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https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-new-rules-of-the-game/
Chris Hedges
The quadrennial political game of least worst, or how to scare the public to vote for presidential candidates who serve corporate power, comes this season with a new twist. Donald Trump, if he faces Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar or Michael Bloomberg, will continue to be an amalgamation of Adolf Hitler, Al Capone and the Antichrist. But should Bernie Sanders manage to evade the snares, traps and minefields laid for him by the Democratic Party elites, should he miraculously become the party’s nominee, the game of least worst will radically change. All the terrifying demons that inhabit Trump will be instantly exorcised. But unlike in the biblical story of Jesus driving the demons into a herd of swine, they will be driven into the senator from Vermont. Trump will become the establishment’s reluctant least worse option. Sanders will become a leper. The Democratic and Republican party elites, joining forces as they did in the 1972 presidential election, will do to Sanders what they did to George McGovern, who lost in 49 of the 50 states.
“If Dems go on to nominate Sanders, the Russians will have to reconsider who to work for to best screw up the US. Sanders is just as polarizing as Trump AND he’ll ruin our economy and doesn’t care about our military,” former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein (net worth $1.1 billion) tweeted. “If I’m Russian, I go with Sanders this time around.”
“Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney, and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it,” Hillary Clinton says of Sanders in a forthcoming television documentary.Blankfein, who calls for cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and who headed Goldman Sachs when it paid Hillary Clinton $675,000 for three speaking engagements in 2013, laid out the stance of the billionaire class that controls the Democratic Party. The New York Times reported that Mike Novogratz, “a Goldman Sachs alumnus who runs the merchant bank Galaxy Digital, said Mr. Sanders’s oppositional nature had prompted ‘too many friends’ to say they would vote against him in November. ‘And they hate Trump,’ he said.”
The courtiers in the press, pathetically attempting to spin Sanders’ New Hampshire win into a victory for the corporate-endorsed alternatives, are part of the firing squad. “Running Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity” read the headline in a piece by Jonathan Chait in New York magazine. “No party nomination, with the possible exception of Barry Goldwater in 1964, has put forth a presidential nominee with the level of downside risk exposure as a Sanders-led ticket would bring. To nominate Sanders would be insane,” he wrote. David Frum — now a darling of the Democratic elites, like many other Republicans who morphed from George W. Bush supporters into critics of Trump — announced in The Atlantic that Bernie can’t win. “Sanders is a Marxist of the old school of dialectical materialism, from the land that time forgot,” Frum wrote. “Class relations are foundational; everything else is epiphenomenal.”
Jennifer Rubin declared in The Washington Post that a Sanders nomination would be a “disaster for the Democrats.” “Sanders’s campaign, like all primary campaigns, is a preview of the general-election race and, if elected, the administration he would lead,” Rubin wrote. “A nominee who insists on personally attacking all doubters and the media might be a model for the Republican Party, but Democrats are not going to win with their own Donald Trump, especially one who has burned bridges and stirred resentment in his own party.”
Thomas Friedman, in a column supporting Bloomberg, the newest savior in the protean Democratic firmament, wrote of Sanders: “On which planet in the Milky Way galaxy is an avowed ‘socialist’ — who wants to take away the private health care coverage of some 150 million Americans and replace it with a gigantic, untested Medicare-for-All program, which he’d also extend to illegal immigrants — going to defeat the Trump machine this year? It will cast Sanders as Che Guevara — and it won’t even be that hard.”
MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews, descending to the Red baiting employed by Blankfein, said that “if Castro and the Reds had won the Cold War there would have been executions in Central Park and I might have been one of the ones getting executed. And certain other people would be there cheering, okay?”
Despite the hyperventilating by corporate shills such as Matthews and Friedman, Sanders’ democratic socialism is essentially that of a New Deal Democrat. His political views would be part of the mainstream in France or Germany, where democratic socialism is an accepted part of the political landscape and is routinely challenged as too accommodationist by communists and radical socialists. Sanders calls for an end to our foreign wars, a reduction of the military budget, for “Medicare for All,” abolishing the death penalty, eliminating mandatory minimum sentences and private prisons, a return of Glass-Steagall, raising taxes on the wealthy, increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour, canceling student debt, eliminating the Electoral College, banning fracking and breaking up agribusinesses. This does not qualify as a revolutionary agenda.
Sanders, unlike many more radical socialists, does not propose nationalizing the banks and the fossil fuel and arms industries. He does not call for the criminal prosecution of the financial elites who trashed the global economy or the politicians and generals who lied to launch preemptive wars, defined under international law as criminal wars of aggression, which have devastated much of the Middle East, resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of refugees and displaced people, and cost the nation between $5 trillion and $7 trillion. He does not call for worker ownership of factories and businesses. He does not promise to halt the government’s wholesale surveillance of the public. He does not intend to punish corporations that have moved manufacturing overseas. Most importantly, he believes, as I do not, that the political system, including the Democratic Party, can be reformed from within. He does not support sustained mass civil disobedience to bring the system down, the only hope we have of halting the climate emergency that threatens to doom the human race. On the political spectrum, he is, at best, an enlightened moderate. The vicious attacks against him by the elites are an indication of how anemic and withered our politics have become.
The Democrats have, once again, offered us their preselected corporate candidates. We can vote for a candidate who serves oligarchic power, albeit with more decorum than Trump, or we can see Trump shoved down our throats. That is the choice. It exposes the least worst option as a con, a mechanism used repeatedly to buttress corporate power. The elites know they would be safe in the hands of a Hillary Clinton, a Barack Obama or a John Kerry, but not a Bernie Sanders — which is a credit to Sanders.
The surrender to the “least worst” mantra in presidential election after presidential election has neutered the demands of labor, along with those organizations and groups fighting poverty, mass incarceration and police violence. The civil rights, women’s rights, environment justice and consumer rights movements, forced to back Democrats whose rhetoric is palatable but whose actions are inimical to their causes, get tossed overboard. Political leverage, in election after election, is surrendered without a fight. We are all made to kneel before the altar of the least worst. We get nothing in return. The least worst option has proved to be a recipe for steady decay.
The Democrats, especially after Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential run, have erected numerous obstacles to block progressives inside and outside the party. They make ballot access difficult or impossible for people of color. They lock third-party candidates and often progressives in the Democratic Party, such as Dennis Kucinich, out of the presidential campaign debates. They turn campaigns into two-year-long spectacles that cost billions of dollars. They use superdelegates to fix the nominating process. They employ scare tactics to co-op those who should be the natural allies of third parties and progressive political movements.
