Rumors Of Coups And War: U.S., NATO Target Latin America

by Rick Rozoff

There is no way of overestimating the challenge that the emergence of ALBA and the overall reawakening of Latin America pose to the role that the U.S. arrogates to itself as lord of the entire Western Hemisphere. The almost two-century-old Monroe Doctrine exemplifies Washington's claim to exclusive influence over all of North, Central and South America and the Caribbean Basin and its self-claimed right to subordinate them to its own interests. Never before the election victories of anti-neoliberal forces throughout Latin America over the past eleven years has the prospect of a truly democratic, multipolar New World existed as it does now.

It is in response to those developments that the U.S. and its former colonialist allies in NATO are attempting to reassert their influence in the Americas south of the U.S. border.


November 28 will mark five months since the coup led by U.S.-trained commanders deposed the president of Honduras, the next day will see a mock election in the same nation designed to legitimize the junta of Roberto Micheletti, and the day following that will be a month since Washington signed an agreement with the Alvaro Uribe government in Colombia for the use of seven military bases in the country.

While intensifying a full-scale war in South Asia, continuing occupation missions in Iraq and the Balkans, maintaining warships off the coasts of Somalia and Lebanon, and deploying troops and conducting war games in most parts of the world, the United States and its NATO allies have not neglected Latin America.

Central and South America and the Caribbean are receiving a degree of attention from the U.S. and its partners not witnessed since the Cold War and in some ways are the targets of even more intense scrutiny and intervention.

Nearly five months since the June 28 coup d'etat against Honduran President Manuel Zelaya led by General Romeo Vasquez Velasquez, a graduate of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formerly the School of the Americas, Washington has not used its substantial - decisive - leverage with the illegal government and its military supporters to reverse the armed takeover of power. Instead it has conspired with the junta to drag out deliberately futile negotiations and has thrown its weight behind the November 29 election which, occurring without the previous reinstalling of President Zelaya, will be a travesty of law and international protocols and is in fact intended to lend false credibility to the current regime.

On November 15 Manuel Zelaya wrote a letter to American President Barack Obama decrying Washington's machinations and stating that accepting the terms of the U.S.-sanctioned (to say no more) arrangement with Micheletti regarding the upcoming election would amount to “covering up the coup d’etat, which we know has a direct impact due to the military repression on the human rights of the inhabitants of our country.”

The letter also said “The same day that the accord’s Verification Commission was set up in Tegucigalpa the statements by officials from the State Department surprised (everyone) where they modify their position and interpret the accord unilaterally with the following statement: ‘the elections should be recognized by the United States with or without the reinstatement’" of President Zelaya. [1]

The accord in question was one brokered by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias and signed on October 29 which would have led to a unity government with Manuel Zelaya returned to the presidency preparatory to a new election.

Micheletti and his supporters in the country's business community and "muscle" in the military unilaterally abrogated the terms of the agreement by thwarting Zelaya's reinstatement and appointing all members of the national cabinet. With the active connivance of Washington, as Zelaya's letter to Obama contends.

If a government friendly to the United States was overthrown in the manner that the Honduran one was on June 28 it would not take the White House and the State Department five months to respond, and even then only to abet the crime. Censure, sanctions and covert operations would have been resorted to immediately.

In nations where candidates not entirely to the West's liking win elections or unapproved presidents win reelection, the whole panoply of "regime change" interventions are put into effect with some variation of a "color revolution" ultimately negating and reversing the result. That such efforts have not been extended in Honduras is ample proof that the U.S. is satisfied with matters as they stand and would prefer the likes of Micheletti and General Vasquez to preside over a country where the Pentagon has a military facility at the Soto Cano Air Base and there stations its Joint Task Force Bravo replete with Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters.

On November 16 a photograph appeared on a Pentagon website, Defense Link, of the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, and his Colombian opposite number, General Freddy Padilla de Leon, shaking hands outside the Pentagon three days earlier. [2]

No story on or details of their meeting are available, not even on Defense Department sites. Only the photograph and brief notices on Facebook and Twitter.

Padilla's resume is both illustrative and typical. He earlier matriculated in "terrorism studies" at George Washington University and received a fellowship for the Foreign Service Program at Georgetown University, as well as taking a course on advanced military studies at Fort Belvoir, Virginia and and training in strategic intelligence at the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center in Washington, D.C.

The transcripts of his discussions with Mullen would prove intriguing, focusing as they no doubt did on the buildup at the seven military bases in Colombia recently turned over to the Pentagon and on the uses thereof.

Since the agreement on their acquisition by the United States was signed on October 30 confirmation of the bases' dual purpose - escalating the counterinsurgency war inside the country and containing and confronting two of its neighbors, Venezuela and Ecuador - has been witnessed.

Bogota reported that nine of its soldiers were killed and four wounded in a major clash with FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) fighters in the southwestern department of Cauca on November 10.

Five days later Colombia seized four Venezuelan border guards on a river off Colombia's Vichada Department. A few days earlier two Venezuelan National Guard troops were killed in the state of Tachira on the Colombian border, leading Caracas to deploy 15,000 troops to the area on November 5.

