50 Top U.S. War Criminals | AfterDowningStreet.org

50 Top U.S. War Criminals | AfterDowningStreet.org

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Obama and the Honduran Crisis

Obama and the Honduran Crisis: Friend or Foe of Enlightened Change?

As the OAS prepares to send a delegation to Honduras – basically on terms dictated by Roberto Micheletti, the head of the golpista government – one can be excused for questioning why this crisis in democratic governance has yet to be resolved. The hemisphere has been unusually united in its condemnation of the coup, as has the entire international community. The United States, in line with President Barack Obama’s stated commitment to adopt more of an equal partnership in regional affairs, took a back seat – almost to a fault – putatively encouraging all of Latin America to share responsibility. But the U.S.’ failure to share authentic solidarity with the rest of the Americas, and its reluctance to take the initiative to project its obvious preeminence when it comes to Western Hemispheric affairs, prevented the region from moving toward a resolution of the constitutional crisis affecting the Central American country. In fact, the dirty little secret known to all Latin American nations is that only Washington possesses the exercisable clout necessary to force outcome on its terms. By playing cat and mouse with the rest of the hemisphere, it has jeopardized, not only the restoration of democracy in Honduras, but also future ties between the U.S. and its now rambunctious former backyard.

The Initial Reaction
On June 29, the day following the military ouster of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, President Obama had the fortitude to assert that “the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the President of Honduras.” U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in turn expressed her belief that the situation in Honduras had “evolved into a coup.” However, these hearty words may have been the high water mark for the administration’s zeal over the future status of Honduras’ constitutional prospects. In addition to a disturbing lack of candor which may come to bedevil the quality of inter-American affairs, the United States is offering up much less than meets the eye by acknowledging that it is “withholding any formal legal determination” that would officially label the ouster of Zelaya as a “military coup.”

After being accused of passivity, the White House responded that it has been very clear in stating its belief that President Zelaya was “removed from office illegally, that it was a coup and that he should return.” But when asked whether reinstatement was a U.S. priority, Secretary of State Clinton responded: “We haven’t laid out any demands that we’re insisting on, because we’re working with others on behalf of our ultimate objectives.” In effect, this agglutination of language added up to very little. Officially coining the ouster of Zelaya as a military coup would of course obligate the Obama Administration to cut millions of dollars of aid to the already impoverished Central American country. In effect, it would also conclude the saga of Honduras against the world, because a termination of U.S. aid would end the matter. Economic sanctions applied by the U.S. would also be in order, a potentially devastating blow, given Washington’s gargantuan role as Honduras’ biggest trading partner. Washington policy makers say that they do not want to take unilateral action, despite the fact that employing “coercive diplomacy” would all but guarantee the reinstatement of Zelaya as president of Honduras. But the fact is that every member of the OAS and the EU has withdrawn their ambassador from Tegucigalpa save the United States.

Washington has, in fact, thus far refused to recognize the interim government of Roberto Micheletti, suspended military aid to Honduras and rescinded the diplomatic visas of a handful of interim Honduran leaders, but this flurry of activity is somewhat deceptive as it has had no fateful consequences for the anti-Zelaya forces. Because the Obama Administration has pledged no longer to plunder in its traditional back yard, more drastic measures are not presently being considered. “The same critics who say the US has not intervened in Honduras are the same people who say we are always intervening and Yankees need to get out of Latin America,” Obama observed. But here Obama plays at being coy. At the end of the day, the world, except for his administration, has cut off aid and recognition. The Obama Administration cannot distance itself from these arguments and pretend it has reformed and become an Eagle Scout.

The Current Policy: Working to Find or Prevent a Solution?
Presently, the law of inertia and the U.S.’ failure to mobilize its diplomatic as well as tangible resources seems to have kept Washington in the background. But each passing day brings an increasing suspicion that the United States, like the coupsters themselves, aims to simply wait it out until November’s presidential elections, when Zelaya’s reinstatement is no longer a topic of debate, since his formal presidential mandate will then be drawing to a close. A number of U.S. lawmakers feel that they are in the dark as to what the Obama Administration plans to do. In this respect, Senator Richard G. Lugar (R-IN) has been good enough to demand that some light be shed on the issue. He has even warned that key State Department appointments could be held up unless the administration gave a “detailed clarification” of the steps it intended to take in its foreign policy toward Honduras. The State Department responded with an August 4 letter to Senator Lugar, written by Richard Verma, the Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs. “Our policy and strategy for engagement is not based on supporting any particular politician or individual,” wrote Verma. “Rather, it is based on finding a resolution that best serves the Honduran people and their democratic aspirations.” But this string of language brings only empty calories to the table and leaves the door wide open for any policy which the White House chooses to follow. By allowing it to survive, the U.S. is enabling the Micheletti regime to carry on to the end of the year, trumping the entire membership of the OAS with its obstinance and guile.

Clinton’s Honduras Strategy Develops – or Deteriorates
Shortly after the coup took place, Secretary of State Clinton proclaimed, “Much of our assistance is conditioned on the integrity of the democratic system, but if we were able to get to a status quo that returned to the rule of law and constitutional order within a relatively short period of time, I think that would be a good outcome.” So much for high-minded democratic rhetoric. The recently composed State Department letter clearly implies that the Obama Administration no longer views Zelaya’s reinstatement as necessary for the restoration of constitutional democracy in Honduras. Thus, one can safely say here that Clinton and her diplomatic team aren’t necessarily planning for Zelaya to reoccupy the Tegucigalpa presidential palace any time soon, despite the fact that President Obama called for the reinstatement of Manuel Zelaya as recently as August 10, almost a week after the letter to Senator Lugar had been sent.

Though the State Department condemned the coup in the above letter, it brought another interesting variable into the equation when it recognized that, “President Zelaya’s insistence on undertaking provocative actions contributed to the polarization of Honduran society and led to a confrontation that unleashed the events that led to his removal.” Hence, the letter not only indicates a shifting stance on the issue of the centrality of Zelaya’s reinstatement, but also justifies its backtracking by adopting the Micheletti faction’s line that Zelaya’s actions in seeking the constitutional opinion of the citizens on whether or not to reform the Constitution (an action his opponents claimed was designed to allow him to run for another term) served as a sufficient affront to provoke the crisis in the first place. Yet this was not precisely the original formulation of the OAS, Costa Rican President and mediator Oscar Arias, or even President Obama’s initial position. What we are witnessing is the development of a fall-back strategy which is not new, creative, or necessarily fully responsive. In fact, it could have been the exact policy, dressed up and sent out to salute the flag, of the Bush Administration, or even the Reagan Administration before it.

A Bit of Military History
This reluctance by the administration to brand the change of power as a military coup is clearly misplaced. Although the army quickly handed power over to the congress, as if it was dealing with poison ivy, this relatively small detail should not obscure the fact that President Zelaya was removed from the country, and kept out of it, by military force, in direct contravention of the Honduran Constitution.

The Honduran military’s involvement in this Rotarian-like mission should come as no surprise, as it has always been the defender of Honduras’ entrenched powers as well as U.S. interests, broadly defined. During John Negroponte’s tenure as ambassador to Honduras in the early 1980s, the country served as an “unsinkable aircraft” and a base for U.S. military operations aimed at destroying the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and defending the right-wing rulers of El Salvador. These wars may have devastated Central America, but Washington’s aims were well served even at the handsome price paid out by the CIA and the U.S. embassy at the time.

It was over this same time period that the infamous death squad Battalion 316 started to crush dissent in a process in which scores of innocent civilians were murdered. Then head of the army, General Gustavo Alvarez, who was chummy with Ambassador Negroponte, oversaw many of its operations and acted as a strongman, simply using the civilian president to achieve his and Washington’s ends. Alvarez fled the country in 1984 after refusing to yield to the pressure of his outraged military comrades-in-arms with whom he allegedly refused to share millions of dollars in pay-offs from the CIA and the U.S. embassy. Later he foolishly returned and was promptly shot to death in 1989. He was never indicted for any of the war crimes he committed. When asked questions about this and other compromising episodes, Negroponte has repeatedly lapsed into amnesia interruptus when trying to recall these seminal events.