The repeated cowardice of the liberal class, which backs a Democratic Party that in Europe would be considered a far-right party, saw it squander its credibility. Its rhetoric proved empty. Its moral posturing was a farce. It fought for nothing. In assault after assault on the working class it was complicit. If liberals — supposedly backers of parties and institutions that defend the interests of the working class — had abandoned the Democratic Party after President Bill Clinton pushed through the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, Trump would not be in the White House. Why didn’t liberals walk out of the Democratic Party when Clinton and the Democratic Party leadership, including Biden, passed NAFTA? Why didn’t they walk out when the Clinton administration gutted welfare? Why didn’t they walk out when Clinton pushed through the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act, which abolished the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, designed to prevent the kind of banking crisis that trashed the global economy in 2008? Why didn’t they walk out when year after year the Democratic Party funded and expanded our endless wars? Why didn’t they walk out when the Democrats agreed to undercut due process and habeas corpus? Why didn’t they walk out when the Democrats helped approve the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of American citizens? Why didn’t the liberals walk out when the party leadership refused to impose sanctions on Israel for its war crimes, enact serious environmental and health care reform or regulate Wall Street? At what point will liberals say “Enough”? At what point will they fight back?
By surrendering every election cycle to the least worst, liberals proved they have no breaking point. There never has been a line in the sand. They have stood for nothing.
Bernie Sanders arose in 2016 as a political force because he, like Trump, acknowledged the bleak reality imposed on working men and women by the billionaire class. This reality, a reality ignored by the ruling elites, was spoken out loud. The elites were held accountable. The Democratic elites scrambled, successfully, to deny Sanders the 2016 nomination. The Republican elites squabbled among themselves and failed to prevent Trump from becoming the party nominee.
The 2016 chessboard has reappeared, but this time in the Democratic Party primary. The Democratic hierarchy, as horrified by Sanders as the established Republican elites were by Trump, is flailing about trying to find a political savior to defeat the Red menace. Their ineptitude, Sanders’ primary asset, was displayed when they mangled the Iowa primary. They, like the Republican elites in 2016, are woefully disconnected from their constituency, attempting to persuade a public they betrayed and no longer understand.
Joe Biden, long a stooge of corporate America, for example, is frantically attempting to paint himself as a champion of poor people of color after his defeats in the largely white states of Iowa and New Hampshire. The onetime vice president, however, was one of the driving forces behind the strategy to take back the “law and order” issue from the Republicans. He and Bill Clinton orchestrated the doubling of the prison population, the militarization of the police, and mandatory minimum sentences along with juvenile boot camps, drug courts, policing in schools and the acceleration of the deportation of “criminal aliens.” During Biden’s leadership in the Senate — where he served from 1973 until 2009, when he became Obama’s vice president — the Congress approved 92 death-eligible crimes in an almost identical period. These Democratic “law and order” policies landed like hammer blows on poor communities of color, inflicting untold misery and egregious acts of injustice. And now Biden, who pounded the nails into those he crucified, is desperately trying to present himself to his victims as their savior. It is a sad metaphor for the bankruptcy of the Democratic Party.
Biden, however, is no longer the Democratic ruling elite’s flavor of the month. This mantle has been passed to Bloomberg, once the Republican mayor of New York and a Rudy Giuliani ally whose indiscriminate stop-and-frisk harassment of, mainly, African Americans and Latinos was ruled unconstitutional. Bloomberg, whose net worth is estimated at $61.8 billion, said he is ready to spend $1 billion of his own money on his campaign, what The New York Times has called “a waterfall of cash.” He has bought the loyalty of much of the ruling Democratic establishment. He spent, for example, $110 million in 2018 alone to support 24 candidates now in Congress. He is saturating the airwaves with commercials. He is lavishing high salaries and perks on his huge campaign staff. Sanders, or anyone else defying the billionaire class, cannot compete financially. The last desperate gasp of the Democratic Party establishment is to buy the election. Bloomberg is ready to oblige. After all, Bloomberg’s money worked miracles in amassing allies to overturn New York City term limits so he could serve a third term as mayor.
But will it work? Will the Democratic elites and Bloomberg be able to smother the Democratic primaries with so much money that Sanders is shut out?
“As with Republicans in 2016, the defining characteristic of the 2020 Democratic race has been the unwieldy size of the field,” Matt Taibbi writes. “The same identity crisis lurking under the Republican clown car afflicted this year’s Democratic contest: Because neither donors nor party leaders nor pundits could figure out what they should be pretending to stand for, they couldn’t coalesce around any one candidate. These constant mercurial shifts in ‘momentum’ — it’s Pete! It’s Amy! Paging Mike Bloomberg! — have eroded the kingmaking power of the Democratic leadership. They are eating the party from within, and seem poised to continue doing so.”
If Sanders gets the nomination it will be due to the Keystone Cops ineptitude of the Democratic leadership, one that as Taibbi points out replicates the ineptitude of the Republican elites in 2016. But this time there will be a crucial difference. The ruling elites, once divided between Trump and Hillary Clinton, with most of the elites preferring Clinton, will be united against Sanders. They will back Trump as the least worst. The corporate media will turn its venom, now directed at Trump, toward Sanders. The Democratic Party’s mask will come off. It will be open warfare between them and us.
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The corporate media and the billionaire class have escalated their propaganda against Bernie and our movement.
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As our vision of a just government that represents working people continues to gain momentum, their attacks will only become more vicious.
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https://thegrayzone.com/2020/02/12/venezuelan-coup-ricardo-hausmann-idb-resignation-harvard/#more-20740
VENEZUELAFebruary 12, 2020
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Caught in a conflict of interest with his employer at Harvard, Ricardo Hausmann publicly resigned his job as Guaido’s Inter-American Bank Representative last September. But he may have never left the bank. Was his resignation merely a ruse?
By Anya Parampil
Lee este artículo en español aquí.
The Grayzone has confirmed that nearly five months since Ricardo Hausmann announced his resignation from his position as Venezuela’s ambassador to the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), he remains in the job.
Hausmann is a top advisor to Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaidó and Harvard University’s Rafik Hariri Professor of the Practice of International Political Economy. He appears to have staged a faux resignation from the IDB in order to maintain his employment at Harvard.
Hausmann is the most senior member of Guaidó’s shadow administration, with a record of several high-level posts in Venezuela’s government in the years before Hugo Chavez’s election as president in 1997. Hausmann has lived in the United States since 1994, when he took a job as IDB’s first “Chief Economist,” before moving to Boston and joining Harvard in 2000. In March of 2019, Hausmann seized the opportunity to return to the IDB as Guaidó’s representative at the bank.
