For Pacifica Radio, April 28th, 2019.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright y'all, and it is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I'm the editorial director of antiwar.com.
Alright, you guys, on the line, I've got Kevin Zeese.
Been a while.
Welcome back.
How are you?
Great.
Good to talk to you again, Scott.
Very good to have you here.
And man, you wrote this great piece about Ukraine and what's going on there that we're going to talk about in a few minutes.
But first, and very importantly, you are on the line right now from the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, D.C., where you are with a coalition of Code Pink, your group, Popular Resistance, and who else, and what are you doing there?
Yeah, we formed the election, excuse me, the Embassy Protection Collective, and we're here in the embassy in Georgetown.
We've been here for more than two weeks, and we are trying to prevent the Trump administration from violating international law and giving the embassy over to their hand-picked puppet fraud government.
And the groups that are involved are Code Pink and Popular Resistance.
We initiated it with the Code Pink.
And then also involved are the Black Alliance for Peace, United National Anti-War Coalition, and the ANSWER Coalition.
And ANSWER has done a great job of bringing people to this.
And we have about 30 people spending the nights here.
We have, and that's going to rise this weekend because we're in the midst of a major mobilization this weekend.
So more people, Sunday is going to be a big day.
There's going to be a lot of people out here.
And it's going to be really, we're really making an effort to stand in solidarity with the Venezuelan people and stand in solidarity with international law.
The Vienna Convention, which protects embassies, does not allow the host government to trespass on embassies.
Embassies are inviolable.
They can't be trespassed on.
Their job is to protect embassies.
The Trump administration is threatening to do the opposite.
They're threatening to give the embassy over illegally to their hand-picked puppet government that has no legal authority as a government.
They violated Venezuelan law in multiple ways.
And they have no ability to make a passport, a visa.
They have no ability to enter into any kind of trade agreements.
They are just a non-government.
They don't exist.
And so for them to give this over, it's a message to the world.
It's a bad message.
The message is, world governments, your embassies are not safe in Washington, D.C. unless you allow us to tell you what to do.
And if you don't do what we want, we're going to pick a president in your country, recognize that president, and take your embassy.
That's what's happening here.
And so we're doing the job that the government should be doing.
We're protecting the embassy.
We're standing for the sovereign government, the independent government of Venezuela.
Whether you like Maduro or not, that's not the issue.
They elected him.
I was at that election, by the way.
I observed that election last May.
And it was a legitimate election.
There were more than 150 international election observers.
And the observers all unanimously agreed it was a legitimate election, met international standards.
There was no fraud, Maduro is the president under that election.
And so for the U.S. government to ignore that and pick some unknown politician from the second smallest state in Venezuela who barely got into the national legislature from a tiny little party that no one knows, to pick him as the president is just incredibly irresponsible.
And now, to allow the Vienna Convention to be violated is just a terrible message.
So we're here at the invitation of the Venezuelan government.
They've offered us their protection.
We're a tenant here.
We're activist tenants who are here to protect the embassy on behalf of the Venezuelan people.
All right.
So now there's all kinds of stuff you brought up there.
But the most important point being that the Trump administration has said outright they want to turn this embassy over to the representatives of so-called the new government, the regime they're trying to put in power there.
The fake government.
But anyway, just to be clear about that, that this isn't just some stunt or whatever.
There's real reason to do this.
So then that means what?
Are you like, you got your caught right in front of the front door so they just can't come in kind of thing?
Well, Scott, they've actually already taken over the military attache in Washington, D.C.
They've taken over the diplomatic building for Venezuela in New York City.
So this has been done already.
There was no opposition in those cases.
This time there's opposition.
So we have 30 plus people spending the nights here, living here, all ages.
We have people coming to forums every night, 100 people at these forums on a whole range.
We've done Julian Assange.
We've done Venezuela.
We've done AFRICOM. We've done Latin music.
We've done cultural events.
Then we have outside, we have people showing support, protesting, and the building is covered with signs that explain that the coup is illegal and that U.S. should put hands off Venezuela.
