4/19/19 Max Blumenthal on Assange, Manning, and Venezuela

Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America and by God we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, this is not a rerun from last week.
It's another interview.
Max Blumenthal from the Grayzone Project.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing?
Good to be back, Scott.
Happy to have you here.
All right, so you're the author of some things I want to talk about here.
Goliath, fear and loathing in greater Israel.
Man, that thing is something else.
Then the 51 Day War, not about Waco.
It's the anniversary today.
That was the 51 Day Siege.
This is the Gaza massacre of 2014.
Then there's Killing Gaza.
It's such an important video.
It cost you a couple of bucks to watch on Vimeo.
It's produced with Dan Cohen.
It's just interviews of Gazans about how they're living.
Man, you guys have to take a look at it.
You just have to.
It's so important.
Then, most importantly now for you and what you're up to, you've got this brand new book, Management of Savagery, which we talked all about last week, but that means that we didn't get a chance to talk about Venezuela, where you have been doing reporting from there recently, as well as reporting from here about what's going on there, and what's going on here about what's going on there.
Lots to talk about there.
But first, even before we get into that, I want to give you a chance to talk about Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning.
Well, right now, it looks like Amnesty International is still refusing to make Chelsea Manning a prisoner of conscience.
Pete Buttigieg, or whatever his name is, is aiming to be the first openly gay president to throw Chelsea Manning in a gulag, since he's called for her imprisonment.
Really?
He did, huh?
Can you elaborate about that part a little bit?
Yeah, let me try to pull up the quote, the exact quote, but he actually did make a statement about Chelsea Manning and the need to – he said he was troubled by Obama's clemency for Chelsea Manning.
Wow.
And actually, for your fellow libertarians' reason, just wrote up a piece about that.
For God's sake.
You know what Anthony Gregory said back then, 2010, simple as this.
Libertarian or socialist or otherwise or anyone else, if you're bad on Bradley Manning, you are a bad person.
Simple as that.
There is a bright line between those who believe that the people are free and allow the government to be their security force and those who lick the boots of the fascist state.
Get the hell out of here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So Chelsea Manning's still apparently in prison.
It's unclear why.
If you read the statement her lawyers put out after the Assange indictment was unsealed, they emphasized that there's nothing new that Chelsea Manning could potentially offer here and there's nothing in the indictment that she didn't already address in her trial.
And so she's being held for purely kind of sadistic and punitive purposes.
And the government's saying she'll be held for as long as the grand jury is impaneled, which means until Assange is extradited and put on trial.
Extradition is, I would say, likely, although there is precedent for preventing extradition from the UK to the US.
I forget the name.
There is some female hacker whose name I forget who did not get extradited.
But then there's also the Abu Hamza, the one-eyed extremist Salafi cleric from London who was brought to the US and now is kind of rotting in a federal prison.
And so that's troubling.
We spoke at my podcast, Moderate Rebels, Ben Norton and I, to the former foreign minister of Ecuador, Guillaume Long, who emphasized the problems that Lenin Moreno is having in justifying stripping Assange of Ecuadoran citizenship.
There's simply nothing in the constitution that allows him to do that.
I think the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights is going to issue a ruling that could be problematic for Moreno, who's basically the figure who came in after Correa and sold out Correa's progressive agenda and proceeded to sell out Assange in exchange for a $4.2 billion IMF loan.
So there's also a European Parliament debate on Assange.
There are protests in Quito and across Ecuador against Moreno's neoliberal agenda.
And these protests are also fueled by his betrayal of Assange.
And they're being harshly repressed and, of course, not really being discussed by the human rights groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty the same way that anything in Venezuela is.
And finally, you just see this massive, I think, wave of activism around Assange across the West where people are mobilizing.
Even some more mainstream elements are warning that this is an attack on press freedom.
And I think this really delineates the boundary between those who simply use press freedom to advance their own partisan or imperialist agenda and those who actually do believe in protecting a free press because there's just simply no question that this indictment was crafted as an attack on anyone who seeks to protect their source.
Number one, which is why the use of SecureDrop is mentioned in the indictment.
Every journalist uses encrypted technology to communicate with sources if they're doing investigative work, or most of them do.
And the publishing of classified information, which many journalists do, is being targeted here.
However, the indictment is written in a way that allows for Assange to be brought to the U.S. and allows for national security state propagandists to say, well, he's only being put on trial for five years.
Let's not worry about—it's not such a big deal.
And then what prosecutors always do, as you know, Scott, is they tack on as many additional charges as they can and try to get their targets in perjury traps, which is why Chelsea Manning, I think, is there in prison, is to try to trap them into various other charges that will eventually lead to being charged with espionage.
Right now the charge is conspiracy.
So I think the key is to kind of prevent extradition for all the reasons I explained.
Yeah, well, that is really important.
And there are, you know, activists doing hard work in the U.K., but they need help.
Anybody listening who can chime in and help provide it there to stop the thing in its tracks, at least as far as it's already gotten.
But, you know, I think it's so important what you said about how we already know, they already know the entire facts of the case as far as possibly Assange.
I don't think we even really know it was Assange, but someone at WikiLeaks saying, hey, let me try to help you with that password and then was unable to crack it anyway.
And then we also know that that password would not have granted Manning any higher level access to the computer network than she already had.
It was just tradecraft, how to help disguise your identity by making it look like someone else did it.
This kind of thing.
And as you say, they already know that much.
And this is a person who has been convicted and has, you know, done her elocution and all of this stuff back at the time.
So there are no new facts to uncover.
As you're saying, they can try to catch her in some kind of perjury trap or something.
But there's not even really a pretension, is there, Max, that they're going to get Manning to say, actually, you know what, there is this whole other story that you haven't heard yet about how Assange helped me break a code or do something.
That's not part of this.
Yeah, I'm not aware of there being anything else.
And obviously, you know, if Obama gave clemency to Chelsea Manning, they did a pretty thorough review and determined there was nothing else there.
This just wasn't worth it.
And, you know, I want to mention here, because I think this is really important, too, is so here's a person who's already done her time, been punished for the whole thing, which was a heroic liberation of truth in the first place anyway.
Nothing truly criminal about it, just illegal.
Right.
And who was held under the most abusive conditions, possibly even torturous conditions, depending on how you define solitary confinement, in pretrial before conviction and sentencing.
And who has, I believe this is right, I really should check this, I keep repeating this, but I believe has tried to commit suicide twice and is threatened a couple of more times.
And apparently, you know, credibly, and people intervene, essentially.
So this is someone who is kind of a fragile person on the edge anyway, who is being extorted, ultimately, when the crime's already been, so-called crime has already been convicted and punished and finished.
Yeah.
And, you know, from the Trump administration, I mean, it's just kind of a, just a classic kind of Mike Pompeo was the one who, you know, kind of gave voice to the vindictiveness of the national security state.
And it's about, you know, just purely punishing those who complicated business for the State Department as it seeks to really meddle in other countries affairs.
And then you have the kind of partisan liberal MSNBC hacks who want blood for the 2016 elections.
And so they want Assange back because they think they're going to learn something that's going to prove collusion took place.
And you had Joe Manchin.
I mean, he kind of often votes with the Republicans.
The senator from West Virginia basically saying we're going to beat it out of Assange.
He said he's our property when in fact he's an Australian citizen.
And he said that we need to get him back here so we can find out what happened in 2016.
And it really just doesn't sound like they're planning to honor the 1988 UN Convention on Torture.
They think they're going to get something out of Assange about Russiagate that he already hasn't said.
And, you know, they could have gotten it out of him if Mueller had agreed to interview him.
I mean, that's the funniest thing about the Mueller report was there was no attempt to even speak to Julian Assange when he said, you know, come talk to me.
Right.
Well, yeah, they don't want to know what he's got to say.
And actually that's got me wondering what they think they're doing here.
You know, I read Andrew McCarthy in The National Review, I admit.