Curiously, Hausmann never resigned nor took a leave of absence from his Harvard position when he went to work for Guaidó. Pressed by this reporter in August of 2019 as to how he could occupy both a full-time government position and academic job without comprising his independence, Hausmann claimed he served “no government function” in his role at IDB.
Harvard seemed to disagree. Weeks after this reporter took similar questions regarding the professor’s apparent conflicts of interest to the university’s press office, Hausmann announced his resignation from the IDB post on September 26, 2019. His departure from the Guaidó shadow regime suggested the university had determined that his government gig violated Harvard’s ethics policy.
Despite his September resignation, Hausmann is still considered Venezuela’s governor by the IDB. The bank confirmed his position in an email to The Grayzone on February 6.
“I would be fired if I did something like this”
Matías Vernengo is a professor of economics who was required to take a leave of absence from the University of Utah when he went to work as a senior research manager at Argentina’s Central Bank in 2012.
“I would be fired if I did something like this at Bucknell,” Vernengo said of Hausmann’s double dealing.
Vernengo, who teaches today at Bucknell University, described Harvard’s ethics code as “purposefully vague.” He hypothesized that Hausmann’s case likely fell in a “gray area” for the university. Still, he knew of no case in which a single person worked a full-time academic job while occupying a supposedly full-time government position.
“There are obvious conflicts of interest, despite the fact that you can’t be in two places at the same time,” Vernengo explained. “A position at the IDB would be a full-time position, he would have been in DC all the time, and hence, there’s no reason he should be tied to Harvard. And he’s acting for a foreign government.”
Even as he acknowledged that “universities in the U.S. have always given cover to right-wing technocrats in Latin America and elsewhere,” Vernengo said he was “surprised that Harvard forced [Hausmann] to resign” at first. Harvard must have concluded the professor was violating its ethics policy, he surmised.
In a WhatsApp tantrum he threw at this reporter in September 2019, Hausman insisted that he served no real government role in his position at IDB, essentially conceding that the Guaidó government existed in name only.
“I think that because you caught them, they had to say, ‘Well, this isn’t a real government,’” Vernengo posited. “Hausmann’s resignation was a cover up for getting caught.”
Hausmann made it clear in his resignation letter that his academic commitments drove his decision to step down from the IDB. According to the professor, his newfound government responsibilities were “incompatible with [his] current obligations at Harvard University.”
Five months after his resignation, however, Hausmann is back as Venezuela’s representative at the IDB. Yet there is no evidence that his stated “obligations at Harvard University” have changed since he publicly left the job.
“He’s a hired gun, that’s what he is. He’s the Pinkerton of the intellectual world,” Vernengo said of Hausmann.
The IDB violates its founding charter for Hausmann
When Hausmann appeared at the World Economic Forum in Davos this January, he was described by attendees as an official representative of Juan Guaidó’s shadow regime. While Guaidó’s own appearance at the annual financial gathering was regarded as a failure, Hausmann leveraged the opportunity to network with foreign government officials.
“During the 2020 World Economic Forum, I met with Ricardo Hausmann, President Juan Guaidó’s representative at the Inter-American Development Bank,” Ecuador’s Finance Minister, Richard Martínez, tweeted in Spanish on January 23.
Hausmann traveled to Davos alongside IDB President Luis Alberto Moreno. Moreno, a Colombian national who previously served as the country’s economy minister and ambassador to the United States, had been an eager supporter of the Trump Administration’s coup attempt in Venezuela from day one.
“The IDB expresses its willingness to work with the Acting President of Venezuela, Juan Guaidó, to ensure the continuity of our support for the development of the Venezuelan people,” Moreno tweeted on January 23, 2019, mere hours after Guaidó swore himself in as self-declared president.
The tweet appeared to violate IDB’s founding charter, which stipulates, “the Bank, its officers and employees shall not interfere in the political affairs of any member.”
But the core principles of the institution he represented were of secondary concern for Moreno.
During an event at the Washington DC think tank, the Atlantic Council, the IDB’s president recalled the heady moments when he first learned of Guaidó’s self-declared presidency. It was at Davos again, but this time in April 2019. At first, he asked his legal team to prepare an opinion regarding the news. But then, “after the second scotch and reading two pages of the legal concept,” Moreno recalled, “I said ‘baloney, I mean Venezuela needs a change… so that’s why I sent the tweet.”
After just a quick tipple, the IDB’s leader was all but ready to toss the rules out the window and let Hausmann through the bank’s front door.
A third conflict of interest for the double dealer
The Grayzone contacted the IDB on January 27 to inquire about Hausmann’s status at the bank, where he is still listed as Guaidó’s ambassador on its website.
Was the professor still an official representative of Guaidó’s shadow government? If so, why did he resign from the bank five months before?
The Grayzone provided the IDB with a September 27, 2019 Associated Press dispatch reporting Hausmann’s resignation.
After a week of silence, IDB’s Public Information Center replied: “Mr. Ricardo Hausmann is currently the Governor for Venezuela.”
Hours before the IDB informed The Grayzone that Hausmann still represented Venezuela at the bank, the official Twitter account of El Salvador’s presidential office announced that the country’s president, Nayib Bukele, had also tapped Hausmann as a top advisor.
Casa Presidencial
✔@PresidenciaSV
· Feb 4, 2020
Replying to @PresidenciaSV
"En estos esfuerzos de ver hacia dónde queremos llevar a El Salvador, hemos contactado al Profesor @ricardo_hausman de @HarvardGrwthLab, para convertir a El Salvador en un país milagro, que seamos un ejemplo de cómo se puede transformar una nación".
Casa Presidencial
✔@PresidenciaSV
El Presidente @nayibbukele ha pedido al Profesor @ricardo_hausman que conforme un equipo multidisciplinario de profesionales. Ha llegado el momento de aprovechar los talentos que hay fuera de nuestras fronteras y que están dispuestos a apoyarnos.
1,075
7:17 PM - Feb 4, 2020
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This meant that Hausmann, a full-time professor at Harvard, was acting as an official representative of the Venezuelan government while at the same time advising El Salvador’s president.
As The Grayzone previously reported, the professor also operates a private consulting firm, Ricardo Hausmann Consulting, which has allowed him to conceal payments he has received from other corporate and government clients over the years.
“You can’t be on three sides of this thing,” explained Vernengo. “The government side with Venezuela; on the consulting side with corporations; and other governments that might have an interest in Venezuelan business – while also doing research at Harvard.”
To elucidate Hausmann’s elaborate conflict of interest, Vernengo pointed to the example of Columbia University Professor Frederic Mishkin, who infamously co-authored a report titled “Financial Stability in Iceland” in 2006.
