual, are really the variables of a disaster.”
Mosby said the police were playing on and manipulating the public’s fears. He said that “police need to come out and communicate why they thought it was a credible threat.”
“Folks in my area, as soon as it came out, they didn’t believe it one bit,” he added. “It’s unfortunate to find it wasn’t credible.”
Malaysian Pressure Forces MH17 Investigation to UN
By Eric Zuesse | RINF | June 27, 2015
Malaysia, frustrated by the refusal of the official international investigation-team to produce any clear evidence yet of whom to blame for the downing of the MH17 Malaysian airliner over the Ukrainian civil-war zone on 17 July 2014, has finally forced the team to request the UN to investigate. They’ve forced the original four nations on the team to accept UN adjudication of any final report. This will enable a court-proceeding to make the ultimate determination of guilt (upon which judgment penalties and compensation will be assessed), and this court-determination would inevitably allow whatever party is being blamed by the five-member official investigating team, to present its own evidence in the case, so that the court will make the ultimate determination — the official investigating team will not be performing that crucial judgmental function.
Malaysia was long prohibited from even participating in this investigational team, but on 5 November 2014, a deal was finally reached with the four nations that did comprise the team — four U.S. allies: Netherlands, Australia, Belgium, and (a suspect in possibly having downed the MH17) Ukraine itself (though it had lost none of its citizens in the disaster) — so, the next day, Malaysia’s New Straits Times headlined “Malaysia to join MH17 criminal probe team,” and reported that, “The prime minister said the country had been invited to play a bigger role in the recovery and investigation of the ill-fated aircraft, believed to have been downed by a missile over eastern Ukraine on July 17.” The Malaysian report went on then, pointedly, to note: “In July, the Dutch and Ukrainian authorities agreed that the bulk of the operations would be carried out by the Netherlands, with assistance from countries whose citizens were on board the flight. Malaysia had repeatedly asked to be part of the joint investigation team, currently comprising investigators from the Netherlands, Belgium, Australia and Ukraine.” Implicitly, that phrase “Malaysia had repeatedly asked to be part of the investigating team” said that Malaysia had consistently been refused membership until 5 November 2014. In fact, even by late November of 2014, Malaysia continued to be refused membership, and I headlined on November 30th, “Malaysia Becomes Angry About Exclusion from MH17 Investigation.” That refusal was especially outrageous because, like three of the four nations that already were on the team, Malaysia had lost (44) citizens from the downing. But in addition, Malaysia had lost the plane, from it. There was no excuse for the four pro-Western nations to exclude Malaysia, and for their limiting the investigating-team to only Ukraine (a key suspect in the downing) and three of its allies. And, between November and now, Malaysia has finally become so fed-up with the team’s continuing refusal to act, and to declare the culprit, so that the rest of the team finally consented to Malaysia’s demand to transfer the investigation over to the UN.
On 24 June 2015, Agence France Press, a mouthpiece for yet another Western nation (France), bannered, “Netherlands, Malaysia push for UN tribunal for MH17 culprits,” and Thailand’s Bangkock Post headlined this same story more honestly and directly, as “Malaysia demands UN court for MH17 shootdown,” but carried unchanged the anti-Russian-slanted AFP text. The anti-Russian-slanted AFP ‘news’ report said “It remains unclear, however, whether Russia would back the creation of the special tribunal” (something which they could also have said of the U.S., for example) and included a sub-head: “- Getting Russia on board -,” which section had only this brief and anonymously sourced reference to Russia: “The diplomat [unidentified] said the countries were mindful of the need to ‘avoid a Russian veto’ [as if a Russian veto would have been likelier than an American one, etc.].” That’s propaganda for a regime, not news-reporting for a democracy — it delivers the bias (to whip up support for war), along with its sugar-coated pro-regime facts.
The present writer has already set forth the conclusive evidence that Ukraine downed this airliner, and that the reason Ukraine did it — intentionally, not at all by mistake — was in order to enable the U.S. to blame Russia for it and thus get the EU to hike economic sanctions against Russia. Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany isn’t the only nation in history that has used what the intelligence trade calls “false-flag attacks” in order to blame the nations that it itself aims to attack. The U.S. has perfected that technique.