But he was making the point that, you know, there's a statute of limitations in play here.
And even the exception where you can get an extension requires a terrorism charge and not even a conspiracy, but like the actual cyber terrorism, which is going to be a real stretch here.
So I don't know what they think they're even going to charge him with.
And, of course, there's The New York Times test.
If they really charge him with espionage and tack on a charge like that, they're throwing the entire First Amendment, you know, American journalistic system into jeopardy at that point.
So, and we know they do not want Julian Assange on that stand testifying his side of any story at all.
God knows what that guy knows.
And that's what they think.
Yeah.
No, I mean, it would just – it would be a multilayered political crisis to put him on trial in the U.S. in a public court.
So I just don't know how they're going to go about doing this.
It's weird to see Alan Dershowitz defending him too, by the way.
But Dershowitz, you know, if he wants – he knows the law.
If he wants to argue the law, Dershowitz can know what he's talking about.
Sure.
It all just depends on the partisan situation.
Exactly.
I don't quite understand the partisan situation here, but he made some of the same arguments that you just cited from McCarthy.
Well, in fact, it was Barr, the attorney general right now, just said in his remarks about the Mueller report yesterday that if Assange is publishing this stuff, as long as he wasn't doing the hack, then that wouldn't be a criminal act.
That's just journalism.
Or maybe that wasn't a reference to Assange.
It was a reference to somebody else in there.
I screwed it up.
But it's the – well, it's the propaganda about Assange that's poisoning the atmosphere, and it's clear that he could never get a fair trial in the U.S. given everything that's been said about him, starting with Lenin Moreno calling him a hacker.
I mean he has been portrayed in the minds of millions of Americans as a hacker, and he's done no such thing, at least not that we know of.
So yeah, I mean – and just as a working journalist who kind of – I don't have the best relationship with mainstream reporters.
I decided I wasn't going to break into mainstream media.
I was just going to try to break it because I just really concluded that it was in fact an enemy of the people, maybe for different reasons than Trump.
I think that for the same reason you probably do because of its promotion of permanent war and just constant deceptions.
The feeling is like who's next?
Who's next after Assange?
Obviously, I haven't done anything on the level that he has, but it just seems like a precedent is being established to not just prosecute other journalists but to just kind of intimidate everyone, make you wonder, am I allowed to do this?
Am I allowed to communicate with this source on a secure encrypted platform?
What am I allowed to do here?
I got one.
I had a source for a story who then sent me a name and password to log in to some government website and get some stuff off of there.
Yeah.
I thought – just how badly nailed to the wall am I going to get if I do this?
I'm not really sure, but I'm definitely worried about it.
Yeah.
So even if Assange isn't extradited, it's something everyone's going to be thinking about.
And actually, reading The New York Times, which relied so heavily on WikiLeaks in 2016 and before on so many stories, they now have to refer to everything that was gathered through WikiLeaks as emails stolen by – stolen emails.
They have to refer to it that way.
So it's like all the information, which could be a diplomatic cable.
For example, I wrote a piece last year about a party in Nicaragua that was established to fracture the Sandinista movement.
And WikiLeaks published all of these diplomatic cables showing that the party was essentially funded and advised by the U.S. and its soft power outfits.
For that to come to light in any other – in mainstream media, they now say stolen emails, so it poisons the factual information in the mind of the readers.
And they think, well, I'm reading stolen information.
It's probably not true.
And it's by that Russian hacker, Julian Assange.
I have no right to know this stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I have no right to know this.
This is stolen information.
My thoughts are stolen.
I love it.
You've got to kind of love it.
And so that's really the thing, right, too, is the media, where the line is if you're some kind of alternative media type on your own out here, then you love Manning and Assange 100 percent and won't brook opposition.
And then there's everybody else.
And they all seem to be in a race to throw them under the bus and say, yeah, well, of course, that's the bad kind of publishing of stuff.
But I would never do that.
I'm racing to the front of the class for the teacher's approval kind of a situation.
It's really something to see, in fact.
Yeah.
No, I mean, he actually is – the indictment hammers Assange for failing to obtain this information without a security clearance.
So pretty much any reporter who goes along with this indictment and says, you know, we should have – Assange should be brought to justice.
They're basically saying that every reporter has to have a security clearance now before they can even look at classified information.
Yeah.
But beyond that, actually, there's this encryption expert who moved to Ecuador in 2013 to work at a tech firm.
A lot of people moved to Ecuador who were into Internet freedom the same way they moved to Iceland 10 years prior.
Correa was opening up a lot of new frontiers and, you know, it just – it attracted a lot of these types.
And his name was Ola Bini.
He's from Sweden.
And he has now been arrested by Lenin Moreno's security apparatus in connection with WikiLeaks.
But there's really no evidence that he did anything.
And this is because Lenin Moreno is facing a scandal that could possibly and probably will bring him down.
I mean, I think his days are numbered, and it's called the INA papers.
Basically, these private communications were revealed in Ecuadorian media showing that Moreno and his inner circle were laundering tons of money that they had siphoned off from public resources in, I believe, in Seychelles or Panama in an offshore account.
And some of it had gone to buy Moreno and his family a luxury apartment in Spain, just all kinds of luxury goods, just classic corruption.
And WikiLeaks had tweeted about it, and this is what kind of was the – what Moreno cited as the final straw.
He called it meddling in internal politics.
And then he started blaming – now he's kind of conveniently blaming WikiLeaks in order to distract the public from this scandal.
And they've arrested this poor guy, Ola Bini.
And all over the news on pro-government channels, they basically laid out his laptops and computer equipment and hard drives on a desk as if they had seized tons of kilos of cocaine or automatic weapons from some – but there was really no evidence that this had been used in conjunction with any hacking.
And they're essentially blaming him for the revelation of the INA papers.
So domestically in Ecuador, you have this corrupt president who sold out to the US using WikiLeaks to basically try to save his own ass.
And this guy that they've grabbed now, he's an American?
Or where is he from?
He's a Swedish.
Oh, OK.
A Swedish citizen.
Again, we're not hearing anything from Amnesty International or any of the human rights groups.
It's just pathetic.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, they tweeted a few days ago, we are aware of Julian Assange's detention and are monitoring it.
They didn't even condemn it.
You look at who funds them.
It's just the who's who of corporate America.
That is so funny.
I mean, why even bother at that point?
The Committee to Protect Journalists?
Yeah.
That's great.
The Committee to Protect Empire.
Try looking up Serena Shim's name on their website and you'll get a big nothing.
Yeah, I bet so.
Oh, by the way, you know, there's something I never got around to covering either and I wish I had.
And you really talk about that a bit in your book real quick.
Could you mention that, this American who was reporting for press TV?
Yes.
Serena Shim was an American woman, I think from Michigan, who was reporting for press TV and was routinely reporting accurate information on Turkish arms shipments over the Turkish border to al-Qaeda and ISIS.
And then this dovetailed with a lot of the reporting that's been confirmed that was coming out of actually the Turkish police themselves because Erdogan was using his intelligence services to ship the arms and the police actually have connections to a lot of rival factions in Turkey.
And police officers were actually jailed after they discovered some of these arms shipments.
So, Shim actually started telling her family and her colleagues that she was worried for her life after issuing some of these dispatches.
And then she turns up dead on a road and the official story is that she had run into the back of a truck and there was no investigation.
She basically, you know, the whole thing was wiped under the rug.
And now we know that, I mean, it wasn't really accepted widely in US media that Turkey did have this rat line to ISIS and al-Qaeda and now it's just kind of conventional wisdom.
But, you know, she's totally forgotten.
And I think this is one of the more frightening cases where, you know, a journalist could have potentially been iced for threatening the, I wouldn't call it a national security policy, but for really exposing Turkey's dirty laundry.
And this is a country that's jailed the most journalists in the world currently.
And she got no write-ups in any major publication of any kind, right?
I mean, this is completely black.