Less than a year before Iceland’s economy collapsed, helping set off the country’s worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, Professor Mishkin predicted “the likelihood of a financial meltdown is very low.” It turned out that Iceland’s Chamber of Commerce had paid Professor Mishkin $124,000 for the report.
After the collapse, Mishkin changed the name of the paper to ‘Financial Instability in Iceland’ on his CV and failed to disclose the payment he received from Iceland’s government.
Stunningly, despite what seemed to have been an obvious act of academic corruption, Professor Mishkin kept his job at Columbia University.
Hausmann has not responded to questions from The Grayzone about whether Harvard demanded he resign from the IDB in September. Because Harvard has not responded to this reporter’s queries, it is also unclear if the university knows he returned as Venezuela’s representative at the bank.
The logic behind Hausmann’s unusual double duty as a Venezuelan shadow government official and Salvadoran presidential advisor is another source of mystery.
“Economics is a terrible profession; 99.9 percent of economists are fine with the kind of thing [Hausmann is doing],” Vernengo said of his colleagues. “They think it’s okay to play both sides… We’re hired guns. Most economists are hired guns and the ethics standards are very low.”
According to the economist, Hausmann’s apparently unethical conduct is not just symptomatic of his field, but of the corruption of academic institutions as a whole.
“Universities are complicit in this, particularly the prestigious ones,” Vernengo remarked. “A guy like Hausmann lends authority to a coup in Venezuela. It’s the same role that [neoliberal University of Chicago] economist Milton Friedman played in the Pinochet coup” in 1973.
“Harvard probably doesn’t care, it’s part of the problem,” he concluded. “Universities have, for a long while, played provided support for this kind of game. And Hausmann is not only getting the prestige of being at Harvard, he is also getting the compensation that comes from being there.”
While Guaidó’s impostor government is an increasing target of international mockery, Hausmann is laughing all the way to the bank.
Anya Parampil
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/02/11/new-leaks-shatter-opcws-attacks-douma-whistleblowers/#more-20690
Facing accusations that it issued a doctored report alleging a chemical attack in Syria, the OPCW has released an inquiry attacking two whistleblowers as rogue actors. Leaked documents obtained by The Grayzone reveal serious distortions in the OPCW inquiry as well as a campaign of intimidation against internal dissenters.
By Aaron Maté
For the past year, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has been roiled by allegations that it manipulated an investigation to falsely accuse the Syrian government of a chemical weapons attack. An OPCW report released in March 2019 lent credence to claims by Islamist militants and Western governments that the Syrian military killed around 40 civilians with toxic gas in the city of Douma in April 2018. The accusation against Damascus led to US-led military strikes on Syrian government sites that same month.
But leaked internal documents published by Wikileaks show that OPCW inspectors who deployed to Douma rejected the official story, and complained that higher-level officials excluded them from the post-mission process, distorted key evidence, and ignored their findings.
After months of virtual silence, the OPCW has responded with an internal inquiry that lambasts two veteran officials who raised internal objections, attacking their credibility and qualifications. The OPCW’s self-described “independent investigation” describes the pair as rogue, low-level actors who played minor roles in the Douma mission and lacked access to crucial evidence. In a briefing to member states, OPCW Director General Fernando Arias dismissed them as disgruntled ex-employees. The two “are not whistle-blowers,” Arias said. “They are individuals who could not accept that their views were not backed by evidence.”
But a leaked document calls Arias’ assertions into serious question. Ian Henderson, one of the two inspectors, recently addressed a special session of the United Nations Security Council with his concerns about the Douma mission. Henderson submitted a supplemental written account that was distributed among participating UN member states and obtained by The Grayzone. It offers the most extensive and detailed account of the internal dispute over the OPCW’s Douma investigation to date.
The full leaked testimony can be read here (PDF).
Henderson provides a thorough timeline that bolsters suspicions that the OPCW leadership covered up a staged deception in Douma. Combined with the available record – which includes other OPCW leaks, as well as Arias’ and the OPCW’s own statements – Henderson’s account firmly demonstrates that he and a fellow dissenting colleague occupied veteran leadership roles inside the organization, including during the Douma fact-finding mission.
Henderson also exposes key gaps in the OPCW’s inquiry, which fails to specifically address the revelations that critical evidence was kept out of the OPCW’s published reports; that key findings were manipulated – and that all of this occurred under sustained US government pressure.
In addition to Henderson’s complete testimony, The Grayzone has obtained a chilling email from a third former OPCW official. The former official, who worked in a senior role, blamed external pressure and potential threats to their family for their failure to speak out about the corruption of the Douma investigation.
This official was not among the pair of dissenting inspectors targeted by the inquiry. The email corroborates complaints by Henderson and his colleague about senior management’s suppression of evidence collected by the team that deployed to Syria.
“I fear those behind the crimes that have been perpetrated in the name of ‘humanity and democracy'”
In his briefing about the investigation of the inspectors, Arias, the OPCW Director-General, described the pair as stubborn actors “who took matters into their own hands and committed a breach of their obligations to the Organization.” He characterized their behavior as “egregious.”
But leaked documents and testimony point to an OPCW leadership that has committed egregious acts of its own, including intimidating internal dissenters.
In an email obtained by The Grayzone, a former senior OPCW official described their tenure at the OPCW as “the most stressful and unpleasant ones of [their] life,” and expressed deep shame about the state of the organization they departed in disgust.
“I fear those behind the crimes that have been perpetrated in the name of ‘humanity and democracy,’” the official confided, “they will not hesitate to do harm to me and my family, they have done worse, many times, even in the UK… I don’t want to expose my self and my family to their violence and revenge, I don’t want to live in fear of crossing the street!”
The former OPCW senior official went on to denounce the removal of members of the original fact-finding team to Syria “from the decision making process and management of the most critical operations…” This tracks with complaints expressed in leaked OPCW documents that superiors who had not been a part of the investigation in Douma marginalized those who had.
The atmosphere of intimidation was confirmed by a second member of the OPCW’s original fact-finding mission to Douma. The whistleblower, identified by the pseudonym “Alex,” spoke to the journalist Jonathan Steele and to a panel convened by the Courage Foundation in October 2019. Alex revealed that a delegation of three US officials visited the OPCW at The Hague on July 5th, 2018. They implored the dissenting inspectors to accept the view that the Syrian government carried out a gas attack in Douma and chided them for failing to reach that conclusion. According to Steele, Alex and the other inspectors saw the meeting as “unacceptable pressure.” In his statement to the UN Security Council, Henderson confirmed that he attended the meeting.
