According to the Guardian, the US government has been accused of trying to undermine the Chávez government in Venezuela by funding anonymous groups via its main international aid agency, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) through its Office of Transition Initiatives.
Information about the grants has been obtained following a Freedom of Information request by the Associated Press. USAID released copies of 132 contracts but obscured the names and other identifying details of nearly half the organizations. Top Secret CIA documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act in 2004 revealed the in-depth role the Agency played in the coup d’état against President Hugo Chávez in April 2002.
This follows the recent announcement that the US has made $80m available for groups seeking to bring about change in Cuba, where Fidel Castro is a close ally of Chávez. The Office of Transition Initiatives, which also works in such “priority countries” as Iraq, Afghanistan, Bolivia and Haiti, has overseen more than $26m in grants to groups in Venezuela since 2002.
China recently agreed to invest $5bn in energy projects in Venezuela, including the building of 13 oil rigs and 18 oil tankers. Last week Mr Chávez announced that China was endorsing Venezuela’s bid for the rotating Latin America seat on the 15-member security council, a candidacy strongly opposed by the US. The commercial arrangements with Beijing are seen as part of the Chávez government’s strategy of establishing new links so as to lessen the country’s dependence on US trade.
VenezuelAnalysis reports that on August 18, US Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, announced the creation of a new special CIA mission to oversee intelligence activities in Venezuela and Cuba. Negroponte, who coordinates the entire intelligence community in the United States and reports directly to the President, named CIA veteran J. Patrick Maher as Acting Mission Manager.
According to a Press Release from the Directorate of National Intelligence, “Maher will be responsible for integrating collection and analysis on Cuba and Venezuela across the Intelligence Community, identifying and filling gaps in intelligence, and ensuring the implementation of strategies, among other duties.” According to Negroponte, “such efforts are critical today, as policymakers have increasingly focused on the challenges that Cuba and Venezuela pose to American foreign policy.”
Since early 2005, the CIA has named Venezuela as one of the “Top 5 Unstable Countries” in Latin America and has increased its intelligence personnel within the country by fifty percent. The new CIA Mission Manager for Cuba and Venezuela will “be responsible for ensuring that policymakers have a full range of timely and accurate intelligence on which to base their decisions.” This implies a further increase in actual ground agents and field officers in both nations.
During the past two years, the Venezuelan Government has discovered and expelled four U.S. officials engaged in espionage activities. Two of these individuals were military attachés, Capitan John Correa and Lieutenant Humberto Rodriguez, and had been actively recruiting members of the Venezuelan armed forces to provide strategic and secret information about internal Venezuelan affairs to the U.S. government. The other two accused spies are not publicly known.
The Mission Manager for Cuba and Venezuela is a position recommended by the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission of the Directorate of National Intelligence and has been endorsed by President Bush. The Cuba and Venezuela Mission becomes the sixth of its kind, though the only other nations with such specific missions are Iran and North Korea. The other missions include one for counterterrorism, one for counter-proliferation and one for counterintelligence.
Venezuela has presidential elections coming up on December 3, 2006, and is concerned that this new special CIA Mission will attempt to interfere with the electoral process.
The British peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet has issued a report finding human rights violations in Port-au-Prince. Central to their findings is the fact that civilian welfare fails to attract the attention it deserves from authorities in times of conflict, with neither the Haitian government, nor the UN peacekeepers being able to estimate the effect of the conflict on civilians. Yet in just 22 months—from the departure of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the end of 2005—an estimated 8000 people were murdered and 35,000 women sexually assaulted, half of whom were under the age of 18 years and over 90% of the assualts involved penetration.
Most perpetrators were identified as criminals, but police, armed forces, paramilitaries, and foreign soldiers were also implicated. Although UN peacekeepers have been investigated for accusations of sexual misconduct in Haiti and elsewhere, the survey did not find evidence for their involvement in murder or sexual assault. However 14% of the interviewees did accuse foreign soldiers, including those in UN uniform, of threatening them with sexual or physical violence, including death.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has spoken out firmly against exploitative behaviour by UN peacekeepers. In 2005, at Annan’s request, Prince Zeid of Jordan, whose soldiers serve in Haiti, proposed a number of measures to reduce sexual exploitation by UN personnel. One result has been the active investigation of allegations. Yet since 2004, only 17 peacekeepers have been dismissed and 161 repatriated out of 313 allegations worldwide.