Well, she was reporting for the Iranians, right?
So, that's all you need to know.
Is that it?
Yeah.
And her mother is just still campaigning to try to seek some kind of closure on this.
But there weren't any investigations undertaken by major media.
And I think it wasn't just her and the fact that she was reporting for, you know, press TV, but it was also the fact that what she was reporting on.
Yeah.
The substance, of course.
The substance, you know, really was something that, you know, a lot of American reporters were going to Turkey and they were invested in seeing the Free Syrian Army get weapons.
And they really believed in this whole project.
That whole crew of reporters that went into Syria in 2012, they were just there to try to – they were hoping to see Damascus taken.
They were there to – I mean, Marie Colvin was there for the same reason.
She was in Libya just to generate the CNN effect and see the U.S. come in and bomb and then the dictator leaves and everybody's happy or not and they get open air slave camps.
But that's why they were there.
And Serena Shim was there to do something different and she's been totally forgotten.
Yeah.
And you're right about how – well, yeah, everybody knows about what was going on in Turkey and the backing of this and that now.
But back then it was, you know, supposed to be at least a secret.
It wasn't very well kept.
I'll have to go back and check the date.
But, you know, Phil Giraldi was on the show talking about being in – I forget if it was Ankara or Istanbul where ISIS guys were just raising money on the streets.
And big time too, like more effectively than any Harry Krishnas you've ever seen out there getting work done.
And this was obviously completely, you know, officially tolerated.
No question about it.
Yeah.
You just look at Aleppo as a good example.
I mean that's when I really turned on Syria and said this is such a gigantic scandal.
And, you know, you had these five neighborhoods overtaken by Turkish and Qatari and U.S. proxy groups.
Oral Sham was the most numerous one and it got most of its funding from Turkey.
And, you know, the U.S. public was sold on this view that all of Aleppo was under the control of the revolution and the dictator is coming to take it from the people when it was basically – and that 350,000 people were going to die.
It was just a giant lie.
It turned out there were maybe 30,000 people in these neighborhoods who were mostly either too old to leave or they were partisans of these insurgent groups.
And the first thing Turkey did when this area was taken was to ship out all of the factories and strip them of everything and basically bring them into Turkey.
They just stole everything from the factory owners.
And, you know, the same thing took place with the ISIS oil fields.
They were just siphoning oil out of Syria into Turkey using ISIS as their proxy.
This is – I just don't understand how you could be in the Syrian government and not want some kind of retribution against Turkey.
But the fact is, you know, now they're starting to normalize relations again because Turkey lost.
And Aleppo was the real death blow.
At the same time, they have Idlib.
Idlib is the big Turkish card.
They control the borders.
There's a great documentary online called – I think it's called Inside Idlib by an Emirati station and a journalist named Cenan Musa.
And it shows that Turkish textbooks are actually being – were at least when Idlib – before Idlib was kind of like rebranded when it was really under the control of Jabhat al-Nusra without any attempt to conceal it.
Turkish religious textbooks that advised on how to hold women as slaves or how to basically hold them as sex slaves were brought in.
Basically, Turkey was providing a lot of the institutional apparatus for al-Qaida's local affiliate to set up a little fiefdom in northeastern – sorry, in northwestern Syria.
So, I mean at every step of the way, Turkey has been there in this catastrophe.
And I think Serena Shim, when we think of her, we should think about the Turkish angle of this scandal and the loss of a journalist's life and the erasure of her memory.
Well, and how about the erasure of the biggest story in the whole wide world?
The good Islamic state, the al-Qaida state in Idlib province that sits there to this day just waiting for – I don't know what all is going to happen when somebody either – I guess the Syrian Arab Army at some point is going to move back in there and those guys are all going to go home to Europe and set stuff on fire.
Well, not just Europe.
I mean you had at a certain point at least 10,000 Uighurs from the Turkmenistan, Turkmenistani Islamic Army or Islamic Front, whatever they're called.
Basically, they were given passports and taken on the Turkish rat line from Xinjiang province, which they consider East Turkmenistan, and sent into Jazir al-Shugair in Idlib and basically given property that was looted from native Syrians.
And they're there.
The Chinese don't want them to come back.
Basically the Chinese government offered military assistance when it appeared that the Syrian Army and the Russian military were going to go and try to retake Idlib because it's a major national security threat for them.
I remember thinking, what's the Chinese interest in Syria?
Oh, the Uighur fighters.
Yeah, and you had had several insurgent factions in Idlib actually sign on to at least a ceasefire in order to avoid the bloodshed that was going to be inevitable with retaking this whole province.
But it was the Uighur fighters from the Turkmenistan Front that refused to sign on because they are officially aligned with ISIS.
They've gone beyond the Al-Qaeda fray.
I wrote a piece at Consortium News, it's up now, about the whole Ilhan Omar outrage.
And I kind of highlighted the point made by Tulsi Gabbard, which is that Donald Trump is protecting the province, which contains the largest franchise of Al-Qaeda since 9-11, while he's blaming Ilhan Omar for 9-11.
And just the hypocrisy of that is so extreme.
It also shows how important her candidacy is, that she's the only person willing to point this out.
Right.
And what's – actually, you know what she really should do there, as long as we're talking about it and maybe she'll hear it, who knows?
You're kind of a big shot.
She should really point out that Donald Trump did the right thing at first by calling off CIA support for these guys and how she thought he was really on the right track with that.
And that now the failure to follow through and something along those lines so that it actually makes more sense instead of standing alone as just sort of a talking point.
What does she mean he's on the side of Al-Qaeda, right, without a kind of a story to explain it?
And what a great start to the story.
Yeah, that's true.
He came in and canceled that terrible program and now look at him still.
He might as well have it go on because he's preventing or helping to prevent the Syrian Arab Army from taking the rest of that land.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean she needs to follow up on that for sure.
And I've noticed she's softened her tone a little bit because she's on the campaign trail and she's trying to beat back the perception that she is like Bashar al-Assad's American bride or however they portray her, have portrayed her in Washington.
So she's been a little bit muted but that was an important point.
And that's a mistake too, right?
Art of the deal.
They call you a traitor.
You're going to have to fight about it.
You're not going to be able to slink away from that.
You go ahead and explain, look, Assad's a bad guy but he was fighting al-Qaeda suicide bombers, okay?
So that's why I took the position I took.
That's easy enough to get across, you know?
No, it was Meghan McCain who really launched the most vitriolic attack, Tulsi Gabbard on The View.
And what she should have done is held up the picture of John McCain with Syrian insurgent kidnappers when he had made his illegal trip in 2013 and said, you know, how about your dad?
I think this is far worse actually.
I think it would be worse to have al-Qaeda in control of Damascus.
But that's what your father wanted and that's what he did in Libya when he met with Abdel Hakim Belhage from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.
And here's a photo of him with Belhage.
So let's talk about your family and you acting as like a proxy for your dead father right now.
I mean she should have just doubled down and done that.
It would have been – instead she kind of waited until she was back home on Twitter and then started hammering Meghan McCain in The View.
And it's like you got to be ready for that stuff and she – I think she's doing a good job of presenting herself in a different light.
But I think I would like to see more of a confrontational campaign.
Well, as long as we're talking about Tulsi for a minute, I'm going to say one more thing about her, which is – and this goes for people who know or need to communicate with her about this too – is that it isn't just the absolutely insane, bananas, treasonous Obama-Brennan war for al-Qaeda in Syria and Obama and Trump's war for al-Qaeda in Yemen, which are both absolutely just out of this world crazy beyond any reason.
But it's – the war against al-Qaeda and against the Islamic State is also horrible.
How about the drone wars going on in Somalia or all the people killed in Pakistan?
Or, for that matter, Iraq War 3.5 going on in western Iraq right now with American special operations forces still embedded with the Iraqi army and the Shiite militias hunting down and killing Islamic State guys.
And this kind of thing can go on forever.