The US intervention at the OPCW could possibly violate the chemical weapons convention, which forbids state parties from attempting to influence investigations. It would not be the first time Washington has attempted to bully the OPCW into submission. During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2002, the George W. Bush administration engineered the ouster of the OPCW’s First Director-General, Jose Bustani. The Bush administration was concerned that Bustani’s negotiations with Iraq about allowing international inspectors could undermine its plans for war.
Bustani later revealed that John Bolton, then an under secretary of state, had personally threatened him and his family with violent retaliation. The US pressure on the OPCW over Douma also took place under Bolton’s watch. When the US bombed Syria in April 2018 and pressured OPCW officials just three months later, Bolton was in the midst of his first months as President Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor. (Bustani, meanwhile, was among a group of panelists who heard direct testimony from Alex at a gathering convened by the Courage Foundation in October 2019.)
OPCW’s inconsistent story on “Inspector A”
The OPCW’s internal inquiry goes to great lengths to denigrate and discredit the two former staffers that challenged the official story on Douma. It refers to its two targets as “Inspector A” and “Inspector B.” The latter’s identity has not been publicly confirmed. “A” is Ian Henderson, a South African engineer and veteran OPCW official with extensive military experience.
Henderson’s written testimony to the United Nations, obtained by The Grayzone, undercuts the negative portrayal of his former managers, and offers a window into the pressure campaign and cover-up that he and his colleagues faced.
A suppressed internal study by Henderson first brought the OPCW scandal to public attention. In May 2019, an engineering assessment bearing Henderson’s name was leaked to a group of British academics, the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media. The document is a detailed engineering analysis of two gas cylinders found at the scene of the alleged attacks in Douma. Whereas the OPCW’s final March 2019 report concluded that the cylinders were likely dropped from the air, Henderson found that there is “a higher probability that both cylinders were manually placed… rather than being delivered from aircraft.” The OPCW’s final report made no mention of this conclusion.
The inference of Henderson’s study is that the attack was staged by the armed opposition. At the time, Douma was under the control of the extremist Saudi-backed militia, Jaysh Al-Islam, and was on the brink of being re-taken by Syrian government forces.
From a political and military standpoint, a chemical weapons attack was the most self-destructive and unnecessary action the Syrian military could possibly take. From the standpoint of a foreign-backed militia on the verge of defeat, however, staging a chemical attack was a desperate Hail Mary operation that offered the hope of US military invention in accordance with Washington’s “red line” policy. The suspected gambit by Jaysh Al-Islam appeared to have paid off when the Trump administration accepted its claims that a chemical attack had killed dozens of civilians in Douma, and initiated cruise missile strikes in response. Yet the US-led attacks failed to prevent the Syrian government from retaking Douma and the whole of eastern Damascus. Within days, Western reporters had entered the area and were able to access local eyewitnesses who claimed that the chemical attack was a staged deception.
Henderson was among the first OPCW staffers to visit the site of the alleged attack in Douma. However, the OPCW inquiry dismissed Henderson’s role in the Douma probe, characterizing his engineering study as a personal, rogue operation. Henderson, the inquiry said, “was not a member of the FFM [Fact Finding Mission]” that deployed to Douma, and only “played a minor supporting role.”
There is ample evidence that contradicts this characterization. In his written UN testimony, Henderson revealed that he served in five Douma deployments as part of the FFM. This includes three instances as a sub-team leader for critical operations: visiting a suspected chemical weapons production site in Douma; conducting interviews and taking chemical samples at the Douma hospital; taking detailed measurements at one of the sites; and inspecting, itemizing, and securing the two cylinders that were removed from the sites of the alleged gas attack. The notion that he “was not a member” of the mission that he played such an active role in strains credulity.
A leaked email shows that at least one of Henderson’s colleagues protested a previous instance in which the OPCW leadership attempted to minimize his role. The “falsehood… that Ian did not form part of the Douma FFM team,” the colleague complained, was “patently untrue” and “pivotal in discrediting him and his work.”
The inquiry also falsely insinuated that Henderson was a low-level official. While acknowledging that Henderson served as an OPCW team leader during his first tenure with the OPCW from 1997 to 2005, the inquiry said that he was “rehired at a lower level” when he returned in 2016, and remained there until his departure in May 2019. Yet the OPCW’s own documents from that latter period showed that Henderson was described as an “OPCW Inspection Team Leader” as late as February 2018, just two months before his deployment to Douma as part of the OPCW’s Fact-Finding Mission (FFM). According to his UN testimony, Henderson served as an inspection team leader for multiple inspections of Syrian laboratory facilities at Barzaeh and Jamrayah in November 2017 and in November 2018, after the US bombed Barzeh on dubious grounds.
After casting doubt on Henderson’s status within the organization, the OPCW inquiry dismissed his engineering report as “a personal document created with incomplete information and without authorisation.” Henderson, the investigators said, defied higher-level officials’ orders and conducted a study on his own with outside contractors.
In his briefing to member states on the inquiry’s findings, OPCW Director General Fernando Arias echoed this conclusion, describing Henderson’s report as “a purported document disseminated outside the Organisation.”
But Arias’ statements today contradict his own words from less than a year ago. Just days after Henderson’s report was leaked in May 2019, Arias delivered an extensive briefing and announced that an inquiry into the disclosure was underway. Arias made no claims of Henderson going rogue, and described his report as an “internal document… produced by a staff member.” It is unclear how Henderson’s report went from an “internal document” by an OPCW staffer in May 2019 to a “purported document disseminated outside the Organisation” in February 2020. Arias has not explained this discrepancy.
In his latest missive, Arias has offered a completely new rationale for keeping Henderson’s report from the public. In May 2019, Arias stated that because Henderson’s report “pointed at possible attribution,” it was therefore “outside of the mandate of the FFM [Fact-Finding Mission] with regard to the formulation of its findings.” The FFM is prevented from assigning blame to parties involved in chemical attacks. However, the OPCW’s published conclusion suggested the Syrian government was to blame for the attack – an act of attribution – since the Syrian military (or its Russian ally) was the only warring party in Douma with aircraft. Even more curiously, by accusing Henderson of freebooting and “subterfuge,” Arias and his organization’s independent inquiry has now offered a completely different explanation than it previously had for the omission of Henderson’s report.
Why was critical evidence excluded?
In yet another highly dubious assertion, the OPCW inquiry claimed Henderson “did not have access to all of the information gathered by the FFM team, including witness interviews, laboratory results, and assessments by independent experts regarding the two cylinders—all of which became known to the team after [Henderson] had stopped providing support to the FFM investigation.”
