TurkishPress.com, June 3, 2010
JERUSALEM — The Israeli military's YouTube site is using 'pirated' footage confiscated from journalists on board a Turkish vessel in a bid to defend its botched flotilla raid, a press body charged on Thursday.
"The Foreign Press Association (FPA) strongly condemns the use of photos and video material shot by foreign journalists, now being put out by the IDF (Israel Defence Forces) spokesman's office as 'captured material'," a statement from the organisation said.
The complaint centres on footage shot on board the Mavi Marmara passenger ship, which was the focus of a deadly Israeli commando raid at dawn Monday, in which nine foreign aid activists were killed, provoking an international outcry.
One of the clips on YouTube, entitled: "Flotilla Passenger: I Want to Be a Shahid (Martyr)" shows a passenger being interviewed on the boat before the raid, by someone holding a microphone with 'Press TV' stamped on it.
The 23-second clip, in which the man talks about wanting to become a martyr, is not credited to any journalist or media outlet, and only described as "footage captured on the Gaza flotilla."
Several other unattributed clips shown on the IDF's YouTube channel also feature "footage captured on the Mavi Marmara" -- one of which shows activists hurling objects and hosing down troops trying to board the vessel from an assault craft.
"The material and/or equipment that was confiscated from journalists covering the events on the ships, should be returned to the owners and their media organisations," the FPA said.
"The use of this material without permission from the relevant media organisations is a clear violation of journalistic ethics and unacceptable," it said, warning media outlets to treat such material "with caution."
"We call upon the authorities to immediately clarify the source of the material."
The army had no immediate comment on the exact source of the footage, with a spokesman saying only it was "found" on board the Marmara after it was taken over by troops following the bloody operation.
Nearly 700 passengers were travelling on board the aid fleet, of which around 60 were journalists, press freedom group Reporters Without Borders said earlier this week, including correspondents from Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya and the Sydney Morning Herald.
Since Monday, the army has broadcast more than a dozen video clips on YouTube in a bid to back up its claim that the activists on the boat were not harmless peaceniks but Islamists bent on violence.
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
“Enough Already”
By Cindy Sheehan, Cindy Sheehan's Soapbox Blog, Aug. 20, 2009
“And you look at somebody like that (note: me -CS) and you think here's somebody who's just trying to find some meaning in her son's death. And you have to be sympathetic to her. Anybody who has given a son to this country has made an enormous sacrifice, and you have to be sympathetic. But enough already.”
- ABC Nightly News Anchor, Charles Gibson, August 18, 2009
“Enough already?” Hmmm…I don’t know Charlie Gibson and I don’t pay any attention to his career, but I seem to agree with him on this one: “Enough already.”
Enough with the killing, torturing, wounding and profiting off of the backs of our troops and off of the lives of the people of Iraq-Af-Pak: as our brothers and sisters in Latin America say: “Basta!”
Somehow, I don’t think that this is what Charlie Gibson meant, though. I am sure that he just wants me to go away like most of the rest of the anti-war movement has done under the Obama presidency.
One of the things I hear quite often from people from all over the political spectrum is: “Why don’t you just go away, you’ve had your 15 minutes of fame.”
Yes, that’s exactly what I thought as soon as I heard that my son was killed in the US’s illegal and immoral war in Iraq: “this is a perfect opportunity to get my 15 minutes of fame.” Actually, after I slowly recovered from the shock and horror, the pain always remains, I thought that I had to do everything I can to end this nightmare so other mothers/families wouldn’t have to go through what I was going through and what I am going through.
I certainly am not the anchor of a major network news show, but last time I checked, people are still dying at a heartrending clip in Iraq-Af-Pak.
If my goal was “15 minutes of fame,” I could have gone quietly away a long time ago. I started because I wanted the wars to end, and I will figure I can go away when the wars end…but when is that going to be? In my lifetime, probably not.
I am cutting my writing-staycation short to head to Martha’s Vineyard because I think the new titular head of the empire needs to know that his policies are devastating people as much as the same policies did when Bush was president.
I would rather be able to go away and spend the rest of my life worshipping my grandchildren, writing, reading, resting, and doing humanitarian work where I am needed.
I wish the wars would go away, but they aren’t going away if we the people don’t get more militantly insistent.
http://cindysheehanssoapbox.blogspot.com/2009/08/enough-already-by-cindy-sheehan.html
“And you look at somebody like that (note: me -CS) and you think here's somebody who's just trying to find some meaning in her son's death. And you have to be sympathetic to her. Anybody who has given a son to this country has made an enormous sacrifice, and you have to be sympathetic. But enough already.”
- ABC Nightly News Anchor, Charles Gibson, August 18, 2009
“Enough already?” Hmmm…I don’t know Charlie Gibson and I don’t pay any attention to his career, but I seem to agree with him on this one: “Enough already.”
Enough with the killing, torturing, wounding and profiting off of the backs of our troops and off of the lives of the people of Iraq-Af-Pak: as our brothers and sisters in Latin America say: “Basta!”
Somehow, I don’t think that this is what Charlie Gibson meant, though. I am sure that he just wants me to go away like most of the rest of the anti-war movement has done under the Obama presidency.
One of the things I hear quite often from people from all over the political spectrum is: “Why don’t you just go away, you’ve had your 15 minutes of fame.”
Yes, that’s exactly what I thought as soon as I heard that my son was killed in the US’s illegal and immoral war in Iraq: “this is a perfect opportunity to get my 15 minutes of fame.” Actually, after I slowly recovered from the shock and horror, the pain always remains, I thought that I had to do everything I can to end this nightmare so other mothers/families wouldn’t have to go through what I was going through and what I am going through.
I certainly am not the anchor of a major network news show, but last time I checked, people are still dying at a heartrending clip in Iraq-Af-Pak.
If my goal was “15 minutes of fame,” I could have gone quietly away a long time ago. I started because I wanted the wars to end, and I will figure I can go away when the wars end…but when is that going to be? In my lifetime, probably not.
I am cutting my writing-staycation short to head to Martha’s Vineyard because I think the new titular head of the empire needs to know that his policies are devastating people as much as the same policies did when Bush was president.
I would rather be able to go away and spend the rest of my life worshipping my grandchildren, writing, reading, resting, and doing humanitarian work where I am needed.
I wish the wars would go away, but they aren’t going away if we the people don’t get more militantly insistent.
http://cindysheehanssoapbox.blogspot.com/2009/08/enough-already-by-cindy-sheehan.html
Rogue States
By Mumia Abu-Jamal, Prison Radio, Written 8/6/09, Recorded 8/9/09
click here to listen to audio column
A president takes power in government, after an election marred by fraud. All opposition is cowed into silence.
The country's highest judicial body gives its legal blessing to its preferred candidate, a fellow partisan.
The national media essentially silences, demonizes, and ultimately ignores the voices of any significant opposition, and gives fawning, largely uncritical coverage of 'the Great Leader' -- one given to outlandish, bombastic and martial rhetoric.
The leader's repressive machinery, its police, prison guards, judges and military violate both national and international law with impunity; torturing, beating and killing opponents.
When protests do arise-- as they inevitably do -- the leader ignores and downplays its significance. They neither change nor influence the leader's decisions -- for He believes that he is chosen by God to rule the nation, and thus his beliefs are higher than any law.
If this sounds like a rogue nation, it is: but probably not the one you're thinking about. For if you are an average American whose mind is formed by the corporate media, you can't help but think I'm making references to Iran.
Of course, I'm not.
I'm writing of the U.S.A. -- especially after the 2000 presidential elections.
Think of it: election fraud; judicial blessings; slavish media; presidential rejection of protests; leader 'chosen' by God?
It's all there. Not to mention the ongoing national and global costs to be paid by the election of a parade of paranoid schizophrenics.
But, of course, U.S. nationalism makes it quite difficult for Americans to see their country as a rogue state. But history unknown doesn't make it untrue.
In fact, the U.S. is a rogue empire, which has sponsored rogue states around the world, largely as part of the Cold War, when there was a Soviet Union, and it wiped out, took over, replaced and/or supported puppets throughout Latin America.
If we look at U.S. policies against the indigenous 'Indian' nations -- the Comanche, the Creeks, the Lakota, the Seminoles, Apaches -- and many, many others - well: rogue nation becomes genocidal nation.
To say the media has become a tool of state is understatement.
It doesn't inform us -- it misforms us, bending our minds so we don't see anything worth seeing.
--(c) '09 maj
***************
The Power of Truth is Final -- Free Mumia!
URGENT Need for Petition Signatures at: http://www.iacenter.org/mumiapetition/
Audio of most of Mumia's essays are at: http://www.prisonradio.org
http://mumiapodcast.libsyn.com/
Mumia's got a podcast! Mumia Abu-Jamal's Radio Essays - Subscribe at the website or on iTunes and get Mumia's radio commentaries online.
Mumia Abu-Jamal's new book -- JAILHOUSE LAWYERS: PRISONERS DEFENDING PRISONERS V. THE USA, featuring an introduction by Angela Y. Davis -- has been released! It is available from City Lights Books: http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100448090
If you are planning to organize an event or would like to order in bulk, you can also receive a 45% discount on any bulk orders of 20 copies or more. The book retails for $16.95, for orders of 20 copies or more the discounted price would be $9.32 per book, plus shipping and handling. Prepayment would be required and books are nonreturnable. If you or your organization would like to place a bulk order, please contact Stacey Lewis at 415.362.1901 or stacey@citylights.com
Let's use the opportunity of the publication of this brilliant, moving, vintage Mumia book to build the momentum for his case, to raise the money we desperately need in these challenging economic times, to get the word out – to produce literature, flyers, posters, videos, DVD's; to send organizers out to help build new chapters and strengthen old ones, TO GET THE PEOPLE OUT IN THE STREETS … all the work that we must do in order to FREE MUMIA as he faces LIFE IN PRISON WITHOUT PAROLE OR EXECUTION!
Please make a contribution to help free Mumia. Donations to the grassroots work will go to both INTERNATIONAL CONCERNED FAMILY AND FRIENDS OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL and the FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL COALITION (NYC).
WWW.FREEMUMIA.COM
Please mail donations/ checks to:
FREE MUMIA ABU JAMAL COALITION
PO BOX 16, NEW YORK,
NY 10030
(CHECKS FOR BOTH ORGANIZATIONS PAYABLE TO: FMAJC/IFCO)
FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:
215 476-8812
212-330-8029
Send our brotha some LOVE and LIGHT at:
Mumia Abu-Jamal
AM 8335
SCI-Greene
175 Progress Drive
Waynesburg, PA 15370
WE WHO BELIEVE IN FREEDOM CAN *NOT* REST!!
Subscribe: mumiacolumns-subscribe@topica.com
Read: http://topica.com/lists/mumiacolumns/read
Subscribe ICFFMAJ email updates list by e-mailing
icffmaj@aol.com!
www.FreeMumia.com
click here to listen to audio column
A president takes power in government, after an election marred by fraud. All opposition is cowed into silence.
The country's highest judicial body gives its legal blessing to its preferred candidate, a fellow partisan.
The national media essentially silences, demonizes, and ultimately ignores the voices of any significant opposition, and gives fawning, largely uncritical coverage of 'the Great Leader' -- one given to outlandish, bombastic and martial rhetoric.
The leader's repressive machinery, its police, prison guards, judges and military violate both national and international law with impunity; torturing, beating and killing opponents.
When protests do arise-- as they inevitably do -- the leader ignores and downplays its significance. They neither change nor influence the leader's decisions -- for He believes that he is chosen by God to rule the nation, and thus his beliefs are higher than any law.
If this sounds like a rogue nation, it is: but probably not the one you're thinking about. For if you are an average American whose mind is formed by the corporate media, you can't help but think I'm making references to Iran.
Of course, I'm not.
I'm writing of the U.S.A. -- especially after the 2000 presidential elections.
Think of it: election fraud; judicial blessings; slavish media; presidential rejection of protests; leader 'chosen' by God?
It's all there. Not to mention the ongoing national and global costs to be paid by the election of a parade of paranoid schizophrenics.
But, of course, U.S. nationalism makes it quite difficult for Americans to see their country as a rogue state. But history unknown doesn't make it untrue.
In fact, the U.S. is a rogue empire, which has sponsored rogue states around the world, largely as part of the Cold War, when there was a Soviet Union, and it wiped out, took over, replaced and/or supported puppets throughout Latin America.
If we look at U.S. policies against the indigenous 'Indian' nations -- the Comanche, the Creeks, the Lakota, the Seminoles, Apaches -- and many, many others - well: rogue nation becomes genocidal nation.
To say the media has become a tool of state is understatement.
It doesn't inform us -- it misforms us, bending our minds so we don't see anything worth seeing.
--(c) '09 maj
***************
The Power of Truth is Final -- Free Mumia!
URGENT Need for Petition Signatures at: http://www.iacenter.org/mumiapetition/
Audio of most of Mumia's essays are at: http://www.prisonradio.org
http://mumiapodcast.libsyn.com/
Mumia's got a podcast! Mumia Abu-Jamal's Radio Essays - Subscribe at the website or on iTunes and get Mumia's radio commentaries online.
Mumia Abu-Jamal's new book -- JAILHOUSE LAWYERS: PRISONERS DEFENDING PRISONERS V. THE USA, featuring an introduction by Angela Y. Davis -- has been released! It is available from City Lights Books: http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100448090
If you are planning to organize an event or would like to order in bulk, you can also receive a 45% discount on any bulk orders of 20 copies or more. The book retails for $16.95, for orders of 20 copies or more the discounted price would be $9.32 per book, plus shipping and handling. Prepayment would be required and books are nonreturnable. If you or your organization would like to place a bulk order, please contact Stacey Lewis at 415.362.1901 or stacey@citylights.com
Let's use the opportunity of the publication of this brilliant, moving, vintage Mumia book to build the momentum for his case, to raise the money we desperately need in these challenging economic times, to get the word out – to produce literature, flyers, posters, videos, DVD's; to send organizers out to help build new chapters and strengthen old ones, TO GET THE PEOPLE OUT IN THE STREETS … all the work that we must do in order to FREE MUMIA as he faces LIFE IN PRISON WITHOUT PAROLE OR EXECUTION!
Please make a contribution to help free Mumia. Donations to the grassroots work will go to both INTERNATIONAL CONCERNED FAMILY AND FRIENDS OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL and the FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL COALITION (NYC).
WWW.FREEMUMIA.COM
Please mail donations/ checks to:
FREE MUMIA ABU JAMAL COALITION
PO BOX 16, NEW YORK,
NY 10030
(CHECKS FOR BOTH ORGANIZATIONS PAYABLE TO: FMAJC/IFCO)
FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:
215 476-8812
212-330-8029
Send our brotha some LOVE and LIGHT at:
Mumia Abu-Jamal
AM 8335
SCI-Greene
175 Progress Drive
Waynesburg, PA 15370
WE WHO BELIEVE IN FREEDOM CAN *NOT* REST!!
Subscribe: mumiacolumns-subscribe@topica.com
Read: http://topica.com/lists/mumiacolumns/read
Subscribe ICFFMAJ email updates list by e-mailing
icffmaj@aol.com!
www.FreeMumia.com
IAC leader says: ‘Don’t echo imperialist hypocrisy’
By Sara Flounders, Stop War On Iran, July 24, 2009
The following is based on a presentation by Flounders, a coordinator of the International Action Center, during a discussion of the latest events in Iran at the National Assembly anti-war conference held in Pittsburgh July 10-12.
If the U.S. government was interested in supporting democracy or in building respect for the will of the people in a democratic election, it should have started by respecting the outcome of the 2006 Palestinian election. The Palestinian people voted in large numbers, electing Hamas candidates to parliament with large enough votes to form the Palestinian government. In Gaza, Hamas had a total sweep.
The U.S./Israeli response was a starvation blockade of Gaza, a siege and then a brutal all-out war on the entire population. When the Israelis attacked Gaza last December and January, they killed more than 1,400 Palestinians, using U.S.-supplied weapons including white phosphorous and cluster bombs.
Now more than half of the elected members of the Palestinian Parliament are in Israeli prisons. Why is the corporate media not telling us day after day about this crime against democracy?
Don’t jump on capitalist bandwagon
We in the anti-war movement need to be especially careful not to jump on the bandwagon when the entire capitalist class, their media, the entire U.S. Congress, and numerous organizations that received direct U.S. funding from the so-called National Endowment for Democracy all speak with one voice in sudden defense of a cause.
