BoRev.Net

James Petras is a cranky old ultra. I don't know why Democracy Now! loves to waste their airtime on him - especially when the BoRev is on deck. At least they've discovered Greg Grandin ...

The Council on Hemispheric Affairs' Larry Birns was apparently on CNN last night, though I don't see any video links yet.

Also from COHA, this:

The Honduran Coup: Was it a Matter of Behind-the-Scenes Finagling by State Department Stonewallers?

Following the June 28 Honduran coup d’etat ousting President Manuel Zelaya, speculation began to be heard concerning the roles played by senior U.S. officials in orchestrating the overthrow of the country’s leader. Links connecting these officials and their motives involving Honduras have been uncovered, raising many questions, some of which have yet to be answered. What still remains to be clarified is why the Obama administration at first had taken a relatively benign stance to the illegitimate government, restricting $30 million in aid to Honduras but still failing to label the ousting of the democratically elected president a “military coup,” which automatically would have cut off much greater sums of financial assistance...

...Who were these outside officials who may have been involved in the planning and execution of the coup and what other possibly compromising actions may they have been associated with in recent months?

Evidence points to Senator John McCain, Otto Reich, the heavily ideological policy advisor on Latin America for the McCain campaign, and Robert Carmona-Borjas, a Venezuelan lawyer, columnist and academic, all of whom may have had significant financial and politicized ties to the U.S. telecommunications industry...

...One also may speculate how much foreknowledge the present U.S. administration had over the planning and implementation of the coup. Former Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemispheric Affairs Thomas Shannon and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Craig Kelly were in Honduras the week prior to the coup, meeting with figures who later participated in the ousting of Zelaya.

Somewhat questionable behavior was also displayed by current U.S. Ambassador to Honduras Hugo Llorens and former Ambassador John Negroponte. Llorens is on record as stating that, “One cannot violate the constitution in order to create another constitution,”(Eva Golinger, Washington and the Coup in Honduras: Here is the Evidence). This chiding of Zelaya is based on a false inference that he was contemplating altering the constitution in order to extend his own term, when his call for a referendum was meant to stage a consultation with the electorate in the future to discuss extending upon the one presidential term.

Following the coup, when asked by journalist Allan Fisher if he had previous knowledge of the events that took place on June 28, Llorens replied with a laugh, “No, no, not really”(Belén Fernández, U.S. Ambassador Hugo Llorens Discloses Secrets of the Honduran Coup). The somewhat flip nature of his reply calls into question how much U.S. officials actually knew about the planned coup...

...Finally, we are left to ponder the confusing position and the multiple shifts taken by the Obama administration over the possibility of U.S. involvement, or at least knowledge, of the oncoming coup and the State Department’s adamant insistence that unlike almost every other member of the OAS, it would not withdraw its ambassador from Tegucigalpa, nor cut off all assistance to the de facto regime. By stonewalling the issue, Washington gave immeasurably aid to the coup regime, and weakened the likelihood that the constitutionalist president of Honduras would be allowed to return...

...After witnessing the meager elements of its Cuba policy, its snarling indifference to Venezuela, and its languorous deportment to the coup makers in Honduras, we may be witnessing what could be the third term of the Bush administration.

Myself, I think it's pretty clear -- the U.S. foreign policy establishment hated Zelaya and the potential for real Honduran reforms, but they were put in an uncomfortable public position by the ham-handed coup-mongering of the Honduran military and its Honduran political elite allies.

The Beltway may not want real democracy in Latin America, but they have very much preferred formal democratic processes as the method of getting their way for roughly the last generation.

(I.e., Haiti, where Aristide was restored without power, and then kidnapped by the U.S. and removed from Haiti by Bush Jr. in 2004, all supposedly for his own safety and the health of Haitian democracy. Who knows, if the U.S. had helped restore Zelaya, maybe they'd be kidnapping him a few years later and dropping him off in Spain.)

The U.S. FPE would have preferred that Zelaya be removed or disempowered or restored in a way which keeps their interests prioritized while still looking like a formal democracy, and the nincompoops of the Honduran military and the Micheletti crowd couldn't even do that.

Noguera is also supposed to have been behind the Finca Daktari plot in Vzla, no?

Hey -- the New York Times notices Colombia's illegal electronic spying scandal.

Apparently they finally noticed how the Colombian publication Semana had published at the end of August a tape they were given of an illegally recorded telephone conversation between a Colombian assistant magistrate and a U.S. DOJ official.

(Anyone could have read about it here on BoRev a long time ago, or of course on Colombia Reports.)

