>How many newspapers am I supposed to find to answer this question?

I went to his web site and read this about his book Gas War:

"GAS WAR proves that the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was solely motivated by the Bush Administration's desire to control Caspian Sea oil and gas reserves--specifically, to establish a U.S. puppet regime that would permit the construction of a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan via Afghanistan."

This is just nothing but garbage.

>>My point remains the same. I knew Chavez was democratically elected.
>
>My point remains the same. I knew Allende was democratically elected.

Actually, your point was that the US media was not telling the fact that Chavez was democratically elected. I, through the US media, did know that Chavez was democratically elected.

>>More speculation on your part. When you have a credible news source, please let me know.
>
>I haven't found a credible news source on this matter. My point is that Fox news or any such is also not credible. What sort of truth in oil business can you expect from a network which fires its two reporters because they didn't want to alter their reports about milk to be in favor of dairy industry?

What 2 reporters and what dairy story are you talking about?

>>That doesn't really help him with Venezuela, does it?
>
>So he wasn't there. Were you?

No, but then again I am not publishing stories about it. Of course, if he would label these stories as fiction, it might help out his reader more.

>And while that sentence is there, you seem to have read too much into it and ignored the rest of the article. How about
>
>However, a defence department official quoted by the New York Times yesterday said: "We were not discouraging people."
>
>"We were sending informal, subtle signals that we don't like this guy. We didn't say, 'No, don't you dare' and we weren't advocates saying, 'Here's some arms; we'll help you overthrow this guy.'"
>
>or
>
>when Mr Carmona and other opposition leaders came to the US they met Otto Reich, the assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs.
>
>or
>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.
>
>...so, I'm actually glad you gave the other side a chance to be heard, thanks for the cue.

Yes, apparently we don't like Chavez. However, at no point does the article say that we backed the coup, like Rall writes in his article. Nor does Rall point out the statement from the US that we had no involvement in it. He distorted if not out and out lied about the article in The Guardian to push his agenda, and when I find an author who does that, they loses credibility with me. If they don't lose credibility with you, that's your business.

>Besides, we'll unfortunately have to wait another 20 years until the archives open, to see how much of the split of Yugoslavia was cooked outside of the country and who were the cooks. While the US insisted on keeping the country whole, much longer than the others, Germany has recognized Slovenia and Croatia far too early, and created a fait accompli. And that's the visible part.

I'll probably still be on the UT then, so we can debate it in 20 years :-).

>Set Speculation on
>
>One of the popular conspiration theories (sorry, I have nothing more substantial than that) was that the West wanted to see what would happen if Soviet Union (or CIS) would split along its seams... and decided to do a smaller scale experiment first, on a country which was already too strong in such a small region.
>
>Set Speculation off

SET SPECULATION ON

There really are aliens at Roswell.

SET SPECULATION OFF

>You'd have to post your criteria publicly... so I figure I should also be withdrawing my application for taking part in this thread? It's obvious from my website that I sometimes write science fiction.

That does explain quite a bit about your posts :-).