Pat Robertson (again)

Johnny_L.A · October 9, 2005, 4:47pm

Got CNN on in the background. Didn’t get all of the details, but Robertson was complaining about a South American dictator. He claimed that this dictator sent Osama bin Laden $2 million (I think) after the WTC attacks. Wolf Blitzer asked him where the dictator got the money. Robertson said, ‘Well, that’s what I was told.’ Yeah, ‘that’s what I was told’ is perfectly good evidence for suggesting someone be killed. :rolleyes:

Silentgoldfish · October 9, 2005, 5:20pm

You know, DNFTT works in real life too.

silenus · October 9, 2005, 5:24pm

That would be Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. A waste of space, but not as big a loon as Robertson.

elucidator · October 9, 2005, 5:40pm

Well, things have certainly got to a pretty place! Used to be, the words “South American dicator” indicated a reliable bulwark of US policy, someone who could be trusted. Nowadays, seems like we’ll let just about anybody run one of our South American countries!

Uguarte, Pinochet, Batista, Trujillo…good times, good times.

Kimstu · October 9, 2005, 5:40pm

What’s ironic is that one dictator who actually has been credibly accused of helping al-Qaeda, through money-laundering schemes involving illegal “conflict diamonds” and other things, is none other than Robertson’s “Christian, Baptist” buddy and business partner, former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor.

And what on earth is this Chavez obsession of Robertson’s, anyway? Chavez may have a lot of popular support and may have launched some policies that help the Venezuelan poor, but he’s still a pretty scary autocrat with apparently little regard for civil freedoms or human rights. Why is Robertson whipping up support for him with outrageous calls to kill him and unsupported accusations of terrorist involvement?

CynicalGabe · October 9, 2005, 5:54pm

Maybe Chavez is secrety funding Teletubbies.

FinnAgain · October 9, 2005, 6:03pm

Okay, that does it, Chavez needs to die.

Dewey_Finn · October 9, 2005, 6:08pm

I believe Hugo Chavez is the democratically elected president of Peru. (He’s a dictator only in Pat Robertson’s warped mind.) So perhaps American’s record of supporting SA dictators is intact.

mhendo · October 9, 2005, 6:12pm

If by Peru, you mean Venezuela…

GIGObuster · October 9, 2005, 7:26pm

I think Pat is just projecting too much:

Charles Taylor, the Liberian president who has been indicted by an international court for crimes against humanity, has few remaining supporters in the United States. But one prominent American who has stuck with the West African leader is religious broadcaster and Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson.

In recent broadcasts of his cable TV show “The 700 Club,” watched by an estimated 1 million households, Robertson has defended Taylor as a fellow Baptist and Liberia’s “freely elected” leader. The “horrible bloodbath” taking place in Liberia, he has repeatedly said, is the fault of the State Department.

"So we’re undermining a Christian, Baptist president to bring in Muslim rebels to take over the country. And how dare the president of the United States say to the duly elected president of another country, ‘You’ve got to step down,’ " Robertson said to his viewers on Monday.

What Robertson, 73, has not discussed in these broadcasts is his financial interest in Liberia. In an interview yesterday, he said he has “written off in my own mind” an $8 million investment in a gold mining venture that he made four years ago under an agreement with Taylor’s government.

It was pointed then that a big chunck of that money from gold and diamonds benefited Al Qaeda:

http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2005-05/2005-05-25-voa2.cfm?CFID=20488728&CFTOKEN=15304364

Charles Taylor gave up Liberia’s presidency and fled into exile in Nigeria in 2003. His departure was part of a hastily-brokered peace deal as rebels besieged Monrovia. As part of the deal, Mr. Taylor was granted asylum as long as he stayed out of Liberian affairs.

The Sierra Leone tribunal later indicted him on 17-counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity for fomenting trouble in that country through an illegal trade in guns for diamonds.

The tribunal’s chief prosecutor David Crane said there is clear evidence of Mr. Taylor’s involvement with al Qaeda. “Al Qaeda has been in West Africa, it continues to be in West Africa, and Charles Taylor has been harboring members of al Qaeda to include those part of allegedly the takedown of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. He harbored them in 1998, we have activities as late as six April 2005,” he said.