The preceding week Venezuela arrested eight Colombian nationals and two locals suspected of paramilitary activity on the two countries' border. Government official Ricardo Sanguino "denounced increasing paramilitary activity as a strategy to conceal soaring US access to Colombian military bases" and said "they are trying to destabilize the government of Venezuela...." [3]

Recently Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez renewed repeated concerns over the new American bases on the territory of his western neighbor, saying "that according to recently produced documents, the military bases would be used for espionage purposes, allowing US troops there to launch a military offensive against Venezuela." [4]

On November 8 Bolivian President Evo Morales said that "the use of Colombian military bases by U.S. troops meant a provocation to the Latin American peoples, mainly to the members of the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas (ALBA)."

He specified that "With the excuse of fighting against drug trafficking and terrorism, thousands of U.S. soldiers will be deployed in Colombia." [5]

ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, consists of Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Honduras (until the coup), Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Antigua and Barbuda, the last three nations joining this June.

Washington using Colombia as the nucleus of a new Latin American military bloc to counteract ALBA has been explored in a previous article in this series. [6] Other prospective candidates include post-coup Honduras, Panama, Peru and Chile, with pressure placed on Brazil, Guyana and Suriname to either supply bases or in other ways augment American and European military presence in Latin America and the Caribbean. [7]

The seven new U.S. military bases in Colombia allow the Pentagon far more scope than is required merely for alleged drug interdiction surveillance and even for the counterinsurgency war against the FARC. The agreement on the bases, bearing the sleep-inducing title of Supplemental Agreement for Cooperation and Technical Assistance in Defense and Security Between the Governments of The United States of America and the Republic of Colombia, lists where U.S. military personnel and equipment will be deployed:

German Olano Moreno Air Base, Palanquero; Alberto Pawells Rodriguez Air Base, Malambo; Tolemaida Military Fort, Nilo; Larandia Military Fort, Florencia; Capitan Luis Fernando Gomez Nino Air Base, Apiay; ARC Bolivar Naval Base in Cartagena; and ARC Malaga Naval Base in Bahia Malaga. [8]

The document also states that "the Parties agree to deepen their cooperation in areas such as interoperability, joint procedures, logistics and equipment, training and instruction, intelligence exchanges, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities, combined exercises, and other mutually agreed activities" and Washington's Colombian client concedes, in addition to the seven bases named above, "access to and use of other facilities and locations as may be agreed by the Parties."

Furthermore, "The authorities of Colombia shall, without rental or similar costs to the United States, allow access to and use of the agreed facilities and locations, and easements and rights of way, owned by Colombia that are necessary to support activities carried out within the framework of this Agreement, including agreed construction. The United States shall cover all necessary operations and maintenance expenses associated with its use of agreed facilities and locations."

U.S. military, intelligence and drug enforcement personnel - and American private contractors - "and their dependents" are granted "the privileges, exemptions, and immunities accorded to the administrative and technical staff of a diplomatic mission under the Vienna Convention....Colombia shall guarantee that its authorities verify, as promptly as possible, the immunity status of United States personnel and their dependents who are suspected of criminal activity in Colombia and hand them over as promptly as possible to the appropriate United States diplomatic or military authorities."

One of the military bases obtained by the United States - the Larandia Military Fort in Florencia - is within easy striking distance of Ecuador (as the Alberto Pawells Rodriguez Air Base in Malambo is of Veneuzela).

Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa and Defense Minister Javier Ponce visited Russia late last month and on October 29 the two nations signed a declaration on strategic partnership. Correa and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev discussed energy and military cooperation. Ahead of the visit Ecuador's president stated, "We need to restore the might of our army" in reference to the U.S. buildup in Colombia, its neighbor to the north. "Ecuador has been alarmed by the decision of Colombia, with which it severed diplomatic relations in March 2008, to allow U.S. troops to use its bases." [9] The severing of relations occurred after Colombia's army launched an attack inside Ecuador.

Ecuador and Russia signed a contract for the delivery of Mi-171E Hip transport helicopters to the Ecuadoran Ground Forces and a Russian newspaper said "Russia could supply six Su-30MK2 Flanker multirole fighters, several helicopters, and air defense systems to Ecuador, which would increase the value of their military cooperation to over $200 million." [10]

Like other members of ALBA - Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua - Ecuador is purchasing Russian military equipment as a counterbalance to traditional U.S. domination of its defense procurements, with the potential for sabotage and blackmail it entails, and as protection against potential attacks from Washington and its proxies, most notably Colombia.

There is no way of overestimating the challenge that the emergence of ALBA and the overall reawakening of Latin America pose to the role that the U.S. arrogates to itself as lord of the entire Western Hemisphere. The almost two-century-old Monroe Doctrine exemplifies Washington's claim to exclusive influence over all of North, Central and South America and the Caribbean Basin and its self-claimed right to subordinate them to its own interests. Never before the election victories of anti-neoliberal forces throughout Latin America over the past eleven years has the prospect of a truly democratic, multipolar New World existed as it does now.

It is in response to those developments that the U.S. and its former colonialist allies in NATO are attempting to reassert their influence in the Americas south of the U.S. border.

The Pentagon recommissioned the Navy's Fourth Fleet, disbanded in 1950 after World War II, last year and fully activated it this one. Its area of responsibility is the Caribbean Sea and Central and South America.

