Untwisting Reality

Sabotage and Blame the Victim

• By Poetry X
• 28 November, 2020
• No Comments

The United States already applies the most inhuman “sanctions” aiming to cause hunger, destruction and death on the most vulnerable of those nations being punished [PX]. However, sanctions by their own don’t satisfy the thirst for suffering, then the US applies sabotage tactics that in many cases could account as terrorist attacks.

We are going to leave aside sabotage attacks to the financial systems and to the communications to simplify the impact of these tactics. Also we are going to leave asides sabotage attacks to the transportations such as airplane or ships that transport food and medicine. However, it is important to mention the US regularly steal resources that are affect entire industries and infrastructure. For example, back on October 2020, the US seized 1.1 million barrels of petroleum from Venezuela and sold it for more than $40 million. That was not an isolated event [Yahoo Oct 29, 2020].

Just as many other weapons the US use against its targets, sabotage attacks make a powerful arsenal that make huge damage to its victims. We could go back to the early years of the Cuban revolution that suffered sabotage attacks at all levels. Cuba’s economy had a high dependency on sugar cane and tourism. For that effect, the sugar cane fields were victims of napalm attacks, and terrorist such as Orlando Bosch and Posada Carriles put bombs in hotels [Cuba, la historia no contada]. In addition, Cuba aimed to become an academic power house, specially on medicine and a very symbolic death is the assassination of Conrado Benítez. Benitez was the first victim of a campaign of targeted assassination of teachers, peasants and fishermen [Vanguardia Jan 5, 2016]. Another important case was the sabotage on the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, an attack so criminal the they ICJ sentenced the US had committed crimes agains humanity and order the a compensation for the damages caused [ICJ].

The CIA has been directing Cyber attacks against Russia, China, North Korea and Iran [Forbes Jul 15, 2020]. We must note the most affected nation by these sabotages has been Venezuela. In fact, there were at least 87 cyber attack on Venezuela’s electrical power grid just on September and October of 2020. The most significant attack so far is the one against the Amuay refinery on October 27th 2020 where it seems a misil impacted those installations [Noticias Col Oct 29, 2020].

Of course the US has not officially admitted being the author of destroying infrastructure with cyber intelligence. However, we must take into account the main utility infrastructure in Venezuelas was built or is provided by US related corporations. For example the German corporation Siemens built the Termozulia and Palito Blanco electrical stations, and also Siemen provides the equipment for Cabletren [Siemens]. It happens those centers have suffered multiple malfunctions that the US always blames on the corruption of the Venezuelan government.

For now there is no direct evidence the US sabotaged those services, but we must keep in mind Iran did catch malware made in the US and the main provider of equipment is Siemens [CNN May 14, 2018]. Now, back in 2010, the Stuxnet virus was used to destroy Iran’s nuclear centrifuges. However, Stuxnet is just one of many viruses used agains Iran infrastructure [Times of Israel Jul 18, 2020]. We could also name Flame and Duqu which two other viruses detected in Iran sabotages [CNN May 30, 2012].

Despite the US describing these malware programs as spy bugs, the experts describe these super viruses as the most potent cyber weapons ever created with the main task of targeting “industrial control systems.” By now, thanks to Edward Snowden we know that Stuxnet was created by the US with the specific mission of directed secret attacks to the Iranian infrastructure [Haaretz Jul 9, 2013]. Just as an example on 2020 Iran had series of explosions targeted at strategic facilities. We must take into account, multiple Israeli officials, like Foreign Minister Gaby Ashkenazi, have hinted they have perpetrated those attacks [NYtimes Jul 5, 2020].