Russia was framed for the downing of MH17, which was a U.S. job carried out by the Ukrainian Air Force. (The EU knows that the U.S. has a mega-criminal government, but they go along with it, thinking that their aristocrats will get some of the loot that’s being yanked off by America’s aristocrats. They do this though 206 of the murdered passengers were EU citizens. And Netherlands, which provided the U.S. key assistance in the buildup to overthrowing Ukraine’s democracy, lost the most people in it, which just goes to show on which side Dutch aristocrats stand — it’s not the Dutch public’s side.)
Finally, Malaysia is having some success in pulling this criminal investigation away from the clearly proven criminal (Ukraine — which now is itself a U.S. client-state) and its friends.
Anyone who believes Western ‘news’ media about international affairs is simply laying his mind out to be raped by agents of the local nation’s aristocracy. Almost everything has become propaganda now. Honest journalism is squelched, if not strangled.
That’s why, if you’ll google the headline of this news-report, none of the major mainstream and ‘alternative’ ‘news’ sites will likely come up — though it has been sent to all of them.
~
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.
Media Report on “Terrorists and Hostages” While Falsifying Iran-Contra
By Sam Husseini | June 26, 2015
Much of the media has been abuzz with President Barack Obama’s announcement that, as NBC put it: “the government will no longer threaten to criminally prosecute families of American hostages who pay ransom to get loved ones back from such groups as ISIS…”
The NBC report — and virtually every other report on this subject I’ve seen — have made no mention of when the U.S. government did pay for hostages in the Iran-Contra Affair. That’s when the Reagan administration sold arms to Iran in exchange for hostages and illegally used the funds for the Contras in Nicaragua.
An extreme example of media mis-reporting was Jake Tapper who claimed on November 18, 2014: “It’s a policy the U.S. government has never wavered on. America does not negotiate with terrorists. You have heard them say that, but now the Obama administration is ordering a full review of how it does deal with hostage situations in light of recent criticism from families of Americans brutally murdered by ISIS terrorists.”
So, I tweeted to Tapper: “never wavered on negotiating for hostages? I guess Iran-Contra didn’t happen.”
He tweeted back: “good point, we should we have couched that”
I responded: “No corrections on cable. Cause, 24-hour news.”
And indeed, no correction was forthcoming. Because it’s not like CNN has a lot of time to fill to educate, especially younger viewers about what happened in Iran-Contra.
Particularly insidious is Tapper’s notion that he should have “couched that” differently. Firstly, it avoids acknowledging that what he said was false: “It’s a policy the U.S. government has never wavered on.” That’s just a brazen lie.
But in a subtle way, his response is even worse. Tapper, it would seem, is tacitly blaming himself for not finessing the lie better. Perhaps he thinks it would be better had he said: “Administration after administration has declared they don’t negotiate with terrorists, but now, that policy is being reconsidered…” This would fulfill the goal of creating a false impression while not being so oafish as to outright lie. And in some way, that’s what most of the media did on this story (and countless others) — create the impression that the U.S. has never traded for hostages without outright lying about it.
All this helps put Iran-Contra, one of the few instances when the machinations of policy were exposed to public scrutiny to at least some degree, further into the memory hole. Indeed, what’s called the Iran-Contra Affair helped bring some light on several insidious policies, including plans to outright suspend the U.S. Constitution.
Another deceitful aspect of this story is it further solidifies the “definition” of terrorist that’s commonly employed by major media being whoever the U.S. government says is a terrorist. These hypocrisies certainly include as FAIR and others have noted not calling Dylann Storm Roof a terrorist. But outside even that discussion is if the violence of the U.S. government and its allies shouldn’t be called terrorism.
Much is also lost by not understanding the dynamics around the Iran-Contra Affair — which involved the U.S. arming both Iran and Iraq while those two countries fought a bloody war. Dahlia Wasfi in her recent piece “Battling ISIS: Iran-Iraq war redux” points out that the U.S. government is in effect doing the same thing in the Mideast now — arming warring sides. She writes: “Just as with Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, the people in the battlefields of Syria and Iraq pay the highest price. And just as was the case in the 1980s, the devastation of these countries serves U.S. and Israeli hegemony.”
State Dept: Hillary Clinton Did Not Turn Over All Emails
By Sheryl Attkisson | June 25, 2015
The State Department has informed the House Committee on Benghazi that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton failed to turn over all of her records related to Benghazi and Libya. That’s according to a statement today from Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-South Carolina.
The news contradicts claims from the Clinton camp which said all relevant emails had, in fact, been handed over.