In early November a new commander for U.S. Army South was appointed, Major General Simeon Trombitas. The Army Times of November 10 provided background information on him:

"Trombitas, a 1978 West Point graduate, began his career in the 2nd Armored Division and served three tours with 7th Special Forces Group. He served in U.S. Southern Command and Special Operations Command in Panama and commanded the U.S. Military Group in Colombia. His general officer assignments include commanding general of Special Operations Command, Korea, and he served on the Iraq National Counter-Terrorism Force Transition Team." [11]

The United States is not alone in threatening a newly and truly independent Latin America and Colombia and Honduras are not the only parts of Washington's plans. On November 5 Paraguay's President Fernando Lugo replaced the nation's top military commanders - Army General Oscar Velazquez, Navy Rear Admiral Claudelino Recalde and Air Force General Hugo Aranda - against a backdrop of what Agence France-Presse reported as a fear of "an ouster similar to the one that befell Honduran President Manuel Zelaya...." [12]

That the Honduran putsch is intended to be the first in a series of similar plots in Latin America and is neither an aberration nor the last of its kind was also indicated last week when Nicaragua expelled a Dutch European Union parliamentarian. Radio Netherlands characterized the motivation for the action as follow: "Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega says Dutch MEP Hans van Baalen was in Nicaragua to see how the army felt about attempting a coup d´etat, but found no officers willing to go along with the idea."

Van Baalen then moved to Honduras to "mediate in the political conflict between ousted President Manuel Zelaya and his de facto successor Roberto Micheletti." [13]

Mexican journalist Luis Gutierrez, speaking at a conference against NATO's global expansion in Berlin last month and in particular of the bloc's Article 5 military mutual assistance clause, observed that "Mexico's 3,000 kilometer border with the United States is also a border with NATO." [14] Troops from 50 nations on five continents and in the Persian Gulf, the Caucasus and the South Pacific are serving or pledged to serve under NATO command in Afghanistan at the moment because of Article 5.

The Netherlands, for example, is not only assisting its American NATO ally in Nicaragua and Honduras, but allows its island possessions in the Caribbean - the Netherlands Antilles - to be employed for surveillance of and future military actions against Venezuela.

In Curacao, a Dutch possession only 70 kilometers from the Venezuelan coast, the leader of an opposition party, Pueblo Soberano (Sovereign People), demanded that the U.S. military base on the island be closed down.

Helmin Wiels said that "he wants to prevent Curacao from being dragged into what he predicts will be a future war between the US and Venezuela.

"The US has a number of military bases in Colombia, and Mr Wiels claims the country is intent on a confrontation with Venezuela's leftwing President Hugo Chavez." [15]

In May of 2008 a U.S. warplane flying from Curacao violated Venezuelan airspace, conducting surveillance of the Venezuelan military base on
Orchila Island. President Chavez said of the intrusion: "They're spying, they're even testing our reaction capacity." [16]

Moreover, Venezuela accused the U.S. of coordinating the action with Colombia, whose soldiers had crossed the Venezuelan border the day before.

In 2005 Chavez appeared on the American television news program Nightline and warned that the U.S. and its NATO allies were rehearsing invasion plans for his nation, codenamed Balboa, which involved aircraft carriers and warplanes, and said that American troops had been deployed to Curacao as part of the preparations.

He further admonished: "We are coming up with a counter-Balboa plan. That is to say if the government of the United States attempts to commit the foolhardy enterprise of attacking us, it would be embarked on a 100-year war. We are prepared." [17]

A former Dutch possession in the Caribbean, Suriname, one country (Guyana) removed from Venezuela, offered the Pentagon bases to test military vehicles for jungle warfare in 2007.

In Guyana, Venezuela's eastern neighbor, the nation's former colonial master Britain canceled a security agreement after the Guyanese government questioned its partner's real intentions.

The nation's Office of the President released a statement which in part said: “This decision by the UK Government is believed to be linked to the administration’s refusal to permit training of British Special Forces in Guyana using live firing in a hinterland community on the western border with Brazil and Venezuela.” [18]

The Head of the Presidential Secretariat, Dr. Roger Luncheon, stated, "It could be that the UK Government did not fully appreciate how dearly held was our position on the non-violation of the sovereignty of Guyana. Their insistence in installing in their design in April...management features that seriously compromise Guyana’s ownership and when our new design re-established ownership that was more consistent with our notions of sovereignty, the plug was pulled...." [19]

With U.S. bases in Colombia to the west and in the Netherlands Antilles to the north, British military presence in the east would tighten the encirclement of Venezuela. A collective siege conducted by NATO allies the U.S., the Netherlands and Britain.

This June the chief of the Pentagon command that covers Central America, South America and the Caribbean - Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) - Admiral James Stavridis, was transferred to Brussels to become top military commander of United States European Command (EUCOM) and NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR).

