US Denies Legacy of Overthrowing Governments

Tyler Bass
Forbidden Knowledge TV
March 31, 2015

In a March 2015 State Department briefing, Spokeswoman Jen Psaki said, “As a matter of long-standing policy, the United States does not support political transitions by nonconstitutional means. Political transitions must be democratic, constitutional, peaceful and legal.” Russian, Venezuelan and Syrian leaders and U.S. journalists would dispute her claim.

In February, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro arrested at least 11 people, including an air force general, whom Maduro says were involved in a plot to overthrow the government. “It is the government of the United States that is behind the plans of destabilization and coups against Venezuela,” said Maduro in a television address.

In March 2015, the White House announced that the situation in Venezeua posed an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

At the briefing, Associated Press diplomatic reporter Matt Lee questioned Psaki on her historical claim. Lee alluded to CIA regime change attempts in Psaki’s lifetime, such as the intelligence agency’s support for rebels who fought the communists ruling Nicaragua in the mid-1980s.

Joking that, as of 2015, she was only 21 years old, Psaki suggested that U.S. coups had not occurred in her lifetime. Psaki, born in 1978, is 36.

Psaki’s denial and even Lee referencing events as distant as three decades ago parallels how U.S. leaders view foreign criticism of U.S. policy since the ’80s.

Following the 2014 Euromaiden protests that ousted Ukraine’s democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, Russia invaded the region of Crimea in eastern Ukraine.

In a February 2015 interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, President Obama addressed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion. Obama said, “And since Mr. Putin made this decision around Crimea and Ukraine, not because of some grand strategy, but essentially because he was caught off balance by the protests in the Maidan, and Yanukovych then fleeing after, we’d brokered a deal to transition power in Ukraine.”

Following Obama’s interview, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov exited a Beijing meeting with Indian and Chinese counterparts. Lavrov told reporters, “[I]f anyone still needed a confirmation of the fact that the United States was directly involved from the very beginning in the coup that President Obama referred to using a neutral term ‘transfer of power,’ they now have it.”

In late 2013, the United States trained and armed rebels aiming to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. In neighboring Jordan, the CIA trained one 50-person cell of such rebels, which soon after were to enter the besieged Mediterranean nation.

In May 2007, sources within the U.S. intelligence community told ABC News that the Bush administration ordered the CIA to manipulate Iran’s “currency and international financial transactions” to destabilize the Islamic republic.

Contributed by Alexandra Bruce

Contact