Regardless of how legitimate, genuine and concerned some individuals may seem, this kind of overwhelming imperialist pressure will distort the struggle.
The U.S. corporate media is not interested in democracy even within the United States.
The whole focus and attention of progressive, anti-imperialist and workers’ struggles, especially here in the very center of imperialism, must be to defend all those who are targeted by the Pentagon, by the police and by the corporate media, which act as an extension of the state on issues of war and peace.
Repression in the U.S.
Just consider the mass raids, round-ups and deportations going on in immigrant communities in every major U.S. city. Think of the workers who never come home from work, the families that are ripped apart.
We cannot for a moment forget that this is the country with the largest prison population in the world, with the greatest number of people on death row. Mumia Abu-Jamal, an internationally famous journalist and human rights activist, has been on death row for decades, just 50 miles from where we are meeting here in western Pennsylvania.
When the corporate media raises their concern about “democracy” in Iran, we cannot forget the Black and Latina/o communities occupied by police. Nor the targeting of Muslim communities, which are overrun with snitches, spies and frame-ups.
We cannot forget the millions of working people who are losing their jobs, homes, health care and their future. They have no vote, no say and no control over who receives trillions of dollars in bailout money and who receives hot air. We cannot forget the police state that greets every bankers’ or international gathering, putting whole areas of cities in lock-down.
There is a certain imperialist arrogance when the corporate media, which hides the lack of democracy here in U.S., suddenly champions democracy in Iran with wall-to-wall and sympathetic coverage of demonstrations there.
Do we want our movement to be an echo of that hypocrisy? Don’t you wonder if there is another agenda? When has a demonstration in the U.S. against war or cutbacks, or for housing or human rights, ever received the kind of sympathetic coverage that we’ve seen in the last month of Iran?
Do we expect that the thousands of activists coming to Pittsburgh for the G20 summit protests will receive even 1 percent of the coverage that’s been given to demonstrations in Iran?
No women’s rights in U.S. client states
The whole world knows the name and face of the young Iranian woman Neda. But do we know the name of even one Iraqi woman killed by the invading U.S. Army? Can you tell me the name of one Palestinian woman killed by Israeli forces? Do we know the names of any Afghan or Pakistani women killed in a drone attack?
Do we know the name of the young Latina killed on the same day as Neda died in Iran, who was shot by border militia in Arizona? Why not?
Have U.S. wars and occupations brought democracy to countries they own and control through feudal monarchies and total dictatorships?
There are no rights for women, or for anyone today, in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Egypt or Jordan.
Nowhere in the world is U.S. imperialism a force for democracy or women’s rights. U.S. interventions bring millions of deaths, millions of orphans, millions of refugees, a whole sex industry, torture on a mass scale and massive impoverishment—but never democracy.
Of course everyone here already knows this. We know of three decades of wars, sanctions, encirclement, sabotage and coup attempts.
Don’t echo imperialist designs
A number of so-called human-rights groups that are funded by U.S.-government NED programs have called for demonstrations on July 25 in the name of “democracy in Iran.” Unfortunately, some anti-war groups have endorsed this U.S. government-funded demonstration. We want to use every skill to persuade our movement not to be pulled in by imperialist destabilization efforts and propaganda and to withdraw their participation.
There is a class struggle in Iran today. Yes, there is. But there is also a massive U.S.-government-sponsored destabilization effort. We cannot allow ourselves to become an echo of imperialist destabilization and interference in Iran. The group Stop War On Iran has called a meeting in New York for an extended discussion of this question on Aug. 1 at 55 West 17 Street at 4 p.m. See stopwaroniran.org for more details.
The following is based on a presentation by Flounders, a coordinator of the International Action Center, during a discussion of the latest events in Iran at the National Assembly anti-war conference held in Pittsburgh July 10-12.
If the U.S. government was interested in supporting democracy or in building respect for the will of the people in a democratic election, it should have started by respecting the outcome of the 2006 Palestinian election. The Palestinian people voted in large numbers, electing Hamas candidates to parliament with large enough votes to form the Palestinian government. In Gaza, Hamas had a total sweep.
The U.S./Israeli response was a starvation blockade of Gaza, a siege and then a brutal all-out war on the entire population. When the Israelis attacked Gaza last December and January, they killed more than 1,400 Palestinians, using U.S.-supplied weapons including white phosphorous and cluster bombs.
Now more than half of the elected members of the Palestinian Parliament are in Israeli prisons. Why is the corporate media not telling us day after day about this crime against democracy?
Don’t jump on capitalist bandwagon
We in the anti-war movement need to be especially careful not to jump on the bandwagon when the entire capitalist class, their media, the entire U.S. Congress, and numerous organizations that received direct U.S. funding from the so-called National Endowment for Democracy all speak with one voice in sudden defense of a cause.
Regardless of how legitimate, genuine and concerned some individuals may seem, this kind of overwhelming imperialist pressure will distort the struggle.
The U.S. corporate media is not interested in democracy even within the United States.
The whole focus and attention of progressive, anti-imperialist and workers’ struggles, especially here in the very center of imperialism, must be to defend all those who are targeted by the Pentagon, by the police and by the corporate media, which act as an extension of the state on issues of war and peace.
Repression in the U.S.
Just consider the mass raids, round-ups and deportations going on in immigrant communities in every major U.S. city. Think of the workers who never come home from work, the families that are ripped apart.
We cannot for a moment forget that this is the country with the largest prison population in the world, with the greatest number of people on death row. Mumia Abu-Jamal, an internationally famous journalist and human rights activist, has been on death row for decades, just 50 miles from where we are meeting here in western Pennsylvania.
When the corporate media raises their concern about “democracy” in Iran, we cannot forget the Black and Latina/o communities occupied by police. Nor the targeting of Muslim communities, which are overrun with snitches, spies and frame-ups.
We cannot forget the millions of working people who are losing their jobs, homes, health care and their future. They have no vote, no say and no control over who receives trillions of dollars in bailout money and who receives hot air. We cannot forget the police state that greets every bankers’ or international gathering, putting whole areas of cities in lock-down.
There is a certain imperialist arrogance when the corporate media, which hides the lack of democracy here in U.S., suddenly champions democracy in Iran with wall-to-wall and sympathetic coverage of demonstrations there.
Do we want our movement to be an echo of that hypocrisy? Don’t you wonder if there is another agenda? When has a demonstration in the U.S. against war or cutbacks, or for housing or human rights, ever received the kind of sympathetic coverage that we’ve seen in the last month of Iran?
Do we expect that the thousands of activists coming to Pittsburgh for the G20 summit protests will receive even 1 percent of the coverage that’s been given to demonstrations in Iran?
No women’s rights in U.S. client states
The whole world knows the name and face of the young Iranian woman Neda. But do we know the name of even one Iraqi woman killed by the invading U.S. Army? Can you tell me the name of one Palestinian woman killed by Israeli forces? Do we know the names of any Afghan or Pakistani women killed in a drone attack?
Do we know the name of the young Latina killed on the same day as Neda died in Iran, who was shot by border militia in Arizona? Why not?
Have U.S. wars and occupations brought democracy to countries they own and control through feudal monarchies and total dictatorships?
There are no rights for women, or for anyone today, in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Egypt or Jordan.
Nowhere in the world is U.S. imperialism a force for democracy or women’s rights. U.S. interventions bring millions of deaths, millions of orphans, millions of refugees, a whole sex industry, torture on a mass scale and massive impoverishment—but never democracy.
Of course everyone here already knows this. We know of three decades of wars, sanctions, encirclement, sabotage and coup attempts.
Don’t echo imperialist designs
A number of so-called human-rights groups that are funded by U.S.-government NED programs have called for demonstrations on July 25 in the name of “democracy in Iran.” Unfortunately, some anti-war groups have endorsed this U.S. government-funded demonstration. We want to use every skill to persuade our movement not to be pulled in by imperialist destabilization efforts and propaganda and to withdraw their participation.
There is a class struggle in Iran today. Yes, there is. But there is also a massive U.S.-government-sponsored destabilization effort. We cannot allow ourselves to become an echo of imperialist destabilization and interference in Iran. The group Stop War On Iran has called a meeting in New York for an extended discussion of this question on Aug. 1 at 55 West 17 Street at 4 p.m. See stopwaroniran.org for more details.
Stand in Solidarity with Prof. Gates! Say NO to Racism!
Stop Racial Profiling and Police Brutality!
Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Was Right!
The Cambridge Cops Must Apologize!
Youth Need Jobs & Schools - Not Jails!
Demand a Justice Department Investigation
of Racial Profiling Across the US
Sign the Online Petition here. Let President Obama, Attorney General Holder, Massachusetts Governor Patrick, Cambridge Mayor Simmons, the Cambridge City Council, Cambridge Police Commissioner Haas, Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano, the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, Congressional Leaders and members of the media know you stand against racism with Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and you want the Obama administration to launch a national investigation into racial profiling and police brutality NOW!
http://www.bailoutpeople.org/gatespetition.shtml
The arrest of Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. by a Cambridge police officer after showing two forms of identification after he, along with a Black limo driver, had unjammed the lock to the front door of Gates' own house in a predominantly white, upscale neighborhood known as "Harvard Square" has brought the struggle against racism to the front pages of newspapers throughout the US and around the world.
The Cambridge Police Department and their racist allies have worked overtime to slander and vilify Prof. Gates. But his only crime was in fact to resist the racist arrogance of the Cambridge Police and not acquiesce to their racist and unjust treatment of him. The torrent of racist vitriol targeting Prof. Gates as well as the absolute racist arrogance displayed by the Cambridge Police Department in demanding that Pres. Obama and Gov. Patrick apologize for expressing support for Prof. Gates, cannot go unanswered! It is time for all poor and working people, and particularly whites, to come out against these racist attacks and stand foursquare in 100% solidarity with Professor Gates and against racial profiling and police brutality.
Cambridge, Harvard University and Boston are seen around the world as bastions of liberalism, hotbeds of progressive ideas and prestigious places from which cutting-edge research emanates. But the racial profiling and arrest of Prof. Gates have re-raised the question of how much has changed since the 1970s when, in the wake of court-ordered busing for desegregation, white racist mobs were stoning buses carrying Black school children and attacking Black people on the streets and in their homes.
Gates was Right! The Cambridge Police Department was Wrong!
Racial profiling is another expression of institutionalized racism. In the U.S., racial profiling and police brutality have become an unfortunate reality of life for people of color, especially youth. It doesn't matter whether it occurs in the inner city, a small town, or an upper-middle class suburb.
In a 2004 report entitled "Threat and Humiliation: Racial Profiling, Domestic Security and Human Rights in the United States," Amnesty International documented that in a year-long investigation, an estimated 32 million people had been racially profiled--the vast majority of them from nationally oppressed groups. One can only imagine how much these numbers have increased over the last five years, not only for those born in the U.S. but also for immigrants. Since 9/11 there has been a corresponding increase in racial profiling targeting the Arab and Muslim communities.
The police have been, by far, the most feared perpetrators of racial profiling, and understandably so. Police harassment and brutality is an epidemic. According to a 2008 report by the Washington, D.C. based Campaign for Youth Justice entitled ”Critical Condition: African American Youth in the Justice System” African American youth make up 30 percent of youth arrested while they represent only 17 percent of the overall youth population. Additionally, African American youth are 62 percent of the total number of youth prosecuted in the adult criminal system and are nine times more likely than white youth to receive an adult prison sentence.
One only needs to remember how the Somerville 5 (5 Black youth from Somerville who were arrested on racist frame up charges by the Medford Police) or the Jena 6 were treated. Not to mention the racism that followed the devastation of the 9th Ward in New Orleans as a result of hurricane Katrina.
As the economic crisis deepens the ruling class will use all means at its disposal to foster artificial divisions between white workers and Black, Latina/o, and immigrant workers. It is our responsibility to build a movement based on anti-racist, class-wide solidarity--as workers of all nationalities are losing their jobs, homes, health care and pensions in rapid numbers; and as the economic crisis becomes even more extreme.
Text of online petition:
To: President Obama, Attorney General Holder, Massachusetts Governor Patrick, Cambridge Mayor Simmons, the Cambridge City Council, Cambridge Police Commissioner Haas, Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano, the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, Congressional Leaders and members of the media
I deplore the racist treatment of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. by the Cambridge police on July 16. Professor Gates was arrested simply for being in his own home and insisting on his right to have the name and badge number of the arresting officer, rather than standing silent in the face of blatant racist injustice inside his own home. I demand an immediate apology to Professor Gates from the Cambridge Police.
The Gates affair throws a bright national spotlight on the reality of racial profiling and police brutality in the United States, as Professor Gates himself said at the time of the incident. President Obama acknowledged this in his comments on it at his national press conference.
I call on all justice-loving people to stand in 100% solidarity with Professor Gates and against racial profiling and police brutality, and to stand up against the barrage of right-wing hate spewing forth from law enforcement and police unions and fanned by news media outlets and commentators, having the arrogance to demand that President Obama and Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick apologize for supporting Prof. Gates and speaking the truth.
I further demand that the Justice Department take up an immediate robust investigation of racial profiling and police brutality nationwide, and bring perpetrating police officers to justice and withdraw funds from police departments which practice racial profiling and police brutality. What happened to Professor Gates is not an individual incident. Racial profiling and police brutality must be dealt with in a serious and systematic way.
Sincerely,
(your signature appended here).
Bail Out The People Movement
Boston
617-522-6626
bopmboston@gmail.com
http://bopm-boston.blogspot.com
National Office
212-633-6646
bailoutpeople@safewebmail.com
http://www.BailOutPeople.org
Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Was Right!
The Cambridge Cops Must Apologize!
Youth Need Jobs & Schools - Not Jails!
Demand a Justice Department Investigation
of Racial Profiling Across the US
Sign the Online Petition here. Let President Obama, Attorney General Holder, Massachusetts Governor Patrick, Cambridge Mayor Simmons, the Cambridge City Council, Cambridge Police Commissioner Haas, Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano, the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, Congressional Leaders and members of the media know you stand against racism with Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and you want the Obama administration to launch a national investigation into racial profiling and police brutality NOW!
http://www.bailoutpeople.org/gatespetition.shtml
The arrest of Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. by a Cambridge police officer after showing two forms of identification after he, along with a Black limo driver, had unjammed the lock to the front door of Gates' own house in a predominantly white, upscale neighborhood known as "Harvard Square" has brought the struggle against racism to the front pages of newspapers throughout the US and around the world.
The Cambridge Police Department and their racist allies have worked overtime to slander and vilify Prof. Gates. But his only crime was in fact to resist the racist arrogance of the Cambridge Police and not acquiesce to their racist and unjust treatment of him. The torrent of racist vitriol targeting Prof. Gates as well as the absolute racist arrogance displayed by the Cambridge Police Department in demanding that Pres. Obama and Gov. Patrick apologize for expressing support for Prof. Gates, cannot go unanswered! It is time for all poor and working people, and particularly whites, to come out against these racist attacks and stand foursquare in 100% solidarity with Professor Gates and against racial profiling and police brutality.
Cambridge, Harvard University and Boston are seen around the world as bastions of liberalism, hotbeds of progressive ideas and prestigious places from which cutting-edge research emanates. But the racial profiling and arrest of Prof. Gates have re-raised the question of how much has changed since the 1970s when, in the wake of court-ordered busing for desegregation, white racist mobs were stoning buses carrying Black school children and attacking Black people on the streets and in their homes.
Gates was Right! The Cambridge Police Department was Wrong!
Racial profiling is another expression of institutionalized racism. In the U.S., racial profiling and police brutality have become an unfortunate reality of life for people of color, especially youth. It doesn't matter whether it occurs in the inner city, a small town, or an upper-middle class suburb.
In a 2004 report entitled "Threat and Humiliation: Racial Profiling, Domestic Security and Human Rights in the United States," Amnesty International documented that in a year-long investigation, an estimated 32 million people had been racially profiled--the vast majority of them from nationally oppressed groups. One can only imagine how much these numbers have increased over the last five years, not only for those born in the U.S. but also for immigrants. Since 9/11 there has been a corresponding increase in racial profiling targeting the Arab and Muslim communities.