The transition was seamless, as one of the first initiatives on his new watch was to recruit U.S.-trained Colombian counterinsurgency troops for the war in Afghanistan. When they arrive they will be the first forces from Latin America, and the Western Hemisphere in general except for NATO members the U.S. and Canada, to serve under the Alliance's command in the escalating South Asian war. [20]

Elsewhere in the Caribbean, Panamanian opposition sources report that Washington is in the process of securing four air and naval bases in their country. A news story from late September revealed that a preliminary agreement on the bases "was reached between Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during recent talks in New York." [21]

On November 9 Senator Bill Nelson of Florida spoke out against drilling for oil off his state's coast, saying "many of the activities at Florida military bases, including testing missile and drone systems and training pilots, depend on the vast open stretches of ocean, much of it restricted airspace."

He mentioned that the Gulf of Mexico is "the largest testing and training area for the U.S. military in the world." [22]

A Cuban analysis of three years ago described the overall American military blueprint for Latin America and the Caribbean:

"The United States has a system of bases that has managed to establish two areas of control:

"1. The circle formed by the Caribbean islands, the Gulf of Mexico and Central America, which covers the largest oil deposits in Latin America, and is formed by the bases of Guantanamo, Reina Beatriz, Hato Rey, Lampira, Roosevelt, Palmerola, Soto Cano, Comalapa and other lesser military posts.

"2. The circle that surrounds the Amazon basin, downward from Panama, where the canal, the region’s wealth and the location of an entry to South America have been essential, and which is formed by the bases of Manta [closed by Ecuador this July], Larandia, Tres Esquinas, Cano Limon, Marandua, Riohacha, Iquitos, Pucallpa, Yurimaguas and Chiclayo, which in their turn are linked to those of the region further north...." [23]

The U.S. strategy to control the Amazon Basin and the Andean region depends on Colombia on the northwest of the South American continent and on obtaining bases and military allies further south. Peru is one such likely location and so is another which is at loggerheads with it, Chile.

Under former defense minister and current president Michelle Bachelet the nation has amassed a formidable arsenal of advanced weapons from NATO states: Hundreds of German, French and American tanks; F-16s from the Netherlands and the United States; Dutch and British destroyers; French Scorpion submarines. [24]

This unprecedented - and unjustified - arms buildup has alarmed Chile's neighbors: Argentina, Bolivia and Peru.

A commentary from four years ago pointed out that "Foreign analysts have said that Chile is seeking hegemonic military power in Latin America vis-a-vis Peru, Argentina and Bolivia in order to defend Chilean economic interests in those countries and, in case of armed conflict, to expand its territory in the way it has done in the past.” [25]

On November 6 Bachelet appointed General Juan Miguel Fuente-Alba Poblete as new commander in chief of the Chilean army, which "aroused objections from human rights organizations, since he has been accused of being involved in a series of massive [violations] during the military regime of 1973-1990." [26]

Six days later the Reuters news agency reported that the U.S. is to provide Chile with $655 million dollars worth of new arms: "The Pentagon on Thursday [November 5] advised the U.S. Congress of the possible sale of stinger missiles worth about $455 million, AIM medium-range missiles worth $145 million and Sentinel radar systems worth $65 million." [27]

Several days later a report titled "U.S. Authorizes Sale of German Missiles to Chile" detailed:

"Seven months after Chile's Defense Minister expressed interest in purchasing a fleet of used (U.S. made) F-16 Fighter Jets from Holland, the U.S. government helped seal the deal by supporting Chile's bid to buy missiles for the jets."

It added: "Also last week, the Pentagon endorsed two other possible defensive arms sales for Chile's army. The first purchase would include six new Sentinel radar systems and six SINCGARS radio systems, at a cost of US$65 million. The second deal could include 36 Avenger planes and 390 ground-to-air missiles at a cost of US$455 million." [28]
....
The accelerating pace and wide-ranging scope with which the U.S. and its allies are militarizing the world is unparalleled. Even during the depth of the Cold War most nations avoided being pulled into military blocs, arms buildups and wars. No longer. And Latin America is no exception.

Notes

1) CNN, November 15, 2009
2) Photograph
http://www.defenselink.mil/dodcmsshare/homepagephoto/2009-11/hires_091116-N-0696M-004d.jpg
3) Prensa Latina, November 2, 2009
4) Press TV, November 16, 2009
5) Xinhua News Agency, November 10, 2009
6) Colombia: U.S. Escalates War Plans In Latin America
Stop NATO, July 22, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/colombia-u-s-escalates-war-plans-in-latin-america
7) Twenty Years After End Of The Cold War: Pentagon’s Buildup In Latin
America
Stop NATO, November 4, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/stop-nato
8) http://justf.org/content/supplemental-agreement-cooperation-and-technical-assistance-defense-and-security-between-gov
9) Vedomosti, October 27, 2009
10) Ibid
11) Army Times, November 10, 2009
12) Agence France-Presse, November 6, 2009
13) Radio Netherlands, November 15, 2009
14) World Future Online, October 24, 2009
15) Radio Netherlands, November 16, 2009
16) Bloomberg News, May 21, 2008
17) Associated Press, September 16, 2005
18) Stabroek News, October 28, 2009
19) Ibid
20) Afghan War: NATO Builds History’s First Global Army
Stop NATO, August 9, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/afghan-war-nato-builds-historys-first-global-army
South Asia, Latin America: Pentagon’s 21st Century Counterinsurgency
Wars
Stop NATO, July 29, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/south-asia-latin-america-pentagons-21st-century-counterinsurgency-wars
21) Russian Information Agency Novosti, September 27, 2009
22) Tampa Tribune, November 10, 2009
23) Granma International, April 18, 2006
24) NATO Of The South: Chile, South Africa, Australia, Antarctica
Stop NATO, May 30, 2009
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/nato-of-the-south-chile-south-africa-australia-antarctica
25) OhmyNews International, December 31, 2005
26) Xinhua News Agency, November 7, 2009
27) Reuters, November 12, 2009
28) Santiago Times, November 16, 2009

