The "Blame the CIA Game" is back!

For a while there it had died (no doubt because of the CIA's clear mishandling of a number of things), but hey! A good game never dies; it just keeps turning up like a bad penny.
(emphasis added to all items)

In Cuba:
Via Babalu, the Cuban government bulldozed a church in the town of El Salado

Fue destruido con un Buldózer utilizado por la policía, el local de la Iglesia Evangélica Reforma Apostólica, en la ciudad de Santiago de Cuba, nos informaba por teléfono desde la oriental ciudad, Juan Ramón Rivero Despaigne, activista de los derechos humanos.
"La iglesia se encuentra ubicada en las calles Nico, #3, en el pueblo El Salado. Todos sus miembros son acusados por el Gobierno de agentes de la CIA. El pastor Alain Toledano sigue celebrando los cultos en el lugar en donde fue destruida su iglesia", concluyó Rivero Despaigne.
(my translation:)
The police bulldozed the locale used as a church by the Reform Apostolic Evangelical Church in the city of Santiago de Cuba, we are told by phone by Juan Ramon Rivero Despaigne, human rights activist.

The church is located at Streets # 3 and Nicon in the town of El Salado. The [Cuban] government is acussing all the members of the church of being CIA agents. Pastor Alain Toledano continues to celebrate worship services at the location where the church was torn down, Rivera Despaigne reports.

In Venezuela:
Simon Romero reports that Chavez came up with a fake CIA memo, which his cronies were too cheap to find someone to translate into English in order to give it a whiff of authenticity:

Mr. Chavez and senior officials here have exhibited increasingly erratic behavior. Mr. Chavez has lashed out at leaders in Colombia and Spain and asked for an investigation into whether CNN was seeking to incite an assassination attempt against him.

Reports of such plots are not in short supply here. The main state television network broadcast coverage this week of a memorandum in Spanish that it claimed had been written by the C.I.A. in which destabilization plans against Mr. Chavez were laid out. American involvement in Venezuelan politics remains a particularly delicate issue here, after the Bush administration tacitly supported a coup in 2002 that briefly ousted Mr. Chavez.

"We reject and are disappointed in the Venezuelan government's allegations that the United States is involved in any type of conspiracy to affect the outcome of the constitutional referendum," Benjamin Ziff, a spokesman for the United States Embassy here, said in a statement.

A C.I.A. spokesman called the document "a fake," while analysts, including investigators who had previously uncovered financing of Venezuelan opposition groups by the United States government, expressed doubts about the authenticity of the memo.

"I find the document quite suspect," said Jeremy Bigwood, an independent researcher in Washington. "There’s not an original version in English, and the timing of its release is strange."

One of the surest signs of a tyrant is his eagerness to play the "Blame the CIA Game". When that fails, blame the White House (and of course, blame Bush).

More on Venezuela's countdown to tyranny later today.


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