We don't want a war.
And the problem is this, to give you a little kind of perspective, there's a U.S. embassy in Caracas that's vacant.
There's a Venezuelan embassy in Washington, D.C. that's vacant except for us, their tenants.
So the question is, if the U.S. violates the Vienna Convention here and enters this embassy and gives it to some other fake entity, their puppet entity, what can the Venezuelans do to the Caracas embassy for the United States?
Do they do the same thing?
I mean, so it's like a terrible, terrible start of a slide of problems.
What we're trying to do is hold this embassy so the two countries can negotiate a settlement.
The settlement that we hope is negotiated, we understand this is being discussed right now, is that the Swiss become the protectorate for the U.S. embassy in Caracas, and then another country becomes the protectorate for the Venezuelan embassy in the United States.
That's what we hope ends up happening to avoid this conflict escalating.
Mm-hmm.
Well, okay.
So, and this is the real problem, right?
Is that the coup already failed.
Somebody told Trump this was going to be easy.
And then, so they recognize the new guy and not just the military, but the entire government stuck with the old guy.
So now they don't really know what to do.
So they can kind of escalate it.
They can move things forward in smaller ways, but God help us.
I don't think they're really planning on, you know, beach invasion.
Although I guess it could come to that, but they really don't know what to do, I think is a big part of the problem right now.
I think you're exactly right.
It's already failed in Venezuela.
Guaido has no support there.
He was an unknown politician to begin with, and he's wrapped his arms around the United States.
He's proven himself that he's a puppet.
He'll do what Trump says to do.
When Trump says pick his arm up, he picks his arm up.
And he's, you know, the U.S. is attacking Venezuela economically.
They've attacked the economic grid to create blackouts.
They've uncovered a terrorist plan by the United States to cause chaos.
I can talk about that more if you want.
They're threatening military action.
They've attempted assassinations in Maduro.
And Guaido's wrapping his arms around this kind of aggressive militaristic behavior by the U.S. That is losing support.
So when I was in Venezuela a month ago, and I went to a protest that was called as an anti-imperialist protest, massive crowds, bigger than any protest I've ever seen in the United States, bigger than the anti-Iraq war protest during the Bush era, bigger than the protest, the Women's March, which was kind of a fake protest, but bigger than that.
But then the same day, Guaido called three protests.
He canceled two of them because no one was coming.
And the third one he held way outside of Caracas was a small protest.
So he can't even call a protest anymore.
The coup has failed.
So Trump is trying to prop up Guaido internationally.
So if they take this embassy, what the Trump administration intends to do is to put their finger and pressure on the right wing Latin American governments that are allied with them, and the Western European governments that are under U.S. thumb, and get them to recognize Guaido and give the embassies there to Guaido's people.
So they'll create this international fake embassy network because the coup has failed in Venezuela.
Well, and you know, it should be said too, that regardless of what you think about Maduro or your take on recent history there, this is none of the USA's damn business at all to intervene.
That's key.
There are some irregularities with kind of suspending the old House of Representatives and creating a new one and this and that.
But then on the other side, you have major divisions in the opposition.
You had a whole bunch of them who, I think on the advice of the Americans, tried to boycott the election in order to shame Maduro since they were going to lose it so bad anyway.
But then one guy ran anyway and lost.
And so the thing is, it's a complicated mess.
And your opinion, in my opinion, about exactly how legitimate Maduro's office holding is there, is completely irrelevant.
The USA has no mandate to overthrow anybody else's country whatsoever, not in our constitution.
That's the bottom line.
And that's the collective has people who are critical of Maduro and people who are less critical of Maduro.
And we still agree that U.S. intervention, U.S. imperialism, U.S. military threats, economic war, attacking the electric grid, all that shouldn't be allowed.
And so we're asking the U.S. to back off.
I disagree with some of the comments you made about the situation in Venezuela.
I was there as an observer.