The officials and investigators also painted a picture of Liberia under Taylor as a haven for Al Qaeda, and raised new questions about why the United States waited so long to support Taylor’s ouster and continues to refrain from using its influence to bring him before a UN war crimes tribunal.

The Defense Department approved a special forces raid to capture Al Qaeda leaders under Taylor’s protection in 2001, but called it off and never reactivated the plan, the US officials said in recent interviews, on condition of anonymity. Meanwhile, senior leaders of Al Qaeda continued to receive Taylor’s protection.

On July 25, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was arrested in eastern Pakistan along with more than a dozen other Qaeda operatives and is being held in connection with the 1998 bombings of two US embassies in Africa. But for at least three years beginning in the late 1990s, he lived in an army camp and hotels run by Taylor’s government in Liberia. In addition, Taylor’s forces harbored other suspected Al Qaeda leaders, including MIT-educated biologist Aafia Siddiqui, US officials and UN investigators said.

Al Qaeda allegedly paid Taylor for protection and then joined him in the African diamond trade, raising millions of dollars for terrorist activities, according to UN war crimes documents.

IIRC Chavez pointed out that Pat Robertson is a terrorist. I am beginning to wonder if he is correct.

CynicalGabe · October 9, 2005, 8:02pm

We begin bombing in five minutes…

Correct. He is only a dictator as far as the corrupt elite he has been infringing on is concerned. Yes, Venezuela, and not Peru, but he is by no means a dictator.

Kimstu · October 9, 2005, 8:28pm

Not quite: he’s also been pulling some pretty dictatorial stuff in terms of human rights violations and interference with the judiciary and the press. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have a lot of complaints about his government.

Yes, he does have a lot of popular support, and he’s not in power illegitimately, but he is definitely exhibiting a lot of dictator-like behavior in governing. I think a lot of his more vehement critics are slimeballs themselves, and Pat Robertson is top of that list, but Chavez is no poster boy for democracy.

Tapioca_Dextrin · October 9, 2005, 9:40pm

Are you sure you mean Chavez and not some other democrtically president of an American country?

Kimstu · October 9, 2005, 10:24pm

Heh heh. No, I meant Chavez:

The definition of the President’s ongoing Revolución Bolivariana under the Quinta República, within a system of democracia participativa, remains hazy. Like Bolívar, he would like to unify Latin America. In Venezuela he is the center of power: Chávez has said in various contexts and in several ways that he is not averse to the word “caudillo.” The revolution’s first priority is the poor. It has some elements of socialism (although Chávez was not always so keen on Fidel Castro). Sometimes it is anti-capitalist, and sometimes not: Chávez, who talks often of his own religious faith, has referred to capitalism as el demonio, but a great many businessmen have prospered under his rule, and he has made it clear that he sees a significant role for the private sector and, most particularly, for foreign investment. What there does not appear to be much room for is the opposition.

Within three months of his inauguration the new president won a referendum authorizing him to call a constitutional convention, which replaced the “moribund” old charter with one that concentrates a great deal of power in his hands, and also threatens the very existence of an opposition: government financing of political parties’ electoral campaigns is now outlawed.

In addition, the chavista majority in the National Assembly—which under the new constitution replaced the old bicameral legislative body—increased the number of judges in the high courts from twenty to thirty-two, and made sure the new ones were pro-Chávez, thus virtually ensuring the President a majority. In the course of a lengthy, and a high-risk, confrontation with the state oil company, PDVSA, Chávez also replaced the old meritocracy with his own directorate. […]

But thanks to a revision in the penal code by the National Assembly—in which chavista members now need only a majority of half plus one to pass legislation—if Rodríguez won his case against El Universal (the lower courts are also packed with professed chavistas these days), the author of the offending editorial could end up serving three to five years of jail time. But this isn’t likely to happen; like other recent legislation on currency controls for individuals, for example, the law is designed to be enforced selectively, and to intimidate.

Other attacks on those who oppose Chávez are more frightening but further from public view; in the army, punishment for opposition has become ruthless, and sometimes fatal. When five corporals were burned to death in their prison cells, a general went on the air to explain how it was possible that blowtorches might have been used to kill them. He was sentenced to five years in prison.

Polycarp · October 10, 2005, 12:08am

Of course. Mr. Finn simply made the wrong turn at Colombia; it could happen to anybody!

