Replies

"President Bush shrugged off suggestions Thursday that his administration welcomed a short-lived Venezuelan coup." C'mon, can't we take pride in our efforts? This from British newspapers on 17 April: "The White House yesterday confirmed that a few weeks before the coup attempt, administration officials met Pedro Carmona, the business leader who took over the interim government after President Hugo Chavez was arrested on Friday. But the White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, denied that the US had offered any support for a putsch. The US defence department also confirmed that the Venezuelan army's chief of staff, General Lucas Romero Rincon, visited the Pentagon in December and met the assistant secretary of defence for western hemispheric affairs, Roger Pardo-Maurer.... Some of the key participants in US meetings with Venezuelan figures in the run-up to the coup were veterans of Reagan-era "dirty tricks" operations. Mr Pardo-Maurer served as the chief of staff to the Nicaraguan contras' representative in Washington between 1986 and 1989. Mr Reich was the head of the office of public diplomacy in the state department, which was later found to have been involved in covert pro-contra propaganda."