The police have been, by far, the most feared perpetrators of racial profiling, and understandably so. Police harassment and brutality is an epidemic. According to a 2008 report by the Washington, D.C. based Campaign for Youth Justice entitled ”Critical Condition: African American Youth in the Justice System” African American youth make up 30 percent of youth arrested while they represent only 17 percent of the overall youth population. Additionally, African American youth are 62 percent of the total number of youth prosecuted in the adult criminal system and are nine times more likely than white youth to receive an adult prison sentence.
One only needs to remember how the Somerville 5 (5 Black youth from Somerville who were arrested on racist frame up charges by the Medford Police) or the Jena 6 were treated. Not to mention the racism that followed the devastation of the 9th Ward in New Orleans as a result of hurricane Katrina.
As the economic crisis deepens the ruling class will use all means at its disposal to foster artificial divisions between white workers and Black, Latina/o, and immigrant workers. It is our responsibility to build a movement based on anti-racist, class-wide solidarity--as workers of all nationalities are losing their jobs, homes, health care and pensions in rapid numbers; and as the economic crisis becomes even more extreme.
Text of online petition:
To: President Obama, Attorney General Holder, Massachusetts Governor Patrick, Cambridge Mayor Simmons, the Cambridge City Council, Cambridge Police Commissioner Haas, Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano, the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, Congressional Leaders and members of the media
I deplore the racist treatment of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. by the Cambridge police on July 16. Professor Gates was arrested simply for being in his own home and insisting on his right to have the name and badge number of the arresting officer, rather than standing silent in the face of blatant racist injustice inside his own home. I demand an immediate apology to Professor Gates from the Cambridge Police.
The Gates affair throws a bright national spotlight on the reality of racial profiling and police brutality in the United States, as Professor Gates himself said at the time of the incident. President Obama acknowledged this in his comments on it at his national press conference.
I call on all justice-loving people to stand in 100% solidarity with Professor Gates and against racial profiling and police brutality, and to stand up against the barrage of right-wing hate spewing forth from law enforcement and police unions and fanned by news media outlets and commentators, having the arrogance to demand that President Obama and Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick apologize for supporting Prof. Gates and speaking the truth.
I further demand that the Justice Department take up an immediate robust investigation of racial profiling and police brutality nationwide, and bring perpetrating police officers to justice and withdraw funds from police departments which practice racial profiling and police brutality. What happened to Professor Gates is not an individual incident. Racial profiling and police brutality must be dealt with in a serious and systematic way.
Sincerely,
(your signature appended here).
Bail Out The People Movement
Boston
617-522-6626
bopmboston@gmail.com
http://bopm-boston.blogspot.com
National Office
212-633-6646
bailoutpeople@safewebmail.com
http://www.BailOutPeople.org
The Day the President Turned Black (But has he turned back?)
By Greg Palast for The Huffington Post, GregPalast.com, July 29, 2009
He's in hot water now. For a moment, on national television, the President of the United States turned black!
Last week, when his buddy "Skip" Gates got busted for being Black in Boston, Barack Obama forgot his official role: to soothe America's conscience with the happy fairy tale that his election marked the end of racism in the USA.
Instead, Obama, the excruciatingly middle-of-the-road President, was seized by Barack the militant State Senator from the South Side of Chicago, who reminded us that cops bust Black guys for no goddamn good reason all the goddamn time.
I'm reminded that it was not so long ago that we watched the vicious gang-beating by Los Angeles cops of a defenseless, handcuffed, Rodney King, an African-American. King's beating was unusual only in that it was caught on videotape.
Yeah, I know: we've come a hell of a long way. Obama won, Jessie cried, Beyoncé has her own line of perfume and Tiger Woods plays where 30 years ago he couldn't eat lunch.
Good on them.
But what about Robert Pratt, Mr. President?
Pratt, a United Auto Workers member, has five kids and a mortgage payment of $1,100 a month on a house in Detroit worth no more than $40,000. The payment's astronomical because he pays 11% on his mortgage balance, double the national average interest rate. Now, on those crazy terms, he's sure to lose his house.
How did that happen? Pratt, whose story we've been tracking, was "steered" into a sub-prime loan by Countrywide Financial. "Steering" is the polite term for forcing folk into crappy loan terms. And not just any folk: Black folk, like Pratt. Over 60% of African-American mortgage applicants were (and ARE) steered into "sub-prime" predatory loans.
According to exhaustive studies by the Federal Reserve Board and the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL), African Americans are 250% more likely to get a loan with an "exploding interest" clause than white borrowers - and notably, the higher the income and the better the credit rating of a Black borrower, the more likely the discrimination.
As an economist, I can tell you it's not a stretch to say that Obama's failure to deal with endemic racism in the finance system is killing off hope of the nation's economic recovery. The "exploding rate" attack centered on Black and Hispanic communities has, according to the CLR, caused 40.2 million homes to lose value due to their proximity to foreclosed properties.
Yet, not a peep from the Obama Administration about ending this Ku Klux lending practice which has laid waste Black neighborhoods and taken a hunk of White America's housing values with it.
Instead, Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is the honored guest of the Board of Directors of JP Morgan, owner of one of the most outrageous of the financial predators, Washington Mutual. Morgan/WaMu, with its racially-poisoned mortgage trickery, makes the Cambridge Police Department look like the NAACP.
(Indeed, Emanuel's host JP Morgan was sued last week by the NAACP for "systematic, institutionalized racism in making home mortgage loans.")
The cold truth is, financial attacks on the Black community continue as freely under Obama as under Bush, despite Obama's power to halt it instantly by banning loan-sharking as a condition of continued bail-outs for these banks. Obama has directed the FDIC to guarantee JP Morgan loans, saving the bank $3.1 billion this year. Obama has directed the FDIC to guarantee Mr. Pratt, uh, "hope."
And what about Thomas Johnson, Mr. President?
Johnson's a minister in Florida who lost his vote in 2000, alongside at least 94,000 others falsely accused of being felons without the right to vote. Most of the innocents accused and abused were Black, the minister included. I know, because I saw those state records with the carefully recorded "BLA" next to the voters' names.
I had an editor on the story, won't say his name because he was so typical, who asked me why Johnson, an African-American, didn't pound the table and DEMAND his ballot. Johnson's no Harvard professor in Boston with the President's phone number on his speed dial.
My extremely white editor, a Yale graduate, sitting in San Francisco, could not imagine what would happen if a dark-skinned Rev. Johnson had started making a scene in Alachua County, in the Deep Deep South. The Reverend was smart not to pull a "Skippy Gates" and lip-off at authority: just a couple months ago, Alachua cops 'Tased' an angry, but unarmed, Black man, then shot him dead with seven bullets.
Johnson's vote loss, you might say, was "so 2000." This is post-racial 2009. Bullshit. In last year's election, Florida went right back into the racially biased block-and-purge of Black voters, barring thousands from the ballot through new ID laws that would have made Jim Crow segregationists of the Fifties proud. (See the investigative report, "Block the Vote," by myself and Bobby Kennedy, from the October 2008 Rolling Stone).
Yet, the Obama Administration appears quite squeamish about taking down the nouvelle ballot-box Bull Connors.
Venom
What I'm saying is that the venom of structural racism in America continues to sicken us all, in our economy, in our voting stations, in our schools (don't get me started), our health care system, our ... well, you name it.
Yes, I joined the Hope Parade and voted for Obama, expecting just this one change: a direct attack on the remaining areas of official sanction of racist policies and practices. I'm still waiting.
It was quite inspiring, last Thursday, to the see a Black man appear, if momentarily, behind the Presidential seal. Unfortunately, Obama's swift demand for equal justice under the law was provoked only when the whip came down on someone, like himself, whose professional and class status had, they presumed, made them exempt from the daily insults and assaults visited on their less privileged brothers.
So much was made of Gates' Harvard post that the issue seemed to be It's not right to cuff a dark-skinned man who's a HARVARD PROFESSOR." The race-neutral rules of class privilege had been violated.
What's missing in America - and in the Oval Office – is any hint of outrage at the endemic, systemic cruelties visited on Black Americans, like Pratt and Johnson, who lack a key to the Harvard Alumni Club.
******
Greg Palast, an expert in finance and regulation, is the author of Armed Madhouse: Strange Tales and Sordid Secrets of a White House Gone Wild. His investigative reports for BBC Television and Democracy Now were recently released as a film on DVD: Palast Investigates: From 8-Mile to the Amazon, on the Trail of the Financial Marauders.
Sign up for his reports at www.GregPalast.com.
He's in hot water now. For a moment, on national television, the President of the United States turned black!
Last week, when his buddy "Skip" Gates got busted for being Black in Boston, Barack Obama forgot his official role: to soothe America's conscience with the happy fairy tale that his election marked the end of racism in the USA.
Instead, Obama, the excruciatingly middle-of-the-road President, was seized by Barack the militant State Senator from the South Side of Chicago, who reminded us that cops bust Black guys for no goddamn good reason all the goddamn time.
I'm reminded that it was not so long ago that we watched the vicious gang-beating by Los Angeles cops of a defenseless, handcuffed, Rodney King, an African-American. King's beating was unusual only in that it was caught on videotape.
Yeah, I know: we've come a hell of a long way. Obama won, Jessie cried, Beyoncé has her own line of perfume and Tiger Woods plays where 30 years ago he couldn't eat lunch.
Good on them.
But what about Robert Pratt, Mr. President?
Pratt, a United Auto Workers member, has five kids and a mortgage payment of $1,100 a month on a house in Detroit worth no more than $40,000. The payment's astronomical because he pays 11% on his mortgage balance, double the national average interest rate. Now, on those crazy terms, he's sure to lose his house.
How did that happen? Pratt, whose story we've been tracking, was "steered" into a sub-prime loan by Countrywide Financial. "Steering" is the polite term for forcing folk into crappy loan terms. And not just any folk: Black folk, like Pratt. Over 60% of African-American mortgage applicants were (and ARE) steered into "sub-prime" predatory loans.
According to exhaustive studies by the Federal Reserve Board and the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL), African Americans are 250% more likely to get a loan with an "exploding interest" clause than white borrowers - and notably, the higher the income and the better the credit rating of a Black borrower, the more likely the discrimination.
As an economist, I can tell you it's not a stretch to say that Obama's failure to deal with endemic racism in the finance system is killing off hope of the nation's economic recovery. The "exploding rate" attack centered on Black and Hispanic communities has, according to the CLR, caused 40.2 million homes to lose value due to their proximity to foreclosed properties.
Yet, not a peep from the Obama Administration about ending this Ku Klux lending practice which has laid waste Black neighborhoods and taken a hunk of White America's housing values with it.
Instead, Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is the honored guest of the Board of Directors of JP Morgan, owner of one of the most outrageous of the financial predators, Washington Mutual. Morgan/WaMu, with its racially-poisoned mortgage trickery, makes the Cambridge Police Department look like the NAACP.
(Indeed, Emanuel's host JP Morgan was sued last week by the NAACP for "systematic, institutionalized racism in making home mortgage loans.")
The cold truth is, financial attacks on the Black community continue as freely under Obama as under Bush, despite Obama's power to halt it instantly by banning loan-sharking as a condition of continued bail-outs for these banks. Obama has directed the FDIC to guarantee JP Morgan loans, saving the bank $3.1 billion this year. Obama has directed the FDIC to guarantee Mr. Pratt, uh, "hope."
And what about Thomas Johnson, Mr. President?
Johnson's a minister in Florida who lost his vote in 2000, alongside at least 94,000 others falsely accused of being felons without the right to vote. Most of the innocents accused and abused were Black, the minister included. I know, because I saw those state records with the carefully recorded "BLA" next to the voters' names.
I had an editor on the story, won't say his name because he was so typical, who asked me why Johnson, an African-American, didn't pound the table and DEMAND his ballot. Johnson's no Harvard professor in Boston with the President's phone number on his speed dial.
My extremely white editor, a Yale graduate, sitting in San Francisco, could not imagine what would happen if a dark-skinned Rev. Johnson had started making a scene in Alachua County, in the Deep Deep South. The Reverend was smart not to pull a "Skippy Gates" and lip-off at authority: just a couple months ago, Alachua cops 'Tased' an angry, but unarmed, Black man, then shot him dead with seven bullets.
Johnson's vote loss, you might say, was "so 2000." This is post-racial 2009. Bullshit. In last year's election, Florida went right back into the racially biased block-and-purge of Black voters, barring thousands from the ballot through new ID laws that would have made Jim Crow segregationists of the Fifties proud. (See the investigative report, "Block the Vote," by myself and Bobby Kennedy, from the October 2008 Rolling Stone).
Yet, the Obama Administration appears quite squeamish about taking down the nouvelle ballot-box Bull Connors.
Venom
What I'm saying is that the venom of structural racism in America continues to sicken us all, in our economy, in our voting stations, in our schools (don't get me started), our health care system, our ... well, you name it.
Yes, I joined the Hope Parade and voted for Obama, expecting just this one change: a direct attack on the remaining areas of official sanction of racist policies and practices. I'm still waiting.
It was quite inspiring, last Thursday, to the see a Black man appear, if momentarily, behind the Presidential seal. Unfortunately, Obama's swift demand for equal justice under the law was provoked only when the whip came down on someone, like himself, whose professional and class status had, they presumed, made them exempt from the daily insults and assaults visited on their less privileged brothers.
So much was made of Gates' Harvard post that the issue seemed to be It's not right to cuff a dark-skinned man who's a HARVARD PROFESSOR." The race-neutral rules of class privilege had been violated.
What's missing in America - and in the Oval Office – is any hint of outrage at the endemic, systemic cruelties visited on Black Americans, like Pratt and Johnson, who lack a key to the Harvard Alumni Club.
******
Greg Palast, an expert in finance and regulation, is the author of Armed Madhouse: Strange Tales and Sordid Secrets of a White House Gone Wild. His investigative reports for BBC Television and Democracy Now were recently released as a film on DVD: Palast Investigates: From 8-Mile to the Amazon, on the Trail of the Financial Marauders.
Sign up for his reports at www.GregPalast.com.
Key witness disputes Hejazi account of Neda death
Press TV, July 29, 2009
More than a month after Neda Aqa-Soltan was killed in the post-election frenzy in Iran, a key witness to the incident moves to set the record straight.
Neda, 26, was shot dead on June 20 in an alley away from the scene of clashes between security forces and demonstrators in Tehran.
She immediately became an international icon after graphic videos of her bleeding to death in a matter of seconds, grabbed the attention of world media outlets.
Hamid Panahi, Neda's friend and music teacher who was by her side in her final moments, dismissed the slew of eyewitness accounts of the sad incident -- particularly the one given by Arash Hejazi.
Arash Hejazi, an Iranian physician currently studying in England, told the BBC that he had witnessed a member of the Basij shooting Neda.
His comments were a contributing factor in the Western-led media campaign against the Ahmadinejad government.
Panahi said contrary to Hejazi's account of the incident, 'there were no security forces of Basij members nearby'.
“In his interviews with foreign media outlets, Mr. Hejazi said that the culprit behind Neda's death was arrested on the spot. I saw nothing of the sort. There were only about a dozen people present at the scene. No one was arrested,” he said.
To prove his point, Panahi said that new revelations have found that Neda was in fact shot not in the chest, but in the back.
Panahi is not the first to dismiss Hejazi's account of Neda's death. Earlier in June, the man who drove Neda to hospital had also said that there were no Basij members around at the time.
Iranian security forces have dismissed the reports out of hand, asserting that they did not open fire on protestors during the sporadic unrest.
While Media outlets in the West blame Neda's death on Iranian security forces, new revelations show that she was murdered by a small caliber pistol-- a weapon that is not used by Iranian security forces.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has asked Judiciary chief Ayatollah Hashemi-Shahroudi to conduct a through investigation into the incident.
SBB/HGH
More than a month after Neda Aqa-Soltan was killed in the post-election frenzy in Iran, a key witness to the incident moves to set the record straight.
Neda, 26, was shot dead on June 20 in an alley away from the scene of clashes between security forces and demonstrators in Tehran.
She immediately became an international icon after graphic videos of her bleeding to death in a matter of seconds, grabbed the attention of world media outlets.
Hamid Panahi, Neda's friend and music teacher who was by her side in her final moments, dismissed the slew of eyewitness accounts of the sad incident -- particularly the one given by Arash Hejazi.
Arash Hejazi, an Iranian physician currently studying in England, told the BBC that he had witnessed a member of the Basij shooting Neda.
His comments were a contributing factor in the Western-led media campaign against the Ahmadinejad government.
Panahi said contrary to Hejazi's account of the incident, 'there were no security forces of Basij members nearby'.
