President Hugo Chavez hosted a terrorist summit in Caracas in which the leadership of Hamas, Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were present, said Roger Noriega, former U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS).
"All indications we have show that Chavez served as host for this summit,” Noriega said in a telephone interview." We don’t have a picture of him [Chavez] in the meeting, but our sources tell us that the main purpose of the trip was to meet him.''
At the meeting held on August 22, 2010 at the headquarters of Military Intelligence at Fort Tiuna in Caracas, "the supreme leader'' of the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, the Hezbollah operations chief and the secretary general of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad allegedly attended, Noriega said.
The three organizations, or branches of them are considered terrorists by the U.S. and other Western countries.
The fact that some of the top leaders of international terrorism have assumed the risk of traveling to Venezuela is in itself a very significant event, emphasized Noriega.
"These people do not take the risk of leaving their safe havens in Syria and the Middle East for social visits,'' said Noriega, who was also secretary of Western Hemisphere Affairs for the State Department and currently serves as managing director of consulting firm Vision Americas, Washington, DC
The secretary general of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Ramadan Abdullah Mohammad Shallah, for example, is in the list of most wanted terrorists by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
Khaled Meshal, the leader of Hamas, was the target of an assassination attempt that was allegedly perpetrated by the Israeli secret service, Mossad. And Hezbollah’s chief operating officer is a person whose identity is one of the best kept secrets of their organization.
Noriega said he had obtained confirmation from several sources and documents that the summit was held. He doesn’t have the minutes of the meeting, and he doesn’t know if they exist, but noted that the context in which the summit was organized was to assess what assistance could be provided by Venezuela.
The idea came at a meeting held on May 10, 2010 between the Venezuelan ambassador in Syria, Imad Saab Saab, and his Iranian counterpart Ahmad Musawi, to assess relations between the South American country with these nations, and strategies to increase "the unity in the international position regarding political events.''
According to a diplomatic cable sent to the Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro, facilitated by Noriega to El Nuevo Herald, the proposal initially sought to join Chavez with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the secretary general of Hezbollah, Hasan Nasrallah.
"Both diplomats [Musawi and Saab] envisioned how it would be interesting to bring together great leaders like Chavez, Ahmadinejad and Nasrallah in an unprecedented summit. Although Musawi acknowledged the difficulty of the mobilizations of Nasrallah, he has not ruled out joining forces to make this event possible in Lebanon in the not too distant future, '' the cable sent to Maduro indicated this on the day of the meeting.
Similarly, the Iranian ambassador added as an alternative to the proposal to hold a meeting in Venezuela with the participation of representatives of Hezbollah, Khaled Meshal, head of Hamas Political Bureau in Syria, and Abdullah Ramadan, from the Islamic Jihad, said the cable.
The document also raises the possibility carrying out "a joint activity on the resistance,'' that counts with the participation of the Syrian government, representatives of Hezbollah and Palestinian factions.
Despite the lack of details on what was discussed, Noriega said he had no doubt that the meeting sought to delineate the type of actions that could be implemented by the Venezuelan government to extend the support currently provided to these organizations.
The U.S. government has failed to confirm the presence of Hezbollah officials in several Latin American countries.
"We assume that they are virtually present in all Latin American countries, and these people have the determination to attack America,'' Noriega said." We believe this is the kind of things that would be discussed at the summit, their ability to take their fight to the Western Hemisphere.''
The fact that Chavez is interested in that goal is not surprising for former U.S. ambassador to the OAS, who has long since denounced the danger he poses to the United States and Latin America as a whole.
"People do not understand that Chavez has spent a decade with the determination to advance a hostile anti-American agenda, and that he [Chavez] is working on that, ''Noriega said.
"He is not looking for reasons to do this. He is already doing it, and he's doing it because that is his ideology,'' he said." The only thing they have in common with Russia, China and Iran is their hostility toward the U.S.''