And it's always been only counterproductive too.
So for her to be good on Obama and Brennan back in al-Qaeda, that's great.
But I want to hear a little bit more sophisticated thing about how we need to call this whole damn thing off.
This is ridiculous.
As Max Blumenthal writes in his book, this whole thing was Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan and George Bush and Bill Clinton's fault in the first place.
There ain't no reason why we have to continue carrying on like we're defending ourselves from Islam or something when we all know that's not really what's going on here.
Well, yeah.
I mean it's the whole fake war on terror, which has just been a war of terror.
You can ask anyone who is stuck in Raqqa about that and how the U.S.
After there was follow up in Aleppo after the Russians, the Russian military helped the Syrian Arab army take it.
There was follow up.
They brought humanitarian assistance.
They helped rebuild that part of the city.
They helped rebuild the citadel.
They maintained this positive presence, whereas in Raqqa there's no follow up.
The U.S. just sent its Kurdish proxies into an Arab city to hold everything.
The Syrian Observatory on Human Rights, it's not exactly an objective source.
It's an opposition source, but they reported today that former ISIS members are actually being rehabilitated as traffic cops in Raqqa.
So the whole thing's a disaster and there's been very little rebuilding of the parts of the city, which comprise really the inner core of the city that were just obliterated.
And then you have the domestic war on terror complex that I write about in my book with the FBI basically ginning up these manufactured terror cases through these so-called mosque crawlers and doing demographic mapping of Muslim communities.
They haven't made America any safer.
They've basically just intimidated and terrorized American Muslims and violated their civil liberties.
So I'd like to hear Tulsi Gabbard talk about that more because she unfairly gets branded as an Islamophobe.
She is Hindu and she's experienced religious discrimination herself.
So it would be a perfect way of challenging the whole war on terror in a holistic way.
Mike Gravel's candidacy is interesting since we're talking about this because he's been – it's been basically run by a bunch of students and they're more accessible to people like me and you than Tulsi's campaign has been.
I mean I've been able to reach out to some people peripherally connected to her campaign, but she isn't – I don't know.
My one criticism is she isn't as accessible as she should be.
She should be going on your show.
She should be hitting grassroots media.
And not just kind of trying to focus on these – what, did she just do an interview with Bret Baier on Fox?
I mean that's fine, but she should be really hitting the grassroots harder.
Yeah.
Well, I'm holding my hopes out for the debates.
I think the best thing about Gabbard here is in this situation is that they think foreign policy is her biggest weakness.
So they'll have their knives out and think they're going to take her on.
When the reason that she's special essentially – it's not so much that she's anti-war as it is that she's experienced enough and smart enough to know the difference between al-Qaeda and Hezbollah.
And she understands why it matters.
And so these people want to say Iran is the greatest state sponsor of terrorism.
Well, she's a veteran of the war in West Iraq and the Anbar province against Zarqawi's guys.
So she's saying, actually, you know what?
Let me be a little bit more detailed about this for you guys.
And so that – in other words, she has the advantage if she uses it right.
She should have her Giuliani, Ron Paul Giuliani moments, crack some skulls and move up a few notches fighting about this stuff.
Yeah, I hope so.
And hopefully she – someone will fight with her about it.
But I think the way they're going to structure the debates is two tiers or even three tiers.
I mean they're putting people in who have never – like Tim Ryan.
Who the hell is this guy?
They're putting so many people into the Democratic clown car.
It makes me get conspiratorial.
And I think two things.
One, they're trying to isolate candidates like her who actually do have an important message and a dissenting message.
And number two, they're trying to split the vote to the point where they can get to superdelegates on Bernie.
And then just have the corporate masters of the party vote to end his candidacy.
It just makes no sense why so many people I've never heard of or who have absolutely no national following are getting involved.
Right.
Well, I mean one thing is Trump really did lower the barrier to entry.
It used to be – the idea that a House member even like Tulsi Gabbard could run a credible campaign.
Forget about it.
That was one of the things that really hurt Ron Paul all along.
He was just in the House.
You got to be a senator, a governor, or a vice president.
Them's the rules.
And Trump certainly changed that now.
So – Yeah.
Yeah.
I hear what you're saying though about the Democratic Party establishment saying let's just blitz everybody with so many characters and stuff that they just zone out.
Essentially let us decide for them.
Yeah.
And then they all have to have their own unique message.
So Tim Ryan's message was Russia is dividing us.
This guy from the Rust Belt in Ohio gets up and gives his first opening speech, his first stump speech.
And he says the Russian trolls are dividing us.
It's like who the fuck cares about Russian trolls in Ohio?
Seriously.
Anyway.
These people are crazy.
It'd be fun to be that crazy maybe.
I don't know.
They seem to like it.
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Hey, let's talk about Venezuela here for a minute.
You got this great scoop, a little bird, I guess, tweeted in your ear, a document about a bunch of people whose names and positions are relevant meeting to discuss the possibility of an American military attack on Venezuela, Max Blumenthal?
Yeah, actually, I was passed a check-in list from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which is one of the big militaristic arms industry and corporate funded think tanks in Washington, on a meeting to assess the use of military force in Venezuela.
It was misdated April 20th, and so I didn't realize it was a check-in list for the day that I received it until I started to actually make calls to CSIS and they confirmed that it had taken place already.
I think they regretted confirming it.
They wanted to keep it out of the eyes and out of the public eye, away from the media.
It was never announced on their site.
It was completely off the record and it was a round table.
And invited to the round table was a who's who of inside and outside Trump advisors, inside the U.S. government and outside, as well as officials from Colombia and Brazil, including a Colombian general who have been conceiving Trump's policy on Venezuela since Trump launched the coup against the elected president, Nicolas Maduro.
So basically, if you look at my article, it's kind of like I just provided dossiers on many of the key figures.
Fernando Cutts, for example, who was the national security advisor who first presented Trump with his options on the coup and how to destabilize Venezuela from the Cohen group.
He's now out of government.
Wait a minute.
Stop for just a second.
I want to go down the list.
I want to let you go down the list.
But let me just ask you something for context here, kind of a thing real quick here.
Somebody, John Bolton, told Donald Trump, this is going to be easy.
This is going to be easy.
We're going to recognize this guy.
And then, you know, the military and the government will essentially change their allegiance over to him.
And it'll be easy.
And and you can trust us because I mean, probably in the plan, it was supposed to work.
Right.
But instead, it didn't work.
And the entire government is still loyal to the guy who's paying their paychecks, ironically enough.
Yeah, it's failed.
It's completely failed.
OK, so it's dead.
So that's really sort of the context here is their unwillingness to concede that or at least they're really looking at options for, well, geez, since this didn't work, maybe we'll just have to invade the country, which just sounds absolutely incredible to think that the U.S. Army and Marine Corps would be responding to the White House that, yeah, sure, that sounds easy or anything like that, because it surely would not be.
Yeah, and I'm glad you made that point.
To me, the meeting reflected desperation because everything they've tried has failed and they have no concrete options left beyond some kind of military intervention.
They're basically waging they meaning the Trump administration is waging an all out economic war on Venezuela, trying to place its entire economy under blockade while telling the media that the sanctions only affect his inner circle.
But the sanctions are starting to bite and hurt the general public.
And we're seeing even people like Ben Rhodes, who is Obama's deputy national security advisor, come out and say these sanctions are a terrible idea.
They're just targeting the whole public.
And meanwhile, the Venezuelan government's been able to find other options for selling its oil in India, China, Turkey and elsewhere.
And so it's just not working.
So here they are exploring military options in secret.
And I got the scoop.
USAID was in the meeting, the United States Agency for International Development.
This is the group that is supposed to be, that attempted the, or helped oversee the February 23rd attempt at ramming aid trucks over the Colombian border and into Venezuela to violate Venezuela's sovereignty and give a propaganda win to Juan Guaido.
And it failed.