GIGObuster · October 10, 2005, 1:25am

Heck, even I don’t like Chavez too much. However, I did take a look at the opposition newspapers and media (the majority of them in control of the well to do) during and after the last coup d’tat against Chavez, the mainstream press in Venezuela said:

[in memory of Don Adams]
Would you believe the coup d’tat was a democratic movement?!?!?

:rolleyes:

Sorry, days after the coup there was only one dissenting point of view published, and it was from someone opposed to Chavez saying something like “maybe a coup is not a democratic movement”…

After the confirmed lies the opposition said after the last referendum they lost, I have to take anything they say with a monumental grain of salt.

Kimstu · October 10, 2005, 10:31pm

Oh sure, I wouldn’t ask anybody to renounce Chavez based on what the anti-chavista Venezuelan opposition says. But what I quoted was not from the Venezuelan opposition, but from a writer on South America for a reputable US publication. By the way, the second half of that article is now out in a recent issue (link sometimes subscriber-only).

GIGObuster · October 11, 2005, 7:08am

But those are books and book reviews, might as well then accept the views of Ann Coulter since she also published books that are well reviewed.

Anyhow, I also remember the shameful actions the US press did before, during and after the coup:

http://www.narconews.com/threedays.html

Kimstu · October 11, 2005, 1:05pm

Huh? Did you actually read the articles I linked to? They are research articles by a respected South America scholar specialist that discuss recently published books on Venezuela and Chavez, not just book summaries by some hack reviewer unfamiliar with the subject.

In particular, the second article (here’s a better link to the full text of it) discusses Guillermoprieto’s own research in Venezuela:

The opposition lives in a permanent state of rage too at the regime’s corruption, its autocratic use of public funds, and Chávez’s determined assault on the institutions that make representative democracy possible (he prefers his own brand of democracia participativa, which has little room for opposition parties or civic rights). […]

Chavistas in the barrios answered the criticisms I proposed with a question: “Y ellos, ¿Qué hicieron?” (“And they, what did they do?”) What did the people in the tall apartment buildings ever do for us? Why, in fact, did the elite now in exile from the halls of power rule in the waning decades of the last century with such careless disregard for the 45 percent or so of the population who earn barely enough to keep themselves fed and clothed, and for the approximately 20 percent […] who cannot lay their hands on enough money to consume the equivalent of 2,200 calories a day? […]

Non-chavista politicians either lost the respect of the electorate during the meltdown of the old party system, in the years preceding the arrival of Chávez and his Bolivarian Revolution, or are too young and inept to enjoy credibility. And many sullied forever their democratic credentials by showing unrestrained glee at the climax of a military coup that removed Chávez from power for forty-eight hours in April 2002. […]

Like Fidel Castro, [Chavez] depends on generating a confrontational environment in which he can claim, as he so often does, that his Bolivarian Revolution is under threat, and must resort to extreme measures to survive. […]

I had several cups of coffee one morning with Teodoro Petkoff […] He is bemused to find himself emerging as the centrist of the hour for the sector of the opposition that neither supported the coup against Chávez three years ago nor identifies with the current leadership. […]

For the moment, he is on the sidelines. “Chávez has two pedals,” he said: “One is formal democracy and the other is authoritarianism, and he steps on one or the other as circumstances dictate. At every election, the results are close to being evenly divided [for and against him], and he knows how to read and weigh those results correctly. Aside from everything else, the sector that is against him is the most dynamic [of the economy]. And if he were to crush this sector he would have to do it a sangre y fuego—with blood and fire. But if Chávez sees that the 40 percent that is against him is growing weaker, he will step again on the authoritarian pedal.” […]

In the half-century since they emerged as citizens, following an era of uninterrupted military dictatorships, Venezuelans have been tolerant, or at the very least easygoing, in their approach to politics and the huge gap in wealth and social possibilities that divide them from each other. The gap is real enough and unconscionable, given the amount of oil money that has coursed through Venezuela in this same period of time, but Chávez has made a political career out of exacerbating the rage it provokes. He has also, through the misiones programs, brought a sense of joyful hope to a great many of Venezuela’s poor—people who failed to see a future for themselves before his advent.