What this indicates is that although this military-fueled reign of terror ended nearly 30 years ago, the government institutions of Honduras have traditionally been controlled by a tight cadre of military hardliners who habitually step in to “correct” or redirect their nation’s policies. The democratic institutions present in Honduras today are still a matter more of form than substance, as they revealed themselves to be when President Zelaya was so effortlessly removed. So it should raise no eyebrows that, faced with a threat to the status quo, Latin America’s preeminent banana republic, with its hard right economic principles, would revert to what it knows best – military intervention in the civilian political process – in order to preserve the corruption which for decades has been allowed as a mainstay of that society.

Embargo-saurus
Although Obama’s rhetoric and selective reopening of what turned out to be a highly limited dialogue between Washington and Havana seemed to usher in a new era in the relationship between, not only the island, but also the entire region, and its resident superpower, the concessions made by the State Department turned out to be quite minimal and the changes demanded by Secretary of State Clinton demonstrated no ascertainable departure from the routine positions of decades of past U.S. administrations. Thus, a possible golden moment, in which Washington’s previously compromised image in Latin America could have been magically transformed, was allowed to pass with minimal skill and finesse. Washington’s long-term contempt, double standards, and selective indignation when it comes to Cuba has been one of the primary sources of Latin American criticism of the Obama Administration and has conjured up the wrong kind of international attention, particularly at June’s OAS summit in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, where the U.S. was the only country to abstain from the vote that lifted the suspension of Cuba’s membership in the organization.

As demonstrated by Clinton’s disappointing performance at the OAS session, Washington has not yet been able to move away from the Cold War mentality that allows the embargo to remain in place more than 50 years after it was instated. While every other nation voted that the time had long since come to return Cuba to its seat at the OAS, the U.S. abstained, doing little to help its damaged reputation. Although Clinton had the good sense not to vote against the resolution or link herself too strongly to the case against it, this charade demonstrated the solid presence of the remnants of past policy that still linger in the minds of today’s decision makers. This was one of the first signs that Obama’s new relationship with Latin America was, at least at this early stage, little better than a Mickey Mouse encounter.

The Failures of Washington’s Current Honduras Policy
Honduras is the latest proof that the Obama Administration’s reluctance to implement significant change in the U.S.’ Latin America policy is impeding progress in a vitally important policy-making sector. By standing by and not taking decisive action, it has, perhaps unwittingly and certainly at great cost to its own reputation, allowed the Micheletti faction to gain security at home and an ill-deserved sense of legitimacy abroad. The extra-constitutional government is now tactically in a position of ascendancy, brazenly dictating its terms to the country, the OAS and the international community. The U.S. has stood by and allowed the rump government to gain far more than a foothold, which looks harder to shake with each passing hour.

The Obama Administration has both voiced its rather passive desire to restore constitutional democracy to Honduras and red flagged Zelaya’s “provocative” actions as a causative factor of the coup, hence the launching of the explanation for the current lack of aggressiveness behind the effort to reinstate him as president. Yet, Zelaya’s performance was just provocative and no more so than a Hillary Clinton or, for that matter, Obama campaign address. We can see that if left to Washington, Zelaya would be well into his first year of retirement whether or not he actually violated any constitutional laws prior to his extra-legal removal from office, an accusation which remains very controversial, even at this late date. What is certain – much more so than the illegality of anything Zelaya did while in office – is that several clear violations of Honduras’ constitution were committed on June 28, including the detention of President Zelaya by the armed forces (violation of articles 293 and 272), his forced deportation to another country (article 102) and Congress’ unqualified decision to replace the executive.

When is a Coup a Coup?
The State Department’s failure to label the events of June 28 a military coup has so far allowed economic aid to continue to flow to the Central American nation where it provides the Micheletti regime with the oxygen it needs to survive. By failing to recall Ambassador Hugo Llorens, Washington sent unclear signals about the degree of its rejection of the coup. Additionally, there has been insufficient investigation into the depth of repression and the range of human rights violations taking place under the current military-installed regime. At the end of July, the Committee of Families of Disappeared-Detainees in Honduras, a nongovernmental human rights organization, reported that more than 1,100 human-rights violations – arbitrary detentions, physical assaults, murders and attacks on the media by the government and affiliated clandestine forces – had taken place since the coup began, a charge which surely deserves to be scrutinized.

Former close campaign aide of Hillary Clinton and current extremely high-paid lobbyist Lanny Davis, who has long been a friend of free trade and has now been hired by business backers of the recent takeover to defend the June 28 coup, responded to questions regarding these alleged human rights violations by diverting attention to his version of Zelaya’s role in the onset of the crisis. “I researched the facts on what occurred during the presidency of Mr. Zelaya. Mr. Zelaya led mob violence, and you can see that on a YouTube video,” said Davis. If Mr. Davis’ research on Latin American issues had been a bit more comprehensive and a little less self-serving, he might have come forth with a more sophisticated, if less lucrative, analysis of the subject – one that differentiated between stretching the limits of power and trampling on a constitution while claiming to uphold it. The commitment to human rights of any regime that takes advice from Fernando “Billy” Joya – the notorious former member of Battalion 316, who fled his home country in 1982 after he was accused of, among other things, kidnapping and torture – must be profoundly challenged.

Furthermore, the imposition and extension of restrictive curfews since June 28 are common knowledge. The interim government has clearly infringed upon freedom of speech and of the press, and if the accusations of forced disappearances as well as daylight murders that have surfaced have any substance, these allegations must be vigorously investigated.

The Real Hypocrite?
It is perplexing that the United States did not summarily respond to these allegations of undemocratic human rights violations, particularly given Washington’s recent decision to terminate $64 million in Millennium Challenge Corporation aid to Nicaragua over “the government of Nicaragua’s likely manipulation of municipal elections.” The U.S. canceled the MCC compact so that it would remain consistent in its aid provision standards. By not taking aggressive action in the wake of the recent Honduran crisis, however, the Obama Administration is displaying a damaging inconsistency and a disquieting double standard in its support for some questionable democracies in Latin America, but not others.

The State Department’s contention that “all states should seek to facilitate a solution without calls for violence and with respect for the principle of nonintervention” suggests hypocrisy when you consider the administration’s still highly intrusive and very much outdated policy toward Cuba. We are not witnessing signs of a de facto regime that is either tolerant or tolerable, yet Obama and Clinton have not convincingly demonstrated their unwillingness to accept these golpistas as legitimate political players. Coherence in Obama’s foreign policy toward Latin America is clearly in short supply.

The Time Factor
With every day that passes, the power of those charged by the global community with violating the Honduran Constitution and international law has become more entrenched. Again, Washington has failed to acknowledge the importance of a quick resolution of the crisis. Micheletti’s unwavering strategy has been to stonewall the matter, banking on his ability to hold onto the presidency until the elections scheduled for this coming November, in which Zelaya cannot run, are staged. UNASUR, which doesn’t include the United States in its membership, has declared that it will not recognize the results of any elections held under the auspices of the interim government, but the U.S. has taken no such action. On the contrary, it has stood idly by while those who staged the coup (for the most part members of the privileged economic classes that saw their traditional advantages as threatened by Zelaya’s left-leaning reforms and Honduras’ new membership in the Chávez-led ALBA) stabilize their regime.

Is It Too Late to Save Honduras?
It is too late for Washington to go back and unwind its past actions. This would have meant withdrawing Ambassador Llorens and decisively cutting economic support to the self proclaimed interim government, delivering the would-be coup a knockout blow by adopting a process that would lead to the reinstatement of the democratically elected President Zelaya. The Americas must not be bored by such a procedure or tire of their responsibility.