Alternativas dos palestinos ao seu Estado

Lejeune Mirhan *

Fiquei contente quando li o artigo de Roger Cohen, no Herald Tribune, intitulado The Mideast Truce (1), cujo título republicado no Estadão foi “Acordo de paz cada vez mais distante”. Não que eu não queira a paz. Ao contrário.

(Muro da Segregação e Vergonha em Israel, com Quase 900 Quilômetros de Extensão)

Desejo a paz ardentemente, e os palestinos também. Ocorre que faz duas ou três semanas, em que publiquei um artigo nesta linha de pessimismo do escritor Cohen. Cabe-nos hoje, refletir as alternativas sobre os rumos do movimento de luta pela libertação da Palestina.

Uma preliminar: o Muro da Segregação

No dia 9 de novembro passado, a direita mundial festejou 20 anos da “queda” do chamado Muro de Berlim, construído em 1961, para separar as duas Alemanhas, a Oriental e a Ocidental, num mundo que não existe mais, que era o da guerra fria. Fizeram festa diante do Portão de Brandenburgo, onde Bach compôs músicas esplendorosas no passado clássico. Dançaram, cantaram. Desenterraram alguns (ex) líderes da época da queda, em 1989, como Mikhail Gorbatchov, queridinha da direita, conhecido como coveiro do socialismo. Se Thatcher parasse em pé hoje, eles a teriam levado, como um cadáver ambulante, uma morta-viva. Merkel, com cara de bebê Johnson, festeja junto com Sarkozy. Querem mostrar ao mundo que a vitória é deles e a derrota é nossa.

De fato, sofremos essa derrota. Já vínhamos sendo derrotados desde 1979, quando a dama de ferro vence as eleições na Inglaterra há trinta anos. Em 1989 foi apenas uma consequência disso. O mundo “endireitou-se” todo de lá para cá, mas hoje, pelo menos na América Latina, o que vemos é uma clara reversão desse processo regressivo, que minimizou estados nacionais, retirou soberania, entregou patrimônio público, demitiu servidores, precarizou trabalho, concentrou renda e riqueza, endividou países, subordinando-os ao Fundo Monetário Internacional.

No entanto, eles fazem essa “festa”, mas estão em depressão profunda. Não possuem saída para a maior crise que o sistema passou desde a de 1929-1932. Seus ideais desmoronaram-se de um dia para outro. Os mais liberais dos liberais, passaram a defender que o Estado saísse em defesa para salvar os capitais em bancarrota. Na verdade, a crise do ano passado foi deles e não foi nossa. A derrota foi deles. É claro, que o nosso lado, os trabalhadores mais sofridos é que acabamos por pagar a crise. Mas o modelo inventado por eles, cuja propaganda mostrava como infalível (falaram até em “fim da história”...), sofreu derrota de morte, esta ferido e pode não ter chance de sobreviver. Vive em estado terminal.

Bem, mas porque falo tudo isso? Que tem a ver a queda do Muro de Berlim com o Oriente Médio? Tudo a ver. É que no Oriente Médio, exatamente na Cisjordânia, na Palestina, desde 2002, vem sendo construído um muro, que o próprio governo israelense chamou de “Muro da Segregação”. É um Muro da Vergonha. Isola aldeias palestinas (daremos os dados adiante).

A direita neoliberal comemora a queda do “nosso” muro. Mas vejam bem. O Muro de Berlim tinha155 Km de extensão. O da Palestina tem 895 Km! Quase seis vezes maior! O Muro de Berlim tinha quatro metros de altura. O da Segregação tem 12 metros de altura! Três vezes mais alto! A largura do Muro de Berlim (área de segurança que ele isolava) era de 40 metros e o da Palestina é de 200 metros! Cinco vezes maior!

Esse Muro da Segregação ou da Vergonha, já condenada pela Corte Internacional de Haia na Holanda (Tribunal da ONU), separa ainda mais os palestinos de suas terras. Israel com isso amplia em mais 12% suas ocupação na Cisjordânia, onde esta ilegalmente desde junho de 1967. E não aceita nenhuma das dezenas de resoluções da Organização para que desocupe esses territórios palestinos. Não só não desocupa, como mantém mais de duas centenas de colônias. Hoje essas colônias (não encontro outra palavra mais apropriada), recebem 450 mil judeus. Se somarmos ocupações, condomínios em Jerusalém Oriental, os judeus em terras palestinas perfazem quase um milhão de pessoas! E esses “assentamentos” não vão parar. Estimulados, inclusive, por declarações desastrosas da secretária de Estado estadunidense, Hilary Clinton, o governo fascista de Netanyahu determinou a continuidade das construções, de novos prédios de apartamentos (mais de 900), na Jerusalém árabe.

