Another in what smells like the latest media-enabled Bush administration escalation of tensions with its perceived enemies, in this case the Venezuelan government and Hugo Chavez. The government of U.S. ally Alvaro Uribe, the bloodiest leader in the hemisphere thanks to more than $4 billion in U.S. military aid, is using a recent report by Interpol, the global policing agency, to back its claims that laptops found after the bombing of a Colombian guerrilla camp in Ecuador offer proof of Venezuelan support for the insurgent FARC.
As we look into this latest adventure of the Bush administration, some of us are reminded of the "evidence" Bush, his "allies" and the U.S. media gave us before dragging us into the abyss of Iraq or the growing tensions with Iran; Those old enough to remember will also be reminded of the many "white papers" put out by the Reagan administration "proving" subversion and terrorism in El Salvador and Central America and how these papers and other "evidence" were used to justify increased military aid that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children, indigenous people and others in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Such presidential proof usually means the slaughter of more innocents in the name of the National Interest, in this case the U.S. interest in turning the left tide in Latin America. In the words of Uruguayan political analyst, Raul Zibechi, this latest Bush adventure is
.."part of the strategy of the United States to alter the military balance in the region. In the crosshairs is Venezuelan and Ecuadorian oil; however it also serves as a check on Brazil as an emerging regional power."
And in what appears to be the elite, bipartisan consensus in Washington, both John McCain and Hillary Clinton support the Bush administration and death squad President Alvaro Uribe. Even more sadly, it appears that Barack Obama's "hope" does not extend beyond our southern border as he too ignores the violation of sovereignty and the human rights atrocities of the Uribe administration.
For their part, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and most of the MSM have gone well out of their way to tout the Interpol report as corroborating Colombia's claims about the controversial laptops all the while ignoring statements of concern about the Uribe government's handling of this "evidence" made by people like Robert Kenneth Noble, the Secretary General of Interpol who stated emphatically that
The volume of this data (on the laptops) would correspond to 39.5 million pages in Microsoft Word. 39.5 million. It would take more than a thousand years to read all the data if 1 person read 100 pages per day.
A thousand years?
Either Colombia's defense department somehow managed to recruit an army of miracle workers who magically compressed a thousand years into the 2 days they held (under questionable circumstances) the laptops or another nasty and quite dangerous escalation of political and military tensions is brewing in the White House. It appears that, in George Bush's broken lexicon, "latop" is Spanish for "WMD".