this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2026
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All I was asking is if there was evidence or not. What we have here is a screenshot of a part of an article with no context which appears to contradict itself that people are circlejerking over. The fact that it happened doesn't prove that Maduro was right (or wrong) all along. I just take issue with this "meme" being posted as some gotcha crap when it's deliberately excluding any actual information.
You are 100% correct to be questioning the way everyone here is treating a news article as a gotcha. It could literally just be awkward phrasing.
But to answer your original question, it's hard to have "evidence" in a "hand holding a smoking gun" way where the CIA are involved - that is kind of the entire point of the CIA - but I cannot imagine that they had zero involvement in Operation Gideon back in 2020, which is the big failed attempt that we do know about. Given that US funded coup attempts clearly were happening, I think it's pretty reasonable to assume the CIA were the ones delivering the orders, if not signing them (given that Opration Gideon happened during Trump's first term in office, it's pretty clear who that was).
If you're asking if the CIA were involved in the recent extraction, it's more or less impossible that they weren't. The kind of boots on the ground foreign intel that they provide would have been essential to pulling off an abduction like that. It would literally stretch credulity to imagine a version of that operation that they didn't have a hand in.
I agree that none of this qualifies as clear cut proof, but I think it's also OK to make assumptions when any other read of a situation would be significantly less likely. That's not jumping to conclusions, it's just excercising our capacity to reason.
Sure, I agree that it's definitely reasonable to make those assumptions and that they were almost certainly involved. I'm definitely not arguing with any of that, just the presentation here. I'm not saying there wasn't evidence, I was genuinely asking because the picture was (intentionally) stripped of any possible context so that we could all feel clever and smug without having to think about anything. Thank you for giving some more history, in any case.
Yeah, no arguments there. As I said, you're absolutely right to be calling out the way this was presented.
Max Blumenthal at the Grayzone has covered American meddling in Venezuela extensively.
Here he is on Piers Morgan. https://youtu.be/xKpVC7D56JQ