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Honduran Coup: The U.S. Connection

CONN HALLINAN — 2009-08-07T13:44:36Z

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

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

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

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

One of those "little reforms" was aimed at ensuring public control of the Honduran telecommunications industry, which may well have been the trip-wire that triggered the coup.

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

Carmona-Borjas has a rap-sheet that dates back to the April 2002 coup against Chavez. He drew up the notorious "Carmona decrees," a series of draconian laws aimed at suspending the Venezuelan constitution and suppressing any resistance to the coup. As Chavez supporters poured into the streets and the plot unraveled, Carmona-Borjas fled to Washington, DC. He took a post at George Washington University and brought Iran-Contra plotters Otto Reich and Elliott Abrams to teach his class on "Political Management in Latin America." He also became vice-president of the right-wing Arcadia Foundation, which lobbies for free-market policies. Weeks before the June 28 Honduran coup, Carmona-Borjas barnstormed the country accusing Zelaya of collaborating with narco-traffickers.

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

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

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

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

Reich's charges against Hondutel are hardly happenstance, as he is a former AT&T lobbyist and served as Senator John McCain's (R-AZ) Latin American advisor during the senator's 2008 presidential campaign. McCain has deep ties with telecom giants AT&T, MCI, and Qualcomm and, according to Nikolas Kozloff, author of Hugo Chavez: Oil, Politics and the Challenge of the United States, "has acted to protect and look out for the political interests of the telecoms on Capitol Hill."

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

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

Republicans in Congress have accused the Obama administration of being "soft" on Zelaya. Sen. Jim DeMint (SC) protested the White House's support of the Honduran president holding up votes for administration nominees for the ambassador to Brazil and an assistant secretary of state. Meanwhile, Zelaya's return was unanimously supported by the UN General Assembly, the European Union, and the Organization of American States.

But meddling in Honduras is a bipartisan undertaking.

"If you want to understand who is the real power behind the [Honduran] coup, you need to find out who is paying Lanny Davis," says Robert White, former U.S. ambassador to El Salvador and current president of the Center for International Policy. Davis, best known as the lawyer who represented Bill Clinton during his impeachment trial, has been lobbying members of Congress and testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in support of the coup.

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

But White says the coup had more to do with profits than law. "Coups happen because very wealthy people want them and help to make them happen, people who are used to seeing the country as a money machine and suddenly see social legislation on behalf of the poor as a threat to their interests," says White. "The average wage of a worker in free trade zones is 77 cents per hour." According to the World Bank, 59% of Hondurans live below the poverty line.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conn Hallinan is a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus.

Editor: Jen Doak

Shadow Wars

CONN HALLINAN — 2009-05-27T13:53:42Z

Sudan: The two F-16s caught the trucks deep in the northern desert. Within minutes, the column of vehicles was a string of shattered wrecks burning fiercely in the January sun. Surveillance drones spotted a few vehicles that had survived the storm of bombs and cannon shells, and the fighter-bombers returned to finish the job.

Syria: Four Blackhawk helicopters skimmed across the Iraqi border, landing at a small farmhouse near the town of al-Sukkariyeh. Black-clad soldiers poured from the choppers, laying down a withering hail of automatic weapons fire. When the shooting stopped, eight Syrians lay dead on the ground. Four others, cuffed and blindfolded, were dragged to the helicopters, which vanished back into Iraq.

Pakistan: a group of villagers were sipping tea in a courtyard when the world exploded. The Hellfire missiles seemed to come out of nowhere, scattering pieces of their victims across the village and demolishing several houses. Between January 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009, 60 such attacks took place. They killed 14 wanted al-Qaeda members along with 687 civilians.
In each of the above incidents, no country took responsibility or claimed credit. There were no sharp exchanges of diplomatic notes before the attacks, just sudden death and mayhem.

War without Declaration

The F-16s were Israeli, their target an alleged shipment of arms headed for the Gaza Strip. The Blackhawk soldiers were likely from Task Force 88, an ultra-secret U.S. Special Forces group. The Pakistanis were victims of a Predator drone directed from an airbase in southern Nevada.

Each attack was an act of war and drew angry responses from the country whose sovereignty was violated. But since no one admitted carrying them out, the diplomatic protests had no place to go.

