Ahem…a little mood music, maestro:
Further to last night’s (now amended) piece on how badly Reuters gets Venezuela wrong, it looks like the Associated Press (or Dissociated Press, as I prefer to call them) is no better. Aporrea columnist Ivana Cardinale takes them to task:
Miguel Rodríguez Torres, the new minister of Interior Relations and Justice, informed the country on Thursday morning of the capture of a US citizen named Timothy Hallett Tracy.
According to the minister, Tracy is linked to a right-wing conspiracy against Venezuela, and its objective was to lead us into a civil war and so provoke immediate intervention on the part of a foreign power. He added that he has documents and videos as proof.
The US daily, The Washington Post, immediately published an article from the Associated Press agency, which should really be called the Associated Pentagon, since many of us know that it is the propaganda arm of the Pentagon. In it, the family of the detainee says that he is an “innocent filmmaker”, who is in Venezuela to make a documentary.
According to the detainee’s father, his son is a graduate of Georgetown University, who majored in English, and has been “filming” for the past year in Venezuela.
The AP article indicates that the gringo detainee made a documentary in 2009 called “American Harmony”, and another documentary, recently filmed, called “Under Siege”, for the Discovery Channel. Both documentaries were directed and produced by one Aengus James, not Timothy Tracy. Once more, AP lies. The name of Timothy Hallett Tracy appears nowhere on the Internet in connection to the filming of one or both of the documentaries.
I searched the Internet for information on him, and the only thing that appeared was his detention in Venezuela. As for the rest, no information on Tracy anywhere. Nothing on documentaries or films by this US citizen. If he is a filmmaker, as they say, there would be information on the Web over his work, and as I said, it does not exist.
The strange thing is that “Under Siege” was broadcast in the US one month ago, in March, by the Discovery Channel. If we take AP at its word that Timothy Hallett Tracy filmed that documentary, how could Tracy, who according to his father, has been filming in Venezuela for the past year, be making films in two different countries at the same time?
These little details betray an intent to conceal. It is evident that this is a CIA operation in Venezuela which uses the AP news agency to publish false information over Tracy, claiming him to be producer and director of two documentaries which in reality were made by Aengus James.
500 videos were seized in the raid. The AP agency says that Tracy was detained twice in Venezuela before April 14 and let go. What AP doesn’t say is that Timothy Hallett Tracy belongs to an intelligence agency, has been trained in these matters, received foreign financing, which was later passed on to young Venezuelans hungry for dollars, who came from the extreme right wing, with the objective to generate violent incidents and provoke a civil war.
Translation mine.
BTW, I looked up Aengus James. He is a real person, and he is a real filmmaker. He’s on Twitter. Here’s an interview he gave about his film, American Harmony, which is a documentary on barbershop quartets. He doesn’t look much like Tim Tracy. If I had to guess at his politics, from his tweets (which reference Paul Krugman), I would say he’s a liberal Democrat — hardly the sort of guy who’d want to hang out with a bunch of overt fascists like JAVU. His work doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that would inspire the CIA to tap him as a front man for one of their operations, either. And I don’t think he’d be at all impressed to hear that his films have been attributed by an agency as big and prominent as the AP to this Tim Tracy guy.
So, AP, what the hell is your explanation for all this? And please, make it a good one. I can hardly wait to hear how you got these two guys so badly mixed up.
