OK, but it sure dampens the impact of what CNN was saying there.

Going from "he kept going on and on about how X was trying to take him out, but he could never prove it" directly to "fortunately, X was able to take him out" in the very next sentence is... an odd choice.

I think it’s pretty clear to all that the US has wanted a regime change in V. Now I suppose we can argue about the legitimacy of such a desire in the first place but this doesn’t matter so much in the first place: the real question is if they were acting on it or not.

I’m no authority on the matter, but it does seem to me that, at the very least, the sanctions were a way to elicit such a change, and that the US has also provided some support to the local opposition.

All in all, the question of how likely is it for the CIA to get involved is a question of if we regard the above as legitimate or not : US libs might find it ludicrous that the CIA would act for regime change because they think the above to be legitimate, while CIA involvement is not, and that the US would never do illegitimate stuff. It’s fair enough I suppose, but it does require some amount of belief.

On the other hand, if you think that any manner of US involvement is illegitimate to begin with, well CIA involvement becomes a much more likely threat. It’s no longer a complete change in paradigm, but just an escalation in what the US is already allowing themselves to do.

In a similar fashion, the historical precedence of CIA regime change being pertinent or not relies on how much you believe the US to have effectively changed. In any case, it’s hardly overly paranoid and delusional to judge that the US might take drastic measures in regards to foreign involvement when they are undeniably involving themselves in the first place.

So the only difference in judging how dangerous the threat lied in how far we believed they were willing to go. And if there’s a threat, it’s hardly lying to say that there’s a threat.

All this doesn’t mean that the CIA hasn’t been used as a boogeyman : Maduro could still have used it as an excuse to do stuff that had nothing to do with US or CIA involvement for example. And if it’s convenient, it’s because, from a certain pov, the threat is quite real. That doesn’t mean that Maduro hasn’t made false claims about the matter either. And that doesn’t mean that his gov. might not have taken actions unjustified in regards of the actual threat they thought existed.

And nothing here requires evidence beyond what was in plain sight. A threat is not an ongoing operation, nor the existence of real plans for an operation, a threat is just the possibility of something “bad” happening : can under certain circumstances the US start making up plans for a CIA regime change in V, can they be willing to give it the green light, and can it succeed? The likelihood of any of these happening determine how much of a threat there was, and the fact that it happened makes a strong case to claim that the likelihood was never zero to begin with.

You sure don't seem to have the least bit of knowledge about Alex Jones... Or anything else.