Congress should be outraged and calling for immediate hearings to determine the chain of command that allowed this to happen. Either Trump is lying, and knows all about the hacking, or some high-ranking military officers who acted without his knowledge should be fired the way President Truman fired an insubordinate Gen. Douglas McArthur during the Korean War.
But of course that won't happen. Trump might fire Gen. Jim Mattis as war secretary, and might fire Gen. H. R. McMaster, as National Security Advisor, but he's not going to fire anyone for hacking Russia's power grid, whether it's Acting Secretary of "Defense" Patrick Shanahan or National Security Advisor John Bolton, the known war-mongerer who may well have been behind the order to do it. The Times itself didn't even deign to run an editorial calling for heads to roll over the news of the dangerous provocation.
But the Times article was disturbing for another reason too. The lengthy investigative piece, while it talked all about the secret cyber war already being fought by the internet forces of the US and Russia, never mentioned Venezuela.
Recall that at the height of opposition militancy a few months ago, when middle-class Venezuelan backers of calls for President Nicola's Maduro's resignation were taking to the streets of Caracas and confronting police and army soldiers, virtually the whole country was thrown into darkness and chaos by the collapse of its power grid.
Maduro's government claimed to have solid evidence that the grid had been hacked by the US. Meanwhile the US, which was openly calling for a coup to oust Maduro, and seeking to build support for it by blocking food imports to Venezuela and oil exports from the country, squeezing its economy in every way possible, and working underground to try and persuade senior military leaders to turn on the government, denied that it was hacking the country's power grid.
Many people probably assumed that the idea of the US using cyber tool to bring down a country's power grid was science fiction, or a paranoid fantasy. But now we know it's reality. If the Pentagon's Cyber Command has the capability to plant remote-controlled cyber weapons in the software of Russia's power grid computer systems, it certainly has the capability of using them to bring down the power grid of a Third World country like Venezuela.
But such an act of sabotage and war has deadly consequences. When Venezuela was out of electricity, hospitals were without power, street lights no longer functioned, frail old people were left in darkness where they were at risk of deadly falls, people in multi-story apartment buildings were without elevators and forced to use dark stairwells to go to and from their apartments, and water, which relies on pumps to reach faucets, became scarce. The list of risks to life and health are endless. If the victims of such an attack were added up, I'm sure it would be staggering.
Did the US bring down the Venezuelan power grid?
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