That was a legitimate election that Maduro won with 67 percent of the vote.
Nine million people voted.
He got six million votes.
It's a better election system than the U.S. system in many ways.
In fact, in that part, I was blaming the opposition because they boycotted the election.
Ask the Sunnis in 2005 how well that worked out for them.
I'll mention to you about that.
I was going to say that the U.S. pressured them to boycott.
They pressured Henry Falcón not to run, and he ran anyway.
They pressured other candidates not to run.
There were six candidates who ran.
Maduro came in first with 67 percent.
Falcón advocated get an IMF loan, which no one wants.
He advocated tying the boulevard to the U.S. dollar so we're tightly controlled by the U.S. No one wants that.
He got 24 percent of the vote.
The other candidates got less.
Maduro won that election, and the election observers all say it was a legitimate election.
Whatever you think of the situation, that's your thought.
Not you personally, people who are listening to this.
The issue really is anti-imperialism.
The U.S. should stay out of Venezuela's business.
It's funny because they say, but look at millions of refugees.
There are a lot of economic refugees from Venezuela, possibly even millions.
It's funny you say that because there's a CIA report.
We published it on Popular Resistance.
A CIA report that ranks Venezuela as 147th in the world as far as immigration goes.
They have more people coming into the country than leaving it.
I mean, actually, the guy that owns the house I'm renting right now is an economic refugee from there.
He doesn't have much politics at all.
There's a lot of travel back and forth over the country.
There used to be one country, Colombia and Venezuela.
A lot of traffic back and forth.
Many Colombians have come to Venezuela.
In fact, Venezuela has built two and a half million homes for the poorest people in their country.
Even during this economic war, two and a half million homes for about 10 million people.
A lot of those homes, hundreds of thousands, went to Colombians who fled Colombia to come to Venezuela because Colombia is so violent.
It's a mess.
Whatever the facts are on that front, it still comes down to this.
U.S., stay out.
Hands off Venezuela.
Stop the imperialism.
It's imperialism because not only does Venezuela have number one oil, everyone knows that, they're number one in gold, they're number one in diamonds, number five in gas, and they have minerals that are critical to electronics, critical to weapons, minerals that shield missiles so they don't burn up when they're flying.
They have very high levels of fresh water that's becoming an incredible important natural resource.
They have a lot of resource wealth, and the U.S. wants to dominate that.
That's why they're putting in place a puppet government.
John Bolton, the national security advisor, said on Fox News, yeah, I'm going to get in there and turn those oil resources over to American companies.
In other words, so we can keep all the oil and all the money too.
Exactly.
It's just stealing.
That's all it is.
Not much mystery about it either.
When you have John Bolton explaining the policy, he doesn't know any words but honest ones.
Even when he's lying.
They've stolen billions already.
In fact, I mentioned that terrorist plot.
They arrested Guaido's chief of staff and bodyguard.
Please go back and explain that whole thing there.
They arrest the chief of staff and bodyguard of Guaido.
They search their phones and computers and their homes.
They find proof, and they've made this proof public, of U.S. spending a billion dollars of money they stole from Venezuela to pay mercenaries from Central America to be trained in Colombia and to come in eight different terrorist cells to cause havoc in Venezuela, to attack the electrical grid, to attack the metro system, to attack government buildings, to do assassinations.
Listen to this.
They were going to dress up in Venezuelan military uniforms to make it look like the military was revolting against Maduro, when the military is actually very loyal to Maduro.
That was the U.S. plan.
That's gotten no attention in the United States, that the U.S. was going to use Venezuelan dollars to create terrorism in Venezuela.
Why are they doing that?
Because they cannot get enough support to do a military attack.
Even though countries are willing to play the game of the fake president, even though they're not willing to get into a military attack, Colombia and Brazil, which are on both two borders of Venezuela, are refusing to get militarily involved.
Western European countries are saying no to militarism.
NATO, which has now gone to Colombia, is another threat to Venezuela.