“This confirms doubts about the completeness of Clinton’s self-selected public record and raises serious questions about her decision to erase her personal server—especially before it could be analyzed by an independent, neutral third party arbiter,” said Gowdy in a statement.
The New York Times was first to reveal that Clinton made controversial use of a private server while she was serving as secretary of state. When the unusual arrangement was discovered, Clinton said she sifted through all the emails from her private server and turned over all of the relevant ones to the State Department. She acknowledged destroying tens of thousands of other emails that she says were private in nature, and she acknowledged wiping her server clean.
Earlier this month, prior to testifying behind closed doors, Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal turned over additional email exchanges between himself and Clinton. The exchanges had not been previously produced to the Committee despite multiple requests and a subpoena. Additionally, the material was not produced as required by law in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, including one I made in 2012.
“This has implications far beyond Libya, Benghazi and our committee’s work. This conclusively shows her email arrangement with herself, which was then vetted by her own lawyers, has resulted in an incomplete public record,” said Gowdy today.
Clinton’s critics say the email exchanges with Blumenthal show that she was receiving and soliciting unvetted intelligence about Libya from Blumenthal, a source with a financial business interest in the country.
Clinton had previously stated that the messages from Blumenthal were unsolicited.
While the State Department says Clinton did not turn over all relevant emails, the agency did give the Committee a new set of Clinton emails that were responsive to subpoena but were not previously provided. The Committee did not disclose the content of the emails.
Clinton has insisted she did nothing wrong and that she complied with the letter and spirit of record retention laws. She says she previously gave the State Department all relevant emails, and that she did not destroy any materials except those which were entirely private in nature.
Does Long Term Use of Psychiatric Drugs Cause More Harm Than Good?
By Peter C Gøtzsche, Allan H Young, John Crace | British Medical Journal | May 15, 2015
We could stop almost all psychotropic drug use without deleterious effect, says Peter C Gøtzsche, questioning trial designs that underplay harms and overplay benefits. Allan H Young and John Crace disagree, arguing that evidence supports long term use.
Psychiatric drugs are responsible for the deaths of more than half a million people aged 65 and older each year in the Western world, as I show below.1 Their benefits would need to be colossal to justify this, but they are minimal.1 23 4 5 6
Summary of Article
Overstated benefits and understated deaths
The randomised trials that have been conducted do not properly evaluate the drugs’ effects. Almost all of them are biased because they included patients already taking another psychiatric drug.1 7 8 9 10 Patients, who after a short wash-out period are randomised to placebo, go “cold turkey” and often experience withdrawal symptoms. This design exaggerates the benefits of treatment and increases the harms in the placebo group, and it has driven patients taking placebo to suicide in trials in schizophrenia.8
Under-reporting of deaths in industry funded trials is another major flaw. Based on some of the randomised trials that were included in a meta-analysis of 100 000 patients by the US Food and Drug Administration, I have estimated that there are likely to have been 15 times more suicides among people taking antidepressants than reported by the FDA—for example, there were 14 suicides in 9956 patients in trials with fluoxetine and paroxetine, whereas the FDA had only five suicides in 52 960 patients, partly because the FDA only included events up to 24 hours after patients stopped taking the drug.1
For antipsychotics, I used a meta-analysis of placebo controlled trials in patients with dementia because they would be less likely to have been receiving psychiatric drugs before randomisation. The absolute death … Full article
Peter C Gøtzsche, professor, Nordic Cochrane Centre, Rigshospitalet, DK-2100 Copenhagen, Denmark, Allan H Young, professor of mood disorders, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neurosciences, King’s College London, UK, John Crace, psychiatric patient and parliamentary sketch writer, Guardian, London, UK
Revealed: Almost 3 Million Faces Stored On Met Police Database
RINF – June 24, 2015
As the result of a Freedom of Information request it has emerged that the London Met Police are compiling a database of almost 3 million people. To put this into perspective, there are currently 8 million people living in the capital.
The database, a bespoke system call the “Facial Recognition System (FRS)” began gathering images in 2009. The Met also acknowledges that they have never conducted a privacy impact assessment on the system.
It even stores pictures of those who have not been charged or found guilty of a crime, and they state:
“All custody images are kept indefinitely unless they are removed under the Early Deletion process.”
This follows on from the revelation in early 2015 that police had secretly built a massive national database that contains the faces of over 18 million people, without the approval of the Home Office or independent watchdogs.