“In his interviews with foreign media outlets, Mr. Hejazi said that the culprit behind Neda's death was arrested on the spot. I saw nothing of the sort. There were only about a dozen people present at the scene. No one was arrested,” he said.
To prove his point, Panahi said that new revelations have found that Neda was in fact shot not in the chest, but in the back.
Panahi is not the first to dismiss Hejazi's account of Neda's death. Earlier in June, the man who drove Neda to hospital had also said that there were no Basij members around at the time.
Iranian security forces have dismissed the reports out of hand, asserting that they did not open fire on protestors during the sporadic unrest.
While Media outlets in the West blame Neda's death on Iranian security forces, new revelations show that she was murdered by a small caliber pistol-- a weapon that is not used by Iranian security forces.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has asked Judiciary chief Ayatollah Hashemi-Shahroudi to conduct a through investigation into the incident.
SBB/HGH
Coup Dictator Publishes OpEd In WSJ; U.S. Delegation Visits Coup Regime; State Dept. Supports Zelaya's Return Only If "Mutual" (If Coup Regime Agrees)
By Eva Golinger, Postcards from the Revolution, July 27, 2009
Honduran dictator Roberto Micheletti published an OpED in the Wall Street Journal today, titled "The Path Forward for Honduras: Zelaya's removal from office was a triumph for the rule of law" justifying the coup and calling on the US public to support his illegal regime. The WSJ presents the dictator Micheletti as "Mr. Micheletti, previously the president of the Honduran Congress, became president of Honduras upon the departure of Manuel Zelaya." - How interesting, so it wasn't vía a coup d'etat that involved the violent kidnapping of democratically elected President Zelaya that Micheletti illegally took over the presidency, but because of Zelaya's "departure". Hmm, sure makes it easier to justify that way!
Micheletti's OpEd lays out the coup regime's "reasons" for kidnapping Zelaya, lying in general as usual, and even claiming Zelaya stole millions of dollars from the Honduran central bank (first time we've heard that one!! I wonder if Micheletti has ever heard the term "defamation"?). The article also oddly states the coup regime's "willingness" to work with the Arias plan set forth by President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica last week, as promoted by Washington, despite the fact that on all prior occasions the regime has outwardly rejected the base of the Arias proposal, which is the return of Zelaya to the presidency. Of course the OpEd was written and publicized by Clinton friend Lanny Davis, the coup regime's lobbyist in Washington.
However, in today's State Department briefing, it became even more clear that Washington is no longer pushing for Zelaya's return as the base of the Arias agreement (I have pointed this out before, but for those skeptics...here it is again)...
"QUESTION: Do you still believe that the return of democratic rule requires the restoration of President Zelaya as president?
MR. KELLY: We – our policy remains the same, that we want the restoration of democratic order. And that includes the return by mutual agreement of the democratically elected president, and that’s President Zelaya."
Meanwhile, over the weekend Republican congressman Connie Mack visited the coup regime in Honduras, along with another member of Congress, Republican Brian Bilbray and fellow party member Tom Dime. As to attempt to garner more prestige and attention to the visit, the illegal and repressive Honduran regime lied and referred to the trio as US Senators...
And BTW, Zelaya is camped out at the Honduran-Nicaraguan border still waiting for his family and supporters to arrive. They have been detained now by coup forces for three days and prevented from reaching the border.
Honduran dictator Roberto Micheletti published an OpED in the Wall Street Journal today, titled "The Path Forward for Honduras: Zelaya's removal from office was a triumph for the rule of law" justifying the coup and calling on the US public to support his illegal regime. The WSJ presents the dictator Micheletti as "Mr. Micheletti, previously the president of the Honduran Congress, became president of Honduras upon the departure of Manuel Zelaya." - How interesting, so it wasn't vía a coup d'etat that involved the violent kidnapping of democratically elected President Zelaya that Micheletti illegally took over the presidency, but because of Zelaya's "departure". Hmm, sure makes it easier to justify that way!
Micheletti's OpEd lays out the coup regime's "reasons" for kidnapping Zelaya, lying in general as usual, and even claiming Zelaya stole millions of dollars from the Honduran central bank (first time we've heard that one!! I wonder if Micheletti has ever heard the term "defamation"?). The article also oddly states the coup regime's "willingness" to work with the Arias plan set forth by President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica last week, as promoted by Washington, despite the fact that on all prior occasions the regime has outwardly rejected the base of the Arias proposal, which is the return of Zelaya to the presidency. Of course the OpEd was written and publicized by Clinton friend Lanny Davis, the coup regime's lobbyist in Washington.
However, in today's State Department briefing, it became even more clear that Washington is no longer pushing for Zelaya's return as the base of the Arias agreement (I have pointed this out before, but for those skeptics...here it is again)...
"QUESTION: Do you still believe that the return of democratic rule requires the restoration of President Zelaya as president?
MR. KELLY: We – our policy remains the same, that we want the restoration of democratic order. And that includes the return by mutual agreement of the democratically elected president, and that’s President Zelaya."
Meanwhile, over the weekend Republican congressman Connie Mack visited the coup regime in Honduras, along with another member of Congress, Republican Brian Bilbray and fellow party member Tom Dime. As to attempt to garner more prestige and attention to the visit, the illegal and repressive Honduran regime lied and referred to the trio as US Senators...
And BTW, Zelaya is camped out at the Honduran-Nicaraguan border still waiting for his family and supporters to arrive. They have been detained now by coup forces for three days and prevented from reaching the border.
The Threads of the Story: Surreal Honduras
By CLIFTON ROSS, CounterPunch, July 24 - 26 2009, issue
Gabriel Garcia Màrquez could easily have written "A Hundred Years of Solitude" in any country of Central America. It's a region replete with characters and magical landscapes and myths with power to make the hair stand up on the back of your neck when you merely hear them. There's the one about the gringo who visited the mining region of Cabañas and soon thereafter the water turned bad and the fish in the river died and the people all began to die simply because a mysterious gringo passed through.
That's the story as Miguel Rivera tells it. His brother, Marcelo Rivera was the latest victim of the newly organized death squads, formed from what appears to be a triad of power: Pacific Rim (a Canadian multinational), the ARENA party (the political party organized by the death squad killer of Monsignor Romero, Roberto D'Aubuisson) and the "maras" or gang members.
Of course Miguel, who has a deep and even scientific knowledge of his locale, is aware that the myth is just that: a small story that reveals a larger, hidden truth, in this case that a "Gringo" multinational indeed entered the area, but the reason for the deaths was the heavy metal waste from the mining that was poured into the community's water.
In cultures and states where telling the exact truth can lead to one's death, it's always more convenient to wrap the story in myth. Those who unpackage the myths, like Marcelo Rivera, often disappear into thin air -- that is, until they're found, as he was, naked, castrated and murdered after being horribly tortured: his fingernails had all been pulled out; his face had been disfigured so much that his brother could only identify him by his nose; the beatings had broken his skull. Finally, after he had been strangled to death, his body was thrown in a sixty-foot well, covered with chicken manure, dirt, and pieces of meat.
The right wing press did, of course, repeat the official story that Marcelo had fallen in with "mara" gangsters and drank with them, but editors had the integrity to also print a counterpoint that everyone who knew Marcelo had quite clear: that the victim of the unholy triad of moneyed power in El Salvador never drank nor hung out with the maras. His hero was Monsignor Romero and Miguel says the last time he saw his brother he was wearing a t-shirt with the image of that martyr on it.
There's a significant difference between El Salvador under the FMLN where power in the media is actively being contested, and Honduras where there is a blackout of the opposition perspective. Another difference is that the ARENA party has lost control of the military and has to rely on "maras" to do its dirty work while in Honduras the government hasn't yet had to consider recruiting "civilian contractors" from the 100,000 or so "maras" operating in Central America. Thus far the military has been quite happy to do the job of eliminating or terrorizing opponents under the "golpista" Honduran government (coup government) of Micheletti. On July 5, for example, the military fired with machine guns on a crowd numbering in the thousands. This is the unofficial story, of course. The papers, including El Heraldo, claimed that the military had fired on the crowd with rubber bullets. Officially, also, only one person died. Protestors say that there were eight or nine victims who died on the way to the hospital, and whose bodies were disappeared. Given the machine gun fire, it's only surprising that more didn't die.
The Honduran government of the 1980s found it had no need to replicate the widespread massacres being carried out in El Salvador and Guatemala. It was able to selectively eliminate a couple hundred leaders of the opposition and take care of its problem with the "subversives." But in order to maintain control over the rest of the population and assure its docility and compliance, like anywhere else, it required a press willing and able to cloak a damning reality in a less threatening myth.
Once again Honduran reporters are being called in to do overtime in psyops. Granted, the press in Honduras under the "golpista" government isn't any worse than Fox News. That being said, everything having to do with the news around the recent "golpe" (coup) has a quality that ranges from surreal interpretation to black propaganda. It would seem that the journalists of the major papers of Honduras really were frustrated writers of dystopian science fiction.
One Honduran tells me she saw a murder in her neighborhood that was multiplied in the journalistic alchemy of the Honduran press by six the following day. I keep that in mind as I sit here in my hotel room in Tegucigalpa, leafing through what my wife back home would call "the daily pack of lies."
As I try to discern the Honduran narrative of the "golpe" I recall the copy of the article I left behind in El Salvador, printed in a right wing paper -- and, unfortunately, the newspapers are all right wing in El Salvador, with the exception of the Diario Co-Latino, the latter a blessing not bestowed upon Honduras. The Salvadoran article was based on a piece that appeared in Honduras' El Heraldo. The author claimed to have in possession secret documents that indicated that President Hugo Chavez was working with a large number of "maras" who he was arming and paying, and also infiltrating his own military to do a lightning attack and kill high-ranking officials of the Micheletti government. Supposedly residents have seen armed men in inaccessible regions of the country. Does that sound like the narrative of "Al Qaeda sleeper cells" doped up on the Koran ready to attack Bush's America? Only the names, places and drugs of choice have changed.
I'm looking here at a full page ad in La Tribuna from Tuesday, the 21st, paid for by "Hondurans for Democracy." There is a photo, in the top half, of Chavez aiming a gun. Beside the photo is the caption "Chavez calls for violence and wants bloodshed in Honduras" Beneath that picture is a crowd shot of Hondurans dressed in white (the color of the Conservative Nationalist Party) and holding the blue flags of Honduras. The caption reads, "But Hondurans want peace, unity, democracy and freedom." Ah, behold the foreign devil who has brought death to our peaceful little country. It's a variation on the diabolic gringo myth, but in reverse, since Chavez has been a counterforce to the "deadly gringo."
The following day, (Wednesday, July 22) El Heraldo has an interview with Alejando Peña Esclusa, a right wing Colombian who is president of UnoAmerica, described as "a democracy organization (sic: organización democracia) of Colombia." The headline reads, "The FARC [Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia), Narcotrafficking and ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas) are all the same thing." The surrealism doesn't end with the title, which makes laughable connections between a program of solidarity created by Venezuela to share its wealth with loans and grants to Latin America to facilitate growth and development, and narcotics trafficking and a guerrilla that, while it taxes the cocaine trade, seems to have fewer connections to the actual trade than does the Uribe government.
Esclusa develops his surreal story in this large-spread article on page 6: He says that the coup "has kept Honduras from falling into the project of Hugo Chavez and saved democracy from the Constitutional coup which Zelaya hoped to undertake." What was the "Constitutional coup" Zelaya was plotting? To bring people more deeply into the political process of the country by asking them if they'd like to write a new constitution. So according to Esclusa, the military coup was a way of saving "democracy" by taking it away. And the project of Chavez, well, ask 60-70% of Venezuelans who support Chavez and they'll tell you that his project is to move the country from "representative to participatory democracy." But the interview with Esclusa gets even wilder: "the principle element of the disturbances in Honduras is not "Mel" Zelaya nor the discussion of whether or not he returns" (this would come as a surprise to the hundreds of thousands of people marching daily in Honduras for the single purpose of having their president return) "but it is Hugo Chavez who finances the dirty campaign, buying minds ("conciencias") so as to disinform about Honduran reality."
Again, the utterly implausible charge that Chavez, and not the golpistas, is behind all the country's problems. For Esclusa, the solution is simple: Isolate Chavez from Honduras and all the problems will be solved.
What's fascinating about this analysis is that there's not even a hint of truth in it. First of all, the marches aren't financed by anyone but the marchers. And secondly, the only Venezuelan I've seen has been an old friend who is a documentary filmmaker--and probably the last Venezuelan journalist in the country since Telesur was chased out. Noticeably absent from the marches is even the slightest mention of Chavez or Venezuela, neither of which appear in any of the chants, placards, discussions, programs, or anything else. There's only one message: "Golpistas Leave! Bring Mel Home."
In this surreal world where Chavez is working with narco gangsters and infiltrating along the coast, paying people to demonstrate, the poor golpistas are also unfairly being persecuted by "the OAS, UN and the international community."
This line was repeated to me the other day in the hotel by the woman behind the desk, who identified herself as a National Party supporter. She almost whined as she told me that "everyone is against us." Does that sound a little paranoid? When a sane person is told that everyone is opposed to what he or she is doing, that person begins to reflect again on his or her actions. Not so Micheletti; not so Mr. Esclusa; not so the National Party and Liberal Party members who went out on the 23rd on the march for "peace, unity, democracy and freedom."
Then the bombshell: According to Mr. Esclusa, the FARC, a guerrilla force of 30,000 with shrinking power, is the force behind all the presidents who are part of ALBA which is, in turn, a project of the FARC and financed by cocaine money.
If this were the ravings of a madman in the street, we could afford to ignore him. But this interview is published in one of Honduras' two major newspapers, with big headlines, a photo of Esclusa, on page 6. And obviously the government is taking this same paranoid siege narrative seriously because on page eight is the story and headline, "Honduras Breaks Diplomatic Relations with Venezuela" and the subhead reads, "Venezuelan officials, in a confrontational attitude, warn they won't leave the country. The [Honduras] Chancellor cancels the consular visa of Iranians for fear of terrorism."
Now that's interesting. Honduras breaks relations with Venezuela and it's Venezuela that is being confrontational. Takes you back to the bad old days of Bush and the Saddam Hussein "menace" doesn't it? Then there are the Iranians, whose government has never so much as threatened anyone in Latin America, yet who now "feared as terrorist." Wild rumor, speculation on a fantastic level: Vice Chancellor Marta Lorena Alvarado says that "we've confirmed the existence of terrorist Iranian cells in Latin America and considering that there are direct trips from Teheran... to Venezuela and from Venezuela to Nicaragua... there's concern that there's been a terrorist incursion into [Honduras]."
Here we've definitively returned to the bad old days of Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush with the Amber, Yellow and Orange alerts when supposed "sleeper" cells that were never uncovered or identified were sleepwalking the US.
These are but a few of the jewels from the Honduran press. You could do with it as I did when I first confronted it in the hotel with the woman behind the desk: you could try reasoning with it. You could, as I did, say, isn't the very definition of a coup when an elected representative is removed from office and, rather than being held and tried and convicted or returned to office, is sent out of the country into exile at gunpoint. But the response is just as wild: "They were trying to prevent bloodshed. If they kept him here, his followers would cause bloodshed." But we're to believe that the people who sent the military to the airport on July 5th to machine gun protesters are really concerned about bloodshed? By the look on the woman's face, a gringo has come to town and poisoned the water.
Clifton Ross is the writer and director of Venezuela: Revolution from the Inside Out and Translations from Silence, a book of poetry introduced by Jack Hirschman available at: www.freedomvoices.org. He can be reached at: clifross@gmail.com
Gabriel Garcia Màrquez could easily have written "A Hundred Years of Solitude" in any country of Central America. It's a region replete with characters and magical landscapes and myths with power to make the hair stand up on the back of your neck when you merely hear them. There's the one about the gringo who visited the mining region of Cabañas and soon thereafter the water turned bad and the fish in the river died and the people all began to die simply because a mysterious gringo passed through.
That's the story as Miguel Rivera tells it. His brother, Marcelo Rivera was the latest victim of the newly organized death squads, formed from what appears to be a triad of power: Pacific Rim (a Canadian multinational), the ARENA party (the political party organized by the death squad killer of Monsignor Romero, Roberto D'Aubuisson) and the "maras" or gang members.
