Time for the US government to stop coddling the thugs?

Time for the US government to stop advising and funding the thugs!

I wholeheartedly agree with Medea Benjamin's bottom line. Diplomatic posturing is nice, but actions speak louder than words. Particularly with so much international, regional, and popular grassroots support for Zelaya's return, the White House should use all the leverage at its disposal (which everybody familiar with US influence in Honduras agrees is considerable) to force the military coup leaders to insure the elected president's safe return.

To shift gears slightly, there should also be a second issue squarely confronted about the Honduran coup - an elephant in the corner that nobody wants to talk about but which should be candidly addressed, here on the north American front.

How the hell did this coup happen in the first place?

Commentators and experts on the ideological right, left, and in the bland mainstream middle all seem to agree that the Honduran military officers who engineered the coup that ousted the elected civilian government were alumni of the infamous School of the Americas training program. There is near universal agreement that somehow a "green light" for the coup to take place had to have come from Washington, or that at a bare minimum the US military and US military intelligence had the capacity to quickly rein in the coup plotters if Uncle Sam had indeed been caught flat footed.

So who is the Cabinet level official responsible for controlling the assets of the Defense Intelligence Agency? Answer: Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, the career spy, former head of the CIA, and lifelong Republican partisan kept on as SecDef by the Obama administration in the interests of bipartisan unity.

What did Robert Gates know, and when did he know it? As Medea Benjamin notes "It's been almost a month since the military rousted Honduran president Zelaya from his bed at gunpoint and whisked him away - in his pajamas - to Costa Rica."

I simply do not believe that Barack Obama and Leon Panetta (and perhaps even Hillary Clinton) huddled up in the Oval Office sometime during the last couple of months, and decided together that regime change was going to take place in Honduras with clandestine US backing. That scenario makes no political sense to me whatsoever.

Zelaya's ouster - right when efforts to revive a good neighbors' style policy towards the Hispanic people of this hemisphere - is a added foreign affairs headache that this new White House would not want added to its plate. For all its shortcomings, the Obama administration simply does not resemble JFK and Allen Dulles, Nixon and Kissinger, Reagan and Bill Casey, or the two Bushes, when it comes to wink-and-a-nod efforts to destablize foreign governments, especially democratically elected governments in Latin America.

So how did this happen?

Well, it happened on Robert Gates' watch, apparently directly involving assets of the Pentagon's international military intelligence network.

That is the Secretary of Defense's core job responsibility.

Why do so few people appear interested in asking tough questions about civilian accountability at the top for the behavior of America's far flung soldier spooks?

Granted, getting Zelaya returned from exile and restored as Honduran president is the most important initial goal. But shouldn't US citizens also be concerned about who is really in control?

Bill from Saginaw

There was an interesting idea I read over at CounterPunch - why didn't President Arias have the plane seized when it landed and have all aboard arrested?

And this is the guy mediating?

You might want to think about U.S. military bases in Latin America. The Manta base in Ecuador is being closed by the Correa government. That leaves the Soto Cano, or Palmerola, base in Honduras, at which there are presently only 600 or so U.S. military personnel but which was huge during the wars against the Sandinistas across the border in Nicaragua in the '80s and could be made huge again. Zelaya had wanted to convert Soto Cano into a civilian airport to replace the small, old airport in Tegucigalpa. They're already increasing the U.S. military presence in Colombia and the Navy's building up its forces off shore. They would no doubt want to hold on to Soto Cano as well and Zelaya was in the way.

There's a good article by Nikolas Kozloff at http://www.counterpunch.org/kozloff07222009.html

nativetongue.miami July 23rd, 2009 11:03 am, said

"Time for the US government to stop coddling the thugs?

Time for the US government to stop advising and funding the thugs!"

You summarized the obvious which seem to require rocket science insight for many bewildered/clueless folk. Often times, you hear variations such us "the US was in bed with Saddam or some other valued despot" etc. Acutually it is the other way around. These so called despots, dictators and other sundry are priced US created or manufactured tactical assets. Simple.

Coups are okay with US as long as the right wing gets in.

But Zelaya wants to turn an airbase into a civilian airport, using Venezuela financing.

That must be, like, uh, anti-semitic or sumpin. Kil 'im.

And where, oh where is our great and noble defender of socialism, fair trade and human rights (Senator Bernie Sanders) on this issue of US troublemaking by silence?

Well, it seems he is silent.

What blows my mind is that many US citizens don't really get to the meat of this coup. It is a coup of Honduras' oligarchy to protect the rights of the oligarchy to rob, ignore and abuse its impoverished citizens.

The cuesta that Mel proposed was more like an opinion poll not a referedum or actual constituent assembly.

If it passed, the nation would start to discuss military immunity, the land question and the regulation of foreign investments and corporate activities.

The military bosses were horrified by the prospect of the nation discussing their past crimes, corruption and inordinate power relative to the civilian government.

No one has answered for the military crimes conducted against Honduran citizens during the '80s...especially the disapperances, torture and murders perpetrated by Batallion 316.

In fact, many of the military coupsters were part of either the earlier Batallion 316 death squad and/or trained by the deadly School of the Americas.

Remember, the Honduras politico-legal system has regularly been identified as the one of the most corrupt in the world...not just within the Americas. Are we to take the pronouncements of members of this extremely corrupt establishment with any seriousness?

