News?

I don't get it. Everyone seems to be stumping the "shocking" story today that the US government is funding groups in order to undermine the Chavez government in Venezuela. This is a surprise? US officials like Oliver North, Otto Reich and Elliot Abrams -- all former Iran-Contra shitcakes -- were otherwise involved in the failed coup attempt of Chavez in 2002. So now we learn that USAID is funding groups meant to destablize the leftist government of a South American nation. Hmm, does that sound at all strange?

Hardly. As far as Venezuela goes, we've known the Bush administration has been trying to do this. For years:

Venezuela coup linked to Bush team

The failed coup in Venezuela was closely tied to senior officials in the US government, The Observer has established. They have long histories in the 'dirty wars' of the 1980s, and links to death squads working in Central America at that time.

Washington's involvement in the turbulent events that briefly removed left-wing leader Hugo Chavez from power last weekend resurrects fears about US ambitions in the hemisphere.

It also also deepens doubts about policy in the region being made by appointees to the Bush administration, all of whom owe their careers to serving in the dirty wars under President Reagan.

One of them, Elliot Abrams, who gave a nod to the attempted Venezuelan coup, has a conviction for misleading Congress over the infamous Iran-Contra affair.

But on the larger scale, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), run by the National Security Council and now headed by Abrams, was employed in the 1973 coup in Chile. Furthermore, during the roaring '80s, NED, under Abrams' and North's tutelage,

supplied the sponsorship of regimes and death squads that followed it in Argentina, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and ... the Contras' rampage in Nicaragua.

US governments have been funding coups, death squads and brutal military regimes for sometime. No news here.