I don't know what NATO is doing in Latin America, but that's the latest NATO addition is Colombia, and they're trying to add Brazil as well.
I'm sure it's just a coincidence that it's two countries that border Venezuela that they're adding to NATO.
They can't get enough support for a military attack, so they're going to create chaos with terrorism.
That's the U.S. plan.
It's grotesque.
I don't know the exact evidence there or how credible it all is, but for anybody who thinks that that's impossible, just look at history and the amount of damage that America has done there in the past.
I think you got to understand that I don't know exactly America's history in Venezuela going back all through the years.
I know they have supported right-wing governments there in the past, but you look at Latin America as a whole, uncountable coup d'etats and internal repression regimes and CIA support for torturous death squads, and God knows what in Colombia and Brazil and in Chile and in Argentina.
We know, Scott, that in Syria, U.S. funded Islamic extremists to do terrorism.
That's just the reality of what's the U.S. policy.
Same with the attack on the electoral grid.
This is stuff the U.S. does whenever they try to create regime change.
They do what they can to undermine the legitimacy of the government and the economy, make the economy scream, make it difficult for everyone to survive, and hope they blame the government.
It's the opposite, by the way, in Venezuela.
It's happening.
When I was in Venezuela, what I found out was even people who criticize Maduro were saying, that's not the issue right now.
We're not going to focus on Maduro and our criticisms.
We're going to focus on stopping U.S. from entering Venezuela.
That's the priority.
They're actually igniting people around Maduro rather than causing division.
Right.
For people who really say that he is the heart of the problem here, or just the way he's handled the collapse of oil prices, then you got to point your accusation finger right at the White House and the CIA for coming up with this whole thing to make all of their problems, at the very least, seem like America's fault.
Putting sanctions on their oil, having the British deny them their gold, and, you know, waging war, kicking them out of SWIFT, and all of the international banking institutions, and all these kinds of things, so that Maduro can say, look, everything that's going on around here is the CIA's fault, just like the Ayatollah in Iran says all the time, and quite plausibly so.
Exactly.
So, in fact, I think it was Greg Palast said that just immediately, like in the first week after the attempted push here, that Maduro's approval rating went up 20 points.
Exactly.
You know, and so the reality, I was down in Venezuela again a month ago, and what I'm seeing is people rallying around Maduro, even if they criticize him, and everyone, every leader can be criticized for making mistakes, for sure, and so can Maduro, and they're more critical of Guaido, who's a joke down there, he's the butt of jokes, and they're more critical of U.S. imperialism.
Elliott Abrams is attacked for his whole history and what he's doing in Venezuela.
John Bolton, with his crazy comments that you mentioned about giving oil to our oil industry, you know, so all this is, people in Venezuela understand that.
They understand, they live with U.S. imperialism, and they don't want it.
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Now let's talk about Ukraine.
Here's a country where, you know, I knew that we had all kinds of problems in Ukraine, but I only recently learned in the coverage of this election that millions of Ukrainians have fled.
I didn't think that they could flee.
I didn't know who would let in a bunch of Ukrainian refugees.
I guess Poland.
But was it your piece that said, yeah, far from sipping tea in Paris like they'd been promised, they're scrubbing floors in Warsaw, because you thought everything was bad in Ukraine before America came and fixed all that in February of 2014.
Yep.
And we spent billions of dollars over many years to build the opposition movement against the government, the democratically elected government, which had its problems.
It was, again, our government has problems, their government has problems, but we wanted to make sure we dominated Ukraine, which is on the Russian border.
And it was one of the most open coups that we've seen.
I think Venezuela may be even more open, but we'll say that until that, Ukraine was pretty open.
And what I put out after the election, in the election Poroshenko, the president, was defeated by a 73-25% vote, a massive landslide against him.
And Poroshenko is interesting because if you look at WikiLeaks documents about Ukraine, you can look up Poroshenko, WikiLeaks to find these, or you can go to my article on popularresistance.org.
We have an article about this, about the Ukraine election.