Of course Miguel, who has a deep and even scientific knowledge of his locale, is aware that the myth is just that: a small story that reveals a larger, hidden truth, in this case that a "Gringo" multinational indeed entered the area, but the reason for the deaths was the heavy metal waste from the mining that was poured into the community's water.
In cultures and states where telling the exact truth can lead to one's death, it's always more convenient to wrap the story in myth. Those who unpackage the myths, like Marcelo Rivera, often disappear into thin air -- that is, until they're found, as he was, naked, castrated and murdered after being horribly tortured: his fingernails had all been pulled out; his face had been disfigured so much that his brother could only identify him by his nose; the beatings had broken his skull. Finally, after he had been strangled to death, his body was thrown in a sixty-foot well, covered with chicken manure, dirt, and pieces of meat.
The right wing press did, of course, repeat the official story that Marcelo had fallen in with "mara" gangsters and drank with them, but editors had the integrity to also print a counterpoint that everyone who knew Marcelo had quite clear: that the victim of the unholy triad of moneyed power in El Salvador never drank nor hung out with the maras. His hero was Monsignor Romero and Miguel says the last time he saw his brother he was wearing a t-shirt with the image of that martyr on it.
There's a significant difference between El Salvador under the FMLN where power in the media is actively being contested, and Honduras where there is a blackout of the opposition perspective. Another difference is that the ARENA party has lost control of the military and has to rely on "maras" to do its dirty work while in Honduras the government hasn't yet had to consider recruiting "civilian contractors" from the 100,000 or so "maras" operating in Central America. Thus far the military has been quite happy to do the job of eliminating or terrorizing opponents under the "golpista" Honduran government (coup government) of Micheletti. On July 5, for example, the military fired with machine guns on a crowd numbering in the thousands. This is the unofficial story, of course. The papers, including El Heraldo, claimed that the military had fired on the crowd with rubber bullets. Officially, also, only one person died. Protestors say that there were eight or nine victims who died on the way to the hospital, and whose bodies were disappeared. Given the machine gun fire, it's only surprising that more didn't die.
The Honduran government of the 1980s found it had no need to replicate the widespread massacres being carried out in El Salvador and Guatemala. It was able to selectively eliminate a couple hundred leaders of the opposition and take care of its problem with the "subversives." But in order to maintain control over the rest of the population and assure its docility and compliance, like anywhere else, it required a press willing and able to cloak a damning reality in a less threatening myth.
Once again Honduran reporters are being called in to do overtime in psyops. Granted, the press in Honduras under the "golpista" government isn't any worse than Fox News. That being said, everything having to do with the news around the recent "golpe" (coup) has a quality that ranges from surreal interpretation to black propaganda. It would seem that the journalists of the major papers of Honduras really were frustrated writers of dystopian science fiction.
One Honduran tells me she saw a murder in her neighborhood that was multiplied in the journalistic alchemy of the Honduran press by six the following day. I keep that in mind as I sit here in my hotel room in Tegucigalpa, leafing through what my wife back home would call "the daily pack of lies."
As I try to discern the Honduran narrative of the "golpe" I recall the copy of the article I left behind in El Salvador, printed in a right wing paper -- and, unfortunately, the newspapers are all right wing in El Salvador, with the exception of the Diario Co-Latino, the latter a blessing not bestowed upon Honduras. The Salvadoran article was based on a piece that appeared in Honduras' El Heraldo. The author claimed to have in possession secret documents that indicated that President Hugo Chavez was working with a large number of "maras" who he was arming and paying, and also infiltrating his own military to do a lightning attack and kill high-ranking officials of the Micheletti government. Supposedly residents have seen armed men in inaccessible regions of the country. Does that sound like the narrative of "Al Qaeda sleeper cells" doped up on the Koran ready to attack Bush's America? Only the names, places and drugs of choice have changed.
I'm looking here at a full page ad in La Tribuna from Tuesday, the 21st, paid for by "Hondurans for Democracy." There is a photo, in the top half, of Chavez aiming a gun. Beside the photo is the caption "Chavez calls for violence and wants bloodshed in Honduras" Beneath that picture is a crowd shot of Hondurans dressed in white (the color of the Conservative Nationalist Party) and holding the blue flags of Honduras. The caption reads, "But Hondurans want peace, unity, democracy and freedom." Ah, behold the foreign devil who has brought death to our peaceful little country. It's a variation on the diabolic gringo myth, but in reverse, since Chavez has been a counterforce to the "deadly gringo."
The following day, (Wednesday, July 22) El Heraldo has an interview with Alejando Peña Esclusa, a right wing Colombian who is president of UnoAmerica, described as "a democracy organization (sic: organización democracia) of Colombia." The headline reads, "The FARC [Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia), Narcotrafficking and ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas) are all the same thing." The surrealism doesn't end with the title, which makes laughable connections between a program of solidarity created by Venezuela to share its wealth with loans and grants to Latin America to facilitate growth and development, and narcotics trafficking and a guerrilla that, while it taxes the cocaine trade, seems to have fewer connections to the actual trade than does the Uribe government.
Esclusa develops his surreal story in this large-spread article on page 6: He says that the coup "has kept Honduras from falling into the project of Hugo Chavez and saved democracy from the Constitutional coup which Zelaya hoped to undertake." What was the "Constitutional coup" Zelaya was plotting? To bring people more deeply into the political process of the country by asking them if they'd like to write a new constitution. So according to Esclusa, the military coup was a way of saving "democracy" by taking it away. And the project of Chavez, well, ask 60-70% of Venezuelans who support Chavez and they'll tell you that his project is to move the country from "representative to participatory democracy." But the interview with Esclusa gets even wilder: "the principle element of the disturbances in Honduras is not "Mel" Zelaya nor the discussion of whether or not he returns" (this would come as a surprise to the hundreds of thousands of people marching daily in Honduras for the single purpose of having their president return) "but it is Hugo Chavez who finances the dirty campaign, buying minds ("conciencias") so as to disinform about Honduran reality."
Again, the utterly implausible charge that Chavez, and not the golpistas, is behind all the country's problems. For Esclusa, the solution is simple: Isolate Chavez from Honduras and all the problems will be solved.
What's fascinating about this analysis is that there's not even a hint of truth in it. First of all, the marches aren't financed by anyone but the marchers. And secondly, the only Venezuelan I've seen has been an old friend who is a documentary filmmaker--and probably the last Venezuelan journalist in the country since Telesur was chased out. Noticeably absent from the marches is even the slightest mention of Chavez or Venezuela, neither of which appear in any of the chants, placards, discussions, programs, or anything else. There's only one message: "Golpistas Leave! Bring Mel Home."
In this surreal world where Chavez is working with narco gangsters and infiltrating along the coast, paying people to demonstrate, the poor golpistas are also unfairly being persecuted by "the OAS, UN and the international community."
This line was repeated to me the other day in the hotel by the woman behind the desk, who identified herself as a National Party supporter. She almost whined as she told me that "everyone is against us." Does that sound a little paranoid? When a sane person is told that everyone is opposed to what he or she is doing, that person begins to reflect again on his or her actions. Not so Micheletti; not so Mr. Esclusa; not so the National Party and Liberal Party members who went out on the 23rd on the march for "peace, unity, democracy and freedom."
Then the bombshell: According to Mr. Esclusa, the FARC, a guerrilla force of 30,000 with shrinking power, is the force behind all the presidents who are part of ALBA which is, in turn, a project of the FARC and financed by cocaine money.
If this were the ravings of a madman in the street, we could afford to ignore him. But this interview is published in one of Honduras' two major newspapers, with big headlines, a photo of Esclusa, on page 6. And obviously the government is taking this same paranoid siege narrative seriously because on page eight is the story and headline, "Honduras Breaks Diplomatic Relations with Venezuela" and the subhead reads, "Venezuelan officials, in a confrontational attitude, warn they won't leave the country. The [Honduras] Chancellor cancels the consular visa of Iranians for fear of terrorism."
Now that's interesting. Honduras breaks relations with Venezuela and it's Venezuela that is being confrontational. Takes you back to the bad old days of Bush and the Saddam Hussein "menace" doesn't it? Then there are the Iranians, whose government has never so much as threatened anyone in Latin America, yet who now "feared as terrorist." Wild rumor, speculation on a fantastic level: Vice Chancellor Marta Lorena Alvarado says that "we've confirmed the existence of terrorist Iranian cells in Latin America and considering that there are direct trips from Teheran... to Venezuela and from Venezuela to Nicaragua... there's concern that there's been a terrorist incursion into [Honduras]."
Here we've definitively returned to the bad old days of Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush with the Amber, Yellow and Orange alerts when supposed "sleeper" cells that were never uncovered or identified were sleepwalking the US.
These are but a few of the jewels from the Honduran press. You could do with it as I did when I first confronted it in the hotel with the woman behind the desk: you could try reasoning with it. You could, as I did, say, isn't the very definition of a coup when an elected representative is removed from office and, rather than being held and tried and convicted or returned to office, is sent out of the country into exile at gunpoint. But the response is just as wild: "They were trying to prevent bloodshed. If they kept him here, his followers would cause bloodshed." But we're to believe that the people who sent the military to the airport on July 5th to machine gun protesters are really concerned about bloodshed? By the look on the woman's face, a gringo has come to town and poisoned the water.
Clifton Ross is the writer and director of Venezuela: Revolution from the Inside Out and Translations from Silence, a book of poetry introduced by Jack Hirschman available at: www.freedomvoices.org. He can be reached at: clifross@gmail.com
A Military Coup is Violence; A President's Return is Restoration of Constitutional Order
By Laura Carlsen, Americas MexicoBlog, July 24, 2009
The capacity of the press and politicians to twist reality never ceases to amaze. In recent days, powerful interests in both these camps have attempted to spin Honduran President Manuel Zelaya's planned return to his homeland as a provocation of violence for which he, and only he, will be responsible.
Why would there be violence if an elected president returned to the country he governs?
Those who are carefully preparing the script to exonerate acts of the coup and blame the president and the Hondurans who accompany him for any violence the Armed Forces should inflict on them are hoping we have already forgotten that part. The June 28 military coup forcibly exiled President Zelaya to Costa Rica, setting him on a 27-day peregrination to every major international forum in the hemisphere. He has garnered a long list of resolutions and declarations calling for his immediate reinstatement, representing unanimity among the nations of the world to support his return.
As Zelaya prepares to enter Honduras from Nicaragua, thousands of supporters are gathering at the border to receive him. They carry no arms and have proven over the past weeks their commitment to non-violence, even when under lethal attack by soldiers. They have had to scrounge up the money to make the trip in a nation where 70% of the population lives in poverty. They have had to pass military checkpoints established to restrict freedom of movement, where they are harassed and the tires of their rickety buses are shot out.
The U.S. State Department has been dodging the application of stricter sanctions and calling for commitment to the mediation process despite its evident breakdown. Secretary of State Clinton and State Department spokespersons have said the United States does not support Zelaya's return. Phillip Crowley went on to imply that Zelaya would be responsible for violence should he decide to return. In response to a direct question regarding the president's return, he replied "Any step that would add to the risk of violence in Honduras or in the area, we think would be unwise."
The Coup's Monopoly Hold on Violence
Violence doesn't just materialize in a given situation. There are those who perpetrate it and those who suffer the brunt of it. Each individual makes a personal decision and bears a personal responsibility. Zelaya recognized that in appealing to Honduran soldiers serving the coup:
"I also want to address the Honduran army," he said from the Nicaragua border yesterday. "Dear Honduran soldiers, do not point your rifles against the representative of the people, against the people. Those rifles are meant to defend the people, not attack the people." Zelaya stated that his side will cross with "the flag of peace."
In fact, the violence in Honduras since the coup is remarkably one-side. There is not one case of security forces killed by protesters. The International Human Rights Observation Mission in Honduras released a report this week documenting five murders of opposition members by coup security or irregular forces. The report cites paramilitary activities, threats, the suspension of civil liberties, arbitrary deportations, threats and attacks on media outlets, and a lack of effective recourse for the protection and exercise of human rights in the country. It concludes, "The International Mission corroborated the existence of grave and systematic violations of human rights since the coup d'etat." The report recommends a series of trade and diplomatic sanctions.
The Perils of Playing the Waiting Game
The shadow of the military coup has been cast throughout the entire country. There's a sunset curfew in place along the frontier lands where Zelaya plans to cross the border. No man, woman or child is allowed in the streets after six o'clock. In this situation, it is understandable why Hondurans have lost patience with the mediation process.
Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department has insisted that Zelaya wait out a stalled mediation process led by President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica. Zelaya attended the first round, when coup leader Roberto Micheletti packed up his cards and went home, blocking any possible agreement. At the second round last weekend, Zelaya delegates agreed in principle to an Arias proposal and the coup once again vetoed it. On Wednesday, Arias made yet another proposal. The main point—the return of Zelaya to power—was rejected again in statements yesterday by the de facto foreign ministry.
Reuters reports that although the latest proposal is supposedly being examined by the de facto regime, its foreign minister Carlos Lopez, said Zelaya's return was "not negotiable." The coup has vowed to arrest Zelaya if he enters his country.
Lopez added, "It is not the talks that failed, but the proposal." The distinction is patently absurd, since the return of Zelaya has always been the first prerequisite for a solution in the talks and is contained in every international resolution on the conflict.
This has even Arias, who has tried to appear optimistic about the mediation, exasperated. He said on Wednesday "It [the coup] is completely isolated. They have become the North Korea or the Albania of Central America," and said it was time for them to compromise.
So what exactly should the world be waiting for? And why should it leave the timing for the restoration of democracy left in the hands of the same coup leaders who shattered it in the first place?
This not only does not make sense, it is extremely dangerous. Every day that goes by, shows signs of the consolidation of the criminal right. The coup has presumably spent millions of dollars (lobbyists like Lanny Davis don't come cheap) in public relations to influence Congress and public opinion but probably even more importantly to galvanize rightwing and business support.
Now Republican congressman Connie Mack has stated he will be leading a delegation to Honduras to talk directly with the Honduran "government." He reiterated that he does not believe the expulsion of President Zelaya was the result of a coup d'etat. A small group in the U.S. Congress has been working hard to push against the consensus of the international community to assert the supposed legitimacy of the coup. The press reports that coup leaders met with rightwing President Uribe in Colombia to build alliances. The Colombian government later denied reports that it had offered its support.
The situation grows more volatile, not because of Zelaya's planned return but because each day is another day of confrontation, another day of military rule, another day of human rights violations. Both sides are growing in strength and growing in determination. In this context, the sooner Zelaya is restored to power, the better.
For More Information:
The Criminal Right and the Obama Ultimatum (Jul 13, 2009)
http://americasmexico.blogspot.com/2009/07/criminal-right-in-honduras-and-obama.html
Mediation Hopes Slip as Coup Leader Returns to Honduras (Jul 10, 2009)
http://americasmexico.blogspot.com/2009/07/mediation-hopes-slip-as-coup-leader.html
Clinton Announces Mediation of Honduras Conflict, Zelaya Says Talks to "Plan Withdrawal of the Coup" (Jul 7, 2009)
http://americasmexico.blogspot.com/2009/07/clinton-announces-arias-to-mediate.html
The capacity of the press and politicians to twist reality never ceases to amaze. In recent days, powerful interests in both these camps have attempted to spin Honduran President Manuel Zelaya's planned return to his homeland as a provocation of violence for which he, and only he, will be responsible.
Why would there be violence if an elected president returned to the country he governs?
Those who are carefully preparing the script to exonerate acts of the coup and blame the president and the Hondurans who accompany him for any violence the Armed Forces should inflict on them are hoping we have already forgotten that part. The June 28 military coup forcibly exiled President Zelaya to Costa Rica, setting him on a 27-day peregrination to every major international forum in the hemisphere. He has garnered a long list of resolutions and declarations calling for his immediate reinstatement, representing unanimity among the nations of the world to support his return.
As Zelaya prepares to enter Honduras from Nicaragua, thousands of supporters are gathering at the border to receive him. They carry no arms and have proven over the past weeks their commitment to non-violence, even when under lethal attack by soldiers. They have had to scrounge up the money to make the trip in a nation where 70% of the population lives in poverty. They have had to pass military checkpoints established to restrict freedom of movement, where they are harassed and the tires of their rickety buses are shot out.