O Muro isolou 212 aldeias palestinas em que vivem centenas de milhares de palestinos e suas família. Fala-se em 233 poços de água que foram subtraídos dos palestinos e pelo menos mais 72 nascentes. No total, fala-se em 713 quilômetros quadrados. Isso significa que Israel amplia em pelo menos 12% de todas as terras palestinas histórica (já demos este dado e voltamos a ele: se toda a Cisjordânia fosse devolvido aos seus donos palestinos, a Faixa de Gaza e Jerusalém Oriental, um possível Estado Palestino teria 22% de toda a Palestina original (um quinto) e mesmo com relação ao Plano de Partilha da ONU, aprovado em 29 de Novembro de 1947, eram 48% da Palestina. Hoje, estamos falando de algo como no máximo 10% do território original.

Nesse contexto, como posso ser otimista? Impossível.

Quais as alternativas possuem os palestinos?

Dei uma entrevista para a Rádio França Internacional (a terceira em três meses), para a competente jornalista brasileira radicada em Paris, Lúcia Fróes. Tratamos sobre quais alternativas estão colocadas hoje para o movimento de resistência dos palestinos (essa rádio é muito parecida com a BBC de Londres e transmite em vários idiomas, para a comunidade francófona).

Com base no que pude ler, ouvir, analisar, travar contatos internacionais, acredito que três podem ser os caminhos. Permito-me compartilhar essas ideias com meus leitores, estando preparado para receber críticas (construtivas). Analiso as consequências inclusive.

1. Completa dissolução da ANP – Mahmoud Abbas, que inclusive chega ao Brasil para avistar-se com Lula em Salvador nesta sexta, dia 20, anunciou dias atrás, que desiste de candidatar-se à reeleição. Ele pertence ao grupo majoritário, mais forte, dentro da OLP, que é o Partido Fatah. Seu grupo deixaria de apresentar qualquer candidatura. Com isso, e se ninguém se apresenta nas eleições marcadas para janeiro, a ANP deixaria de existir! Quase que uma auto-dissolução. Um golpe fatal tanto em Israel, quanto nos Estados Unidos de Obama, cada vez mais frustrando esperanças dos povos e dos governos árabes do OM. Não haveria mais que se falar em negociação da paz, pois do lado palestino não haveria nenhum interlocutor. Fala-se na volta da Intifada dentro da Fatah (revolta de jovens com pedras e fundas). Isso gera um profundo impasse. Os acordos de Oslo de 1993, que renderam o Nobel da Paz para Arafat, Peres (que visitou o Brasil esta semana) e Rabin (assassinado por um fanático dois anos depois) e criaram a ANP, tinham o claro objetivo que esse “Autoridade” deveria seguir as negociações de paz, que objetivassem a criação do Estado Palestino. Passaram-se 16 anos e nada de estado;

2. Criação de um Estado da Palestina de forma unilateral pelos palestinos – Essa é uma opção forte e pode ser adotada, à revelia da ONU e do governo israelense. Israel já rechaçou essa possibilidade, portanto registrando o golpe. Claro, é uma operação mais arriscada. Os palestinos podem não ter de imediato o reconhecimento de várias nações importantes e grandes ao seu Estado. Sabemos que vários estados e repúblicas mais avançadas, em especial as bolivarianas da América Latina, podem imediatamente reconhecer esse novo Estado, criando um problema, digamos, diplomático. Mas, estaria criado uma situação de fato e depois de direito. Força-se uma negociação imediata. Não podemos esquecer que, em 15 de novembro de 1988 (mesmo dia de nossa República...), Arafat proclamou na cidade de Argel, Argélia, de forma unilateral, a Independência da Palestina. Foi um gesto mais político, uma jogada de mestre, mas que teve pouca eficácia para a paz;

3. Defesa de um Estado único da Palestina, binacional e laico – Essa é a mais polêmica de todas. Tratei disso no inicio deste ano. Seria como se existisse um estado único num território que hoje se chama Israel, mas que já se chamou Palestina, voltasse a se chamar dessa forma. Ele seria binacional, bilíngue e lá morariam duas etnias, duas povos, o palestino e o judeu. Tentariam viver em paz. As escolas teriam dois idiomas, o país ou duas bandeiras ou uma nova bandeira que refletisse as duas tradições. Teria que ser democrático e laico. Nunca poderia ser confessional, nem judaico, nem islâmico ou cristão. Coisa parecida com o Canadá, que tem duas línguas e duas culturas bem distintas, onde seu povo fala francês e inglês. Muitos intelectuais veem essa proposta com bons olhos. Claro, Israel é completamente contrário. Até porque, é impossível eles defenderem um estado laico, pelo simples fato que eles são por um estado judeu, sem constituição e, portanto, não democrático. Acho esta a mais difícil das três alternativas.

Registro

Durante o 12º Congresso do PCdoB, realizado de 5 a 8 de novembro de 2009, precisamente para coincidir com as comemorações do aniversário da Revolução de Outubro (7 de Novembro no calendário ocidental) de 1917, na Rússia, que chamamos de revolução Bolchevique ou Socialista. O presidente Lula prestigiou esse evento no ato político de abertura, que ocorreu na sexta-feira, no Palácio das Convenções do Anhembi, na sala que cabe três mil pessoas (compareceu com uma comitiva de oito ministros; discursou 1h15 e foi aplaudido nesse tempo exatas 20 vezes, das quais cinco com a plateia em pé).