And so it just, the presence of those officials, three USAID officials in this meeting made it clear to me that they were thinking about some other scheme to intervene under the auspices of some kind of humanitarian operation.
That it's not just going to be a straight up invasion.
And the Brazilian government is also dead set against a straight up invasion because of the instability it'll cause.
The Brazilian military is even checking Bolsonaro's more extreme impulses.
The Colombian government, it's not as right wing as they are as much as they act as kind of the Israel of South America.
They don't want to exacerbate a migration crisis on their borders.
They don't have the resources to take care of millions more people.
And that's what this will cause.
And you had a figure from the Inter-American Dialogue, which is a Latin American focused centrist think tank in Washington at the meeting.
And I found congressional testimony by another staffer at that group basically saying that invading Venezuela will cause massive casualties.
It will be bloody and it'll be a region wide disaster and a mess.
So I mean there's kind of a consensus that this will be a disaster.
But then you have people around Juan Guaido and his puppet shadow government who are in the meeting.
And these are the people that I think are pushing the hardest for it.
Including his new fake OAS ambassador.
And this is such an embarrassment because in Venezuela, I was there for a few weeks and you talk to people who are going to opposition rallies.
They don't want to be collateral damage.
They do understand that a military invasion would wreck their country and they don't want Caracas to be bombed.
So Guaido has actually had to come out and say that he's against military intervention.
It is the first time he's really made this clear statement.
So in a way- He had hinted before that it maybe would be okay and refused to commit to saying that he would refuse it.
Yeah.
He invoked part of the Venezuelan constitution that's really for disaster relief that allows for foreign intervention in the country.
And he said that we will refuse to take this off the table.
He said that at a rally.
It was really disturbing.
Now he's had to come out and really take off the table an invasion because his credibility is at stake.
So I think- Can you imagine Al Gore saying, oh yeah, well I'm going to get France and Britain to help me straighten this out because George Bush didn't really win Florida.
Yeah.
Or anything like that, right?
Even if you believe that this guy has a claim, he's going to invoke the military power of the US government to come in?
I mean, that's just crazy.
I can only assume he's despised nationwide as a traitor by all factions.
Yeah.
On my flight out of Venezuela, basically if you can afford to fly from Venezuela to Miami, you're going to be aligned with the opposition.
Jorge Ramos from Univision was in first class and the whole flight was these upscale Venezuelan people who just despise Maduro.
I was talking to some of them on my way to customs.
I said, isn't it kind of just indisputable fact that Juan Guaido is a traitor?
I mean, he's basically calling on foreign countries to come and topple his government and they're like, yeah, but we want it.
That's kind of like, that's just their response to everything.
And I'd say, aren't the sanctions going to really wreck the whole economy for everyone, including you guys?
And they're like, yeah, but it's something we just need to do so we can get what we want.
Can you imagine the chaos of an actual invasion?
I mean, if they think that there's some Chalabi plan to parachute in 5,000 guys and they'll take care of it, forget that.
The army and the Marines know if they're going to do something like this, it's going to take, this isn't Manuel Noriega's Panama.
You know, this is a serious business.
They have a 300,000 man, 350,000 man army.
I don't know how many of those are actual infantry, but that's enough that you have to really fight them to get anything done there.
It's not like we're talking about a lucky strike with a drone or some kind of silly, you know, movie of the week episode here.
So it's unfathomable the level of violence.
And as you're saying here, every government in the region knows that too.
No one's going to sit here and say, yeah, no, it's going to be flour and candies and finally we'll have stability in Venezuela once the Americans invade.
Nobody's fallen for a storyline like that.
Not this time around.
It would be the worst war in the Western Hemisphere in history.
And possibly one of the worst wars since, it would be possibly worse than Vietnam.
The US Civil War was pretty bad in the Western Hemisphere.
But yeah, I mean, it would be on that order though.
It would be absolutely- It would be, well, that's what, 600,000 casualties?
Right, yeah.
The US, I think the level of casualties would be higher if the US- It could be.
It absolutely could be.
Because you don't just have the Venezuelan military, which is a good military.
They have anti-aircraft batteries that are on the same level as Syria.
They have Russian advisors who are on the ground now helping them use the equipment that they've bought.
They also have the colectivos, which are committed average citizens who have small arms.
And I've visited some of the areas that they're active in.
And they're basically active in the poor and working class barrios across Caracas and across cities around the whole country.
They're armed and prepared to fight if it comes down to it.
Then you have the ELN in Colombia.
I mean, you have basically a failed peace treaty.
Ivan Duque has basically kicked the legs out from under it.
And you have a well-trained leftist paramilitary force or guerrilla force that could activate again.
You have just so many different factors that you would see a region-wide crisis that could reactivate the Colombian Civil War.
The caravan that we witnessed on the border.
Trump wouldn't have to build a wall this time.
I don't know.
He'd have to have several walls to stop the caravan that would be triggered by this region-wide catastrophe.
So it's unbelievable to me that it would even be considered.
And it makes me think they're trying to do some crafty humanitarian intervention again.
I don't know what was talked about at the meeting.
I did get two sources on the phone on the record who attended the meeting.
And they were under instructions not to tell me what happened.
And one actually said, I'm uncomfortable discussing these things with you.
Why are you asking this?
How dare you ask about this?
Why are you a journalist?
And then she hung up on me.
So anyway, the point is that there's a desperation in the Trump administration on this.
And you know what?
And you don't have to be an alarmist and think that this is definitely due.
Or, you know, for the audience, you don't have to interpret what he's saying as a threat that this is going to break out next week.
But then again, it's a pretty high level meeting over there at the CSIS.
And it is meaningful.
I mean, I don't know.
Have you seen any reporting about, say, you know, the Marine Corps and what they think?
I mean, one thing that was really important, say, at the end of the Bush years, was that the Marines and the special operations forces, they didn't want to attack Iran because they were the ones who were going to have to do all the dying, right?
Not the Air Force and Navy flyers.
It was going to be them.
And it was going to be just too much.
And so they were saying things to Bush like, don't make me do this, dude, and things like that.
And that's what I want to hear, right?
Is the Marines saying, you know, the days of marching right into wherever down there and it being easy enough are over.
And this won't be easy enough.
And please, sir, we're advising that we really would not like this kind of deal.
And you know what?
Isn't that funny?
Because we've been like this in the 21st century time and time again where we hope that the standing army can be a check and balance on the passions of our civilians who control the military.
Well, 241 Marines didn't fare so well in Lebanon.
And they would face a similar situation in Venezuela where they would be involved in guerrilla warfare.
The top U.S. military official in this meeting was Admiral Kurt Tidd, K.W. Tidd, I think.
He was the former head of SOUTHCOM.
He stepped down in 2018 and has been replaced by another admiral who's constantly calling on the Venezuelan military to switch sides.
And obviously, those calls have fallen on deaf ears.
But back to the Marines, I mean, I don't know what's the point of the Marines anymore.
I just saw some article about the Marines training for warfare in mega cities.
And as frightening as it was, it also seemed like a public relations act of desperation, just trying to emphasize their relevance to the future of warfighting.
Right.
But I just don't.
Yeah, that's their new advertising campaign, actually, is them helicoptering into the middle of some Arab city.
Yeah.
Some vast, long-season house.
Yeah, that'll work out well.
That's going to be great.
No one's going to die there.
No good guys.
No secret coffins like we had during the, or that can't be photographed like we had when Iraq started getting grisly.
So, yeah, I just don't see what the U.S. military can do here from just a purely, you know, just from a conventional warfare standpoint.
So we have to look at it in terms of hybrid warfare.
And I think that's what's been taking place.
It's kind of forbidden in American media to talk about the blackouts that have been hitting Venezuela as a potential act of U.S. sabotage.
But you had on March 7th, Marco Rubio sit, basically chair a hearing at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Venezuela and call explicitly for widespread unrest.
And then he said, Venezuela is about to enter a period of suffering unlike any country in modern history.