He is a high-risk gambler: if in the next few years the misiones fail to narrow the yawning distance […] the fury he has encouraged will be turned on him. Among his opponents there is the occasional fanatic who calls for his overthrow by the United States, or even, in a Pat Robertson mode, his assassination. But the besieged moderate sector, in the unhappy realization that the forcible removal of Chávez would only guarantee his spiritual domination of Venezuelan politics for decades to come, pray that Chávez will be allowed to fail, so that he can be voted peacefully out of office.

Clearly, these articles are not the sentiments of somebody who’s just parroting the bitter (and often racist) slanders of the anti-Chavez Venezuelan opposition. Rather, they expose valid reasons to be concerned about the Chavez regime, despite the unquestioned improvements it’s making in the lives of many poor Venezuelans, and not to dismiss all criticism of it as mere anti-Chavez raving.

And do you mind explaining what earthly reason there could be for treating the articles of someone like Alma Guillermoprieto on a par with those of someone like Ann Coulter? Do you really not see any difference between a respected, thoughtful researcher with substantial knowledge of her field and a partisan hack whose extremist and exaggerated assertions have been widely discredited?

You started out reasonably enough a couple posts ago, acknowledging that Chavez is far from perfect but pointing out that the anti-chavista Venezuelan opposition has largely been completely untrustworthy, and that their claims should not be accepted on faith.

I agreed with you, but noted that the article(s) I was citing were not expressing the views of the Venezuelan opposition. (And the publication where they appeared, btw, is not part of the US “mainstream media” that parrotted opposition propaganda during the coup attempt.) In fact, the author severely criticizes the opposition, and praises Chavez’ accomplishments for the poor, at the same time that she critiques the genuinely worrying antidemocratic tendencies of his regime.

Subsequently, you apparently had a neural misfire that caused you to suggest that something published in the NYRB is unreliable because it’s a US publication, and that Guillermoprieto’s writings needn’t be taken seriously because she’s no better than Ann Coulter.

I trust that this condition is merely temporary and that you’ll be feeling better soon.

GIGObuster · October 11, 2005, 9:14pm

Kimstu:

Huh? Did you actually read the articles I linked to? They are research articles by a respected South America scholar specialist that discuss recently published books on Venezuela and Chavez, not just book summaries by some hack reviewer unfamiliar with the subject.

In particular, the second article (here’s a better link to the full text of it) discusses Guillermoprieto’s own research in Venezuela:

Clearly, these articles are not the sentiments of somebody who’s just parroting the bitter (and often racist) slanders of the anti-Chavez Venezuelan opposition. Rather, they expose valid reasons to be concerned about the Chavez regime, despite the unquestioned improvements it’s making in the lives of many poor Venezuelans, and not to dismiss all criticism of it as mere anti-Chavez raving.

And do you mind explaining what earthly reason there could be for treating the articles of someone like Alma Guillermoprieto on a par with those of someone like Ann Coulter? Do you really not see any difference between a respected, thoughtful researcher with substantial knowledge of her field and a partisan hack whose extremist and exaggerated assertions have been widely discredited?

Sorry, but there was a lot that is being ignored by that author, and that IMHO is not good. I also remember many so called respected independent people that appeared after, with criticisms to Chavez, and more than once I caught them with lies. There was a very short thread recently that explains what I mean: (the OP did go MIA after one reply):

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=156409&highlight=Chavez

And I have seen before many views that were not from the Venezuelan opposition also supporting the points of the opposition, nothing new.

I would worry only if Chavez had closed the opposition Newspapers, again, I did read the press of the opposition, for less than what the newspapers said about Chavez -calls to disobedience and outright support for a coup- even in the USA charges or removal of licenses to the airways would be expected. Chavez allowed and still allows that (by contrast, Castro changed content in the press and then censored the press), and in my book that throws some of what this author is saying into the suspect pile.

I grant you that was an exaggeration, but I did not exaggerate in the fact that many reviews were good for her books (of course, I dismiss those reviews as propaganda)

I see, so only a sick person can see the evidence and then based on that, distrust even a serious researcher…

Sorry, even a serious researcher misses a lot. During the coup, supporters of Chavez were being rounded up (the majority of the government BTW) and some began to appear dead, but then the coup fizzled. I can not let out the fact that the opposition was working to make someone like Pinochet look like a kindergarten cop. At least I grant you that this researcher is fairer than most, but even if I don’t like Chavez much, I hate incomplete reports even more.