Thursday, January 19, 2006

Super-witness was in jail while supposed conspiratorial meetings he witnessed took place In the latest contradictions in the Danilo Anderson case, Colombian documents have established that the "super-witness" in the case, whose record as being reliable leaves a lot to be desired, was actually in jail in Colombia while the meetings he claims to have attended in Panama and Maracaibo with the intellectual killers of Prosecutor Danilo Anderson were taking place! According to the testimony of the fake psychiatrist Giovanny Vasquez de Armas, he attended a meeting sometime between September 3 and 6 of 2003 in which those charged with Anderson's murder planned to kill President Chavez and other Venezuelan Government officials. However, documents obtained by Globovision show that Vasquez was in jail in Colombia at the time. He was detained on August 16th. 2003 for impersonating a medical doctor at a hospital in Santa Marta. He remained in captivity until December 16th. of that same year. Copies of the documents can be found here and here. Way to go Isaias! Your sloppy work has reached new levels of incompetence! 11:40:49 PM    comment []

It is prohibited to inform Today's Tal Cual Editorial It is prohibited to inform by TEodoro Petkoff in Tal Cual It was inevitable. At some point, it had to happen that the General Prosecutor of the Republic would attempt to cover up the sloppiness of his acts in the Anderson case via the attempt to censor information about them. Isaias requests that it be judicially “forbidden” to all kinds of media the publication of records from the Anderson file case. He is threatening penal sanctions to those that would broadcast information that would place in doubt the credibility of his “star witness”, the fake psychiatrist Vasquez de Armas. We are facing a frontal attack against the exercise of freedom of speech. It happens to be a crass and coarse attempt to silence the media in a case that shook public opinion. If “verbatim” copies – as they are qualified by the request for censorship- from the Prosecutors office leak from the Anderson case files, the responsibility should not be put on the reporters, but on those that give it to them. If the Prosecutor’s office presents as a key witness an individual of whom it has been shown with documents that is a hardened criminal whose “specialty” is, precisely, the stealing of identities and the forgery of public documents, which gives him little credibility, it is not the Prosecutor’s office that has erred centrally leaning in such a precarious testimony, but the media that committed a crime because the discover the ruse and bring it to light. Is the behavior of the Prosecutor casual and isolated? It does not seem like it. If we put together this request for censorship with the “administrative procedure” opened against Laureano Marquez and this newspaper in the context of an article entitled “Dear Rosines”, it would indicate more that we are facing a full force offensive, directed at silencing the media via the rogue utilization of “justice”. It would not be the Government the one that would establish the mechanisms of censorship” with censors provided with red pencils, the old fashioned way, but the courts of “justice” in the supposed application of legal dispositions so that in cases like this, “we protect justice and prevent the abuses of freedom of speech” And who protects the citizens from a “justice” applied in arbitrary manner, to obstruct precisely the channels of information? Who would stop the abuses by public powers, when they are committed, if little by little the possibility of denouncing them is closed? The investigation of the Anderson case has been plagued with irregularities. Particularly with all of those parts relating to the “intellectual authors”, where the Prosecutor’s office placed the leading role in a crude comedy of mistakes, unsustainable to such a point that the court handling the case had no choice but to order the freedom of those charged. It was the media who made the contradictions and inconsistencies of those charges visible. What they are now pretending is that the acts of the Prosecutor, no matter how sloppy and erroneous they may be, be protected by a judicial decision that would forbid speaking about them. Therefore, that they be secret. Could it be that they are trying to cover something up? “In the shadows of mystery only crime works” Words by Bolivar. 11:23:08 PM    comment []