I mean, he used those exact words.
And then five hours later, the hydroelectric plant at the Guri Dam, which supplies 80 to 90 percent of Venezuela's electricity, goes down.
It seemed kind of unusual.
And then Mike Pompeo jumps on Twitter and celebrates the whole thing and says, no lights next, no Maduro.
You know, I mean, the thing is, is there is plausible deniability there, too, that it's perfectly reasonable to expect that a government as unstable as this one might have real problems keeping the lights on.
But on the other hand, it's certainly not the realm of kukri to speculate about this.
And we ran a piece at Antiwar.com by Ted Snyder, a Canadian writer who is really great on this.
And he compiled, you know, 10 reasons to take this seriously as a possibility, essentially not not getting out over his skis and making claims, but just saying this is possible.
And here are real reasons why to believe so.
Yeah, it's plausible.
It's also kind of like it's not just plausible, but it's pretty well established that there has been sabotage of transmission lines in these rural areas that actually there have been burnings of actual transmission lines.
And the Western press has tried to come up with all these different explanations of how that happened.
The trees weren't cut back sufficiently.
So the trees caught on fire and then it didn't that didn't really pan out.
And so they even haven't come up with kind of a counter explanation for any of this.
It just seems too perfect.
But even if this wasn't sabotage, the New York Times somehow, after ignoring the effect of sanctions for years, acknowledged that backup fuel supplies had been limited by sanctions.
And so it was difficult to get the plant back online.
Beyond that, I mean, what we've witnessed since 2007, at least, and there was a coup in 2002, but there's just an open agenda on the part of the U.S. to wage hybrid warfare on Venezuela.
That means like trying to stir up a color revolution.
Juan Guaido is himself a weapon.
I mean, it really isn't working.
Right.
I mean, it seems like I at least read one poll or I was told about one or something that said that his approval rating, Maduro's approval rating had gone up 20 points since the declaration by the United States that they were recognizing Guaido as the new president, which is to be expected.
Right.
Just like the Ayatollah in Iran blames all of his opposition on the CIA.
And he's right at least half the time.
And so it's believable and it makes him look good in comparison to the foreign interventionists there.
Yeah.
I haven't been able to find reliable polling on Maduro's approval rating.
I would love to see that.
I think it was Greg Pallas that said that.
I'll have to ask him.
Well, in October, an opposition polling firm called Data Analysis reported that Juan Guaido's party, Popular Will, Voluntad Popular, was polling at 7% or no, they had an approval rating of 7%.
I think they're polling at 7%.
The U.S. Congress.
Yeah.
The National Assembly, which is what Juan Guaido represents, has a disapproval rating of something like 65%, which is similar to U.S. Congress.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Well, it's just that there is no popular consensus in support of this guy.
And if you actually look as a whole at the Venezuelan opposition, which Western media kind of avoids doing, there are powerful or sizable factions that would like to negotiate a way out of this crisis.
Specifically, the supporters of Henry Falcón, who ran in the 2018 election, that we're always told is this giant fraud.
And he was threatened with U.S. sanctions for running in the election because the goal of the U.S. and Guaido's party, which had been discredited, was to delegitimize the democratic institutions of Venezuela.
Which makes sense, but you're saying he's trying to negotiate a solution now and nobody wants to hear that?
Well, the chief of staff of Falcón actually came out and said that we don't support Guaido and what he's trying to do.
We don't support regime change.
Well, but so is Maduro saying that he would accept Falcón as a negotiator with the other side?
They've been trying as far as I know.
And one way out of this that we could see is something similar to 1990 in Nicaragua, where under the orders of Daniel Ortega, the leader of the Sandinista front, the commander of the Sandinista front, who had come into power after winning this civil war where the U.S. backed his opposition.
He agreed to go to elections and when he lost to Violeta Chamorro, who within the scope of Nicaraguan politics is more moderate than the extreme right, he ordered the Sandinistas to demobilize and they gave up their weapons and had a peace deal.
And it was essentially a concession in order to prevent many more deaths and to get the U.S. out of there.
And so Nicaragua was at peace and this would be a possible way out for Venezuela as well.
The thing is the opposition is so divided, there's no way they can win an election.
And you have so much of the opposition wrapped up in this regime change fantasy.
Yeah, and tied up with the Americans.
I mean, that just ruins everything.
If you're on their side, that's the worst thing they've got going for them is us.
Well, completely.
And, you know, common Venezuelans see that.
Then you have the Chavista movement, which is, you know, it's been weakened a little bit.
You know, Venezuela is not as prosperous as it was at the high point of Chavismo.
You know, the price of oil has gone down.
A lot of people who were into it because they were getting paid well.
And it was just it seemed like the future of Latin America have turned their backs on it.
But then you just have this people's movement that has cultivated a political consciousness over the last 20 years that understands what imperialism is.
And so when you go into the barrios and talk to people, they have a pretty sophisticated analysis of what's being done to them.
And they're not going to stand down.
Right.
And of course, it makes perfect sense, no matter where you are in the world, that people will put independence and dignity above just basic dollars.
I mean, this is what we see right now with this deal of the century in Palestine.
Who believes you're going to be able to bribe the Palestinians into not caring what's been done to them here or this kind of thing?
And so isn't that our highest ideal in America?
Independence?
Our highest ideal out, you know, at the water's edge is bribing the world into into complicity.
And if we can't do that, just ram a barrel of a gun down their throats.
And neither is possible in Venezuela right now.
As I said, you have an anti-imperialist consciousness.
You have an exhausted opposition and you're actually starting to see the Lima Group fracture.
The Lima Group is the collection of kind of mostly conservative leaning U.S. vassal governments or governments that are aligned with the U.S.
And they all run around trying to act like Trump's apprentice and see who can get hired.
And there was an interesting exchange between Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and I think a reporter from The Washington Post.
Yeah, it was a reporter from The Washington Post, actually one of the few good ones.
And he asked Pompeo, do you oppose Peru agreeing to negotiate with the Venezuelan government?
And Pompeo actually said, you're not supposed to ask that question.
He just said, you're not allowed to ask that.
You're not allowed to talk about the fact that the Lima Group is fracturing.
And so now there's this new – oh, also within the Lima Group, I think you have Mexico there.
And AMLO, their recently elected president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, is not going along with the U.S.
He just refuses to go along with this.
He's maintaining neutrality and emphasizing dialogue with Venezuela.
And it's been a real problem for the U.S.
No matter what they do, they can't dislodge his pledge of neutrality.
So they're creating this new kind of phony regional bloc to replace UNASUR, which was founded during the heady days of the progressive wave of Latin America.
And Ecuador is going along with it.
But Ecuador, as I mentioned before and earlier in this interview, Lenin Moreno is facing massive street protests now and this huge corruption scandal.
And the U.S. was really banking on him.
And it appears he's on his way out.
So I just see that as much as Latin America is really in a right-wing phase right now and Venezuela has been kind of surrounded, as much as the economy is going to suffer, I don't see a way forward for the U.S. short of something really extreme.
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So I wonder, you know, I read this interesting thing and, you know, I've not been really reading a whole lot of stuff about Venezuela, but trying to keep up here.
And I read a thing, I think it was by a Russian journalist that was translated over the Saker's blog there.
And he had some interesting takes.
You know, he talked about the currency problems and this and that.
He got robbed by a cop for his cell phone, which he thought was funny more than anything.
I think that's your search term if you're looking for it, is a cop stole my cell phone, something like that.
Anyway, he's down there and he goes, look, man, I was there and it's a Saturday and there were, I don't know, 10 or 20,000 people were having a pro-government protest on this side of town.
There were about 10 or 20,000 people, yeah, pretty good sized rally, having an anti-government protest on the other side of town.
And then, yeah, but the rest of the city, millions of people, they were just going about their Saturday.
And there are economic problems here and there are social problems here and there are divisions and there are fights and political arguments and different factions and what kind of things.