What you find is that Poroshenko was known as OU insider.
OU means our Ukraine insider, because before he became president for years, he was a US informant.
He was an informant to the State Department and CIA.
And so putting Poroshenko in was putting in OU, our Ukraine insider.
And what's interesting about the memos is, one of the other memos talking about Poroshenko says, there's credible evidence that he's corrupt, but we just have to accept that for OU.
In other words, we'll accept the corruption so we have our Ukraine insider in office.
Corruption was the issue in this most recent election.
Zelensky has a TV show, which is a very funny show, you can watch it on Netflix, it's a few years old, where he plays a teacher who becomes president, and his whole thrust is fighting corruption.
And that's what his campaign was primarily about, was fighting corruption.
And so Poroshenko, our government knew he was corrupt.
He was OU, he was our Ukraine insider.
And his corruption came in, he got a lot richer, while the country got a lot poorer.
And one example of that corruption that made worse was really the gas company, the private gas company Ukraine.
The United States brought its corruption to Ukraine.
Joe Biden's son, Hunter, was put on the board of that gas company.
John Kerry's longtime financier was put on the board of that gas company.
There was an investigation of the corruption of that gas company.
Joe Biden was in Ukraine.
He told Poroshenko, if that prosecutor is not fired in six hours, I'm going to block a billion dollar loan to Ukraine.
I'm going to bankrupt your country if you don't fire that prosecutor who's investigating my son's company.
Poroshenko fired him, and Biden went back home and signed off on that billion dollar loan.
And they put in place a prosecutor that Biden could accept.
That's the only thing I like about Biden, is he just loves talking, and everything he says is about how guilty he is about the things that he's done.
He says that on camera.
He says it with pride.
It's embarrassing.
But you're right, he's a big mouth.
He's on every issue—student debt, on drug war, on the drug czar, on mass incarceration, on racism in the drug war, on Clarence Thomas becoming a Supreme Court justice.
Over and over, on issue after issue, Biden is a terror, and Ukraine is a good example.
Biden just announced he's running for president, and most of his announcement was focused on Charlottesville.
Most of his announcements were on Charlottesville and the racism that was seen in Charlottesville during the Trump administration.
Get this, in Ukraine, Biden allied with racists.
He allied with anti-Semites.
He allied with the racists in Ukraine, and here he is running for president saying he's not a racist.
The guy is just a two-faced liar.
He's the most fraudulent, nice guy, Joe, on the Amtrak train, Joe.
He's a fraud.
He is a corporatist, drug war incarcerator, militarist, and he needs to be defeated, and he will be defeated.
I guarantee he's not going to make it to the primaries.
He'll probably be one of the first people knocked out of this presidential nomination race because he has such a terrible record.
Ukraine is going to become exhibit one for his racism, the anti-Semitism he allied himself with, and for his corruption with his son being put on the board of the largest gas company.
You know what the U.S. provides assistance for?
We provide funding and technical assistance for fracking.
So we're going to destroy Ukraine's environment, and Biden's pushing that.
Then he does this whole thing with stopping the investigation of the corruption of the gas company.
So over and over and over again, Biden's fraud is shown in Ukraine, and his long record of being a militarist, mass incarcerator, racist with Clarence, with the Anita Hill hearings, anti-female in his Anita Hill hearings, his pawing of women on video, over and over and over again.
And kids.
Biden is wrong.
Yeah, young kids.
That's right.
Young kids.
He's wrong on all fronts.
He's got a terrible record, and he's not going to survive it.
Well, I just think you're being way too soft on Biden here, Kevin, honestly.
For example, these aren't racists.
These are Nazis.
These are the proud grandsons of the guys who were in the Galatian SS during World War II and perpetrated the Holocaust against Jews and Poles, killed hundreds of thousands of them.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And he's allied himself with that openly.
He's allied himself with those right-wing, swastika-carrying parties, and that's who he's allied with.
It's just grotesque.