If the elections are staged with the de facto government still in power, matters will become inadmissibly complicated. Acceptance of those elections would validate the coup government. At the same time, a refusal to do so could plunge Honduras into an indefinite state of isolation from which it could not easily escape. The problem is that no mechanism currently exists for deciding when the next round of elections will once again be legitimate. Thus, it is imperative that a mechanism be arranged for Micheletti and his illegal administration to step down before the electoral process is resumed.

In order to ensure the return of lawful governance in Honduras, the United States, the most powerful member of the OAS, which has up to now been inappropriately cautious, must take decisive action against the current regime. Zelaya’s ouster is not, as the coup-backers have painted it, a great victory for democracy. Rather, it is a turn away from that ideal. If democratic order is not restored, it will represent a crushing victory for the economically privileged and a telling set-back for democratic values, further dividing an already deeply polarized society. Moreover, Zelaya’s downfall will undermine Obama’s efforts to reconstruct Washington’s image in Latin America and the nature of its relationship to the region on more generous terms. As Lanny Davis signs on to defend this extra-constitutional change of power to officials in Washington and Hillary Clinton describes Zelaya’s desire to return to the country from which he was evicted as “reckless,” Micheletti sits in Zelaya’s place, without winning a single vote, and dictates terms to international organizations. This bodes poorly for Obama’s credibility and has the potential to freeze in place the new democratic order of which the American president spoke even before it is launched. Although many believed that this administration was ready to turn over a new leaf in the region, its timidity up to now has prevented it from doing so. Already Cuba and now Honduras have come to constitute the broken bones of what had been the hopes enkindled by Obama’s rhetoric. These proud dreams have been all but suffocated by the lack of a responsible Latin America policy behind them.

This analysis was prepared by COHA Director Larry Birns and Research Associate Sean Johnson
August 13th, 2009

Monday, 17 August 2009, 12:45 pm
Press Release: Council on Hemispheric Affairs

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0908/S00285.htm

Dispatches From the Edge: Honduras Coup: The U.S. Connection

While the Obama administration was careful to distance itself from the recent coup in Honduras—condeming the expulsion of President Manuel Zelaya to Costa Rica, revoking Honduran officals’ visas, and shutting off aid—that doesn’t mean influential Americans aren’t involved, and that both sides of the aisle don’t have some explaining to do.

The story most U.S. readers are getting about the coup is that Zelaya—an ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez—was deposed because he tried to change the constitution to keep himself in power.

That story is a massive distortion of the facts. All Zelaya was trying to do is to put a non-binding referendum on the ballot calling for a constitutional convention, a move that trade unions, indigenous groups and social activist organizations had long been lobbying for. The current constitution was written by the Honduran military in 1982 and the one-term limit allows the brass hats to dominate the politics of the country. Since the convention would have been held in November, the same month as the upcoming presidential elections, there was no way that Zelaya could have remained in office in any case. The most he could have done was to run four years from now.

And while Zelaya is indeed friendly with Chavez, he is at best a liberal reformer whose major accomplishment was raising the minimum wage. “What Zelaya has done has been little reforms,” Rafael Alegria, a leader of Via Campesina told the Mexican daily La Jornada. “He isn’t a socialist or a revolutionary, but these reforms, which didn’t harm the oligarchy at all, have been enough for them to attack him furiously.”

One of those “little reforms” was aimed at ensuring public control of the Honduran telecommunications industry and that may well have been the trip wire that triggered the coup.

The first hint that something was afoot was a suit brought by Venezuelan lawyer Robert Carmona-Borjas claiming that Zelaya was part of a bribery scheme involving the state-run telecommunication company, Hondutel.

Carmona-Borjas has a rap sheet that dates back to the April 2002 coup against Chavez. It was he who drew up the notorious “Carmona decrees,” a series of draconian laws aimed at suspending the Venezuelan constitution and suppressing any resistance to the coup. As Chavez supporters poured into the streets and the plot unraveled, he fled to Washington D.C.

There he took a post at George Washington University and brought Iran-Contra plotters Otto Reich and Elliott Abrams to teach his class on “Political Management in Latin America.” He also became vice president of the right-wing Arcadia Foundation, which lobbies for free market policies.

Weeks before the June 28 Honduran coup, Carmona-Borjas barnstormed the country accusing Zelaya of collaborating with narco-traffickers.

Reich, a Cuban-American with ties to right-wing factions all over Latin America, and a former assistant secretary of state for hemispheric affairs under George W. Bush, has been accused by the Honduran Black Fraternal Organization of “undeniable involvement” in the coup.

This is hardly surprising. Reich’s priors makes Carmona-Borjas look like a boy scout.

He was nailed by a 1987 Congressional investigation for using public funds to engage in propaganda during the Reagan administration’s war on Nicaragua. He is also a fierce advocate for Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, both implicated in the bombing of a Cuban airliner in 1973 that killed all 73 on board.

Reich is a ferocious critic of Zelaya and, in a recent piece in the Weekly Standard, urged the Obama administration not to support “strongman” Zelaya because it “would put the United States clearly in the same camp as Cuba’s Castro brothers, Venezuela’s Chavez, and other regional delinquents.”

Zelaya’s return was unanimous supported by the UN General Assembly, the European Union, and the Organization of American States.

One of the charges that Reich levels at Zelaya is that the Honduran president is supposedly involved with bribes paid out by the state-run telecommunication company, Hondutel. Zelaya is threatening to file a defamation suit over the accusation.

Reich’s charges against Hondutel are hardly happenstance.

The Cuban-American, a former lobbyist for AT&T, is close to Arizona Senator John McCain and served as McCain’s Latin American advisor during the senator’s run for the presidency. John McCain is Mr. Telecommunications.

The senator has deep ties with telecom giants AT&T, MCI and Qualcomm and, according to Nikolas Kozloff , author of Hugo Chavez: Oil, Politics and the Challenge of the U.S., “has acted to protect and look out for the political interests of the telecoms on Capitol Hill.”

AT&T is McCain’s second-largest donor, and the company also generously funds McCain’s International Republican Institute (IRI), which has warred with Latin American regimes that have resisted telecommunications privatization. According to Kozloff, “President Zelaya was a known to be a fierce critic of telecommunications privatization.”

When Venezuelan coup leaders went to Washington a month before their failed effort to oust Chavez, IRI footed the bill. Reich, as then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s special envoy to the Western Hemisphere, met with some of those leaders.

In 2004, Reich founded his own lobbying agency and immersed himself in guns, rum, tobacco, and sweat. His clients include Lockheed Martin (the world’s largest arms dealer), British American Tobacco and Bacardi. He is also vice chairman of Worldwide Responsible Apparel Production, a clothing industry front aimed at derailing the anti-sweatshop movement.

Republicans in Congress have accused the Obama administration of being “soft” on Zelaya, and protested the White House’s support of the Honduran president by voting against administration nominees for the ambassador to Brazil and an assistant secretary of state.

But meddling in Honduras is a bipartisan undertaking.

“If you want to understand who is the real power behind the [Honduran] coup, you need to find out who is paying Lanny Davis,” says Robert White, former U.S. ambassador to El Salvador and current president of the Center for International Policy.

Davis, best known as the lawyer who represented Bill Clinton during his impeachment trial, has been lobbying members of Congress and testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in support of the coup.

According to Roberto Lovato, an associate editor at New American Media, Davis represents the Honduran chapter of CEAL, the Business Council of Latin America, which strongly backed the coup. Davis told Lovato, “I’m proud to represent businessmen who are committed to the rule of law.”

But White says the coup had more to do with profits than law.

“Coups happen because very wealthy people want them and help to make them happen, people who are used to seeing the country as a money machine and suddenly see social legislation on behalf of the poor as a threat to their interests,” says White. “The average wage of a worker in free trade zones is 77 cents per hour.”