But I guess essentially what he was saying is on a scale of Lake Placid to Iran, 1953, this place is nowhere near, or maybe 79, this place is nowhere near revolution.
Well, 53 is probably the better example.
There's nothing like the instability that one would expect to be taking place in a context where the CIA and the NED and whoever thought that they, USAID, thought that they could get away with something like this.
That's supposed to be pushing over a toddler or something, but there are no circumstances really for them to exploit here, it doesn't sound like really.
Yeah, I actually had to kind of mentally prepare myself when I was going into Venezuela to actually see some level of the dystopia that was constantly relayed back to us by Western media, by the New York Times or CNN.
And I just had to prepare myself, what if I am wrong here a little bit?
And I was actually shocked at how stable the situation seemed, how people were just going about their daily lives in a very normal way.
And you just didn't even see the same level of homelessness and desperation that I see where I live in Washington, D.C.
I'm actually looking out my window right now and there's a tent behind my house that a homeless person has just set up.
You just don't see that.
The opposition rallies were pretty weak compared to in the past.
And there have been a lot of reporters to go down and kind of convey the reality which stands in total contrast to the reporting that we've been getting from mainstream media.
A good reporter is John McAvoy for the Canary UK.
At the same time, millions of people have fled.
Did you talk to anyone about, did they lift the price controls?
Because I'm reading that the level of price inflation, and that's partly because of monetary inflation, but it's also partly because of the American financial war against the currency there.
That makes sense, too.
The real problem that causes the shortages, as destructive as hyperinflation can be, it's the price controls that cause the system of distribution to break down.
And I think they certainly had instituted price controls, and that certainly had caused a lot of chaos.
But I wonder whether they had just, they're going ahead now and just letting, hands off and let the hyperinflation go ahead and run, because at least it's better than trying to control it when you can't.
Well, without stopping printing money.
It's impossible to stop hyperinflation.
It's kind of just, it just multiplies like a cancer.
Well, I mean, they can stop adding to the money supply.
But it's also true that there's a war to devalue their currency from the outside, which is a separate issue.
But it's the price controls, I think, that really cause a breakdown.
But I just wonder, when you were there, if anybody had said something along those lines to you, that like, yeah, back during the price controls, it was worse, but now it's a bit better without them.
I don't even know the state of them.
I just assume they must be lifted if people are able to queue up at the store and get food.
Yeah.
I mean, people weren't complaining about price controls.
They were complaining, however, about that the price of food was too high and that their salaries were too low because the currency had been devalued through a myriad of factors.
Right.
One being speculation from the outside, as well as, you know, deliberate kind of war, like kind of hybrid warfare attempts to confuse people about the value of the currency.
This website, Dolar Today, that's based in Alabama and is run by a former member of the opposition or a member of the Venezuelan opposition, basically tells people what the bolivar is worth compared to the dollar.
And it's just done to wreak havoc on the economy.
A lot of cash.
I mean, that price is going to be set by the willingness of the customer to go along with those kinds of things.
I mean, certainly part of it is that the government has over there, they obligated themselves to spend more money than they can take in when the price of oil fell in half.
Yeah.
And so they really have, you know, increased the money supply by a great extent, has a lot to do with that.
I think that's kind of almost common knowledge.
And, you know, I am not an economist, so it's difficult for me.
I really want to know.
In fact, I really want to see a chart that says, look, here's the date when the sanctions kick in.
And here's what effect that had on the value of the currency on that week or whatever.
You know, that kind of thing.
I haven't seen anyone break that down properly yet.
Well, it was 2014, I think, when the price of oil plummeted.
And there were a few articles, including in oil trade publications, petroleum trade publications about how the oil had been strategically – the price of oil barrels had been strategically lowered through a deal between Secretary of State John Kerry and then King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.
To weaken Russia and Iran, Nicolas Maduro was quoted possibly in the Wall Street Journal.
I know he was quoted complaining that this was done to harm Russia and obviously he'd be collateral damage.
Right.
And that Kerry agreed to support Saudi Arabia in Syria in exchange for doing this, for basically turning on the tap and basically flooding the market with Saudi oil because they have the most strategic reserves.
I mean, they can just produce so much more oil than everyone else thanks to their infrastructure and so forth.
So that was a huge factor.
And then the following year, Barack Obama declares Venezuela a national security threat and imposes the first real round of sanctions.
And that does great damage to the economy.
I mean, just talking to people who are in and out of government, who were in government at the time, including economists, they say that that made it difficult for them to restructure their debt or to actually compensate for the fact that their main source of income and buying medicine and food, because most food is imported into Venezuela, was harder.
And then Trump comes in and the sanctions just escalate rapidly.
But you talk to an economist like Mark Weisbrot, who consulted for the Venezuelan government and who still defends the government's right to sovereignty and respect under the UN Charter, who's now at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.
I mean, he has been on the record hammering their mistakes and saying they made, according to him, decisions that were more ideological than objectively economic.
And he points to some of the same mistakes that you're highlighting here.
If you look at- And you're right, by the way, that there's no question of where Mark Weisbrot's loyalties lie on these questions.
I mean, he's a very good leftist by your standard on all of these questions.
I like the guy.
I've interviewed him before.
Yes.
I mean, he's pretty withering.
And Maduro actually acknowledged he used the word mistake in his inaugural address.
Same thing with Greg Palast too.
Greg Palast is a great sympathizer with Hugo Chavez.
He's definitely a progressive and an economist as well as an investigative reporter in his own right.
And he's more than happy to point the finger at all of Maduro's errors as severe ones too.
But, you know, he made a great analogy.
He said, you know, take Canada.
They have a stable currency most of the time.
Socialist health care programs and what have you, notwithstanding.
And yet, if the American Treasury Department declared a financial war against Canada, against their oil, against, you know, kicking them out of SWIFT and the Bank for International Settlements and whatever it is, these kind of institutions, what do you think would happen to the value of the Canadian dollar?
Without any monetary inflation at all, it would still, the value would be going way down because of this outside pressure.
So, my people, the libertarians, like to just say, aha, see, socialism doesn't work.
Which, you know, it can get really expensive.
And that's certainly part of this story.
But as with everything, we should always blame the U.S. government first.
We should always certainly look for its role, the most powerful organization on the planet, its role, before we distribute the blame to anyone else.
After all, that's what we do, libertarians listening, that's what we do when a bank fails.
When Bear Stearns fails, we go, well, those guys are criminals.
But it's really all Alan Greenspan's fault, which is true, right?
But if we're going to give a break to a banker, we better give one to a poor little third world country our government's picking on, too.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, there's an elemental point to make here, which is that Venezuela uses its oil assets to purchase food and medicine.
And that food is distributed to the poorest of the poor through a basically free food program and the medicine as well.
They have all of the food distribution.
They have the mechanisms to provide humanitarian aid to their people.
But if they don't have the assets, what the U.S. is doing with its sanctions is actually blockading food and medicine.
And that is just, you know, the ultimate hypocrisy.
It's strangling Venezuelans with one hand and then trying to wave in USAID trucks with the other hand.
And that's the strategy here.
And again, you know, no matter, people have different opinions about the nature of the government over there and all that.
I actually was reading a thing about how this is one of the greatest cases of the resource curse ever, where they actually used to have a pretty diversified economy.
But under socialist government spending on these necessities, as you're talking about, people became so, even in industry, everybody became so dependent on the government.
They quit diversifying their economy.
And in fact, it got more and more dependent.
Like, as you said, now they import most of their food instead of having really a domestic food industry at all.
All these things.
It's still the same answer at the end of the day, no matter what you think about all of that.
It's none of the U.S. government's business to make decisions for these people about how to run things.
And in fact, you know, if you really have an anti-socialist bent and you want Maduro to take the full rap for his responsibility for his, quote, mistakes and the way he's running his government, the last thing you want to do is intervene and make it Uncle Sam's fault, which is exactly what they've done.
