Just before the release of a report that showed the CIA conducted disgusting acts of torture on scores of suspected terror detainees.. Amid weeks of demonstrations against the repeated killings of unarmed black men by white US police officers.. The United States Senate passed a bill to impose economic sanctions on Venezuelan officials over the handling of anti-government protests earlier this year.

More than 40 Venezuelans from both sides died in the protests against the legally-elected Socialist government.  Protest leader Leopoldo Lopez is charged with inciting the violence that led to the deaths. 

The protest leaders and organizers were generally from the upper class, educated in America, and resented the continued electoral success of former President Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro, as well as the policies that brought healthcare, education, and development to the slums.  Their side had been unable to win an election since 1999, although poll results in recent years had tightened.  Chavez and Maduro, meanwhile, took up the oft-bellicose and sometimes funny haranguing of US foreign policy as the Castro brothers across the Caribbean Sea advanced into their golden years.

The Venezuela Defense of Human Rights and Civil Society Act is the work of US Senators Marco Rubio, the republican US-born scion of Cuban immigrants; and Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat who turns into a hawk on Cuban issues.  It targets current and former Venezuelan officials who directed what are called “significant acts of violence or serious human rights abuses against persons associated with the anti-government protests in Venezuela that began on 4 February”.  It now goes to the lower House of Representatives, which is dominated by backwoods ideological conservatives.  The Obama Administration has in the past signaled that it opposes the bill, although the White House has warmed up to it recently.  The Maduro government thinks it’s crap.

On Tuesday, the US Senate released a report detailing the horrors of the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) incredibly incompetently-run program of capturing suspected terrorists and torturing them – crudely, ineffectively, and with an unusual focus on things going up the prisoners’ butts. 

Last week, a grand jury in New York City failed to return an indictment against a white police officer who was caught on video delivering a fatal chokehold to an overweight, out of shape, middle aged black man who was suspected of selling individual cigarettes out of opened packs, called “loosies”.  That followed a similar grand jury failure in Ferguson, Missouri, in which no charges were leveled against the white cop who killed black teenager Michael Brown within seconds of stopping the kid for jaywalking.  There’ve been numerous reports of white cops killing unarmed black guys in recent months, with no consequences to the police officers.

Those blatant injustices, flagrantly paraded over indignant communities with smirking sadism, inspired weeks of scattered protests all over the country – protests that were often met by cops in paramilitary regalia and vehicles, hurling flash grenades, shooting tear gas and rubber bullets, and ganging up on protesters with batons.  The intimidation tactics often failed, as protests grew larger and louder on the nights following police violence.

But the US wants to condemn Venezuela.