Não quero descrever sobre o Congresso. Ele foi grandioso e unitário sobre vários aspectos. Quero discorrer sobre as delegações internacionais. Em torno de 150 camaradas de 50 países estiveram presentes de todos os continentes, em uma demonstração de solidariedade internacional e de internacionalismo proletário.

Tive o prazer de travar contatos com as delegações árabes. Vieram representações da Palestina, do Líbano e da Síria. A Palestina surpreendeu a todos os presentes. Enviou quatro representações distintas. Todos os partidos de esquerda, marxistas-leninistas (Partido do Povo palestino, ex-Partido Comunista; Frente Democrático de Libertação da Palestina – FDLP; Frente Popular de Libertação da Palestina – FPLP e o Fatah).

Nas próximas semanas, terei a honra de tentar entrevistar, ainda que por e-mail, os camaradas dos comitês centrais da FDLP, Dr. Jehad Youssef (a quem tive a honra de recepcionar no aeroporto internacional de Guarulhos) e o Dr. Nassim Alam, da Secretaria das Relações Internacionais do CC da Fatah. Aguardem.

Nota

(1) O artigo pode ser lido neste endereço e saiu no Estadão de 18 de novembro de 2009.

1 comentários

* Presidente do Sindicato dos Sociólogos do Estado de São Paulo, escritor, arabista e professor. Membro da Academia de Altos Estudos Ibero-Árabe de Lisboa e da International Sociological Association.

Shining Light on Roots of Terrorism By Ray McGovern

Media commentary on the upcoming 9/11 trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has raised concern that state secrets may be divulged, including details about how the Bush administration used torture to extract evidence about al-Qaeda.

“I think that we’re going to shine a light on something that a lot of people don’t want to look at” is how American Civil Liberties Union attorney Denney LeBoeuf put it, according to The New York Times on Saturday.

No problem, says Attorney General Eric Holder, who claims to have “great confidence” that other evidence – apart from what may have been gleaned from the 183 times Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded, for example – will suffice to convict him.

Maybe so, But what the Fawning Corporate Media (or FCM) have so far neglected is the likelihood that the testimony will be so public that they will have to break their studied silence about why Sheikh Mohammed and his associates say they orchestrated the attacks of 9/11.

For reasons that are painfully obvious, the FCM have done their best to ignore or bury the role that Israel’s repression of the Palestinians has played in motivating the 9/11 attacks and other anti-Western terrorism.

It is not like there is no evidence on this key issue. Rather, it appears that the Israel-Palestine connection is pretty much kept off limits for discussion.

Yet, as Sheikh Mohammed and the other alleged 9/11 conspirators go to trial, the FCM's tacit but tight embargo will be under great strain. Eyes will have to be averted from the sensitive Israeli-Palestinian motive even more than from torture, which most Americans know about (and, God help us, are willing to explain away).

The Bromides

To refresh our memories, let’s recall the bromides we were fed by the likes of President George W. Bush about why the terrorists attacked on 9/11.

Rather than mentioning long-held grievances expressed by many Arabs – such as Western intrusion into their region, Washington’s propping up of autocrats who enrich themselves in deals with multinational oil companies, and Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian territory – Bush told the American people that “the terrorists hate our freedoms.”

Former Vice President Dick Cheney reprised that feel-good theme in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute on May 21. Cheney said the terrorists hate “all the things that make us a force for good in the world — for liberty, for human rights, for the rational, peaceful resolution of differences.”

Some observers might have found those qualities strange for Cheney to cite given his role in violating constitutional rights, torturing captives and spreading falsehoods to justify an aggressive war against Iraq.

But Cheney also slipped up in the speech, presumably because he had lost his best speechwriters upon leaving office. He inadvertently acknowledged the Israeli albatross hanging around the neck of U.S. policy in the Middle East.

“They [terrorists] have never lacked for grievances against the United States. Our belief in freedom of speech and religion … our belief in equal rights for women … our support for Israel… — these are the true sources of resentment,” Cheney said.

Yet “our support for Israel” is hardly ever included in these formulations, but Cheney at least got that part right.

Rarely in the FCM – and not even often on the Web – does one find Sheikh Mohammed’s explanation for what motivated him to “mastermind” 9/11. Apparently, few pundits have made it as far as page 147 of the 9/11 Commission Report.

The drafters were at work on the report when they learned that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had been captured. They knew that he earned a degree in mechanical engineering from North Carolina A&T in Greensboro in 1986, before going to Afghanistan to fight the Russian occupier.

And it seems their first assumption was that he suffered some major indignity at the hands of Americans in Greensboro. Thus the strange wording of one major finding on page 147 of the 9/11 Commission Report:

“By his own account, KSM’s animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experience there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.”

