Chavez Threatens To Arrest U.S. Spies

Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, in a statement obviously aimed at his domestic audience, is threatening to jail any U.S. spies caught gathering intelligence on his military.

Chavez is not as oblivious to the facts of diplomatic immunity as his statement would make it seem. He knows full well that the CIA officers and U.S. military attachés he is watching hold a "get out of jail free" card. He could conceivably capture a NOC or two, but we are not likely to be using vulnerable non-official operatives in the hostile environment of a Venezuela teeming with Cuban and Cuban-trained counter-intelligence personnel.

Chavez's warning came hours after his vice president, Jose Vicente Rangel, accused officials at the U.S. Embassy of involvement in a spying case involving several Venezuelan naval officers who allegedly passed sensitive information to the Pentagon... He addressed the spying accusations for the first time since the allegations came to light earlier this week.

"We've just discovered a case, one more espionage case," Chavez told the audience of activists who are attending the World Social Forum in Caracas this week.

"I warn the U.S. government: the next time we detect a soldier or civilian official - but above all American soldiers - trying to obtain information about our armed forces, we're going to put them in prison."

By American soldiers, he presumably means military attachés, who have full diplomatic immunity.

In the pot calling the kettle black department, we find the following:

Washington has raised concern about the health of democracy under Chavez and has accused him of destabilizing the region. Chavez has shrugged off the claims, saying his government is democratic and it is the U.S. that is a destabilizing force.

Chavez has clearly been studying up on the United States:

The frequent and vocal critic of U.S. global policy used especially harsh terms to describe the U.S. government, calling it a "perverse, murderous, genocidal, immoral empire."

His words may be "harsh", but that doesn't make them untrue.