According to the World Bank, 66 percent of Hondurans live below the poverty line.

The United States is also involved in the coup through a network of agencies that funnel money and training to anti-government groups. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) contribute to right-wing organizations that supported the coup, including the Peace and Democracy Movement and the Civil Democratic Union. Many of the officers that bundled Zelaya off to San Jose were trained at the Western Hemispheric Institute for Security Cooperation, the former “School for the Americas’ that has seen torturers and coup leaders from all over Latin America pass through its doors. Reich served on the Institute’s board.

The Obama administration condemned the coup, but when Zelaya journeyed to the Honduran-Nicaragua border, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denounced him for being “provocative.” It was a strange statement, since the State Department said nothing about a report by the Committee of Disappeared Detainees in Honduras charging 1,100 human rights violations by the coup regime, including detentions, assaults and murder.

Human rights violations by the coup government have been condemned by the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights, the International Observer Mission, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and Reporters Without Borders.

Davis claims that the coup was a “legal” maneuver to preserve democracy. But that is a hard argument to make, given who some of the people behind it were. One of those is Fernando Joya, a former member of Battalion 316, a paramilitary death squad. Joya fled the country after being charged with kidnapping and torturing several students in the 1980s, but he has now resurfaced as a “special security advisor” to the coup makers. He recently gave a television interview that favorably compared the 1973 Chilean coup to the June 28 Honduran coup.

According to Greg Grandin, a history professor at New York University, the coup makers also included the extremely right-wing Catholic organization, Opus Dei, whose roots go back to the fascist regime of Spanish caudillo Francisco Franco.

In the old days, when the United States routinely overthrew governments that displeased it, the Marines would have gone in, as they did in Guatemala and Nicaragua, or the CIA would have engineered a coup by the local elites. No one has accused U.S. intelligence of being involved in the Honduran coup, and American troops in the country are keeping a low profile. But the fingerprints of U.S. institutions like the NED, USAID and School for the Americas—plus bipartisan lobbyists, powerful corporations, and dedicated Cold War warriors—are all over the June takeover.

By Conn Hallinan
Thursday August 13, 2009

http://berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2009-08-13/article/33507?headline=Dispatches-From-the-Edge-Honduras-Coup-The-U.S.-Connection

Another political site blocked by Google/Blogger

The censorship of Google/Blogger does not cease. Many have fallen victim to it, and when it happens, it’s quite shocking, especially if you have many thousands come to read each day and what you print can’t usually be found in mainstream media. I ran Peacepalestine, which was a very popular blog. It had faced quite of few of its own trials, especially because censorship and gatekeeping are enemies of spreading information about our situation, as did many other blogs that reported the atrocities of Israel and the Imperialist Occupation forces causing hell in the Middle East. We went through all that happened below, and I have written amply about it, as well as my friend, Blogger Machetera, giving some insight but also some tips for bloggers to protect their rights of free speech.

http://peacepalestine.wordpress.com/2008/04/05/internet-censorship-the-ballad-of-gilad-and-pepa/.

Another dear friend, Steve of Desert Peace posted my tips. http://desertpeace.wordpress.com/2008/05/06/is-google-ethnic-cleansing-the-internet/.

I can only suggest that those who run blogs consider seriously making mirror sites, archiving what you can, and not giving up!

This was sent to me by Machetera:
Sibel Edmonds just emailed me saying that she has been blocked from her Blog account by Google. The timing is suspicious given her two recent explosive radio interviews and having just been subpoenaed as well. She wants support from anyone to disseminate this information.

I have deleted her personal email but the below is in its entirety from her
website

http://www.justacitizen.com/Press_Releases/URGENTGoogle%27s%20Blogger-Aug6.htm

URGENT: GOOGLE BLOCKS MY SITE DURING SENSITIVE PERIOD

WE NEED YOUR HELP

My Blog Site http://123realchange.blogspot.com is now blocked by Google/Blogger. They will not let me post during this most sensitive period, when I am about to provide deposition on Foreign US government illegal operations in the United States!

A few weeks ago I started receiving Google & Blogger warnings from my
technologically savvy friends and well-wishers, who encouraged me to have a mirror site as a back up and or cease using Google’s Blogger all together.

I did take these warnings seriously and started looking at alternatives and
other options. Well, this is what I got from Blogger yesterday:

*From: **Blogger**
Date: Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 8:19 AM
Subject: http://123realchange.blogspot.com/ – ACTION REQUIRED
To: XXXXXXXXXXXX

Hello,

Your blog at: http://123realchange.blogspot.com/ has been identified as a
potential spam blog. To correct this, please request a review by filling
out the form at

http://www.blogger.com/unlock-blog.g?lockedBlogID=6542765284440328864

Your blog will be deleted in 20 days if it isn’t reviewed, and your
readers will see a warning page during this time. After we receive your
request, we’ll review your blog and unlock it within two business days.

Once we have reviewed and determined your blog is not spam, the blog will be
unlocked and the message in your Blogger dashboard will no longer be
displayed. If this blog doesn’t belong to you, you don’t have to do
anything, and any other blogs you may have won’t be affected.

We find spam by using an automated classifier. Automatic spam detection
is inherently fuzzy, and occasionally a blog like yours is flagged
incorrectly. We sincerely apologize for this error. By using this kind of
system, however, we can dedicate more storage, bandwidth, and engineering
resources to bloggers like you instead of to spammers. For more information, please see Blogger Help: http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42577

Thank you for your understanding and for your help with our spam-fighting
efforts.

Sincerely,

The Blogger Team

P.S. Just one more reminder: Unless you request a review, your blog will
be deleted in 20 days. Click this link to request the review:

http://www.blogger.com/unlock-blog.g?lockedBlogID=6542765284440328864

*

I am still looking into it and will be corresponding with them to find out
what the heck is going on, but I must say the timing of this is extremely
troubling:

Is it coincidence that this comes up when I am subpoenaed to
provide sworn deposition on matters that have sent our government
scrambling and certain high-level criminal entities sweating big time?

Is this due to my latest interviews for my Boiling Frogs Show on explosive
issues such as AIPAC, Iran, Central Asia, and Pakistan? We know big brother
NSA has been listening, and my guests have really been talking. We just
wrapped up our phone interviews with Phil Giraldi (on AIPAC & Israel and
more), Richard Barlow (on Pakistan and what our government didn’t want its
people to know), Joe Trento (on Iran, Brzezinski, and more), Sandalio
Gonzalez (on our phony War on Drugs, House of Death, Kent Memo, and
more)? You see what I am getting at here?

Or is it the fact that this blog is becoming more popular, the visitors’
number has been going up rapidly, and its content getting picked up by many, nationally and internationally? And I am talking about content and topics that are blacklisted by the US Mainstream Media.

I don’t know the answer. I may never know. However, what I know is this: I
better find a different or multiple different, blog sites and keep this forum alive. I also want to warn others who may become subject to this kind of notice, or maybe get terminated without any notice!

Please help me, thus all of us, resolve this blockage immediately, since in
the next few days this blog may prove to be extremely crucial to report
developing news and cases which will not be covered by MSM.

Thank you,

Sibel Edmonds

Honduras: the 1980′s All Over Again?

“Murillo said about President Zelaya, I have never seen a President like this. He has broken the walls behind which the people were held.”

Honduras: the 1980′s All Over Again?

Murillo said about President Zelaya, I have never seen a President like this. He has broken the walls behind which the people were held.

I spent many weeks in Central America in the 1980′s when people of faith were trying to stop the Reagan war policies and were deeply concerned about human rights in the region.

The stories I hear from the Quixote Center delegation in Honduras today sound a lot like the reports of repression and human rights violations I heard in the 1980′s.

Take the case of David Murillo. He is the father of a young boy who was shot dead at the airport the night that President Zelaya, overthrown in a coup, tried to return to the country. He was arrested shortly after his boy died, and our delegation visited him in a prison in Juticalpa. He is an environmental activist in the area of Olancho, working against deforestation and water privatization.