The "privatization" of war, with its use of armed mercenaries, has come under heavy scrutiny, especially since a 2007 incident in Baghdad in which guards from Blackwater USA (now Xe) went on a shooting spree, killing 17 Iraqis and wounding scores of others. But the "covertization" of war has remained largely in the shadows. The attackers in the Sudan, Syria, and Pakistan were not private contractors, but U.S. and Israeli soldiers.

Assassination Teams

In his book The War Within, The Washington Post's Bob Woodward disclosed that the U.S. military has developed "secret operational capabilities" to "locate, target, and kill key individuals in extremist groups."

In a recent interview during a Great Conversations event at the University of Minnesota, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh revealed a U.S. military "executive assassination ring," part of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Hersh says that "Congress has no oversight" over the program.

According to a 2004 classified document, the United States has the right to attack "terrorists" in some 15 to 20 nations, including Pakistan, Syria, and Iran. The Israeli military has long used "targeted assassinations" to eliminate Tel Aviv's enemies. U.S. and NATO "assassination teams" have emerged in Iraq and Afghanistan, where, according to the UN, they have killed scores of people. Philip Alston of the UN Human Rights Council charges that secret "international intelligence services" allied with local militias are killing Afghan civilians and then hiding behind an "impenetrable" wall of bureaucracy.

When Alston protested the killing of two brothers in Kandahar, "not only was I unable to get any international military commander to provide their version of what took place, but I was unable to get any military commander to even admit that their soldiers were involved," he told the Financial Times.

In Iraq, such special operations forces have carried out a number of killings, including a raid that killed the son and a nephew of the governor of Salahuddin Province north of Baghdad. The Special Operations Forces (SOF) stormed the house at 3AM and shot the governor's 17-year-old son dead in his bed. When a cousin tried to enter the room, he was also gunned down.

Such "night raids" by SOFs have drawn widespread protests in Afghanistan. According to the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, night raids involve "abusive behavior and violent breaking and entry," and only serve to turn Afghans against the occupation.

Iraqi Prime Minster Nuri Kamal al-Maliki charged that a March 26 raid in Kut that killed two men violated the new security agreement between the U.S. and Iraq.

The Predator strikes have deeply angered most Pakistanis. Owais Ahmed Ghani, governor of the Northwest Frontier Province, calls the drone strikes "counterproductive," a sentiment that David Kilcullen, the top advisor to the U.S. military in Afghanistan, agreed with in recent congressional testimony. The U.S. government doesn't officially take credit for the attacks.

Budgets and Strategy

If Congress agrees to the Defense Department budget proposed by Pentagon chief Robert Gates, attacks by SOF and armed robots will likely increase. While most the media focused on the parts of the budget that step back from the big ticket weapons systems of the Cold War, the proposal actually resurrects a key Cold War priority of the 1960s.

"The similarities between Gates' proposals and the strategy adopted by the Kennedy administration are too great to ignore," notes Nation defense correspondent Michael Klare. These similarities include "a shift in focus toward unconventional conflict in the Third World."

Gates' budget would increase the number of SOFs by 2,800, build more drones like the Predator and its bigger, more lethal cousin, the Reaper, and enhance the rapid movement of troops and equipment. All of this is part of General David Petraeus's counterinsurgency doctrine.

The concept is hardly new. The units are different than they were 50 years ago — Navy SEALS and Delta Force have replaced Green Berets — but the philosophy is the same. And while the public face of counterinsurgency is winning "hearts and minds" by building schools and digging wells, its core is 3AM raids and Hellfire missiles.

The "decapitations" of insurgent leaders in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan is little different — albeit at a lower level — than Operation Phoenix, which killed upwards of 40,000 "insurgent" leaders in South Vietnam during the war in Southeast Asia.

Hidden Wars

In the past, war was an extension of a nation's politics "too important," as World War I French Premier Georges Clemenceau commented, "to be left to the generals."

But increasingly, the control of war is slipping away from the civilians in whose name and interests it is supposedly waged. While the "privatization" of war has frustrated the process of congressional oversight, its "covertization" has hidden war behind a wall of silence or denial.

"Congress has been very passive in relation to its own authority with regard to warmaking," says Princeton international law scholar Richard Falk. "Congress hasn't been willing to insist that the government adhere to international law and the U.S. Constitution."