The report, based on interviews with 1,260 random households (about 5,720 individuals), reports over 50% of the murders were committed by government forces or anti-Lavalas groups and the bulk of the others by criminals, very few by Lavalas supporters themselves (Lavalas being pro-Aristide supporters). About a quarter of the rapes were committed by either government forces, police or anti-Lavalas groups.
According to Ha’aretz, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is urging the US Treasury Department to disconnect an Iranian news site from American Internet servers, charging that the site has ties to terrorist organizations. The allegation is based on a report published by Ha’aretz last month.
According to the Ha’aretz report, the site, Baztab, published details about a month ago of what it termed “an interrogation” of the two Israeli soldiers kidnapped by Hezbollah on July 12. Baztab’s report claimed that the soldiers had admitted that Israel planned a military attack on Hezbollah in September or October, and the kidnapping had foiled this plan.
Scores of American troops are deserting, even from the front line in Iraq, according to the Sunday Times. The American administration prefers not to draw attention those who have gone Awol from their units and not returned, risking imprisonment and opprobrium.
When First Lieutenant Ehren Watada of the US Army, who faced a court martial in August, refused to go to Iraq on moral grounds, the newspapers in his home state of Hawaii were full of letters accusing him of “treason”. He said he had concluded that the war is both morally wrong and a horrible breach of American law. His participation, he stated, would make him party to “war crimes”. Watada is just one conscientious objector to a war that has polarised America, arguably more so than even the Vietnam war.
The Pentagon says that a total of 40,000 troops have deserted their posts (not simply those serving in Iraq) since the year 2000. This includes many who went Awol for family reasons. Many seek asylum in Canada, often with the help of Canadian anti-war groups. One Toronto lawyer, Jeffry House, has represented at least 20 deserters from Iraq in the Canadian courts; he is himself a conscientious objector, having refused to fight in the Vietnam war—along with 50,000 others, at the peak of the conflict. He estimates that 200 troops have already gone underground in Canada since the war in Iraq began.
Many of the deserters, such as First Lt Watada, are not pacifists, but view the Iraq war as wrong. Canada welcomed Vietnam-war draft dodgers and deserters, but under today’s political climate, US deserters who are now north of the border are applying for refugee status and the Canadian government is saying no. Cases rejected for refugee status are going to appeal in the federal courts. If all judicial possibilities are exhausted, they may be deported back to the US—but their presence in the US will in itself represent yet another public-relations headache for the Bush administration.
UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, Jan Egeland, reported in a press conference “the shocking new information” his Office had received from the staff of the United Nations Mine Action Coordination Centre, who had identified 359 separate cluster-bomb strike locations contaminated with as many as 100,000 unexploded bomblets. “These devices are going to be with us for many, many months, and possibly years”, he said. What was “shocking and completely immoral” was that 90 per cent of the cluster-bomb strikes had occurred in the last 72 hours of the conflict, when everybody knew that there would be an end to hostilities. “It shouldn’t have happened”, he said. Every day, people were maimed and killed by those devices. Civilians were going to die, disproportionately, again—not during the war, but after the end of the conflict.
The US supplied cluster bomb munitions to Israel. The shells eject multiple small sub-munitions and are considered an anti-personel munition. They are particularly dangerous because they have a high level of duds that can explode much later after the attack. Often the sub-munitions are picked up by children.
Chris Clarke, head of the UN Mine Action Coordination Center attached to the UN Interim Force in Lebanon told the Washington Post on 26 August that 12 civilians have been killed and 39 wouned by cluster bombs exploding since the cease-fire. Of the dead, 2 were children; of the wounded, 11.
According to the International Herald Tribune, on 29 August, Secretary General Kofi Annan cited numbers from the UN forces indicating that Israel had violated the cease-fire nearly 70 times, while Hezbollah had done so only four times. Israel has also refused to lift the blockade of Israel, which Annan has warned risks being viewed as “collective punishment” by the Lebanese people. Israel denies it has violated a cease-fire, claims its use of cluster bombs meets international standards, and has no quarrel with the Lebanese people.
Jan Egeland also said at his press conference that the Palestinian areas were facing a deep crisis. Gaza was a ticking time bomb that could lead to a social explosion in 10 days, or 10 months. “You cannot seal off an area, which is a little bigger than the city of Stockholm, has 1.4 million people, of whom 800,000 are youth and children and then have 200 artillery shells go in there virtually every day”. “On top of that, we don’t have money”, he continued. The last humanitarian appeal had brought in only 40 per cent of the $385 million that were required for the Occupied Palestinian Territory.