He told of being presented with a blank piece of paper to sign (or be shot). Then, a manufactured confession to charges of murder and rape was typed above his signature. He believes that all this is an attempt to stop his activism, and it’s surely a message to others. Because the real issues behind the coup are economic. The poor are getting uppity, and the old order wants power back. Murillo said about President Zelaya, I have never seen a President like this. He has broken the walls behind which the people were held.

But the people as a whole continue to feel empowered to act. They have called for a 7-day National March Against the Coup, which will end August 11th. Thousands marched yesterday in Tegucigalpa, and thousands more are making their way on foot to both Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula (the two largest cities in the country).

Today, the U.S. delegation will present a letter regarding human rights violations to U.S. Ambassador Llorens, followed by a press conference. Stay tuned.”

By Maureen Fiedler

The National Catholic Reporter

http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/honduras-1980%E2%80%99s-all-over-again

Greg Grandin: Honduran Coup Over?

VICTORY FOR HONDURAS: ZELAYA CHECKMATES HILLARY!

Once Again South America Comes to Washington’s Rescue

Honduran Coup Over?

By GREG GRANDIN

Bloomberg is reporting that Honduran coup leader, Roberto Micheletti has accepted the Arias plan, which means — if true — that Manuel Zelaya will be, with conditions, as president. Though Micheletti is still begging for time, saying he needs Ariass help in convincing his co-coup leaders to agree.

The terms are unclear about what is covered in the Arias’ amnesty, but it is doubtful there will be any investigation or prosecution of the human-rights violations that have taken place, including nine, perhaps ten murders, all against Zelaya supporters, over the last month.

The very fact that there are conditions on Zelaya’s return, and that there were negotiations, granted legitimacy to the coup leaders. But, and this is a big but, the very fact of Zelaya’s return is important for three reasons:

1. The momentum building in Honduras could continue, including an emerging alliance between the traditional, organized left (unions, peasant organizations, politicians), new social movements, real democrats, and the long-suppressed reformist wing of the liberal part (of course, it could fizzle out; if this new alliance put its energies into backing a presidential candidate in the coming elections, which are presumably advanced from November to take place in October, and that candidate lost, it could effectively end any energy (but right now, social movements are saying that no matter what the Arias accords say, they plan to still push the idea of a constitutional amendment). .

2. Potential coup plotters in neighboring Guatemala, and possibly El Salvador, must be discouraged. They were hoping Honduras might offer a model to follow, what with peasants on the march in Guatemala (protesting, among other things, transnational mining and biofuels) and a center-left president in office who refuses to repress them, and the FMLN in power in El Salvador. If Zelaya returns, this is a set back for them.

3. Perhaps most important on an international level, it delays the maturation of the budding alliance between neoliberals like Lanny Davis (who stands in for the broader Clinton camp) and neo-cons like Reich and Roger Noriega, who have developed close ties with Colombia, Venezuelan self-exiles, and displaced neoliberals from Bolivia. It also strengthens the relatively more sane tendency within the Obama foreign-policy coalition. One underreported aspect of the coup is that Nike, Adidas, Gap, and Knights Apparel lobbied Washington to restore Zelaya. They have maquilas in San Pedro Sula and were afraid of further labor unrest, which I guess is what passes these days for the modernizing bourgeois

Also, the chronology of the diplomacy has been interesting:

1. coup

2. US responds tepidly, but when the rest of Latin America, the OAS, and the EU condemns the coup forcefully, Obama responds in kind.

3. South America, having solved without US help in a very impressive fashion two regional crises last year (Bolivia and Ecuador/Colombia) seems to let the US take the lead on this, since it is taking place in an area squarely in its sphere of influence; White House defers to State Department, which enlists Costa Rica and Oscar Arias to negotiate, despite the fact that OAS and most of South America opposed granting that degree of legitimacy to coup plotters

4. Coup government initially rejects Arias plan, indicating that US can’t even curb this client state, the third poorest in the hemisphere

5. Zelaya threatens to return over land, prompting State Department embarrassed by the breakdown of Costa Rican talks to call Zelaya reckless. But Zelaya’s presence on Honduras’ southern border ramps up pressure on coup regime, which begins to accuse Zelaya’s supporters of receiving money from Colombia’s FARC (the FARC must be brimming with money, for left politicians from Honduras to Ecuador are accused of being on its payroll).

6. At the same time, South America, both individual countries like Brazil, Chile, and Venezuela and collectively through Mercosur (which met last week in Paraguay), return to putting pressure on Washington to put pressure on Honduras.

7.Washington revokes visas of coup plotters, perhaps signaling that the game is over.

8. Micheletti just days after publishing an op-ed in the WSJ probably ghost written by Otto Reich or Lanny Davis’ throws in towel, hopefully.

So once again, South America comes to Washington’s rescue…

Greg Grandin teaches Latin American history at NYU and is the author of the Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, The United States, and The Rise of the New Imperialism, from which this essay has been excerpted.

http://www.counterpunch.org/grandin07302009.html

Recalling the Downing Street Minutes

Seven years ago this week, then British Prime Minister Tony Blair gathered his top national security advisers at 10 Downing St. to hear a report from U.K. intelligence chief Richard Dearlove, just back in London from face-to-face talks with then-CIA Director George Tenet in Washington.

Blair and President George W. Bush had been talking regularly by telephone for several months. But, as is well known, even the most secure phones can be tapped, and there are some things — like preparing criminal wars of aggression, I suppose — that are so outrageous one doesn’t dare take any chances.

Besides, Blair apparently had some misgivings about taking at face value the Texas-size braggadocio he was hearing at the other end of the phone about what was going to happen to Saddam Hussein and why. It is understandable that he would seek independent, authoritative confirmation that this was also what Bush was sharing with his top accomplices.

Who better to confirm or deny than Bush-vassal Tenet, who met six mornings a week with the American president to discuss the President’s Daily Brief?

Blair prevailed on a reluctant Tenet to host a visit from Dearlove on Saturday, July 20, 2002. Blair had seen enough of the garrulous Tenet in action to be able to calculate — correctly — that once you got him talking about secrets he was privileged to know about, kernels of truth could be gleaned from beneath all the usual bull. Documentary evidence now shows that the Dearlove dug out some remarkable kernels.

Matthew Rycroft, aide to Blair foreign policy guru David Manning, was taking minutes at the Downing Street meeting on July 23, 2002, minutes he immediately circulated to Blair and other participants. The minutes observed quite bluntly that “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

Enter an unknown patriotic truth-teller who eventually gave a copy of those minutes to London’s Sunday Times which, after performing due diligence regarding their provenance, published them on May 1, 2005. Blair himself has been careful not to dispute the authenticity of what then became known as the “Downing Street Minutes.”

We Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity also performed due diligence and were first off the mark with “Proof Bush Fixed the Facts,” May 4, 2005.

Too Late the Leak

The Downing Street Minutes represent the kind of documentary evidence after which trial lawyers, intelligence analysts – and serious investigative journalists – lust.

Though the unauthorized disclosure did not come early enough to head off the war, which had started more than two years before the document surfaced, the unique disclosure could have thrown some harsh light on the war’s origins — IF the Fawning Corporate Media in the United States did its job.

However, having been acrobatic cheerleaders for war on Iraq, the FCM did its level best to suppress this documentary evidence of the war’s fraudulent character.

Enter John Conyers, bless his heart, who was House Judiciary Committee ranking member at the time. Sadly, it is necessary to reach back four years to find the last thing Conyers did that took any courage, but one must give the timid please-don’t-say-impeach-in-my-presence Conyers his due with regard to the Downing Street Minutes.

(Full disclosure: Conyers had me arrested on July 23, 2007 — the five-year anniversary of the plotting at 10 Downing St. — when I would not leave his office until he agreed to do his duty under the Constitution to launch hearings on impeachment.