The U.S. State Department has been dodging the application of stricter sanctions and calling for commitment to the mediation process despite its evident breakdown. Secretary of State Clinton and State Department spokespersons have said the United States does not support Zelaya's return. Phillip Crowley went on to imply that Zelaya would be responsible for violence should he decide to return. In response to a direct question regarding the president's return, he replied "Any step that would add to the risk of violence in Honduras or in the area, we think would be unwise."
The Coup's Monopoly Hold on Violence
Violence doesn't just materialize in a given situation. There are those who perpetrate it and those who suffer the brunt of it. Each individual makes a personal decision and bears a personal responsibility. Zelaya recognized that in appealing to Honduran soldiers serving the coup:
"I also want to address the Honduran army," he said from the Nicaragua border yesterday. "Dear Honduran soldiers, do not point your rifles against the representative of the people, against the people. Those rifles are meant to defend the people, not attack the people." Zelaya stated that his side will cross with "the flag of peace."
In fact, the violence in Honduras since the coup is remarkably one-side. There is not one case of security forces killed by protesters. The International Human Rights Observation Mission in Honduras released a report this week documenting five murders of opposition members by coup security or irregular forces. The report cites paramilitary activities, threats, the suspension of civil liberties, arbitrary deportations, threats and attacks on media outlets, and a lack of effective recourse for the protection and exercise of human rights in the country. It concludes, "The International Mission corroborated the existence of grave and systematic violations of human rights since the coup d'etat." The report recommends a series of trade and diplomatic sanctions.
The Perils of Playing the Waiting Game
The shadow of the military coup has been cast throughout the entire country. There's a sunset curfew in place along the frontier lands where Zelaya plans to cross the border. No man, woman or child is allowed in the streets after six o'clock. In this situation, it is understandable why Hondurans have lost patience with the mediation process.
Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department has insisted that Zelaya wait out a stalled mediation process led by President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica. Zelaya attended the first round, when coup leader Roberto Micheletti packed up his cards and went home, blocking any possible agreement. At the second round last weekend, Zelaya delegates agreed in principle to an Arias proposal and the coup once again vetoed it. On Wednesday, Arias made yet another proposal. The main point—the return of Zelaya to power—was rejected again in statements yesterday by the de facto foreign ministry.
Reuters reports that although the latest proposal is supposedly being examined by the de facto regime, its foreign minister Carlos Lopez, said Zelaya's return was "not negotiable." The coup has vowed to arrest Zelaya if he enters his country.
Lopez added, "It is not the talks that failed, but the proposal." The distinction is patently absurd, since the return of Zelaya has always been the first prerequisite for a solution in the talks and is contained in every international resolution on the conflict.
This has even Arias, who has tried to appear optimistic about the mediation, exasperated. He said on Wednesday "It [the coup] is completely isolated. They have become the North Korea or the Albania of Central America," and said it was time for them to compromise.
So what exactly should the world be waiting for? And why should it leave the timing for the restoration of democracy left in the hands of the same coup leaders who shattered it in the first place?
This not only does not make sense, it is extremely dangerous. Every day that goes by, shows signs of the consolidation of the criminal right. The coup has presumably spent millions of dollars (lobbyists like Lanny Davis don't come cheap) in public relations to influence Congress and public opinion but probably even more importantly to galvanize rightwing and business support.
Now Republican congressman Connie Mack has stated he will be leading a delegation to Honduras to talk directly with the Honduran "government." He reiterated that he does not believe the expulsion of President Zelaya was the result of a coup d'etat. A small group in the U.S. Congress has been working hard to push against the consensus of the international community to assert the supposed legitimacy of the coup. The press reports that coup leaders met with rightwing President Uribe in Colombia to build alliances. The Colombian government later denied reports that it had offered its support.
The situation grows more volatile, not because of Zelaya's planned return but because each day is another day of confrontation, another day of military rule, another day of human rights violations. Both sides are growing in strength and growing in determination. In this context, the sooner Zelaya is restored to power, the better.
For More Information:
The Criminal Right and the Obama Ultimatum (Jul 13, 2009)
http://americasmexico.blogspot.com/2009/07/criminal-right-in-honduras-and-obama.html
Mediation Hopes Slip as Coup Leader Returns to Honduras (Jul 10, 2009)
http://americasmexico.blogspot.com/2009/07/mediation-hopes-slip-as-coup-leader.html
Clinton Announces Mediation of Honduras Conflict, Zelaya Says Talks to "Plan Withdrawal of the Coup" (Jul 7, 2009)
http://americasmexico.blogspot.com/2009/07/clinton-announces-arias-to-mediate.html
Honduras Talks Postponed; Zelaya Says "On His Way" To Honduras; Coup Regime Expels Venezuelans
By Eva Golinger, Postcards from the Revolution, July 22, 2009
Supposedly the "final" talks scheduled for today in Costa Rica - after President Oscar Arias, the designated (via Washington) mediator, requested an additional 72-hours on Sunday, when the talks had failed - have now been postponed. Last night, President Manuel Zelaya announced his return to Honduras today, and charged chief military commander General Romeo Vasquez - heavily involved in the coup d'etat that ousted Zelaya over three weeks ago - with his safety. "If anything happens to me", said President Zelaya last night in a press conference from Nicaragua, "General Romeo Vasquez is responsible". The Honduran military, trained, armed and funded by the United States, which also maintains a major strategic military base in the Central American nation, kidnapped and forced President Zelaya into exile on June 28, and since then has militarized the streets, repressed the people protesting the coup, assassinated, injured and detained over 1000 Hondurans, and shut down media outlets reporting on the events in the country.
Coup regime leader Roberto Micheletti declared his delegation will not attend the talks today in Costa Rica, claiming that Arias is drafting a new proposal that allegedly will "appease" the illegal regime. The main issue of contention is President Zelaya's return to power. The coup regime refuses to allow the constitutionally elected head of state to assume his position again, despite the fact that the current presidential term ends on January 27, 2009 and the Honduran Constitution does not allow for reelection.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a "tough" phone call to Micheletti on Sunday - coincidentally as Arias announced he was requesting an additional 72-hours to arrive at an agreement between the two parties. Clinton's call to Micheletti was an effort to arrive at some kind of resolution that would allow Washington to save face. So far, the Department of State has declared the events in Honduras do not constitute a "coup d'etat" (see this post) despite the fact that the whole rest of the world sees it as a coup. Washington is also the only government with a remaining ambassador in place in Honduras, and has broken absolutely no diplomatic, military or economic ties with the coup regime. Yesterday the European Union suspended over $90 million in aid to Honduras because of the coup.
The coup regime also issued an order to the Venezuelan Embassy declaring all Venezuelans to leave the country immediately. Nevertheless, Venezuela responded by stating it does not recognize the order from the illegal coup regime, since it does not constitutionally represent Honduras. The Venezuelan Ambassador was recalled right after the coup, but some diplomats do remain at the embassy in Tegucigalpa and have been key in protecting international journalists that have come under attack by the regime.
Meanwhile, the Honduran people are still out in the streets protesting the coup, on this 25th day since the de facto regime was first installed. The economy remains shut down by striking workers, schools remain closed because of teacher's strikes and there are disturbances throughout the nation. A national curfew is still in effect, imposed by the dictatorial regime.
The new Panamanian government, led by recently inaugurated President Martinelli, a multi-millionaire neoliberal conservative, has applauded the Honduran military for "keeping order" in the country. Apparently, Panama is recognizing the coup regime and working closely with Micheletti to resolve the growing economic problems in Honduras. Micheletti and Martinelli are old friends, both members of several business councils in Central and Latin America.
The longer things stall, the coup regime consolidates. On Sunday, a month will have passed since the coup d'etat was executed. Hopefully, it will be defeated before then.
Supposedly the "final" talks scheduled for today in Costa Rica - after President Oscar Arias, the designated (via Washington) mediator, requested an additional 72-hours on Sunday, when the talks had failed - have now been postponed. Last night, President Manuel Zelaya announced his return to Honduras today, and charged chief military commander General Romeo Vasquez - heavily involved in the coup d'etat that ousted Zelaya over three weeks ago - with his safety. "If anything happens to me", said President Zelaya last night in a press conference from Nicaragua, "General Romeo Vasquez is responsible". The Honduran military, trained, armed and funded by the United States, which also maintains a major strategic military base in the Central American nation, kidnapped and forced President Zelaya into exile on June 28, and since then has militarized the streets, repressed the people protesting the coup, assassinated, injured and detained over 1000 Hondurans, and shut down media outlets reporting on the events in the country.
Coup regime leader Roberto Micheletti declared his delegation will not attend the talks today in Costa Rica, claiming that Arias is drafting a new proposal that allegedly will "appease" the illegal regime. The main issue of contention is President Zelaya's return to power. The coup regime refuses to allow the constitutionally elected head of state to assume his position again, despite the fact that the current presidential term ends on January 27, 2009 and the Honduran Constitution does not allow for reelection.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a "tough" phone call to Micheletti on Sunday - coincidentally as Arias announced he was requesting an additional 72-hours to arrive at an agreement between the two parties. Clinton's call to Micheletti was an effort to arrive at some kind of resolution that would allow Washington to save face. So far, the Department of State has declared the events in Honduras do not constitute a "coup d'etat" (see this post) despite the fact that the whole rest of the world sees it as a coup. Washington is also the only government with a remaining ambassador in place in Honduras, and has broken absolutely no diplomatic, military or economic ties with the coup regime. Yesterday the European Union suspended over $90 million in aid to Honduras because of the coup.
The coup regime also issued an order to the Venezuelan Embassy declaring all Venezuelans to leave the country immediately. Nevertheless, Venezuela responded by stating it does not recognize the order from the illegal coup regime, since it does not constitutionally represent Honduras. The Venezuelan Ambassador was recalled right after the coup, but some diplomats do remain at the embassy in Tegucigalpa and have been key in protecting international journalists that have come under attack by the regime.
Meanwhile, the Honduran people are still out in the streets protesting the coup, on this 25th day since the de facto regime was first installed. The economy remains shut down by striking workers, schools remain closed because of teacher's strikes and there are disturbances throughout the nation. A national curfew is still in effect, imposed by the dictatorial regime.
The new Panamanian government, led by recently inaugurated President Martinelli, a multi-millionaire neoliberal conservative, has applauded the Honduran military for "keeping order" in the country. Apparently, Panama is recognizing the coup regime and working closely with Micheletti to resolve the growing economic problems in Honduras. Micheletti and Martinelli are old friends, both members of several business councils in Central and Latin America.
The longer things stall, the coup regime consolidates. On Sunday, a month will have passed since the coup d'etat was executed. Hopefully, it will be defeated before then.
The Criminal Right and the Obama Ultimatum
By Laura Carlsen, Americas MexicoBlog, July 13, 2009
This is a video of an anti-Zelaya rally taken just days after the military coup in Honduras and shown on the the coup-run national television channel. It is typical of constant broadcasts from the coup-controlled press that seek to pound into the heads of Hondurans and the world the 1984-ish messages that run along the bottom of the screen in Spanish: "Our government is recognized by all Hondurans," "On to the elections next November!" "We are under a legally constituted government," "Substitution is in our legal norms," "Hondurans on the side of the Constitution," "Honduras has gained democracy."
Never mind that no Constitution in the civilized world, including Honduras', condones Armed Forces kidnapping a democratically elected president. Or that no country would recognize elections staged by a military coup. Or that the majority of Hondurans disagree with the forced exile of Zelaya and hundreds of thousands have hit the street calling for his return. The messages here are standard practice when attempting to justify the unjustifiable.
But this montage of doublespeak begins with an interesting twist. Initiating the rally, the speaker says, "We are not alone. I want to recognize a brave man by the name of Robert Carmona." The crowd, which would be deemed a "mob" by the mainstream press if it were against the coup, cheers wildly.
So who is Robert Carmona?
The man with the anglicized name who has become a hero to the Honduran coup is actually a Venezuelan businessman and lawyer and a veteran of rightwing coups. Carmona is credited with writing the decrees for the short-lived coup d'etat against President Hugo Chavez in April of 2002. The Apr 26, 2002 Miami Herald reports that after that claim to fame he arrived in the US the week of the 15th, where he sought asylum.
Carmona is co-founder of the Arcadia Foundation. The Arcadia Foundation bills itself as an anti-corruption group but its political agenda is up-front. Although it says it works in many countries, the media section lists only Honduras in specific actions.
The foundation launched a campaign in Honduras focused on the telecommunications company Hondutel. In the video Carmona is recognized as "the first to denounce the maneuvers of Hondutel" and thanked for leading to the coup's arrest, the day before, of former head of Hondutel, Marcelo Chimirri. Chimirri is among more than 1,000 people arrested by the regime since the June 28 coup. The campaign was aimed at weakening and ultimately bringing down the Zelaya government and the hat-tip at the rally explicitly revealed its role in the overthrow.
Honduras was finishing up an investigation of Chimirri, charged with accepting kickbacks for re-routing calls through a U.S. private carrier. The Justice Department fined the carrier, LatiNode, in the case.
In the end, armed force proved a faster route than the slow wheels of justice. Regardless of the merits of the case, the politicized nature of Arcadia's anti-corruption offensive was clear from the start. Carmona, along with Otto Reich, charged President Zelaya of complicity. The issue grew so hot that Zelaya threatened to file a defamation claim against Reich.
Otto Reich is another name that has come up repeatedly since the Honduran coup as the man behind the scenes. Although Arcadia has denied a formal affiliation, Reich was intimately involved in Arcadia's anti-corruption charges against the Zelaya government. Honduran government officials note that he was formally featured on the Arcadia site up until Sep 10, 2008 when he was erased from the web page. Reich is infamous for his involvement in the illegal Iran-Contra affair. A 1987 report by the U.S. Comptroller-General, “found that some of the efforts of Mr. Reich’s public diplomacy office were ‘prohibited, covert propaganda activities,’ ‘beyond the range of acceptable agency public information activities….’"
Under fire, Reich felt compelled to pen a guest column in the Miami Herald entitled "I Did Not Orchestrate Coup in Honduras." He spends the entire first half of this article attacking Venezuelan ambassador Roy Chadderton who denounced Reich's involvement in the OAS. He then goes on to say that he would have allowed legal processes to take their course.
Reich does not mention, or deny, his involvement with the Arcadia campaign or say anything about his activities in Honduras. He concludes, "Without my involvement, these steps (the legal charges issued after the coup) were taken. Therefore, under Honduran law, the new government is legal and constitutional. The United States should not betray our values by joining the efforts of some of the most repressive and undemocratic leaders of this hemisphere to seek the reinstatement of lawbreaker Mel Zelaya."
Reich thus contradicts his own title, which calls the events a "coup," and in passing accuses the entire 34-nation Organization of American States that have called for Zelaya's reinstatement "some of the most repressive and undemocratic leaders of this hemisphere."
Carmona and Arcadia's involvement in Honduras did not stop with the coup. Honduran Radio Globo reports that Carmona returned to Honduras after the coup. Luis Galdames, who hosts the radio program Detras de la Noticia, located him at the downtown Plaza Libertador Hotel in Tegucigalpa under a false name. He reportedly was in attendance at the above rally.
Why did Arcadia choose Honduras? A brief review of Carmona's recent writings reveals his abhorrence of progressive governments in Latin America and his broad political agenda to defeat them. Most recently he published a piece against the Feb 2009 referendum to lift term limits, saying "The regime (of Hugo Chavez) is desperate, faced with its eventual defeat next Feb 15. Venezuelans no longer believe in the revolutionary farce, in the equality it professes, in Chavez's participatory democracy. Only its beneficiaries and collaborators, some who scarcely believe in it themselves, accompany this destructive project in Venezuela." The referendum passed easily with 54% of the vote.
Carmona also campaigned heavily against the election of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, comparing him to Chavez and calling him a wolf in sheep's clothing.
This string of failures in popular elections no doubt soured Carmona on the popular will. After exhorting, "The utter failure of populist regimes in the region dangerously opens up a new stage in the political history of the region. Let us hope that the people react in a more civilized manner than their political leaders and find a path that guarantees peace and stability in new societies", it has been the people who have continued to vote for candidates and measures calling for more equitable distribution of wealth and participatory measures like the constitutional referendum proposed in Honduras.
I attempted to reach Arcadia to find out its position on the Honduran coup and ask about the Reich connection and the recent activities of Carmona. The Washington and Mexico City offices answered with a cheery recording on the foundation's fight against corruption but then routed the call to voice mail with no human intervention. The New York office recording replied that it does not receive anonymous callers.