But an important piece of context is missing from this salvo: by the time Henderson carried through on his study in summer 2018, he and other members of the FFM had already complained to the OPCW leadership that their findings were being manipulated and suppressed.
According to Henderson’s testimony, a draft interim report circulated in June 2018 was subjected to “‘last-minute unexpected modifications” that were “contrary to the consensus that had been reached within the team.” This included a change to “reflect a conclusion that chlorine had been released from cylinders,” which was not consistent with the findings at that stage. An intervention by one of the FFM team members, possibly Inspector B, forced FFM team leader Sami Barrek to revise the interim report before its eventual release on July 6 2018.
Despite agreeing to hear his team’s objections, Barrek personally blocked critical evidence that conflicted with the official story of Syrian government responsibility. One email chain revealed that Barrek resisted pleas from an inspector to include the relatively low levels of chemicals found in Douma. Alex, the anonymous second OPCW whistleblower, told journalist Jonathan Steele that chlorinated organic chemicals at the scene “were no higher than you would expect in any household environment.”
Another leaked document showed the OPCW had consulted with toxicologists in June 2018 to determine whether symptoms observed in victims were consistent with exposure to chlorine. According to minutes of that meeting, “the experts were conclusive in their statements that there was no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure.” But these critical findings, which dramatically undercut the official narrative, were inexplicably omitted from both the interim and final report.
The “core” cover-up team
One day after US officials attempted to bully OPCW staff into submission on July 5 2018, an interim report on Douma was published that reflected some of the inspectors’ key objections, albeit with watered-down language and significant omissions. A critical change then took place. OPCW officials announced that the ensuing final report would be drafted by a “core team” that was separate from the one which deployed to Douma. That left the core team without any of the FFM members who had been on the ground at the site of the supposed attack, with the exception of one paramedic. Henderson told the UN that the move deprived the core team of anyone qualified to conduct the needed engineering assessments on the chlorine cylinders that were said to have been dropped in Douma.
With superiors omitting critical information, Douma inspectors excluded from the so-called “core” team, and US officials applying direct pressure, Henderson attempted to carry on with his report. Despite the inquiry’s claims, Henderson presented evidence to the UN that his work was approved by his superiors. Henderson reported that he held several meetings with top OPCW officials beginning in late summer 2018, where he informed them of his study and relayed concerns about the methodologies of the then-FFM team leader. Henderson said he was told by the then-Chief of Cabinet, Sebastien Braha: “I don’t see why both studies can’t be done.” Henderson took that as a green light.
Henderson completed his engineering study in January 2019 and submitted a “detailed executive summary” for peer review. OPCW colleagues, including members of the Douma FFM, an unidentified former “core team” former inspector, and other “trusted [Technical Secretariat] staff members who had expertise in specific areas,” studied Henderson’s work and offered written feedback.
“This review was considered necessary and responsible,” Henderson wrote, “in that I knew (after the analysis had been completed) that these would be unpopular findings; therefore, I wanted to make sure there were no objections to any of the facts, observations, methodology used or findings reported in the summary.”
In its bid to portray Henderson’s engineering study as the work of a disconnected freelancer, the OPCW’s inquiry strangely made no mention of this peer review.
When he met with FFM team leader Sami Barrek the following month, Henderson ran into more obstructions. Barrek flatly rejected Henderson’s report, “stating that he had been instructed not to accept it.” Alarmed by the possibility that the OPCW would soon release a final report without a sound engineering assessment, Henderson submitted a physical copy to the OPCW’s Documents Registry Archive, and alerted management by email.
It was then that another hostile response arrived from above. Braha, the Chief of Cabinet, emailed back an order: “Please get this document out of DRA (Documents Registry Archive) … And please remove all traces, if any, of its delivery/storage/whatever in DRA.”
Days later, on March 1 2019, the OPCW’s final report was released. Omitting Henderson’s engineering findings, it reached a conclusion that contradicted that of its own inspectors. According to the report, the investigation found that there were “reasonable grounds that the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon took place…This toxic chemical contained reactive chlorine.” For its analysis of the cylinders, the report claims it relied on “three independent analyses” without specifying them and only directly citing one.
This raises an ineluctable question: why did the OPCW rely on three unspecified “independent analyses” from outside experts who never set foot in Douma, rather than on the evidence-based reports of a veteran OPCW staffer and his colleagues who investigated the site of the supposed attack? The OPCW has yet to offer an explanation.
“I was shocked by the decision to release the report without having taken into account the engineering report, as all the FFM management knew it had been submitted,” Henderson recounted in his UN testimony. “I had expected the report to reflect the situation that had been the consensus of the Douma FFM team after the deployments, and for the assessment of the cylinders to be consistent with the findings of the engineering assessment, but found the complete opposite. I saw what I considered to be superficial and flawed analysis in the section on the cylinders.”
Henderson tried to resolve his concerns internally. He met with at least six high-level officials, and sought a meeting with Arias. A senior manager angrily rebuffed that request, telling Henderson that “you will never get to the Director-General, and if you try and go around me to get to him, there will be consequences.” Henderson also submitted a detailed dossier outlining his concerns to the Acting Director of the Office of Internal Oversight, which was later rejected.
Perhaps most critically, Henderson sought a meeting where the drafters of the FFM report – the so-called “core” team that had excluded all but one member of the team that visited Douma – “would explain what new information had been provided or new analysis conducted, that had turned around the situation from what had appeared to be clear at the end of deployments to Douma.”
Henderson also requested an opportunity to hear from the “three experts” who had conducted the engineering studies cited by the FFM’s final report. “This would be a technical discussion, comparing the information and inputs used and methodology applied, and interpretation of results, and would very quickly identify any flawed approaches and would help clarify the situation,” Henderson recalled.
“Throughout this period, I acknowledged there was a possibility that I could be wrong, but stressed that I was not the only one with concerns,” he added. “Investigating the situation would bring things to light and potentially defuse the situation.”
But Henderson’s requests were denied. “Whilst many in management were shocked and concerned, and all expressed sympathy with my concerns,” Henderson told the UN, “the responses I received included ‘this is too big’; ‘it’s too late now’; ‘this would not be good for the [Technical Sectrariat’s] reputation’; ‘don’t make yourself a martyr’; and ‘but this would play into the Russian narrative’.”
A leaked memo written by Henderson to Arias, the OPCW Director General, in March 2019, captures his contemporaneous objections. The final report, Henderson wrote, “does not reflect the views of all the team members that deployed to Douma,” a view he said was shared by about 20 inspectors. (Alex relayed a similar account to Jonathan Steele: “Most of the Douma team felt the two reports on the incident, the Interim Report and the Final Report, were scientifically impoverished, procedurally irregular and possibly fraudulent.”) On top of the fact the report was written by a “core” team that excluded all but one Douma inspector, Henderson complained that its authors “had only operated in Country X” – believed to be Turkey.