A Scandal Over Spying Intensifies in Colombia

By SIMON ROMERO
Published: September 16, 2009 | The New York Times

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — President Álvaro Uribe, the top ally of the United States in Latin America, is enmeshed in a scandal over growing evidence that his main intelligence agency carried out an extensive illegal spying operation focused on his leading critics, including members of the Supreme Court, opposition politicians, human rights workers and journalists.

The scandal, which has unfolded over months, intensified in recent weeks with the disclosure of an audio intercept of a top official at the United States Embassy.

Semana, a respected news magazine, obtained an intercept of a routine phone call between James Faulkner, the embassy’s legal attaché, and a Supreme Court justice investigating ties of Mr. Uribe’s political supporters to paramilitary death squads.

Other recordings obtained in investigations by journalists and prosecutors point to resilient multiyear efforts to spy on Mr. Uribe’s major critics by the Department of Administrative Security, a 6,500-employee intelligence agency — possibly South America’s largest — that operates directly under the authority of the president’s office.

The agency, known widely by the acronym DAS, has been the focus of accusations of illegal spying before. But this case is sowing fear among Mr. Uribe’s critics in the political elite, coming as the president, a conservative populist, presses ahead with a project to secure a third term...

... For the United States, which works closely with DAS on many intelligence-gathering issues, the scandal complicates its warm relations with Mr. Uribe’s government, the recipient of more than $5 billion in security aid from Washington this decade.

[Not mentioned: the U.S. provided much of the electronic equipment used in the spying which is the basis of the article, but, hey...]

Ian C. Kelly, a State Department spokesman, said last week that the accusations of illegal wiretapping were “troubling and unacceptable.”

But in the same statement, he said Colombia’s human rights record was satisfactory enough to meet standards allowing Mr. Uribe’s government to receive all of the military assistance included in the $545 million in American aid that Colombia was set to receive this year.

This article appeared yesterday, the 16th, so it'll be forgotten by tomorrow's news about how Hugo Chavez looked threateningly at a stopped clock or something.

They even mention former DAS director Jorge Noguera, former re-election campaign manager of Alvaro Uribe's re-election, being up on charges of murder for passing illegally obtained info via DAS in order to facilitate paramilitary death squad hits against numerous targets, particularly union organizers and an academic.

Simon Romero was even doing on-site interviews, which really surprised me, as it suggests that he or the Times actually gave a serious damn about the story.

I assume this story will go unnoticed, or perhaps even celebrated somehow, on the Washington Post editorial pages.

i still like to lick pie from the chest of hotbod "inka" valero

i still like pie

So the US denied a visa to hotbod Inka Valero.

More smackdown and pwnage, courtesy of James Petras:

http://www.aporrea.org/tiburon/n142337.html

Nicolás Maduro delivers a grand smackdown:

http://www.aporrea.org/tiburon/n142285.html

Pwned!

Any nation that the U.S. demands open its books to the U.S. must open its books. Any nation which asks the U.S. to open its books to them, even when the U.S. is about to be stationing troops alongside the same Colombian armed forces currently scandal-ridden for paramilitary-links, massacres, and killing civilians and dressing them afterwards as combatants, well, fuck you, you don't need to know shit, brownies.

¿Hill no sabe, Obama no sabe, a nadie ni sabe nada?

El mundo llenado con idiotas al Norte.

Utpal,

Freemasons believe in a higher being but it isn't specific to any one religion.

Hill can stuff her unilateral demands. And Uribe can stuff his unilateral gringo bases.

One of the signers of that letter is Congressman "Chaka Fattah". I found this info on him on wikipedia kinda funny:

Fattah's parents, David Fattah (born Russell Davenport) and Sister Falaka Fattah (born Frances Brown, also known as Queen Mother Falaka Fattah), are community activists in West Philadelphia, where they are building an "urban Boys' Town" through their organization, the House of Umoja.[8] Chaka Fattah has lived all his life in the city, attending Overbrook High School, the Community College of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania's Fels Institute of Government, where he received an MGA in 1986.[9]

He has four brothers.[citation needed]

He is the father of three daughters, Frances, Cameron, & Chandler and one son, Chaka Fattah Jr. His two youngest daughters go to private school.[citation needed]

He has been married twice.[citation needed] His current wife is Renee Chenault-Fattah, a local Philadelphia television news broadcaster on WCAU-TV (NBC 10).[citation needed]

He is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first intercollegiate Greek-letter fraternity established for African Americans.[citation needed] Representative Fattah is a Prince Hall Freemason, Scottish Rite.

Son of "Queen Mother Falaka Fattah" and a FREEMASON? Hmmm ...

I like pie