The Weakest Lamb in the Flock
Arcadia picked Honduras to block the spread of "populism" by pushing for the fall of Zelaya. It picked Honduras because of its failures in other countries and because Honduras is a small, poor nation with a somewhat erratic president with a low approval rating and weak institutions. In other words, the international right picked Honduras because it was the weakest lamb in the flock.
The coup has consistently portrayed Zelaya as a tool of Hugo Chavez—you see more anti-Chavez signs than anti-Zelaya signs in the video. Coup leaders have developed a message that hides the aspirations of the Honduran poor (70% of the population) for a more fair and equal society. The desperate move to block the vote-on-a-vote over a constitutional assembly reflected their deep suspicion that it would win.
Honduras is a land of deep contradictions where an oligarchy has attempted to destroy logic through the force of repetition. Logic and basic human rights dictate that something has to give in the economic model. No society would be considered viable for long where the top 10% of the population earns 42% of the income, the free-zone wage is 63 cents an hour and more than 10% of its population has been forced to migrate to the United States. A population forced to live under those conditions cannot be called free. Whether or not you agree with what Zelaya did or how he did it, his overwhelming support among poor people demonstrates that he was attempting to take steps toward increasing their wellbeing.
That invariably comes at the price of the haves vs. the have-nots. And that's why Honduras has become a battleground for the international right—to preserve the privileges of the haves. Today the critical battle on that battlefield is to defeat the coup in the name of law and democracy; it bears repeating--a military coup cannot be tolerated in our Hemisphere or anywhere else on the planet.
But the coup would not exist if it weren't for the battle against entrenched interests and for greater equality.
The U.S. Must Choose Sides
Ironically, as coup supporters scream "Whoever doesn't wave the flag is Venezuelan" at their rallies (did Carmona wave his flag, or not?), they have received significant outside help from the Venezuelan and U.S. right and other well-funded and organized rightwing organizations that will emerge as we continue to investigate the roots of the coup.
Despite the involvement of former U.S. diplomat Otto Reich, if the international campaign against the elected government of Zelaya were entirely run and carried out by private organizations like Arcadia, there would be little room for citizens to pressure the U.S. government. The revolving door that permits former diplomats like Reich to use contacts and inside information to carry out political agendas after leaving office, is an established and regrettable pillar of U.S. politics.
But unfortunately, efforts to topple the Honduran government do not end with Arcadia and raise questions about the involvement of U.S. government agencies. These are the opaque "democracy promotion" programs, in particular the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) that in turn channels funds to other government-affiliated and non-government organizations in Honduras and the U.S.
According to NED reports the International Republican Institute (IRI) received $550,000 "To promote and enhance the participation of think tanks in Mexico and Honduras as 'pressure groups' to impel political parties to develop concrete positions on key issues. Once these positions are developed, IRI will support initiatives to implement said positions into the 2009 campaigns. IRI will place special emphasis on Honduras, which has scheduled presidential and parliamentary elections in November 2009."
Under another NED grant, IRI received another $400,000 to "equip elected officials with practical institutional management skills" in Honduras, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic.
Obviously these "positions on key issues" are not politically neutral and represent U.S. interests, and yet the IRI does not specify to taxpayers what they are or whose U.S. interests they represent. Nor does it specify the criteria for selection of elected local officials within the country. Many of the groups who have reportedly received these funds now form part of the coalition supporting the coup. Similar programs were found to favor local governments rising up against the government of Evo Morales in Bolivia.
What little we know of these programs does not prove by itself U.S. government instigation of the coup. But in terms of self-determination and democracy, they constitute a reprehensible form of intervention, as well as being notoriously secretive with public funds.
It is no coincidence that Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen, strongly anti-Castro and ranking Republican on the house Foreign Affairs Committee, proposed an amendment to cut funding to the OAS for "its knee-jerk support of Manuel Zelaya" and transfer the $15 million to NED. The ideological bent of the institution is demonstrable and virtually undisputed.
The indigenous organization OFRANEH made these links in a recent communiqué:
"If a total economic blockade is not established against the de facto government, the polarization of the country will continue, promoted by the existing disinformation and the clamor of groups close to the most feudal sectors of the country. From the churches to the business groups to the shrunken middle class, the effects of the work of NED and the USAID can be felt in the country. For the OFRANEH, it is urgent that the Obama administration stop the work of intelligence agencies dedicated to destabilization and disinformation since they seek to create conflict between groups supporting the coup and the defenders of democracy. The government of the United States will be directly responsible for any bloodshed."
The U.S. government, including the Obama administration, has said it does not agree with Zelaya's policies. The Bush administration sought to isolate and undermine ALBA countries and center-left governments throughout its tenure. At stake was not so much an economic model in the abstract but the powerful interests of transnational corporations and national elites.
In Russia, Obama made a strong statement on the Honduran coup saying that self-determination is a principle that should be defended regardless of political differences. The U.S. government took strong steps early on to join with the international community to condemn the coup and call for the reinstatement of Zelaya. That hasn't worked. The attempt to pass the matter on to mediation has not worked either.
President Zelaya has issued an ultimatum saying he will consider the talks failed unless he is reinstated in the next meeting. The Obama administration also faces an ultimatum, this one from the international community and Hondurans putting their lives on the line in an attempt to restore their democracy: be consistent in upholding principles above shady interests or the attempt to build a new, respectful foreign policy will be considered hypocrisy.
In the short term this means:
1. Issuing the definition of the coup as a coup and suspending remaining aid as stipulated by law;
2. Removing Ambassador Hugo Llorens. In the strict sense, the Bush-era ambassador should not merely be withdrawn in line with the withdrawal of other ambassadors to the country but should be fired. At best, he was inept in avoiding the coup; at worst, he didn't really try.
3. Assuring the safe and immediate return of President Zelaya.
In the longer term, a public review of "democracy promotion" programs like NED and IRI forms part of the urgent need to coordinate a new consistent foreign policy in the region that will demonstrate the primacy of diplomacy and the principles of non-intervention and self-determination.
This is a video of an anti-Zelaya rally taken just days after the military coup in Honduras and shown on the the coup-run national television channel. It is typical of constant broadcasts from the coup-controlled press that seek to pound into the heads of Hondurans and the world the 1984-ish messages that run along the bottom of the screen in Spanish: "Our government is recognized by all Hondurans," "On to the elections next November!" "We are under a legally constituted government," "Substitution is in our legal norms," "Hondurans on the side of the Constitution," "Honduras has gained democracy."
Never mind that no Constitution in the civilized world, including Honduras', condones Armed Forces kidnapping a democratically elected president. Or that no country would recognize elections staged by a military coup. Or that the majority of Hondurans disagree with the forced exile of Zelaya and hundreds of thousands have hit the street calling for his return. The messages here are standard practice when attempting to justify the unjustifiable.
But this montage of doublespeak begins with an interesting twist. Initiating the rally, the speaker says, "We are not alone. I want to recognize a brave man by the name of Robert Carmona." The crowd, which would be deemed a "mob" by the mainstream press if it were against the coup, cheers wildly.
So who is Robert Carmona?
The man with the anglicized name who has become a hero to the Honduran coup is actually a Venezuelan businessman and lawyer and a veteran of rightwing coups. Carmona is credited with writing the decrees for the short-lived coup d'etat against President Hugo Chavez in April of 2002. The Apr 26, 2002 Miami Herald reports that after that claim to fame he arrived in the US the week of the 15th, where he sought asylum.
Carmona is co-founder of the Arcadia Foundation. The Arcadia Foundation bills itself as an anti-corruption group but its political agenda is up-front. Although it says it works in many countries, the media section lists only Honduras in specific actions.
The foundation launched a campaign in Honduras focused on the telecommunications company Hondutel. In the video Carmona is recognized as "the first to denounce the maneuvers of Hondutel" and thanked for leading to the coup's arrest, the day before, of former head of Hondutel, Marcelo Chimirri. Chimirri is among more than 1,000 people arrested by the regime since the June 28 coup. The campaign was aimed at weakening and ultimately bringing down the Zelaya government and the hat-tip at the rally explicitly revealed its role in the overthrow.
Honduras was finishing up an investigation of Chimirri, charged with accepting kickbacks for re-routing calls through a U.S. private carrier. The Justice Department fined the carrier, LatiNode, in the case.
In the end, armed force proved a faster route than the slow wheels of justice. Regardless of the merits of the case, the politicized nature of Arcadia's anti-corruption offensive was clear from the start. Carmona, along with Otto Reich, charged President Zelaya of complicity. The issue grew so hot that Zelaya threatened to file a defamation claim against Reich.
Otto Reich is another name that has come up repeatedly since the Honduran coup as the man behind the scenes. Although Arcadia has denied a formal affiliation, Reich was intimately involved in Arcadia's anti-corruption charges against the Zelaya government. Honduran government officials note that he was formally featured on the Arcadia site up until Sep 10, 2008 when he was erased from the web page. Reich is infamous for his involvement in the illegal Iran-Contra affair. A 1987 report by the U.S. Comptroller-General, “found that some of the efforts of Mr. Reich’s public diplomacy office were ‘prohibited, covert propaganda activities,’ ‘beyond the range of acceptable agency public information activities….’"
Under fire, Reich felt compelled to pen a guest column in the Miami Herald entitled "I Did Not Orchestrate Coup in Honduras." He spends the entire first half of this article attacking Venezuelan ambassador Roy Chadderton who denounced Reich's involvement in the OAS. He then goes on to say that he would have allowed legal processes to take their course.
Reich does not mention, or deny, his involvement with the Arcadia campaign or say anything about his activities in Honduras. He concludes, "Without my involvement, these steps (the legal charges issued after the coup) were taken. Therefore, under Honduran law, the new government is legal and constitutional. The United States should not betray our values by joining the efforts of some of the most repressive and undemocratic leaders of this hemisphere to seek the reinstatement of lawbreaker Mel Zelaya."
Reich thus contradicts his own title, which calls the events a "coup," and in passing accuses the entire 34-nation Organization of American States that have called for Zelaya's reinstatement "some of the most repressive and undemocratic leaders of this hemisphere."
Carmona and Arcadia's involvement in Honduras did not stop with the coup. Honduran Radio Globo reports that Carmona returned to Honduras after the coup. Luis Galdames, who hosts the radio program Detras de la Noticia, located him at the downtown Plaza Libertador Hotel in Tegucigalpa under a false name. He reportedly was in attendance at the above rally.
Why did Arcadia choose Honduras? A brief review of Carmona's recent writings reveals his abhorrence of progressive governments in Latin America and his broad political agenda to defeat them. Most recently he published a piece against the Feb 2009 referendum to lift term limits, saying "The regime (of Hugo Chavez) is desperate, faced with its eventual defeat next Feb 15. Venezuelans no longer believe in the revolutionary farce, in the equality it professes, in Chavez's participatory democracy. Only its beneficiaries and collaborators, some who scarcely believe in it themselves, accompany this destructive project in Venezuela." The referendum passed easily with 54% of the vote.
Carmona also campaigned heavily against the election of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, comparing him to Chavez and calling him a wolf in sheep's clothing.
This string of failures in popular elections no doubt soured Carmona on the popular will. After exhorting, "The utter failure of populist regimes in the region dangerously opens up a new stage in the political history of the region. Let us hope that the people react in a more civilized manner than their political leaders and find a path that guarantees peace and stability in new societies", it has been the people who have continued to vote for candidates and measures calling for more equitable distribution of wealth and participatory measures like the constitutional referendum proposed in Honduras.
I attempted to reach Arcadia to find out its position on the Honduran coup and ask about the Reich connection and the recent activities of Carmona. The Washington and Mexico City offices answered with a cheery recording on the foundation's fight against corruption but then routed the call to voice mail with no human intervention. The New York office recording replied that it does not receive anonymous callers.
The Weakest Lamb in the Flock
Arcadia picked Honduras to block the spread of "populism" by pushing for the fall of Zelaya. It picked Honduras because of its failures in other countries and because Honduras is a small, poor nation with a somewhat erratic president with a low approval rating and weak institutions. In other words, the international right picked Honduras because it was the weakest lamb in the flock.
The coup has consistently portrayed Zelaya as a tool of Hugo Chavez—you see more anti-Chavez signs than anti-Zelaya signs in the video. Coup leaders have developed a message that hides the aspirations of the Honduran poor (70% of the population) for a more fair and equal society. The desperate move to block the vote-on-a-vote over a constitutional assembly reflected their deep suspicion that it would win.
Honduras is a land of deep contradictions where an oligarchy has attempted to destroy logic through the force of repetition. Logic and basic human rights dictate that something has to give in the economic model. No society would be considered viable for long where the top 10% of the population earns 42% of the income, the free-zone wage is 63 cents an hour and more than 10% of its population has been forced to migrate to the United States. A population forced to live under those conditions cannot be called free. Whether or not you agree with what Zelaya did or how he did it, his overwhelming support among poor people demonstrates that he was attempting to take steps toward increasing their wellbeing.
That invariably comes at the price of the haves vs. the have-nots. And that's why Honduras has become a battleground for the international right—to preserve the privileges of the haves. Today the critical battle on that battlefield is to defeat the coup in the name of law and democracy; it bears repeating--a military coup cannot be tolerated in our Hemisphere or anywhere else on the planet.
But the coup would not exist if it weren't for the battle against entrenched interests and for greater equality.
The U.S. Must Choose Sides
Ironically, as coup supporters scream "Whoever doesn't wave the flag is Venezuelan" at their rallies (did Carmona wave his flag, or not?), they have received significant outside help from the Venezuelan and U.S. right and other well-funded and organized rightwing organizations that will emerge as we continue to investigate the roots of the coup.
Despite the involvement of former U.S. diplomat Otto Reich, if the international campaign against the elected government of Zelaya were entirely run and carried out by private organizations like Arcadia, there would be little room for citizens to pressure the U.S. government. The revolving door that permits former diplomats like Reich to use contacts and inside information to carry out political agendas after leaving office, is an established and regrettable pillar of U.S. politics.
But unfortunately, efforts to topple the Honduran government do not end with Arcadia and raise questions about the involvement of U.S. government agencies. These are the opaque "democracy promotion" programs, in particular the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) that in turn channels funds to other government-affiliated and non-government organizations in Honduras and the U.S.
According to NED reports the International Republican Institute (IRI) received $550,000 "To promote and enhance the participation of think tanks in Mexico and Honduras as 'pressure groups' to impel political parties to develop concrete positions on key issues. Once these positions are developed, IRI will support initiatives to implement said positions into the 2009 campaigns. IRI will place special emphasis on Honduras, which has scheduled presidential and parliamentary elections in November 2009."
Under another NED grant, IRI received another $400,000 to "equip elected officials with practical institutional management skills" in Honduras, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic.
Obviously these "positions on key issues" are not politically neutral and represent U.S. interests, and yet the IRI does not specify to taxpayers what they are or whose U.S. interests they represent. Nor does it specify the criteria for selection of elected local officials within the country. Many of the groups who have reportedly received these funds now form part of the coalition supporting the coup. Similar programs were found to favor local governments rising up against the government of Evo Morales in Bolivia.
What little we know of these programs does not prove by itself U.S. government instigation of the coup. But in terms of self-determination and democracy, they constitute a reprehensible form of intervention, as well as being notoriously secretive with public funds.
It is no coincidence that Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen, strongly anti-Castro and ranking Republican on the house Foreign Affairs Committee, proposed an amendment to cut funding to the OAS for "its knee-jerk support of Manuel Zelaya" and transfer the $15 million to NED. The ideological bent of the institution is demonstrable and virtually undisputed.
The indigenous organization OFRANEH made these links in a recent communiqué:
"If a total economic blockade is not established against the de facto government, the polarization of the country will continue, promoted by the existing disinformation and the clamor of groups close to the most feudal sectors of the country. From the churches to the business groups to the shrunken middle class, the effects of the work of NED and the USAID can be felt in the country. For the OFRANEH, it is urgent that the Obama administration stop the work of intelligence agencies dedicated to destabilization and disinformation since they seek to create conflict between groups supporting the coup and the defenders of democracy. The government of the United States will be directly responsible for any bloodshed."
The U.S. government, including the Obama administration, has said it does not agree with Zelaya's policies. The Bush administration sought to isolate and undermine ALBA countries and center-left governments throughout its tenure. At stake was not so much an economic model in the abstract but the powerful interests of transnational corporations and national elites.