The SFOs may be hidden, but there are eight dead people in Syria, four of them reportedly children. There are at least 39 dead in northern Sudan, and more dead in Iraq and Afghanistan. The number of civilian dead in Pakistan runs into the hundreds.

The new defense budget goes a long ways toward retooling the U.S. military to become a quick reaction/intervention force with an emphasis on counterinsurgency and covert war. The question is: Where will the shadow warriors strike next?

Conn Hallinan is a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist.

Editor: John Feffer

US and Israeli Manoeuvers

CONN HALLINAN — 2008-08-16T15:21:20Z

One of the major causes of the recent war in Georgia has nothing to do with the historic tensions that make the Caucasus such a flashpoint between east and west. Certainly the long-stranding ethnic enmity between Ossetians and Georgians played a role, as did the almost visceral dislike between Moscow and Tbilisi. But the origins of the short, brutal war go back six years to a June afternoon at West Point.

Speaking to the cadets at the military academy, President George W. Bush laid out a blueprint for U.S foreign policy, a strategy lifted from a neocon think tank, the Project for a New American Century. In essence, the West Point Doctrine made it clear that Washington would not permit the development of a “peer competitor,” and that, if necessary, the U.S. would use military force to insure that it maintained the monopoly on world power it had inherited after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The 21st Century was to be an American century.

Some of the building blocks of this strategy were already in place before the President's address. Rather than dismantling the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) following the disintegration of the East bloc's Warsaw Pact in 1991, the alliance was expanded to include former Pact members Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Bulgaria followed in 2004. On the eve of the latest Caucasus war, Washington was lobbying hard to recruit Georgia and the Ukraine.

It is important to keep in mind the deep paranoia—a state of mind well founded in historical experience—that the Russians have over their borders. Those borders have been violated by Napoleon, and by Germany in both WW I, and WW II. In the later conflict, the Russians lost 27 million people.

Besides expanding NATO from a regional military pact to a worldwide alliance—the organization is deeply engaged in Afghanistan and is currently moving into the Pacific Basin—the Bush Administration began dismantling East-West agreements, including the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM). The demise of the Treaty allowed the U.S. to deploy an ABM and to recruit nations to sign up for the system, including Japan, India and Australia. Lastly, NATO has just agreed to build an ABM system in Eastern Europe.

In spite of the way it is portrayed, an ABM is not a defensive system and is certainly not aimed at “rogue states,” since none of them have missiles than can threaten the U.S. or Europe. An ABM is designed to absorb a retaliatory attack following a first strike. U.S. nuclear doctrine is based on this first strike, or “counterforce,” strategy.

Russia and China—currently the only two nations that can seriously challenge the idea of an American century—find themselves surrounded by U.S. bases from northern Europe, through the Middle East and Central Asia, to the north Pacific. At least in theory, the U.S. ABM system pretty much cancels out China's modest nuclear capability, and, fully deployed, a European system could neutralize much of Russia's.

The Bush Administration says that its ABM system is not large enough to stop Russia's thousands of nuclear warheads, but it fails to mention that a first strike would destroy all but about five percent of those weapons. All an ABM would have to do is handle the handful of warheads that survived a counterforce strike.

The Russians and the Chinese have made it quite clear that they consider the ABM system a threat to their nuclear deterrence ability.

The Russians are also deeply angry over the European Union and NATO's support for dismembering Yugoslavia and the forcible removal of the province of Kosovo from Serbia

“I think we have underestimated the anger in Moscow over the increasing NATO involvement in Russia's backyard,” says Christopher Langton of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

This is the context in which the recent fighting took place. While the western media has largely portrayed the war as the mighty Russian bear beating up on tiny Georgia, Moscow sees Tbilisi's attack on South Ossetia as yet another move aimed at surrounding it with hostile powers.

U.S. non-governmental organizations, some, like the National Endowment for Democracy, close to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, played a key role in helping to bring Georgia's current president Mikhail Saakashvilli to power. For all the Bush Administration touts him as a “democrat,” the Georgian president has exiled his political enemies, closed down opposition newspapers, and turned his police on peaceful demonstrators.

Following his election, the U.S. and Israel poured military aid and trainers into Georgia. Some 800 U.S. and 1,000 Israeli trainers are currently working with the Georgian military.

While the U.S. claims that it strongly advised the Georgians not to use force in Ossetia and Abakhzia, just a few weeks before the attack Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Tbilisi and made it clear that the Bush Administration fully supported Georgia claim over the two provinces.