I stressed that, like him, I had sworn an oath – in my case as an Army officer – to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States; that my oath carried no expiration date; and that it was the Constitution that I was trying to protect and defend.

Unimpressed, Conyers called the Capitol police. I was quickly marched out of the Rayburn building off to jail, and later convicted of unlawful assembly. I would add only that, while we Irish are notorious for bearing grudges, I continue to believe — strongly — that Conyers’ inaction did grave damage to our Constitution by shirking his duty to start the orderly process called impeachment that the Founders intended for use in removing a president who thought he could act like a king.)

With respect to the Downing Street Minutes, though, Conyers did manage a temporary fit of courage. Readers may recall that he scheduled a “hearing” for June 16, 2005, in the only space the Republican majority would make available — a basement room under the Capitol.

On the morning before the hearing, Amy Goodman invited Conyers and me to be interviewed on Democracy Now. Just before the interview, I had a chance to look at the editorial page of Pravda, er, I mean the Washington Post, for that morning, and guess what? The Post saw fit to mention the Downing Street Minutes, though dismissively so as not to tarnish the newspaper’s glorious cheerleading for war.

“The memos add not a single fact to what was previously known about the administration’s prewar deliberations,” the Post’s editors wrote, explaining why the leading newspaper of Washington had largely ignored the contents of the British documents. “Not only that: They add nothing to what was publicly known in July 2002.”

I just now downloaded the Democracy Now transcript of my comments that morning, and was happy to see that I managed to suppress — sort of — the anger seething inside me (although my wife tells me some of it broke through). I beg readers’ indulgence:

AMY GOODMAN: I’m Amy Goodman, as we talk about the Downing Street Memo, a hearing being held on this issue by Congress Member John Conyers in Congress tomorrow. Congress Member Conyers joins us in Washington, along with former C.I.A. analyst, Ray McGovern. Ray McGovern, can you talk about what is most explosive about both, what is being called the Downing Street Memo, that talks about fixing the facts and intelligence around the policy, and this latest exposé of the Sunday Times of London, showing British cabinet members were warned that Britain was committed to taking part in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and they had no choice but to find a way to make it legal?

RAY McGOVERN: Well, Amy, we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity had been saying for three years that the intelligence and the facts were being fixed to support an unnecessary war. We never in our wildest dreams expected to have documentary proof of that under a SECRET label: “SECRET: U.K. EYES ONLY” in a most sensitive document reserved just for cabinet officials in the Blair government. And so, what we have now is documentary proof that, as that sentence reads, the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

The Washington Post this morning is still at it. They quote that sentence, and they say, “Well, this is vague, but intriguing.” Well, there’s nothing vague about that at all, and it’s not at all intriguing. It’s highly depressing. Now, we veteran professionals, we professionals that toil long and hard in the intelligence arena are outraged at the corruption of our profession, but we are even more outraged by the constitutional implications here because as Congressman Conyers has just pointed out, we have here a very clear case that the Executive usurped the prerogatives of Congress of the American people and deceived it into permitting, authorizing an unauthorizeable war.

And, you know, when you get back to how our Constitution was framed by those English folks that were used to kings marching them off to the war blithely, for their own good, of course, those framers of our Constitution were hell-bent and determined, and wrote into the very first Article of our Constitution, that the power to make or authorize war would be reserved to the representatives of people in the Congress, not in the Executive. And so, for that usurpation to happen, that is a constitutional issue, and we’re even more outraged by that. …

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Michigan Congress Member John Conyers who is holding a hearing on the Downing Street Memo tomorrow, and has won a small victory. It will actually be able to be held in Congress. Ray McGovern also with us, a long-time C.I.A. analyst for more than a quarter century, a top briefer for former Vice President George H.W. Bush. I wanted to ask you about Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, who had said that there were no weapons of mass destruction, cited by western officials, U.S. officials, for many other reasons, but they never brought up that issue. Can you talk about the significance of this?

RAY McGOVERN: Yes. This gentleman’s name was Hussein Kamel. He was one of Saddam Hussein’s sons-in-law. And he defected in 1995 and was thoroughly debriefed by U.N. and U.S. and U.K. debriefers. He had quite a story to tell, because he was head of the missile, chemical, biological and nuclear programs in Iraq. And he was able to finger some of the things that the U.N. inspectors did not know, and what he told them turned out to be quite right. He also told them that the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs and weapons were destroyed at his order in July of 1991, right after the Gulf War. That’s in black and white. It’s in the debriefing report. An enterprising British researcher went to Vienna. I don’t know how he got access to the debriefing report, but he did, and he found out that Kamel also said, as I said, that all those weapons were destroyed at his order. Of course, he was in charge.

Now, curiously enough, that seemed to escape our leaders. It was never cited, although Hussein Kamel himself was held up as the paragon of a reliable source. Dick Cheney, himself, in his major speech of 26 August 2002, held Hussein’s son-in-law as one of our most lucrative, reliable sources, but he never told us that this source, this wonderful source, also told us that all those weapons had been destroyed in July of 1991 at his order. Now, there’s no excuse for them not knowing that. It may have slipped in a crack between the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., I suppose, but it also appeared in Newsweek four weeks before the war. Four weeks before the war, the report that Hussein Kamel, their paragon source, had said all those weapons had been destroyed. Now, the C.I.A and the spokesmen there and all of the other spokesmen in government said this was ludicrous, this was false; besides, it’s untrue and everything else. And they came down real hard on it.

Guess what our domesticated press did with that. No more story on that, because they were all cheerleading for the war. And I’ll just make one more point about our domesticated press. The Washington Post today in this lead editorial says that these memos were not given much play in the press because, (quote), “They do not add a single fact to what was previously known about the administration’s pre-war deliberations.” Now, if The Washington Post knew that as of 23 July 2002, the president had, in the British words, inevitably decided on war, if they knew that the president intended to use as justification the conjunction between terrorism and so-called weapons of mass destruction, and if they knew that the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy, you know, they really ought to — they surely should have told us that, The Washington Post should have.

It’s really ludicrous. It would be laughable if it weren’t so serious a situation. Because what needs to happen here is you have a start-up newspaper in Washington called The Washington Spark, okay? Now, on the 11th of May, they carried the whole story, including the memo itself. Right here. Now, that hasn’t appeared in The Washington Times or The Washington Post, but here in The Washington Spark, new start-up paper, just days after the memo, it’s there. So it’s possible there’s some kind of a rule against publishing things that are so critically damaging of our president, and the editorial in the Post today is Exhibit A.

When the Conyers hearing was held on June 16, 2005, the witnesses included Gold Star mother and anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, former U.S. Ambassador Joe Wilson, constitutional lawyer John Bonifaz, and me together as panelists. (My prepared remarks can be seen at “June 16 Testimony of Ray McGovern.”)

The room was more than somewhat cramped, but half the space was allotted for the TV cameras — including C-SPAN, which carried the proceedings live.

Fitting with its dismissive attitude toward the Downing Street disclosures, the Post sent satirical columnist Dana Milbank to cover the hearing and his article the next day dripped with sarcasm.

“In the Capitol basement yesterday, long-suffering House Democrats took a trip to the land of make-believe,” Milbank wrote. “They pretended a small conference room was the Judiciary Committee hearing room, draping white linens over folding tables to make them look like witness tables and bringing in cardboard name tags and extra flags to make the whole thing look official.”

Milbank also took some cheap shots at Conyers, who – Milbank wrote – “banged a large wooden gavel and got the other lawmakers to call him ‘Mr. Chairman.’” [For the article’s full flavor, see the Washington Post’s “Democrats Play House To Rally Against the War,” June 17, 2005]

Now seven years after the Downing Street Minutes were written – and more than four years after their disclosure – they remain one of the most damning pieces of evidence against both the Bush administration for its criminal deceptions in leading the nation to war and the FCM for its complicity in hiding the truth from the American people.