How much did renewable electricity grow in China last year?
By Robert Wilson | Carbon Counter | June 25, 2015
Last year global renewable electricity – i.e. hydro, wind and solar – consumption grew by 193.7 TWh. This represented 55% of the total growth in global electricity consumption.
And China, where renewable electricity consumption grew by 174.9 TWh, made up a large part of the increase. A renewables revolution is clearly unfolding. Or maybe not.
Careful readers will have noted the word order in my first sentence – hydro, wind and solar. If you follow debates on energy closely you will regularly be astonished by how often commentators act as if wind and solar dominate renewable energy. The fact that bioenergy has grown by more in this century than wind and solar combined is not something you will ever be told.
The same is true for hydro-electricity.
A representative image of renewables in China is not this:
or this:
Instead it is this:
Big hydroelectric dams, such as The Three Gorges shown above, dominate Chinese renewables. In fact, they dominate China’s total low carbon energy supply.
China gets five times more electricity from its hydroelectric plants than from wind and solar combined. Total hydroelectricity supply in 2014 was 1064.3 TWh, while wind was 158.4 TWh and solar was 29.1 TWh.
Most of these hydroelectric plants have been built this century. Total hydroelectric generation in 2000 was 222.4 TWh, one fifth of what it is today.
Last year China’s hydroelectric output increased by 144 TWh, but wind and solar increased by 30.8 TWh. Put together this made up roughly three quarters of the rise in China’s electricity generation.
So are renewables or, more accurately big hydro, taking over electricity generation?
Probably not.
First, growth in China’s electricity generation is slowing because its economy is having problems. In the decade before last year China’s electricity generation increased by an average of 350 TWh each year. If China’s economy returns to the growth levels the Communist Party believes is necessary to stop the risks of another Tiananmen, we aren’t likely to see such low growth continuing.
Second, hydroelectric output was artificially high due to the weather.
Hydroelectric dams operate on a simple principle. Flowing water is converted into electricity. More flowing water equals more power. So, roughly speaking, if it is wetter dams will produce more electricity.
And this is what happened in China last year. Official data shows that the capacity factors of China’s hydroelectric dams increased by 8.7% last year. In other words, had the climatic conditions been the same as in 2013, China’s hydroelectric output would only have grown by 48 TWh, and not 144 TWh.
The increase in China’s total renewable electricity generation was therefore double what it would have been had it not been for the wetter conditions.
So, not only does hydroelectricity dominate Chinese renewables, but we have to be incredibly careful interpreting year to year changes in production caused by rain conditions.
The same holds at the global level. If China’s hydroelectric output had stayed still last year, global hydroelectric output would have actually fallen by 67 TWh last year. Again, this was due to climatic conditions, not a decrease in hydroelectric capacity.
This fall in non-China hydroelectricity was greater than the increase in global generation from either wind or solar. Clearly lumping hydro, wind, and solar generation into one figure can lead to erroneous conclusions.
Note on data
Generation data taken from the latest BP Statistical Review of World Energy.
Not OK, Google! Covert installations of ‘eavesdropping tool’ raise alarm
RT | June 24, 2015
Open source developers and privacy campaigners are raising concerns over the automatic installation of a shady “eavesdropping tool” designed to enable ‘OK Google’ functionality but potentially capable of snooping on any conversation near the computer.
When one installs an open source Chromium browser, as it turns out, it “downloads something” followed by a status report that says “Microphone: Yes” and “Audio Capture Allowed: Yes,” according to an article by Rick Falkvinge, Swedish Pirate Party founder, published on the website Privacy Online News.
While the Chromium, the open source basis for Google’s browser, at least shows the code and allows user to notice it and turn it off, the same installation is included by default in the most popular browser Chrome, used by over 300 million people.
The code was designed to enable the new “OK, Google” hot word detection, which lets the computer do things like search or create reminders in response to human voice. Yet, some users are worried that the service could be activated without their permission, eventually sending recorded data to Google. The worried users describe the Chrome Hotword Shared Module as an audio-snooping “black box”, with only the corporation that provided it fully aware of what the injected pre-compiled code is capable of.
“Without consent, Google’s code had downloaded a black box of code that – according to itself – had turned on the microphone and was actively listening to your room,” wrote Falkvinge.
“Which means that your computer had been stealth configured to send what was being said in your room to somebody else, to a private company in another country, without your consent or knowledge, an audio transmission triggered by … an unknown and unverifiable set of conditions.”