The U.S. pledge was made despite the fact that Saakashvili broke a 2005 agreement not to use force in the two provinces. In 2006, the Georgian president sent troops into Abkhaza to occupy the Kodori Valley. Did it occur to the U.S. that backing Saakashvili's adventurism in Abkhaza might encourage him to consider a similar move in South Ossetia?

Besides the trainers, 1,000 U.S. troops recently carried out joint exercises with the Georgian military. How would Americans feel about Russians troops training in Mexico, particularly if the latter government was demanding back the lands seized by the U.S. in the Mexican-American War? And what were those troops training for? An invasion of South Ossetia? Defense against a Russian counterattack?

U.S. trainers say they had no inkling that the Georgians were going to attack Ossetia, a denial that is hard to swallow given the buildup of ammunition, armored vehicles, and supplies that the Georgians must have made in preparation for the invasion. It strains credibility to think that U.S. advisors did not know what was up, but if they did not, it bespeaks a sobering level of incompetence on the American military side.

The Israelis are not so coy.

According to the DEBKA File, a publication close to the Israeli military and intelligence agencies, Israeli advisors “were undoubtedly deeply involved in the Georgian Army's preparations to conquer the South Ossetian capital.”

The Israeli interest in Georgia is over the two oil and gas pipelines that transit the country, bypassing Russian pipelines to the north. Israel takes on oil at the Turkish port of Ceyhan and ships it to a refinery at Ashkelon.

So who knew what, and when did they know it? This is not an abstract exercise. Had Georgia been admitted to NATO, the war would have triggered Article 5 requiring alliance members to use “collective force” against Russia. Such a scenario could well have led to a worldwide thermonuclear war.

Did the Georgians think they could attack Ossetia, kill civilians and Russian peacekeepers, and get away with it? Unless President Saakashvili and the people around him are snorting something that turns reality upside down, they must have known that Georgia's army was no match for Russia's.

Could the Georgians have been working under the illusion they had the full backing of the U.S? What Rice told Saakashvili during her July 10 trip becomes critical. Did she really tell the Georgians in private not to attack as she claims? Or did Tbilisi take Rice's public rhetoric supporting Georgia's claim of sovereignty at face value?

Shortly before Georgia attacked, the Russians tried to get a resolution through the UN Security Council calling on Ossetia and Georgia to renounce the use of force. The U.S., Britain, and Saakashvili torpedoed it. Why?

Might the U.S. have snookered the Georgians into making an attack Washington knew would end in disaster? Political commentator Robert Scheer suggests the war was a neocon election ploy aimed at getting John McCain elected president. On one level the charge seems far-fetched, but as Scheer points out, the McCain campaign is filled with neocons and Georgia boosters, and some of McCain's recent statements seem as if they were lifted from the depths of the Cold War.

Is the Georgia War the “October surprise” for the fall elections as Scheer suggests? The Republicans need a crisis so they can argue that only McCain has the experience to handle it. The Iran bugaboo is wearing thin, and the polls show overwhelming opposition to a war with Teheran. China is playing nice, and, in any case, it is not a good idea to pick a fight with someone who can call in its loans and bankrupt you.

But there is always the big, bad Russian bear.

This is an inordinately dangerous situation. The Bush Administration has sent U.S. troops into Georgia, and it is not inconceivable that Russians and Americans might end up shooting at one another. Wars have a tendency to get out of hand, which is one reason why it is good to avoid them.

But avoiding war means avoiding the kind of policies that make war a possibility. If you have a strategy that says you have the right to determine what happens in the world, and then go about surrounding your potential competitors with military bases and destabilizing weapons systems, sooner or later someone is going to push back. A hundred years ago that would lead to tragedy. In today's nuclear-armed world, it is an existential issue.

In the short run the solution is a ceasefire, withdrawal of troops, and a pledge not to use force in the future.

But the problem that brought about the recent war is the result of policies that the U.S. and its allies have followed since the end of the Cold War. A real solution would be:

Dissolve NATO;
Revive the ABM Treaty;
Enforce the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, which means dismantling the world's supply of nuclear weapons and embarking on a course of general disarmament.
To do less it to hold the world hostage to the actions of a few who might at any moment hurl us all into a war that none would survive.

Conn Hallinan is an analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus.