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Wednesday, March 13, 2019

Whitney Webb - ‘Lights out!’ Did Trump and his neocons recycle Bush-era plan to knock out Venezuela’s power grid?


Even as the Venezuelan government blamed the power outage on U.S.-led ‘sabotage,’ the U.S. has long had a plan on the books for targeting the civilian power grid of adversarial nations.


CARACAS, Venezuela—For nearly a week, much of Venezuela has been without power, bringing the country’s embattled economy to a near standstill. The outage saw U.S. officials and politicians blame the Venezuelan government for the crisis while officials in Caracas accusedthe U.S. of conducting “sabotage” and launching cyberattacks that targeted its civilian power grid as well as of employing saboteurs within Venezuela.
Although many mainstream media outlets have echoed the official U.S. government response, some journalists have strayed from the pack. One notable example is Kalev Leetaru, who wrote at Forbes that “the United States remotely interfering with its [Venezuela’s] power grid is actually quite realistic.”
Leetaru also noted that “timing such an outage to occur at a moment of societal upheaval in a way that delegitimizes the current government, exactly as a government-in-waiting has presented itself as a ready alternative, is actually one of the tactics” he had previously explored in a 2015 article detailing U.S. government hybrid warfare tactics “to weaken an adversary prior to conventional invasion or to forcibly and deniably effect a transition in a foreign government.”
In addition to Leetaru’s claims, others have asserted U.S. government involvement after U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), who is deeply involved in Trump’s Venezuela policy, appeared to have prior knowledge that the blackouts would occur when he tweeted about them only three minutes after they had begun.
Intrepid Report

3 comments:

  1. China has been helping to restore Venezuela’s power grid after the US attack on March 7.

    Venezuelan Minister of Communication and Information Jorge Rodriguez said yesterday that operations of the country’s power grid have almost fully resumed nationwide.

    https://www.rt.com/business/453697-china-venezuela-electricity-help/

    Once again it seems that the coup is not quite going according to U.S. plan.

    “Human Rights Watch” is assisting in the anti-Maduro propaganda effort.

    The article below says that rich elitists in Venezuela did not suffer from the US-imposed blackout.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/03/12/dispatch-venezuelas-rich-drink-whisky-dance-blackout-cripples/

    Two days ago Venezuela’s authorities arrested freelance journalist Luis Carlos Díaz on suspicion that he used a USB zip drive to implant the worm at the electrical grid’s central control complex in Caracas.

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  2. .
    OFF TOPIC

    The RAND Corporation ("Research ANd Development") is an American nonprofit global policy think tank created in 1948 to offer research and analysis to the United States Armed Forces. It is financed by the U.S. government and private endowment, corporations, universities and private individuals. RAND has approximately 1,850 employees.

    World War III ‘wargames’ by the RAND corp. show U.S. forces crushed by Russia and China in certain hot spots around the globe.

    RAND has run dozens of wargames simulating major conflict scenarios in what it describes as Russia and China’s “backyards.” The wargames suggest that the U.S. forces in those locations would get attacked by a vast array of both conventional and cyber weapons.

    RAND Senior Defense Analyst David Ochmanek discussed the simulations at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) in Washington D.C. last week. “In our games, where we fight China or Russia … blue gets its ass handed to it” he said during a panel discussion.

    “We lost a lot of people, we lose a lot of equipment, we usually fail to achieve our objectives of preventing aggression by the adversary,” Ochmanek added during the CNAS discussion.

    NOTE: We don’t know if this is true, or if it’s a US Air Force-commissioned sales pitch for more money. Defense Analyst Ochmanek went in to say, “For a sustained investment of an additional $8 billion a year between 2020 and 2030, the U.S. Air Force could buy the kit needed to make a difference.” Ochmanek said similar sums would be required for the Army and Navy.

    Trump’s fiscal 2020 budget plan proposes $750 billion for defense, up 5 percent from fiscal 2019. (Each year sets new spending records, and no one ever screams, “ZIMBABWE! Or, “How will you pay for it?”)

    https://www.foxnews.com/tech/chilling-world-war-iii-wargames-show-us-forces-crushed-by-russia-and-china

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