As philosopher George Santayana wisely observed a century ago, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He spent almost 30 years in Army intelligence and as a CIA analyst, and now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/072409d.html

Soldiers In Colorado Slayings Tell Of Iraq Horrors | Washington Examiner

COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO. — Soldiers from an Army unit that had 10 infantrymen accused of murder, attempted murder or manslaughter after returning to civilian life described a breakdown in discipline during their Iraq deployment in which troops murdered civilians, a newspaper reported Sunday.

Some Fort Carson, Colo.-based soldiers have had trouble adjusting to life back in the United States, saying they refused to seek help, or were belittled or punished for seeking help. Others say they were ignored by their commanders, or coped through drug and alcohol abuse before they allegedly committed crimes, The Gazette of Colorado Springs said.

The Gazette based its report on months of interviews with soldiers and their families, medical and military records, court documents and photographs.

Several soldiers said unit discipline deteriorated while in Iraq.

“Toward the end, we were so mad and tired and frustrated,” said Daniel Freeman. “You came too close, we lit you up. You didn’t stop, we ran your car over with the Bradley,” an armored fighting vehicle.

With each roadside bombing, soldiers would fire in all directions “and just light the whole area up,” said Anthony Marquez, a friend of Freeman in the 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment. “If anyone was around, that was their fault. We smoked ‘em.”

Taxi drivers got shot for no reason, and others were dropped off bridges after interrogations, said Marcus Mifflin, who was eventually discharged with post traumatic stress syndrome.

“You didn’t get blamed unless someone could be absolutely sure you did something wrong,” he said

Soldiers interviewed by The Gazette cited lengthy deployments, being sent back into battle after surviving war injuries that would have been fatal in previous conflicts, and engaging in some of the bloodiest combat in Iraq. The soldiers describing those experiences were part of the 3,500-soldier unit now called the 4th Infantry Division’s 4th Brigade Combat Team.

Since 2005, some brigade soldiers also have been involved in brawls, beatings, rapes, DUIs, drug deals, domestic violence, shootings, stabbings, kidnapping and suicides.

The unit was deployed for a year to Iraq’s Sunni Triangle in September 2004. Sixty-four unit soldiers were killed and more than 400 wounded — about double the average for Army brigades in Iraq, according to Fort Carson. In 2007, the unit served a bloody 15-month mission in Baghdad. It’s currently deployed to the Khyber Pass region in Afghanistan.

Marquez was the first in his brigade to kill someone after an Iraq tour. In 2006, he used a stun gun to shock a drug dealer in Widefield, Colo., in a dispute over a marijuana sale, then shot and killed him.

Marquez’s mother, Teresa Hernandez, warned Marquez’s sergeant at Fort Carson her son was showing signs of violent behavior, abusing alcohol and pain pills and carrying a gun. “I told them he was a walking time bomb,” she said.

Hernandez said the sergeant later taunted Marquez about her phone call.

“If I was just a guy off the street, I might have hesitated to shoot,” Marquez told The Gazette in the Bent County Correctional Facility, where he is serving a 30-year prison term. “But after Iraq, it was just natural.”

The Army trains soldiers to be that way, said Kenneth Eastridge, an infantry specialist serving 10 years for accessory to murder.

“The Army pounds it into your head until it is instinct: Kill everybody, kill everybody,” he said. “And you do. Then they just think you can just come home and turn it off.”

Both soldiers were wounded, sent back into action and saw friends and officers killed in their first deployment. On numerous occasions, explosions shredded the bodies of civilians, others were slain in sectarian violence — and the unit had to bag the bodies.

“Guys with drill bits in their eyes,” Eastridge said. “Guys with nails in their heads.”

Last week, the Army released a study of soldiers at Fort Carson that found that the trauma of fierce combat and soldier refusals or obstacles to seeking mental health care may have helped drive some to violence at home. It said more study is needed.

While most unit soldiers coped post-deployment, a handful went on to kill back home in Colorado.

Many returning soldiers did seek counseling.

“We’re used to seeing people who are depressed and want to hurt themselves. We’re trained to deal with that,” said Davida Hoffman, director of the privately operated First Choice Counseling Center in Colorado Springs. “But these soldiers were depressed and saying, ‘I’ve got this anger, I want to hurt somebody.’ We weren’t accustomed to that.”

At Fort Carson, Eastridge and other soldiers said they lied during an army screening about their deployment that was designed to detect potential behavioral problems.

Sergeants sometimes refused to let soldiers get PTSD help or taunted them, said Andrew Pogany, a former Fort Carson special forces sergeant who investigates complaints for the advocacy group Veterans for America.

Soldier John Needham described a number of alleged crimes in a December 2007 letter to the Inspector General’s Office of Fort Carson. In the letter, obtained by The Gazette, Needham said that a sergeant shot a boy riding a bicycle down the street for no reason.

Another sergeant shot a man in the head while questioning him, lashed the man’s body to his Humvee and drove around the neighborhood. Needham also claimed sergeants removed victims’ brains.

The Army’s criminal investigation division interviewed unit soldiers and said it couldn’t substantiate the allegations.

The Army has declared soldiers’ mental health a top priority.

“When we see a problem, we try to identify it and really learn what we can do about it. That is what we are trying to do here,” said Maj. Gen. Mark Graham, Fort Carson’s commander. “There is a culture and a stigma that needs to change.”

Fort Carson officers are trained to help troops showing stress signs, and the base has doubled its number of behavioral-health counselors. Soldiers seeing an Army doctor for any reason undergo a mental health evaluation.

The Associated Press
July 27, 2009

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/nation/51746897.html

Healthy, Wealthy, Unwise – Washington Times

“I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody,” then-candidate Barack Obama famously told Samuel J. “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher when campaigning in Ohio last fall.

About the same time Mr. Obama was revealing this wealth redistributionist vision, he was also presenting a redistributionist vision for health and health care — but with far less publicity.

Today, Mr. Obama’s belief that health itself needs redistributing has become a guiding force behind the health care reform bills recently approved by committees in the House and Senate.

These bills are saturated with the concept that there is an unjust distribution of health among Americans that can and should be adjusted by government policies.

The supposed endgame is an America where all demographic groups get identical health care and enjoy identical levels of health.

This might have been achievable — at least temporarily — in Eden. In our fallen world, it is futile.

Yet, if Congress enacts legislation based on the absurd notion that government policies can equalize health across the U.S. population, it will give politicians and bureaucrats an unbounded rationale for monitoring and controlling every aspect of our lives.

The health care plan Mr. Obama published during his campaign made “health disparities” a priority — and vowed to hold “accountable” those he believed caused them. “Barack Obama and Joe Biden will tackle the root causes of health disparities by addressing differences in access to health coverage and promoting prevention and public health, both of which play a major role in addressing disparities,” said the plan. “They will also challenge the medical system to eliminate inequities in health care by requiring hospitals and health plans to collect, analyze and report health care quality for disparity populations and holding them accountable for any differences found.”

As a candidate for president, Mr. Obama even published a paper promising a strategy to “reduce HIV-related health disparities.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi endorsed something similar when she addressed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People this month. “It is a moral issue for our country to reduce health disparities whether in diabetes, asthma, heart disease, cancer and HIV/AIDS,” she said. The health-care bill approved last week by the House Ways and Means and Education committees gives the secretary of health and human services unilateral authority to choose demographic groups that will be monitored for determining whether they are victims or beneficiaries of such disparities.

“The term ‘health disparities’ includes health and health care disparities and means population-specific differences in the presence of disease, health outcomes, or access to health care,” says Page 960 of the bill. “For purposes of the preceding sentence, a population may be delineated by race, ethnicity, geographic setting, or other population or subpopulation determined appropriate by the secretary.”

The Senate bill mandates the creation of a massive national database to be used for ferreting out “disparities” wherever they might be found.