Arias instructed Henderson to submit his report to the newly formed Investigation and Identification Team, which had been mandated to further investigate the Douma attack. The IIT met with Henderson in March 2019 and accepted a copy of his report. But two months later, Henderson was suspended and removed from the OPCW building after a leaked copy of his engineering assessment was published on the internet. The OPCW’s inquiry does not accuse Henderson of responsibility for the leak.
Conspicuous claims about “Inspector B”
Less is known about “Inspector B,” the second OPCW inspector targeted by the inquiry. It is possible, though unconfirmed, that B is the same person as “Alex,” the aforementioned Douma team member turned whistleblower. Like Henderson, B has been with the OPCW since its formation. The inquiry notes that B initially served from July 1998 to December 2011, including as Team Leader, and then again from September 2015 until August 2018.
As with Henderson, the inquiry attempted to portray Inspector B as a marginal figure in the Douma inquiry who went rogue after he had left the OPCW. While acknowledging that he was a member of the FFM team that deployed to Syria in April 2018, the report said that B “never left the command post in Damascus”, and therefore did not visit Douma.
By the OPCW’s own standards, however, that was hardly disqualifying: Sami Barrek, the FFM team leader, was only in Damascus for three days and departed before his team members – including Henderson – first reached Douma. Yet Barrek was tasked with drafting the final report, and, as leaked emails show, faced internal complaints that he excluded critical evidence.
According to the Working Group, the British academic collective that received and published Henderson’s leaked report, Barrek subsequently visited Turkey where he met with members of the White Helmets. The White Helmets are a Western government-funded organization known for carrying out rescue operations in areas under the control of foreign-backed anti-government militias. As The Grayzone has reported, the US and UK-funded White Helmets have operated alongside extremist militants during Syria’s proxy war, and been used for propaganda efforts to promote U.S. military intervention and sanctions on Syria. In the case of Douma, the White Helmets participated in a staged video to create the appearance that a local hospital was treating victims of a chemical attack.
Conspicuously, the inquiry offered no specifics on what “Inspector B” did in Damascus or his role in the FFM. This omission could be seen as an indication that an accurate description of his role would reveal that he played a significant one. The inquiry noted that he “was involved in the drafting of the interim report on the Douma incident” – but did not offer further details. It seems unlikely that someone with a limited role in the investigation would have been entrusted to participate in drafting the public report on its findings.
As with its portrayal of Henderson, the inquiry claimed that the FFM “undertook the bulk of its analytical work, examined a large number of witness interviews, and received the results of sampling and analysis,” in the months after Inspector B was no longer involved. But it had nothing to say about Inspector B departing only after raising concerns that the Douma team’s analytical work was manipulated and excluded, including on vital chemical samples. Accordingly, the fact that more work was done after B’s ouster did not resolve his concerns; if anything, it only raised further questions about the OPCW’s faulty final product.
Western media outlets complicit in cover-up
The OPCW’s unprecedented rebuke of two career officials has received a warm reception in mainstream media outlets that have carefully ignored the OPCW scandal to date, turning a blind eye as one explosive internal document after another appeared on Wikileaks.
Though the scandal was itself a product of disclosures by the OPCW’s own staff, The Guardian bizarrely described it instead as “a Russia-led campaign” that has now “been dealt a blow” by the OPCW’s inquiry. The New York Times published reports by Reuters and the Associated Press that also aired the inquiry’s conclusions without a scintilla of critical scrutiny.
At a time when whistleblowing is supposed to be held in high esteem, the Western political and media establishment’s flagrant disinterest and disregard for the two dissenting inspectors and the explosive leaked documents is glaring. This carries significant dangers.
As the email by a “former senior official at the OPCW” – someone who was not among the pair of dissenting inspectors – made clear, fear within the organization is almost as profound as the pressure to self-censor and conform to the dominant narrative.
The experience of the OPCW’s first director-general, Jose Bustani – who was ousted from his position after direct threats from John Bolton to him and his family – attests to the threats these new whistleblowers face. When Bustani heard Alex’s testimony, he came away from the meeting firmly convinced that something had gone extremely wrong at the OPCW.
“The convincing evidence of irregular behaviour in the OPCW investigation of the alleged Douma chemical attack confirms doubts and suspicions I already had,” Bustani said after the session. “The picture is certainly clearer now, although very disturbing.” Bustani added that he hoped the Douma revelations “will catalyse a process by which the [OPCW] can be resurrected to become the independent and non-discriminatory body it used to be.”
In his statement to the United Nations, Henderson echoed this sentiment. The ousted expert called on the United Nations to allow for a scientific, peer review process to weigh his report against the three “independent experts” whom the OPCW claimed to rely on for its final report. The “method of scientific rigour,” Henderson wrote, “dictates that one side cannot profess to be the sole owner of the truth.
Should an independent scientific panel be allowed, he concluded, “I have no doubt that this would successfully clarify what happened in Douma.”
With his explosive UN testimony and the leaks that preceded it, Ian Henderson and his colleagues have made clear that the OPCW experts who deployed to Syria are determined to bring the cover-up of an elaborate deception to light.
Aaron Maté
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/02/14/mistrial-trump-case-venezuelan-embassy-protectors/#more-20854
The Trump administration’s case against Venezuelan embassy protectors was severely biased, but ended up with a hung jury. The mistrial is a victory for sovereignty and democracy, and another failure in the coup attempt.
By Leonardo Flores / CODEPINK
A hung jury in the Donald Trump administration’s case against activists who were arrested protecting Venezuela’s internationally recognized embassy in Washington, DC is being heralded as a major win for sovereignty, amid the US government’s floundering coup attempt against the Chavista government in Caracas.
On February 14, a jury of 12 DC residents were deadlocked over the issue of the embassy defenders, forcing the judge to declare a mistrial — in a blow to the federal government and to a judicial system that had stacked the odds against them.
The embassy defenders — Adrienne Pine, Margaret Flowers, Kevin Zeese, and David Paul — had been accused of “interfering with the protective functions” of the US State Department after they, as part of the Embassy Protection Collective, had spent 37 days in the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington, DC in the spring of 2019, protecting it from an illegal takeover by the US-backed supporters of coup leader Juan Guaidó.
Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell overtly favored the prosecution by severely limiting the scope of the case, ruling that the defendants were limited to speaking only about events between May 13 and May 16.