In Russia, Obama made a strong statement on the Honduran coup saying that self-determination is a principle that should be defended regardless of political differences. The U.S. government took strong steps early on to join with the international community to condemn the coup and call for the reinstatement of Zelaya. That hasn't worked. The attempt to pass the matter on to mediation has not worked either.
President Zelaya has issued an ultimatum saying he will consider the talks failed unless he is reinstated in the next meeting. The Obama administration also faces an ultimatum, this one from the international community and Hondurans putting their lives on the line in an attempt to restore their democracy: be consistent in upholding principles above shady interests or the attempt to build a new, respectful foreign policy will be considered hypocrisy.
In the short term this means:
1. Issuing the definition of the coup as a coup and suspending remaining aid as stipulated by law;
2. Removing Ambassador Hugo Llorens. In the strict sense, the Bush-era ambassador should not merely be withdrawn in line with the withdrawal of other ambassadors to the country but should be fired. At best, he was inept in avoiding the coup; at worst, he didn't really try.
3. Assuring the safe and immediate return of President Zelaya.
In the longer term, a public review of "democracy promotion" programs like NED and IRI forms part of the urgent need to coordinate a new consistent foreign policy in the region that will demonstrate the primacy of diplomacy and the principles of non-intervention and self-determination.
LAT, Arias: US Must Pressure Honduran Coup Leaders
By Robert Naiman, Just Foreign Policy, July 14, 2009
Some people may have hoped that the problem of the coup in Honduras would magically go away once talks began between President Zelaya and leaders of the coup regime under the mediation of Costa Rica's President Oscar Arias. But of course it wasn't so and it isn't so. For the mediation to succeed, a key ingredient is required: sustained and escalating US pressure on the coup regime, until it agrees to the restoration of President Zelaya.
As the Los Angeles Times explains in an editorial today:
As the New York Times reported Sunday (perhaps you missed this in the 17th paragraph):
Some people may have hoped that the problem of the coup in Honduras would magically go away once talks began between President Zelaya and leaders of the coup regime under the mediation of Costa Rica's President Oscar Arias. But of course it wasn't so and it isn't so. For the mediation to succeed, a key ingredient is required: sustained and escalating US pressure on the coup regime, until it agrees to the restoration of President Zelaya.
As the Los Angeles Times explains in an editorial today:
The coup leadersIndeed, while everybody in the U.S. supposedly loves President Arias, a Nobel laureate with a track record of helping to resolve deep conflicts in the region under difficult conditions, few people in the U.S. (with perhaps the praiseworthy exception of the LAT editorial board) seem to be listening to what Arias is saying.
seem to believe that if they can shoulder the hardships until November elections, all will be forgiven. Not so. The Obama administration needs to make it clear now that elections held under those conditions will not be regarded as legitimate and that such a plan would only prolong Honduras' troubles. Meanwhile, the U.S. should consider imposing sanctions on individuals involved with the coup, such as canceling visas and freezing bank accounts.
As the New York Times reported Sunday (perhaps you missed this in the 17th paragraph):
[three officials close to the talks] said Mr. Arias told Mrs. Clinton that the United States had to make clear to Mr. Micheletti [head of the coup government] that elections held by an illegitimate government would themselves not be considered legitimate.The NYT account corroborates the problem requiring US pressure as stated in the LAT editorial:
Among the most intractable of those obstacles [to a peaceful compromise], said three officials close to the talks, was Mr. Micheletti. While Mr. Zelaya indicated that he was willing to accept a compromise that would return him to office with significantly limited powers, the officials said, it appeared that Mr. Micheletti believed he could run out the clock and hold on to the presidency until his country's presidential elections in November.Under U.S. law - the Foreign Assistance Act - not only is President Obama required to suspend U.S. aid in the event of a military coup; he is not allowed to resume aid until he certifies that a democratically elected government has assumed office. Not just any elections will do. As President Arias and the Los Angeles Times have said, the Obama Administration must make clear to the coup leaders that they must vacate and allow President Zelaya to return before the U.S. will recognize any subsequent election.
Correct False Wall Street Journal Claim That Hondurans Support Coup
Just Foreign Policy, July 13, 2009
Last week, the Wall Street Journal falsely reported that a plurality of Hondurans supported the military coup against President Zelaya. The Journal reported: "Complicating matters, Honduran media published a CID-Gallup poll that showed 41% of Hondurans said the coup was justified, while 28% were opposed. The survey, conducted between June 30 and July 4, supported anecdotal evidence of anger at Mr. Zelaya."
But that's not what the poll said. It found a plurality of Hondurans - 46% - were opposed to the coup. This was reported correctly by the New York Times [2], Associated Press [3], and the Voice of America [4], which actually interviewed the president of CID-Gallup.
Can you join us in asking the Wall Street Journal for a correction of its inaccurate report? You can ask the Wall Street Journal for a correction by clicking the following link:
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/gallup-wsj
The false Wall Street Journal report seems to have originated in the Honduran newspaper La Prensa. But the Wall Street Journal should have checked before simply repeating what La Prensa said. Of course, even if a poll showed that a plurality of Hondurans supported the coup, that would not make the coup legitimate. But to misreport the opinion of the Honduran public is to misreport a fundamental fact about the situation, and it is important that such an error be corrected. [5]
Please join us in asking the Wall Street Journal to print a correction.
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/gallup-wsj
Thank you for all you do for a just foreign policy.
References:
1) "Honduran Officials Begin Talks on Country's Political Future," David Luhnow, Wall Street Journal, Friday, July 10, 2009,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124718543706320515.html
2) "Honduras Conflict Talks Yield Little Movement," Ginger Thompson, New York Times, July 10, 2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/11/world/americas/11honduras.html
3) "No easy end in sight for Honduras coup crisis," Marianela Jimenez, AP, July 12, 2009
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jAkMGKIUDg_ngUiZboxQbYj5_DPwD99C37KO0
4) "41-46: Honduras un país dividido," Diana Logreira and Gesell Tobías, VOA, July 9, 2009,
http://www1.voanews.com/spanish/news/latin-america/Honduras-pais-dividido-golpe-estado-zelaya-50408857.html
5) "U.S. Press Falsely Claims Honduran Plurality for Coup," Just Foreign Policy, July 13, 2009
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/node/258
Last week, the Wall Street Journal falsely reported that a plurality of Hondurans supported the military coup against President Zelaya. The Journal reported: "Complicating matters, Honduran media published a CID-Gallup poll that showed 41% of Hondurans said the coup was justified, while 28% were opposed. The survey, conducted between June 30 and July 4, supported anecdotal evidence of anger at Mr. Zelaya."
But that's not what the poll said. It found a plurality of Hondurans - 46% - were opposed to the coup. This was reported correctly by the New York Times [2], Associated Press [3], and the Voice of America [4], which actually interviewed the president of CID-Gallup.
Can you join us in asking the Wall Street Journal for a correction of its inaccurate report? You can ask the Wall Street Journal for a correction by clicking the following link:
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/gallup-wsj
The false Wall Street Journal report seems to have originated in the Honduran newspaper La Prensa. But the Wall Street Journal should have checked before simply repeating what La Prensa said. Of course, even if a poll showed that a plurality of Hondurans supported the coup, that would not make the coup legitimate. But to misreport the opinion of the Honduran public is to misreport a fundamental fact about the situation, and it is important that such an error be corrected. [5]
Please join us in asking the Wall Street Journal to print a correction.
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/gallup-wsj
Thank you for all you do for a just foreign policy.
References:
1) "Honduran Officials Begin Talks on Country's Political Future," David Luhnow, Wall Street Journal, Friday, July 10, 2009,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124718543706320515.html
2) "Honduras Conflict Talks Yield Little Movement," Ginger Thompson, New York Times, July 10, 2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/11/world/americas/11honduras.html
3) "No easy end in sight for Honduras coup crisis," Marianela Jimenez, AP, July 12, 2009
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jAkMGKIUDg_ngUiZboxQbYj5_DPwD99C37KO0
4) "41-46: Honduras un país dividido," Diana Logreira and Gesell Tobías, VOA, July 9, 2009,
http://www1.voanews.com/spanish/news/latin-america/Honduras-pais-dividido-golpe-estado-zelaya-50408857.html
5) "U.S. Press Falsely Claims Honduran Plurality for Coup," Just Foreign Policy, July 13, 2009
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/node/258
2 Honduras Activists Killed; Venezuelan Journalists Expelled; Coup Leaders Hire Top Democrat Lobbyists To Justify Their De Facto Government
By Eva Golinger, Postcards from the Revolution, July 13, 2009
Things are getting worse each day inside Honduras. Over the weekend, two well-known social leaders were assassinated by the coup forces. Roger Bados leader of the Bloque Popular & the National Resistance Front against the coup d'etat, was killed in the northern city of San Pedro Sula. Approximately at 8pm on Saturday evening, Bados was assassinated and killed immediately by three gun shots. Bados was also a member of the leftist party, Democratic Unity (Unificación Democrática) and was president of a union representing workers in a cement factory. His death was denounced as part of the ambience and repressive actions taken by the coup government to silence all dissent.
Ramon Garcia, another social leader in Honduras, was also killed on Saturday evening by military forces who boarded a bus he was riding in Santa Barbara and forced him off, subsequently shooting him and wounding his sister. Juan Barahona, National Coordinator of the Bloque Popular & the National Resistance Front against the coup, stated that these actions are committed by the coup government "as the only way to maintain themselves in power, by terrorizing and killing the people."
Despite statements made by representatives of the coup government, the national curfew remains in place. Different social organizers from Honduras have been denouncing the curfew is still in effect and that the coup government is lying about lifting it, so as to seem less repressive to the international community.
However, over the weekend, foreign journalists from Telesur, Venezolana de Televisión (VTV - Venezuelan State TV) and EFE, were detained by military forces and expelled from Honduras. The Venezuelan journalists returned last night to Venezuela, while Telesur is still trying to find a way to maintain its correspondents on the ground. For now, they are all in Nicaragua after being forcibly expelled from the country. This means few, if any, international media are left in Honduras covering the reality on the ground, of a coup d'etat now 15 days in the making.
Honduran media, which supports the coup, reported on the journalists' detention stating that the police arrested and deported them due to "car theft". The massive censorship inside Honduras by the media and coup government is already taking an extraordinary toll on the people of Honduras who each day are finding it more difficult to resist.
Meanwhile, the coup government has hired top notch democrat lobbyists in Washington to make their case before Congress and the White House and convince the US people to recognize them as a legitimate government. The New York Times has confirmed that Clinton lobbyist Lanny Davis, former Special Counsel for President Bill Clinton from 1996-1998, and close advisor to Hillary's campaign for president last year, has been hired by the Latin American Business Council - an ultraconservative group of Latin American businesses - to represent the coup leaders in the U.S. Davis arranged a series of meetings with congress last week, including a hearing before the House Foreign Relations Committee, where he testified in favor of the coup government alongside Iran-Contra propaganda man Otto Reich, as well as several private meetings in the State Department and interviews with U.S. media. Another lobbyist, Bennett Ratcliff of San Diego, another close friend and advisor of the Clinton's, was also hired by the coup government in Honduras to advise them on the negotiations taking place in Costa Rica.
Ratcliff actually accompanied the coup representatives and dictator Roberto Micheletti himself, to Costa Rica, presenting the "conditions" of a negotiated return for President Zelaya to Honduras.
So what's up with the Clinton advisors and lobbyists hanging out with the coupsters? Obviously, it's a clear indication of Washington's support for the coup regime in Honduras, despite the rhetoric we heard last week "condemning the coup" and blah, blah, blah. The real actions show just the opposite: clear, undivided support for Micheletti and a definite rejection of President Zelaya's return to the presidency in Honduras.
Ratcliff's conditions for the negotiation - approved by Secretary of State Clinton in Washington - included the following five main terms:
1. Zelaya can return to the presidency, but not to power. The presidency and the exercise of power are two different things.
2. Zelaya must not pursue any plans to reform the Constitution or promote polls or referendums that give voice to the people.
3. Zelaya must distance himself substantially from President Chávez. "This is essential", they said.
4. Zelaya must share governance with the Congress and those in the coup regime until the elections in November.
5. Zelaya must give amnesty to all those involved in the coup.
Well, there you have it! Obama's first coup and Hillary's first use of "smart power" to achieve the ouster of a left-leaning president that was further opening the doors of Central America to Latin American integration and sovereignty. There is no doubt that this coup has been executed to cease the expansion of socialism and Latin American independence in the region.
Things are getting worse each day inside Honduras. Over the weekend, two well-known social leaders were assassinated by the coup forces. Roger Bados leader of the Bloque Popular & the National Resistance Front against the coup d'etat, was killed in the northern city of San Pedro Sula. Approximately at 8pm on Saturday evening, Bados was assassinated and killed immediately by three gun shots. Bados was also a member of the leftist party, Democratic Unity (Unificación Democrática) and was president of a union representing workers in a cement factory. His death was denounced as part of the ambience and repressive actions taken by the coup government to silence all dissent.
Ramon Garcia, another social leader in Honduras, was also killed on Saturday evening by military forces who boarded a bus he was riding in Santa Barbara and forced him off, subsequently shooting him and wounding his sister. Juan Barahona, National Coordinator of the Bloque Popular & the National Resistance Front against the coup, stated that these actions are committed by the coup government "as the only way to maintain themselves in power, by terrorizing and killing the people."
Despite statements made by representatives of the coup government, the national curfew remains in place. Different social organizers from Honduras have been denouncing the curfew is still in effect and that the coup government is lying about lifting it, so as to seem less repressive to the international community.
However, over the weekend, foreign journalists from Telesur, Venezolana de Televisión (VTV - Venezuelan State TV) and EFE, were detained by military forces and expelled from Honduras. The Venezuelan journalists returned last night to Venezuela, while Telesur is still trying to find a way to maintain its correspondents on the ground. For now, they are all in Nicaragua after being forcibly expelled from the country. This means few, if any, international media are left in Honduras covering the reality on the ground, of a coup d'etat now 15 days in the making.
Honduran media, which supports the coup, reported on the journalists' detention stating that the police arrested and deported them due to "car theft". The massive censorship inside Honduras by the media and coup government is already taking an extraordinary toll on the people of Honduras who each day are finding it more difficult to resist.
Meanwhile, the coup government has hired top notch democrat lobbyists in Washington to make their case before Congress and the White House and convince the US people to recognize them as a legitimate government. The New York Times has confirmed that Clinton lobbyist Lanny Davis, former Special Counsel for President Bill Clinton from 1996-1998, and close advisor to Hillary's campaign for president last year, has been hired by the Latin American Business Council - an ultraconservative group of Latin American businesses - to represent the coup leaders in the U.S. Davis arranged a series of meetings with congress last week, including a hearing before the House Foreign Relations Committee, where he testified in favor of the coup government alongside Iran-Contra propaganda man Otto Reich, as well as several private meetings in the State Department and interviews with U.S. media. Another lobbyist, Bennett Ratcliff of San Diego, another close friend and advisor of the Clinton's, was also hired by the coup government in Honduras to advise them on the negotiations taking place in Costa Rica.
Ratcliff actually accompanied the coup representatives and dictator Roberto Micheletti himself, to Costa Rica, presenting the "conditions" of a negotiated return for President Zelaya to Honduras.
So what's up with the Clinton advisors and lobbyists hanging out with the coupsters? Obviously, it's a clear indication of Washington's support for the coup regime in Honduras, despite the rhetoric we heard last week "condemning the coup" and blah, blah, blah. The real actions show just the opposite: clear, undivided support for Micheletti and a definite rejection of President Zelaya's return to the presidency in Honduras.
Ratcliff's conditions for the negotiation - approved by Secretary of State Clinton in Washington - included the following five main terms:
1. Zelaya can return to the presidency, but not to power. The presidency and the exercise of power are two different things.
2. Zelaya must not pursue any plans to reform the Constitution or promote polls or referendums that give voice to the people.
3. Zelaya must distance himself substantially from President Chávez. "This is essential", they said.
4. Zelaya must share governance with the Congress and those in the coup regime until the elections in November.
5. Zelaya must give amnesty to all those involved in the coup.
Well, there you have it! Obama's first coup and Hillary's first use of "smart power" to achieve the ouster of a left-leaning president that was further opening the doors of Central America to Latin American integration and sovereignty. There is no doubt that this coup has been executed to cease the expansion of socialism and Latin American independence in the region.
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