“Ensures that any ongoing or new federal health program achieve the collection and reporting of data by race, ethnicity, geographic location, socioeconomic status, health literacy, primary language and any other indicator of disparity,” says the Senate Health Committee’s summary of the bill. “The secretary shall analyze data collected to detect and monitor trends in health disparities and disseminate this information to the relevant federal agencies. The secretary shall also award grants to develop appropriate methods to detect and assess health disparities.”

In the name of reducing “disparities,” Section 224 of the House bill directs the secretary to change the way that the proposed government-run “public option” health insurance plan pays the health-care providers that do business with it.

“The secretary,” it says, “shall design and implement the payment mechanisms and policies under this section in a manner that — (1) seeks to … reduce health disparities (including racial, ethnic and other disparities).”

The Senate Health committee’s bill includes a section – “Creating Healthier Communities” — that authorizes paying tax dollars to so-called community-based organizations so they can monitor individual behavior patterns on the neighborhood level and in schools in the name of reducing “health disparities.” Only community-based organizations that are part of a “national network of community-based organizations” will be eligible for these grants.

So, what will these government-funded, national networks of community-based organizations monitor in American neighborhoods in the interest of reducing “health disparities”?

“In carrying out subparagraph (A),” says Page 386 of the bill, “the eligible entity shall, with respect to residents in the community, measure — (i) decreases in weight; (ii) increases in proper nutrition; (iii) increases in physical activity; (iv) decreases in tobacco use prevalence; (v) other factors using community specific data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey; and (vi) other factors as determined by the Secretary.”

They will be government-funded busybodies paid to monitor the personal behavior of a once proud and free people who surrendered an irretrievable measure of their liberty to a government-run health care system spawned by the redistributionist vision of Mr. Obama and his allies in the Congress.

Terence P. Jeffrey is the editor-in-chief of CNSnews.com.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jul/25/healthy-wealthy-unwise/

Obama and the Guantánamo Deadline: It’s Worse than You Think

When the Obama administration’s Detention Policy Task Force, established by executive order on the president’s second day in office, conceded last week that it would miss its six-month deadline to issue its recommendations about how to close Guantánamo, many observers focused on whether this meant that Obama would fail to meet his deadline of Jan 21, 2010, for the closure of the prison, and missed the bigger story, which was only revealed through close scrutiny of the Task Force’s five-page interim report (PDF).

Disturbingly, this document revealed that the Task Force envisages three options for dealing with the prisoners who will not be released from Guantánamo: trials in federal courts, trials by military commission (the “terror trials” introduced by former Vice President Dick Cheney in November 2001 and revived by Congress in 2006 after the Supreme Court ruled them illegal), and indefinite detention without charge or trial.

These proposals accord with plans outlined by the president in a major national security speech in May, but they are no more acceptable now than they were then, for one simple reason: they are designed not to secure justice, but to prevent any of the prisoners who fit into these three categories from being released; in other words, as Glenn Greenwald reported for Salon.com, “If they know they’ll convict you in a real court proceeding, they’ll give you one; if they think they might lose there, they’ll put you in a military commission; if they’re still not sure they will win, they’ll just indefinitely imprison you without any charges.”

The proposals put forward by the Task Force — and clearly endorsed by Obama — are bitterly disappointing, not only because they are so shamefully dismissive of the presumption of innocence, and because they reveal a desire to further turn the judicial system on its head by endorsing preventive detention, but also because they are cowardly in the extreme.

There is, to be blunt, no need for the administration to revive the widely reviled commissions (criticized in the past by most leading Democrats, including Barack Obama) because the federal courts are more than capable of prosecuting terror suspects, having successfully done so on more than a hundred occasions in the last 15 years. The Task Force itself admitted in its interim report that “a broad range of terrorism offences with extraterritorial reach are available in the criminal code and procedures exist to protect classified information in federal court trial where necessary,” and also noted, “The evidentiary rules at trial are well-established, and experienced prosecutors can often find ways to overcome any challenges those rules may pose to [the] introduction of critical evidence in specific cases.”

In addition, as Glenn Greenwald also explained, “As a result of breathtakingly broad criminal laws in the U.S. defining ‘material support for terrorism,’ there are few things easier than obtaining a criminal conviction in federal court against people accused of being terrorists.”

Moreover, given that successful prosecutions have taken place in cases where no evidence of actual terrorist activity is required, there is no excuse whatsoever for proposing to continue to hold some prisoners indefinitely, using a form of “preventive detention” for which congressional approval will have to be sought. If, after seven and a half years, the government cannot even reach the low evidentiary hurdle required by a federal court, then it should stop pretending that it has grounds for believing that these particular prisoners are too dangerous to be released, and let them go.

For the Guantánamo prisoners, it is worrying enough that everyone involved in reviewing their cases for the government appears to have forgotten a number of crucial facts that tend to undermine the illusion that the prison still contains a significant number of terrorists: namely, that the majority of the prisoners were not seized on a battlefield, but were handed over by the U.S. military’s Afghan and Pakistani allies, at a time when bounty payments, averaging $5,000 a head were widespread (PDF); that they were never screened according to the Geneva Conventions’ competent tribunals — held close to the time and place of capture — to establish whether they were actually combatants, or civilians caught up in the fog of war; that, subsequently, they were never adequately screened at Guantánamo, where the process instigated by the Pentagon — the Combatant Status Review Tribunals — was described by a former insider, Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, as a farce, in which most of the material put forward as evidence was “garbage,” and the entire process was designed to rubberstamp the Bush administration’s decision that they were all ”enemy combatants,” who could be held without charge or trial; and that the majority of the supposed evidence against the men has, indeed, been revealed as deeply untrustworthy when scrutinized by District Court judges.

Following the Supreme Court’s ruling last summer that the prisoners have habeas corpus rights, judges in the District Courts have, in 84 percent of the cases on which they have delivered a verdict, ruled that the government either had no case at all or that its cases were based upon statements by unreliable witnesses, who were tortured, coerced or bribed, or had severe mental health problems. In addition, judges have also poured scorn on attempts to create a “mosaic” of intelligence from these and other sources that does not stand up to close examination.

The fact that the Task Force appears not to have fully understood the scale of the Bush administration’s incompetence regarding the capture and interrogation of the Guantánamo prisoners and the manifold problems with the supposed evidence against them counts, in the end as a distressing example of the sort of paranoia for which Dick Cheney is best known triumphing over the kind of common sense and dedication to the pursuit of justice for which Barack Obama seemed to stand just a few short months ago.

Moreover, the Task Force’s egregious errors are not confined just to the present and to the question of what will happen to the Guantánamo prisoners. As the interim report states, “The Detention Policy Task Force has thus far focused much of its work on developing options for the lawful disposition of detainees held at Guantánamo Bay. Important questions remain concerning our policies in the future regarding apprehension, detention, and treatment of suspected terrorists, as part of our broader strategy to defeat al-Qaeda and its affiliates.”

The authors of the report then indicate that they are involved in an ongoing analysis of a number of questions relating to the future, including “what the rules and boundaries should be for any future detention under the rule of war,” ignoring, both in the present, and in their deliberations about the future, that the answer has, in fact, been obvious all along, and that, as it appears from this hideous and worrying document, all the talk of alternative trial systems and preventive detention is nothing more than a conjuring trick to disguise policies that, essentially, cleave closely to the arrogant and lawless innovations conceived by senior officials in the Bush administration.

And the answer that has been obvious all along? It goes like this: If your enemy is a combatant, seized in wartime, then you hold him as a prisoner of war according to the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit inhumane treatment and coerced interrogations, until the end of hostilities. And if your enemy is a suspected terrorist, then you hand him over to interrogators who know how to get a man to talk without using torture, according him the procedural protections in the Bill of Rights, and you put him on trial in a federal court.

It really is that simple.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press) and serves as policy advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation. Visit his website at: www.andyworthington.co.uk.

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