For context, the Embassy Protection Collective began staying in the building on April 11. All was peaceful until April 30, when coup supporters surrounded the embassy and attacked the protectors with physical and verbal abuse, as well as death threats.
The protectors were then put under a joint siege by the police and coup supporters — the latter of whom did all they could to prevent food from being delivered into the premises. On May 8, the electricity and water were cut off.
On May 13, they subsequently received a trespass “notice” — a piece of paper with no official letterhead, signature or seal that was most likely written in Spanish and translated. They were then asked, but not ordered, to leave the premises by police.
Finally on May 16, the protectors were arrested, when, in violation of international law, US federal agents in swat-style gear raided the sovereign Venezuelan embassy.
Judge Howell’s pre-trial decisions to severely limit the defense from putting the arrest in context ensured a bias that many observers considered impossible to overcome in a jury trial. The embassy defenders were not allowed to say that Nicolás Maduro is the president of Venezuela.
The defense was not allowed to talk about international law, including the Vienna Convention (which prohibits entry into another country’s embassy, even in times of war). They were not allowed to talk about the protecting power agreement (an agreement for third countries to ensure the safety of embassies in Caracas and DC) that was being negotiated by the US, Switzerland, Turkey, and Venezuela.
They were not allowed to mention that President Maduro, Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza, Vice Minister Carlos Ron, and UN Ambassador Samuel Moncada had all authorized the activists’ stay in the embassy. They were not allowed to discuss the fact that the Trump and Maduro administrations had been in contact throughout April and May.
They were not allowed to discuss the blatant cooperation between law enforcement and Guaidó supporters in DC. They were not allowed to discuss Guaidó’s corruption and connections to paramilitary drug cartels. They were not allowed to question Guaidó’s legitimacy.
In short, they were not allowed to tell the whole truth.
The partiality on brazen display against citizens who are supposedly presumed to be innocent made it clear that the US justice system was doing its best to ensure justice would be denied — a true kangaroo court.
The justice system’s subservience to the Trump administration’s attempt to install an unelected president in Venezuela effectively made this court that supports a coup — a kanga-coup court, if you will.
That this trial resulted in a mistrial means that US citizens saw through the farce, just as Venezuelans saw through the farce represented by Juan Guaidó.
“Elections mean something”
In explaining that the U.S. constitution supposedly grants the president authority to recognize a foreign government, the judge defended this concept by claiming “elections mean something.” Those of us in the audience found it hard not to laugh out loud.
Elections mean something, except when a U.S. adversary wins, and Washington then decides to just name someone else president, as in the case of Venezuela.
In a courtroom in which the judge had ruled that “Boliviarian” Republic of Venezuela was too confusing and therefore the country was to only be referred to as Venezuela, the “president” of Venezuela is Juan Guaidó and the question isn’t up for debate.
This isn’t surprising, given that Guaidó recently attended the State of the Union and was applauded by Representative Nancy Pelosi and other pro-regime change Democrats. Guaidó then met with President Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, USAID administrator Mark Green, OAS Secretary General Almagro. And the coup leader even had 2,000 people come rally for him at a pro-coup demonstration in Miami.
The reality, of course, is wildly different inside Venezuela. There, after Guaidó’s successful” global tour, he was greeted at a rally by merely 500 people, which is actually a big improvement to rallies just a few months before, where he was cursing the fact that same dozen or two “jerks” were the only ones to show up to events.
At the height of Guaidó’s popularity, around 2014 and 2015, the opposition drew massive crowds of tens of thousands. Pro-government rallies, on the other hand, routinely turn out tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands.
Dan Cohen
✔@dancohen3000
More footage emerging of Guaidó’s arrival to Caracas yesterday. Here he is physically assaulted, called a murderer and chased away from the airport.
But Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi swear he’s loved by the people of Venezuela 
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While Guaidó may have looked presidential during his U.S. tour, the façade was broken within minutes of landing in Venezuela. Workers from the state airline Conviasa, which was recently sanctioned by the Trump administration, confronted the coup leader at the airport, leaving him shaken and drenched in sweat — a “’president” afraid of his own people.
That Guaidó has fallen so low is an indictment of an extremist right-wing opposition that seeks to punish the working class by supporting sanctions, threats of war, and the sabotage of basic services. (Guaidó’s arrival came mere days after a warehouse containing telecommunications equipment was set on fire, while the next day a metro line went out of service after a cable line was cut.)
Alex Rubinstein
✔@RealAlexRubi
Failed coup frontman Juan Guaido gets a taste of how Venezuelan citizens feel about his circuit through foreign countries trying to drum up support for regime change immediately after landing at Caracas airport
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Incompetence mirrors incompetence
The failure of Juan Guaidó, the opposition, and the Trump administration is also indicative of their incompetence and utter confusion regarding the reality of Venezuela. This incompetence mirrors the incompetence of the U.S. government in the sham trial of the embassy defenders.
Prosecutors attempted to pull a bait-and-switch on the jury, building their case on an allegation that the “final four” – as Margaret, Kevin, David, and Adrienne are affectionately called – were trespassing in the Venezuelan embassy, while the actual charge was a misdemeanor of “interfering with protective functions.”
At least some members of the jury were clearly perplexed by this, asking the judge for clarification of whether trespassing could be perceived as interfering. Although the answer should have been a clear “no”, the judge obfuscated and left them more confused than before they asked the question.
The jurors then brought up a seeming contradiction between the law and the judge’s instructions. The law regarding interfering with protective functions requires that alleged perpetrators “knowingly and willfully” interfered, while the judge instructed the jury that the defendants did not have to have knowledge of the statute in order to be convicted. One observer characterized the judge’s response to the jury on this issue as “a riddle.”
A bewildering judge and a bumbling prosecution led to a deadlocked jury. Three jurors voted to acquit. They apparently recognized that the government was trying to railroad the defendants.
This shows that people of conscience can thwart a government intent on criminalizing peace activism.
The defendant’s four lawyers also managed to instill reasonable doubt, against all odds.
The Embassy Protection Collective brought people’s power to Washington, and it was only fitting that it was people’s power on the jury that led to a mistrial.
However, the mistrial is not quite the end of this ordeal. The final four have one last status hearing to determine if the prosecution will retry the case.
For me, as a Venezuelan who has spent a dozen years helping my country resist U.S. imperialism, what these four people did, as well as what the entire Embassy Protection Collective did, has earned them my gratitude and admiration.
David, Margaret, Kevin and Adrienne are deserving of our full solidarity and support.
They have left me hopeful and inspired that we can build a movement in the United States to challenge a foreign policy based on war and profits, and replace it with one built on peace and dialogue.