“We don’t know and can’t know what this black box does,” he added.
The users’ complaints were received with the Google developers’ words that: “While we do download the hot word module on startup, we do not activate it unless you opt in to hot wording.” They also underlined the fact that “Chromium is not a Google product. We do not directly distribute it, or make any guarantees with respect to compliance with various open source policies”.
However, according to Falkvinge, the default install will still “wiretap your room without your consent, unless you opt out, and more importantly, know that you need to opt out, which is nowhere a reasonable requirement.”
While the fact that the voice recognition module is always listening does not mean it transmits all the data to Google’s servers, Falkvinge argues that no one knows what other keywords could trigger the feature on.
The only reliable measure against mass surveillance, according to the first Pirate Party leader, is a manual disabling of the microphone and camera on the computer with a hardware switch.
The latest voice search functions have raised the concerns of privacy advocates, as their use presupposes the sending of voice recordings to company servers, as well as the controversy over the continuous recognition to catch the moment a user says the ‘hot’ phrase.
Former Colombian Commander Investigated for Extrajudicial Killings
teleSUR | June 23, 2015
The former commander of Colombia’s National Army, General Mario Montoya, was called in for interrogation on Tuesday over his alleged role in thousands of extrajudicial killings that were carried by the country’s security forces to be presented as guerrilla fighters killed during clashes.
His interrogation is set for July 16. The scandal, dubbed False Positives, began in 2008 and is still being investigated by the Colombian authorities. But already more than 400 army commanders, 800 unit commanders and almost 3,000 soldiers have been formally indicted.
According to the Prosecutor’s Office, Montoya would be questioned given that the killings occurred under his authority, and could be charged for failing to effectively overview the actions that led to the killings. Another three retired commanders were also called for questioning by the Prosecutor’s Office.
Montoya has still pending charges, regarding his links to the now defunct paramilitary group Colombian Self-Defense Force (AUC), a group that killed tens of thousands of civilians throughout its existence. The false positives became such a common practice during the administration of former President Alvaro Uribe that by 2007, more than 40 percent of registered combat kills were in fact murdered civilians dressed in fatigue.
In exchange for the killings, generals were awarded vacations and cash prices. Uribe vowed to destroy the FARC guerrilla using military strength, instead of trying to negotiate with the group through peace talks as other presidents had done in the past.
It is estimated that around 3,000 civilians were extra-judicially murdered by the Colombian army.
Venezuela Rejects “Media Manipulation” of Brazilian Senator Visit
Ministry of Popular Power for Foreign Relations, Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela | June 19, 2015
Communique
Caracas – The government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela publicly rejects the attempts made by the national and international rightwing to pull a political media manoeuvre based on lies propagated about the visit of a group of Brazilian senators who arrived in the country with the singular aim of destabilising Venezuelan democracy and of generating confusion and conflict between brother countries.
The first substantial lie reported in the media was to falsely claim that the Venezuelan government had denied airplane landing permission to this committee, when it had not, in fact, received any such request.
The second substantial lie was to blame the national government for blocking the main road which connects the (national) airport to the country’s capital city. In reality, a truck containing flammable material had overturned which prevented free transit on this freeway. This even delayed the transfer of an high security prisoner extradited by the Colombian government for his responsibility in the murder of a journalist during the terrorist acts which took place in the barricades last year.
The third substantial lie was to state that the security and physical wellbeing of these rightwing Brazilian senators was compromised. There is audiovisual and photographic material which shows the senators interacting with political activists in relation to the upcoming elections that will take place this year in Venezuela. In the same way, the national government assigned a special security dispatch made up of more than 30 officials on motorbikes, patrols and security bodies who accompanied this group the whole time. Likewise, it also coordinated with the embassy of the Federal Republic of Brazil.
It is notable that figures of the extreme rightwing, who took part in state coups in Venezuela, participated in the entire agenda of these representatives of the international opposition, who are the authors and promoters of these fairytales in the media and which attempt to bring the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela’s long recognised democratic tradition into disrepute.
The Venezuelan Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela reiterates its friendly and co-operative ties based on mutual respect, non-interference in internal State matters and the self-determination of the people with its sister federal Republic of Brazil. As well as its unshakable commitment to maintaining these ties in spite of any divisive scheme against our countries.
Translated by Venezuelanalysis
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