A peek into the news of the future as tax collection drops in 2006 After reading this news today that the Government may exempt people who live in Vargas state of both the VAT and the income tax, I looked into my crystal ball and saw the news of the future: Chavez: Phantom Vargas residents should be sent to Cuba for life El not so Universal, November 27th. 2006 In yesterday’s Alo Presidente, Hugo Chavez said that if it were not because the Constitution prohibited it, he would send everyone that moved his legal residence to Vargas state to Cuba for the rest of their life as punishment. “These people are traitors” said Chavez after learning that the population of Vargas state had quintupled since the Government decreed the tax exemption last January. The Superintendent of Seniat, the tax office, said that there would be a shortfall of 300% in tax collection after close to 1. 5 million people declared Vargas state as their legal residence and thus paid not income tax. Moreover 83.6% of the country's companies moved their Headquarters to Vargas after the decree was passed. The tax office banned the moves, accusing those moving of tax rebellion and claiming the whole thing was a conspiracy to overthrow the Government. “This is another attempt led by Pedro Carmona and the oligarchy to overthrow the legally elected Government of Venezuela by reducing tax collection and thus limiting the resources available for the Presidential campaign of Hugo Chavez” said Vielma. Vielma has asked the Supreme Court to ratify the rebellion charges against the 1.6 million people accused of tax evasion and send them to jail for a sentence from 6 to 14 years according to the tax code. The Constitutional Hall of the Supreme Court took the case away from the Penal Hall, because one of the Justices in the Penal Hall lives in Vargas and thus paid no taxes. But the Court has yet to give an opinion, except for the comment by the Court’s President who said: “Clearly anyone that does not pay taxes and thus limits the number of votes that Chavez may get next week is simply conspiring against the Government and participating in a very explicit form of rebellion, but I will not say more, it would be unethical as I am writing the majority opinion on the case” The President of the National Assembly Nicolas Maduro said the Assembly will begin an investigation of the case immediately, beginning with a house to house census of Vargas state. Said Maduro: “We have found one room houses with more than 1,500 residents and the top four industrial companies in the country have now moved to Vargas. We will pass a bill prohibiting this retroactively. While the Constitution prohibits passing any law retroactively, this is a national affront and an emergency and we can not tolerate this type of conspiracy. Opposition members, as defined by the Maisanta/Tascon database/algorithm version 17.3, will have an "O" tatooed on their forehead and will need Congressional approval to change residences. This is not a violation of their rights, but a necessary precaution”. Maduro also said that they had found CIA pamphlets explaining how to move to Vargas state, without using the collapsed viaduct in the Caracas-La Guaira highway or the old road which takes now three days to drive after it also collapsed all over the place. “Once again, all of our problems can be traced back to the CIA; I don’t understand why it is that while the CIA botches up all of its operations in the world, all of those carried out in Venezuela are successful, except for the fact that we always discover them”. Maduro also showed a bazooka which was actually not used by the CIA in the operation. Deputy Iris Varela said yesterday that her committee on enviromental issues would look into why no banks had moved to Vargas as that sounded very fishy to her. When told that banks pay no taxes, the session of the committee was cancelled. The Minister of Energy and Oil Rafael Ramirez announced with a stern face that he will look into who within the company moved PDVSA’s legal residence to Vargas, exempting the oil company from paying taxes to the Government: “We only noticed it last week, because we were very busy preparing the 2004 financial statements which we had promised to the SEC for November of one of these years” said Ramirez at a press conference. Deputy Pedro Carreño said that this was all planned at the White House by Jorge W. Bush using a new weapon, a “Superconducting-levitated diamond knife linked to 12,000 DirecTV satellites controlled by all the Coca Cola truck drivers in the world, which were used to cut the viaduct into two pieces, causing the crisis”. He claimed that US Ambassador Brownfield wrote the decree exempting Vargas from the taxes and slipped it into the agenda of the Cabinet last January, while the Cabinet was watching the winter ball baseball finals, in which Leones beat Magallanes 23 to 21 in a 30 inning, 16 hour game. The game itself is also being investigated. Attorney General Isaias Rodriguez blamed the media and said this was related to the Danilo Anderson case, saying he had a witness who is a Chinese economist from Bolivia, who lives in Iraq who had been at the CIA meetings in Nepal where the operation was planned and Patricia Poleo was present. Luis Tascon said he would not say anything because he had said too many stupid things in 2006 and was afraid of saying another one. He would speak again in 2007. Opposition candidates were quiet on the topic. Julio Borges said he had better things to worry about, with his most recent proposal of a primary the day before the presidential election. Roberto Smith said he was walking one million miles around Venezuela so that everyone in the country would shake his hand in the week prior to his election. Teodoro Petkoff explained that this was simply a case of human nature and revealed that half of the members of the 100% pro-Chavez National Assembly had filed their tax statements with a Vargas residence to avoid taxes (The other half did not even file). So had the Comptroller and the People's Defender. Fidel Castro said sending people to Cuba was not a punishment, but a reward in his "sea of happiness: lobster, prostitutes, beaches and good music for all non-Cubans". Chavez’ daughter Rosines could not be quoted on the subject, as there were 67 court orders banning people from quoting her both here and abroad and in all forms of media, TV, printed, pamphlets, viedo, FM, AM, shortwave, podcasts, analog, digital or hybrid. Additionally, she was very busy rewriting Art. 350 of the Constitution for her father, particularly erasing the part about "rights". 1:17:20 AM    comment []