The

The Welcome to Media Roots Radio. I'm your host, Abby Martin.

This week, the Obama administration made a bizarre announcement that Venezuela is a, quote, extraordinary threat to national security,

and that he's, quote, deeply concerned about its human rights abuses,

a declaration necessary to justify an entire new round of harsh sanctions.

So to understand why this is really happening, I'm joined now by Mark Weisbrod,

co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and President of Just Foreign Policy.

His work specializes in Latin America and international economic policy.

And he just wrote an excellent article for Al Jazeera explaining the hidden agenda behind this absurd move.

Mark, thank you so much for joining me today.

First, I want to get your reaction to the State Department recently saying it has a long-standing

policy against backing coups. Yes, well, the United States did more than back the coup, the military

coup in 2002 against Chavez, against President Chavez of Venezuela, they actually succeeded in getting rid of

them for a couple of days. And there's plenty of documentary evidence of this. For instance,

the State Department itself wrote a report that said, and I'll quote from it, that they

provided training, institution building, and other support to individuals

and organizations understood to be actively involved in the brief ouster of President

Hugo Chavez.

That was the State Department's own report.

And there's a whole pile of other evidence that the U.S. media just ignores, you know, they had advanced knowledge of the coup

according to their own CIA documents. And yet when the coup happened, the White House got on the TV

and said it wasn't a coup that had Chavez had resigned. They actually knew what was going on

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