Then he goes in and uses Charlottesville, uses Charlottesville to try to proclaim himself as a non-racist.
But in reality, he's had a racist history.
You combine that with the other Democrats running against him pointing to his record.
That led to mass incarceration, led to racist incarceration.
And talk more about that in the 1990s, his work in Congress on the drug wars and stuff, because he really was a leader of that stuff, wasn't he?
Yeah, he was.
He was the chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
And so he was leader of creating the drug czar's office.
He was leader of creating the new round of mandatory sentencing.
He was leader of creating the crack powder discrepancy, which led to racist cocaine enforcement.
He was leader in Plan Colombia, which led to the militarization of Colombia.
He was leader in going after dance parties, known as raves, as a drug war enforcement effort.
So on issue, he was wrong on all that.
And when he was chairman of the Judiciary, he only allowed police and prosecutors who supported the drug war to testify.
There were a lot of police and judges and prosecutors who opposed the drug war, but Biden would not let those voices being heard.
He would stifle those voices as chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
And then he became chairman of foreign relations.
And he was a cheerleader for the Iraq war more than George W.
Bush.
He, again, would use his position as chairman to stop admirals and generals who opposed the war testifying against the war.
He only allowed people who supported the war to testify.
He was an abuser of his right, his powers, and his chairmanship positions to warp the truth.
He did not want the truth to be known that there were no weapons of mass destruction, that going into Iraq would be a quagmire, that it could cost a trillion dollars, and it has cost, in fact, a million lives and millions more refugees.
I mean, so- Wait, so we got to wrap up.
Sorry to interrupt.
We got to wrap up real quick on the time though, but with the most important part here, back to the point, is that he was very involved in the 2014 coup in Ukraine because Victoria Nuland, Robert Kagan's wife, who was at that time essentially the ambassador to the European Union, is caught on tape saying, so we're going to get Biden to help glue this thing together and midwife it and this and that.
And then you have his son installed on the board of directors of this gas company.
And then you have him admitting at the Council on Foreign Relations on video about his intervention in their legal process to protect his son like that.
Exactly.
And Nuland said she spent billions of dollars on this.
They picked Poroshenko.
They picked Yaks as the prime minister.
And here's the one, Nuland's staff, who has been a longtime State Department's assistant, and the Orange Revolution, the previous US coup effort, moved to Ukraine, became the funnel for billions of dollars from the United States into the opposition.
And then she was appointed the finance minister.
On the day she was appointed, oh you, our man in Ukraine, he made her a citizen so she could be the finance minister.
So you have the president, the prime minister, the finance minister, and the board of directors of the largest gas company, and Monsanto's giving free reign to use their herbicides in Ukraine's agriculture.
So we have abused Ukraine terribly.
It's a very ugly coup that US worked toward.
And now we're trying to cause trouble on the Russian border by having a conflict with the Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine.
And that's what Zelensky says he's going to try to solve.
He's willing to negotiate with Russia to solve that conflict.
I hope that succeeds, because a war on that border could become a US war on the border with Russia.
It's amazing he's running.
It's a total embarrassment to the Democratic Party that he's right now the frontrunner.
But he's a frontrunner that's made of sand.
Yeah, he's not going to last.
He can't.
It's going to make Sanders and the others look like very powerful politicians when they take Biden down, because Biden's going to be one of the first to fall, because his record, his videos of employing women and children are going to come back and ruin his campaign.
He shouldn't be running.
It's going to be a terrible end to his career at 78 years old.
No question.
All right.
So that's the great Kevin Zeese, often writing with Margaret Flowers at popularresistance.org.
And this one is called Ukraine.
Why are you lost by a landslide?
And he's on the line from the Venezuelan embassy in Georgetown outside of Washington, D.C.
That's right.
Thanks again, Kevin.
Thanks a lot for having me on.
Talk to you soon.
All right, Sean, that's it for Anti-War Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
You can find this and almost 5,000 more interviews for you in the archives there at scotthorton.org.
See you next week.