My fellow US citizens please hope that Zelaya and his supporters successfully fight their own oligarchy. Possibly, it will inspire the global stuggle against national oligarchies until it finally reaches the nation with the most powerful oligarchy and military: the US.

Under our financial, banking and insurance oligarchy, our society has been financialized and militarized. Well paid manufacturing and service jobs have been either outsourced or they are directed toward the vulnerable undocumented workers.

When a national oligarchy is established, truth, authentic culture and material resources increasingly decrease for more and more citizens. In other words, it corrupts all relationships between citizens, citizens and their government and it increasingly limits (deregulation and privatization) the rights of the individual against the power of the massive corporations and their henchmen.

And then one finds oneself living in a society similar to Honduras.

Ultimately, progressive countries bordering Honduras will have no option but to militarily support the return of Zelaya to the presidency. If this doesn't happen, all those countries will be vulnerable to losing their democracies by right wing coups in the future. Democrats will need to support democracy even if it takes military force to do so. We can't expect an unarmed population to do it themselves.

The US just wishes the media would stop covering this and the whole incident would fade from public mind. That is why every solution the US brings up resolves nothing but passing time.

Apparently our government is caught having to publicly "denounce" a coup it helped instigate and supporting the coup though non-action at the same time. It is only mildly doing the former for public relations purposes.

The coupsters will not and likely cannot allow Zelaya to return. They have taken the government by force and must fear reprisal.

Accordingly, any negotiation wtih them needs to involve more force of some sort - along with any assurance of their safety on capitulation that can be made.

The US gov't does not want Zelaya back; they just do not want the blame for having backed him because they're overextended and underfunded and faced with a growing consensus throughout the hemisphere against their hegemony.

It will be interesting to see how much clout rising Latin American democracies can have in punishing the coupsters. The illicit government will surely respond to further protest with further force, and the last people to suffer from boycotts are rulers. However, large business losses may erode support for the goons.

Remember the Sandinistas? They were part of the Evil Empire!
Like what Uncle Ronnie told me on the TeeVee!
They were like a day's drive from San Diego!
Those Commies had to be stopped at all cost!
Even if it means SOA trained paramilitary Death squads & CIA/NED backed military Coups...
Even if it means selling weapons to iran and cocaine & heroin in order to fund the "freedom fighters".
Now Ortega is the elected leader of Nicaragua once again, and the US had to flex it's muscule...
The manufactured turf wars of the Mexican drug cartels plays nicely for the militarization of the border.
It will be interesting to see how this one plays out...

It's time to close the School of the Americas. American tax dollars should not be used to train dictators and death squads in Honduras or anywhere else.

Tell President Obama and Congress: close the School of the Americas now!

http://tinyurl.com/closeSOA

This gal and Laura Carlson have it right down to the T, and I have written something similar in my own blog which can be accessed ahgoldberg.radioleft.com.

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Coup -- About to backfire on Obama

For surely Zelaya counseled with Chavez and other progressive presidents in the hemisphere before each major move toward a more liberal government. Surely Zelaya fully expected a military coup after firing a top general and taking millions in profits away from rich corporations, a 60% increase in minimum wage being something impossible for rich corporations to stomach.

For U.S. capitalism has sucked up the wealth and natural resources of Central and South America, is destroying one economy after another and politics in the Americas is on a fast track toward the social left.

So when the coup arrived Obama at first pretends its not a coup. Then he pretends that the coup leaders would agree to a democratic compromise, when the goal of such tyrants is to destroy democracy by refusing all compromise.

Comes now three weeks of economical and political paralysis, with the military regime going all it can short of starting a revolt, and protesters doing all they can short of being machine gunned to death. For the regime wants to do nothing until November elections, and the unions, teachers and many public servants plan to strike and block all roads until democracy returns.

The result being three weeks of dead silence from Obama, three weeks of the whole world knowing that the coup continues only because of military aid from Obama, and three weeks of majority support for Zelaya leading up to a super-grand welcome home at his eminent return.

Zelaya -- A coup conspirator, Chavez supporter or martyr most perfect?

Mind readers we are not, but for the fun of it and to somehow ease the stress of it, for a moment let us try and articulate a rational for the actions of our darling hero.

First let us impugn the worst possible motive to Zelaya, that capitalist loving governments in Central America staged the coup so that Zelaya could sucker Chavez into looking weak and helpless by trying to defend a cause impossible to win. So if this was the truth, then Zelaya would say nothing about the way the U.S. is doing all it can to support the coup without blowing a hole in its CIA smoke screen; agree to not change the Constitution; agree to be a powerless president; make no real effort at returning to Honduras under the cover of darkness to spearhead a residence movement; avoid prison at all cost.

Next let us presume that our hero is a true and devoted friend of Chavez and the progressive left Bavarian revolution. If this be true, then Zelaya would keep doing what he is doing now, keep encouraging his people to resist and return home when more then a couple thousand organized to greet him. For if but 7% of Honduras came out in protest, they would be a half million strong and the coup would disappear without a shot being fired.

Finally the best possible motive, our hero a true martyr, and the point in time comes when his people have lost all hope, when 233 years of military dictatorship is a learned helpless impossible to overcome. Well then he shall rot in prison until they torture him to death or until his people gun down everyone with a dictator mentality in Honduras. For nothing can be more brutal and bloody then a revolution like the one in Honduras, where about half the people are enriching themselves upon the misery of those they consider the “lower class.”