Otto Reich
Otto Reich
from the book Robbing Us Blind (book)
- Steve Brouwer - p179
In the 1980s, Otto Reich was chief of
a department in the State Department that was ; called the Office
of Public Diplomacy and staffed with CIA and Pentagon "psychological
; warfare" specialists. The function of the operation was
to fool the American public about the nature of the conflicts
in Central America by disseminating false information, discrediting
reporters whose work the Reagan administration did not like, and
using other means of mist leading propaganda. In short, the Office
of Public Diplomacy was in the business of producing disinformation
of the kind that is generally used to mislead an enemy during
conventional warfare, except that during the unconventional and
illegal Contra war it was being used to lie to journalists, Congressional
committees, and the U.S. people. Reich "helped plant stories
and opinion pieces praising the Contras in U.S. newspapers. It
wasn't just the stories that were phony, so were the authors.
Reich's office wrote them all." Congress, once it uncovered
the illegal operations of this office, closed it down and Otto
Reich barely avoided indictment.
Otto Reich was sent off as Ambassador
to Venezuela after the Contra war, where he was able to secure
the release of the jailed Cuban exile terrorist, Orlando Bosch.
This man had been jailed for eleven years for his role in the
worst instance of airline terrorism in the Western Hemisphere
(up until September 11, 2001, that is). This was the bombing of
a Cuban plane which killed all 73 civilians on board in 1976.
The U.S. Justice Department had evidence of Bosch's involvement
in more than 30 other terrorist acts, some of them committed within
the United States, including a rocket attack on a Polish ship
in Miami. With the help of Otto Reich and Jeb Bush, who was busy
ingratiating himself with right-wing Cuban Americans in Florida,
Bosch was pardoned by George Bush I in 1992.
In 2001, Reich rejoined the Bush Gang
by taking over the Latin American desk at the State Department
for just one year. The Administration used a special loophole
that allowed for his temporary appointment without getting the
approval of the Senate. This was because many Senators, such as
Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, would have grilled him
about his past activities and opposed his formal nomination. When
the one year term expired, Reich was immediately appointed as
a special Latin American envoy to the National Security Agency,
another post that does not require congressional approval. This
allowed him to keep pursuing his major preoccupation, which was
the same as Abrams'-to overthrow regimes and control oil. The
only difference was that Reich was assigned to raid and plunder
in the Western Hemisphere (not the Middle East), where he was
overseeing the destabilization of the government of Venezuela,
the biggest American oil producer. He was also seeking to oust
President Chavez, the democratically elected leader who was detested
by the Bush Gang for his obstinacy and independent thinking, particularly
on the issue of using Venezuela's vast oil revenues. Chavez had
stated that he wanted to use the country's oil wealth to serve
and educate the poor, who form the vast majority of the country's
population.
Reich regularly met with Chavez's upper-class
opponents in Washington to contemplate strategies, one of which
was a constant barrage of attacks from the Venezuela's press and
television, almost all of which are controlled by a right-wing
business oligarchy. A military coup was engineered by the oligarchy
in April 2002 after repeated consultations with Washington, but
it failed. Then, in December of 2002, a large scale petroleum
strike was engineered by state oil company executives in concert
with a commercial business shutdown planned by the oligarchs and
the rest of the upper class. Both actions failed to dislodge President
Chavez. As of the spring of 2003, the Venezuelan upper class had
failed in their coup attempts. The plots that Reich had helped
initiate were as ill conceived as the Iran/Contra scandal and
ended up as fiascos. The business shutdown in December hurt the
middle class more than the poor, while the sabotage of the oil
industry nearIy wrecked the economy and cost the country many
billions of dollars. The oil shutdown also helped push the price
of oil sky-high as the U.S.A. and the world braced for war in
the Middle East.
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