So, no matter which side of the debate you're on, you have to be against intervention here.
I've heard this stuff about diversification before and it just doesn't wash.
I mean, if you look at the previous governments before Hugo Chavez, they were relying entirely on oil, entirely.
And Venezuela had this giant oil boom in the 70s and it wasn't distributed.
The general population didn't benefit from it.
And this is what led to Chavismo.
I mean, I could give more details to it.
In the 80s, you just saw the pensions of Venezuelans get raided in 1984.
You saw basically the government of – the government that was in power in the late 80s basically spend like a drunken sailor on all sorts of programs that couldn't be paid down.
And then you had giant riots because the next government that came in under Carlos Andres Perez, who made all these promises to help the poor, had to raise bus fares and they had to raise taxes and they had to raise food prices and you had rioting.
You had the same level of speculation.
The government had trouble keeping prices under control under these previous governments.
Hugo Chavez inherited so many of the problems of a petro state that had been that way since oil was discovered in Venezuela.
So this whole thing of diversification, it doesn't really – it's ahistorical.
And the fact is that right now Maduro is doing everything he can to try to encourage food production, which is understood as food sovereignty.
He's trying to encourage people in the colectivos, which support the government, to move to the countryside and establish cooperative farms.
And people generally don't want to do it.
It's just the money is in Caracas.
The money is in the cities.
And so you just have a problem where Nicaragua, for example, produces 70 to 80 percent of its own food because it's just a traditionally agricultural society.
Venezuela just hasn't been that way because of these constant oil booms.
Well, another thing that Pala says is that the oil is all on land that's essentially just rock.
Like even Indians didn't live there.
It never belonged to anyone essentially except for the national government, which always took that oil money and spent it on the maybe 10 percent, the few percent instead of the rest.
And that all Hugo Chavez did in practice, Red Beret and everything aside, was instead of saying socialism for 10 percent, he said socialism for everybody, which makes 10 percent angry, but obviously was a big help.
All the stats show it was a big help to everybody else, especially the desperately poor in that country.
Those kinds of things can certainly be taken too far.
Right.
Right.
I mean, you also have a problem with Venezuelan oil is heavy crude, and so it needs to be mixed with other oil.
And the U.S. had provided those facilities through CITCO, and they're now being, I think next month they're going to be completely taken over.
There's an attempt by the U.S. to sanction an Indian company that provides some of the technology that allows the Venezuelan government to mix its crude oil with light crude and make it possible to export it.
So there are all these different – there's so many layers of problems, and yet the government has managed I think last month to export a million barrels, which is well below what they were doing in the heady days of Chavez.
Yeah.
But they're able to survive.
And talking to friends in Caracas, they tell me life kind of continues as normal to the great chagrin of Marco Rubio and Elliott Abrams, who is actually going to appear at the Atlantic Council on April 25th here and talk about Venezuela after Maduro.
And it's just ridiculous that they keep doing this again and again and again.
The day before, on April 24th, the Venezuelan embassy expects to be essentially raided by Juan Guaido's representatives under Secret Service protection, and they're going to try to take over the embassy, and they're expecting that to take place.
And it will be the only consular institution that they control, but they won't be able to provide consular services to Venezuelans because they don't control the government.
So it's just a joke what's going on here.
And back to the oil crisis and the financial crisis over there and all of these other things.
It sounds crazy to imagine, but what if we had a policy of just being friends and trying to help them, no matter how much we disagreed with their bad economic policies?
It sounds ridiculous even to put it that way.
That's how far down this road we already are.
Or what if we just said, yeah, you know what?
We think you could probably shape up and fly right, but in the meantime, we're willing to help you to maintain your facilities, to keep your people fed as best you can.
Well, this is something- Kill them with kindness, I don't know.
Bernie Sanders has made terrible comments about Venezuela when he's asked about it.
And I know there are people in his campaign that don't agree with that, but he tries to waver between not supporting a regime change operation and saying that democracy needs to be restored to Venezuela.
He knows nothing about what took place there in the election, and he says it was a fraud election.
He also refused to even comment about Assange and Manning too, right?
Yeah, they just have said nothing about it.
He doesn't know probably what to say, but he needs to be- He's got that Hillary-itis, can't be too far to the left or they just won't like me.
And so I wonder what Robert Kagan thinks about what I said today, you know?
Yeah, I wouldn't call it Hillary-itis because Hillary really believed that stuff.
Bernie doesn't.
In his Foxtown Hall, he said we need to stand up against a military industrial complex.
She also believed it was sound strategy to always be a muscular hawk so that Republicans know that, swing voters know that you're not a wimpy tie-dye type.
Yeah, as soon as she got in the Senate, she wanted the Armed Services Committee.
That was her whole strategy.
But then even after she lost to Obama and watched him trounce McCain too, she didn't learn a thing.
She was still a hawk as a Secretary of State too.
Yeah, I'm just making a point about Bernie, which is that he's the frontrunner.
And there was a lot of pressure on him in 2016, even before 2015, to get him to take a better position on Palestine.
And he responded to it.
And I think Venezuela is the issue that should be – that Bernie should be hammered on.
He has to take a strong position here that he will do sanctions relief.
He'll end the sanctions, which are a form of warfare, and that he will support dialogue, the Mexico and Uruguay track of dialogue, to end this political crisis.
And he needs to come out on the record and say it.
I actually think there is a chance he could be elected president.
There's a strong chance he could win in the primary.
So he's more responsive to grassroots pressure than Hillary was, of course, or Joe Biden.
You're certainly right.
He's gone further on Palestine lately than ever before, right?
Yeah, yeah, he has.
And he's done very well on Yemen.
And I know that some of the people who worked heavily on the Yemen bill in Congress to invoke the AUMF to assert congressional authority are on Bernie's campaign, going on his presidential campaign.
So I wouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater just because he makes these heinous comments because he doesn't know what he's talking about.
Like, I think there is an opportunity here.
Well, I sure would like to see him run on the Yemen war for the next year and a half.
That's how to get me to vote for Bernie Sanders.
Well, I would watch him, his Foxtown Hall.
He was asked by a Syrian-American, Bernie, are you going to be just another hog in the war party?
Will you get troops out of Syria?
And will you oppose regime change in Venezuela?
And he didn't answer the question, but he did shift to Yemen.
And he talked about his role in stopping the war in Yemen.
And I thought that was fairly admirable.
Trying to, yeah.
I mean, the thing is, too, it's the same thing with Rand Paul.
These guys have to realize what a bully pulpit they have.
I mean, what if part of the narrative for the next month was, for God's sake, for some reason, Bernie Sanders just won't shut up about Yemen.
It's all he talks about, no matter what anybody asks him, and make a thing out of it.
You know what I mean?
Because obviously TV isn't going to make a thing out of it unless you find a way to make them make a thing out of it.
And in his position, the Democrat Party frontrunner, as you said, sponsor the bill.
Go ahead and bring the hammer down now.
You know, this is a real crisis.
There's no greater emergency on the face of this earth right now than the war in Yemen.
And he's got nothing to lose.
We have a piece up at the Grayzone, by the way, about a protest against MSNBC where Joe Scarborough was confronted about his and his network's refusal to cover Yemen.
So there is a lot of activity.
But, yeah, check that out.
I don't have any time left to lose here, so I got to jump off.
Right on.
Good.
Listen, thanks for coming on the show.
It's great to talk to you again, Max.
Yeah, thanks, as always, for having me, Scott.
All right, you guys.
This is Max Blumenthal.
He wrote The Management of Savagery.
What a great title for a book.
Stolen from the Al-Qaeda guys, but, yeah, I like it.
And it's a really great book.
Please check it out.
And check out thegrayzone.com for the Grayzone Project.
And, again, Killing Gaza.
You pay three bucks.
You sit and watch it for an hour.
OK?
All right, thank you.
Bye.
All right, y'all, thanks.
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