Moreover, the footnote section reveals that KSM was not the only “mastermind” terrorist motivated by “U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel,” although in the footnote the Commission dances around a specific reference to Israel, leaving it to the reader to infer that point from the context. Note the missing words in the footnote on page 488:

“On KSM’s rationale for attacking the United States, see Intelligence report, interrogation of KSM, Sept. 5, 2003 (in this regard, KSM’s statements echo those of Yousef, who delivered an extensive polemic against U.S. foreign policy at his January 1998 sentencing),” the footnote said.

Was Yousef, who happens to be Mohammed's nephew, perhaps upset about U.S. foreign policy favoring NATO expansion, or maybe toward Guam? Obviously, the unstated inference in the footnote was about Israel.

The First Attack

The family connection between Yousef and Mohammed was not incidental, either. “Yousef’s instant notoriety as the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing inspired KSM to become involved in planning attacks against the United States,” the 9/11 Commission Report noted on page 147.

The 1993 World Trade Center bombing occurred on Feb. 26, 1993, when a car bomb was detonated below Tower One. The 1,500-pound urea nitrate-hydrogen gas-enhanced device was intended to knock the North Tower (Tower One) into the South Tower, bringing both towers down and killing thousands of people.

It failed to accomplish that, but the bombing did kill six people and injured 1,042.

Motive? Ramzi Yousef spelled out his motive in a letter to The New York Times after the bombing:

"We declare our responsibility for the explosion on the mentioned building. This action was done in response for the American political, economical, and military support to Israel, the state of terrorism, and to the rest of the dictator countries in the region."

Yousef was captured in Pakistan in 1995, imprisoned in New York City, and held there until his trial. On Nov. 12, 1997, he was convicted of “seditious conspiracy” and was sentenced the following January to life without parole. He is held at the high-security Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.

Regarding the touchy Israel connection, the 9/11 Commission stepped up to the plate in the “Recommendations” section of its final report, which was issued on July 22, 2004, but then bunted:

“America’s policy choices have consequences. Right or wrong, it is simply a fact that American policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and American actions in Iraq are dominant staples of popular commentary across the Arab and Muslim world. … Neither Israel nor the new Iraq will be safer if worldwide Islamist terrorism grows stronger.” (pp 376-377)

A more convincing swing at this issue was taken in an unclassified study published by the Pentagon-appointed U.S. Defense Science Board on Sept. 23, 2004, just two months later. The board stated:

“Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf States.

“Thus, when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy.”

The report directly contradicted what Bush had been saying about “why they hate us,” letting the elephant out of the bag and into the room, so to speak.

But, you say, you didn’t hear much about that report either, despite 24-hour cable “news” networks and the “change-everything” importance of 9/11 in justifying U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq?

Creative Editing

If you’ve read down this far, you will not be surprised that the FCM ignored the Defense Science Board findings for two months. On Nov. 24, 2004, The New York Times, erstwhile “newspaper of record,” finally published a story on the report — but only after some highly instructive surgery.

Thom Shanker of the Times quoted the paragraph beginning with "Muslims do not 'hate our freedom'" (see above), but he or his editors deliberately cut out the following sentence about what Muslims do object to, i.e., "what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights" and support for tyrannical regimes.

The Times did include the sentence that immediately followed the omitted one. In other words, it was not simply a matter of shortening the paragraph. Rather, the offending middle sentence fell victim to the “delete” key.

Similarly creative editing showed through the Times' reporting in late October 2004 on a videotaped speech by Osama bin Laden. Almost six paragraphs of the story made it onto page one, but the Times saw to it that the key point bin Laden made at the beginning of his speech was relegated to paragraphs 23 to 25 at the very bottom of page nine.

Buried there was bin Laden's assertion that the idea for 9/11 first germinated after "we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the American-Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon."

There is other evidence regarding the Israeli-Palestinian motive behind 9/11.

Though Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was not allowed to talk to the attorneys in the 2006 trial of 9/11 co-conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, the judge did allow into the official record a statement by Mohammed on the “Purpose of the 9/11 Attacks,” which was drawn from “numerous written summaries of Sheikh Mohammed’s oral statements in response to extensive questioning.”

The following statement from Sheikh Mohammed appears on page 11 of Defense Trial Exhibit 941 from “United States v. Zacarias Moussaoui, Criminal No. 01-455-A”:

“Sheikh Mohammed said that the purpose of the attack on the Twin Towers was to ‘wake the American people up.’ Sheikh Mohammed said that if the target would have been strictly military or government, the American people would not focus on the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel against the Palestinian people and America’s self-serving foreign policy that corrupts Arab governments and leads to further exploitation of the Arab/Muslim peoples.”

Some recent articles about Mohammed’s upcoming trial also have mentioned the Israel-Palestine motive behind 9/11, though usually in passing and deep inside the stories. For instance, Sunday’s New York Times carries a front-page article giving a “portrait of 9/11 ‘Jackal,’” Mohammed.

But one has to read deep into the jump on page 26 to learn that the original plan for the 9/11 attacks envisioned Mohammed flying on one of 10 planes that were to be hijacked and that “he would be on the one plane not to crash, and after the plane landed would emerge and deliver a speech condemning American policy on Israel.”

Revisionist View

Yet, the Fawning Corporate Media won’t stop performing its creative editing – or creative composition – to obscure this motive. Never mind what the 9/11 Commission Report said about Mohammed not being driven by resentments from his college days in North Carolina, the Washington Post offered a revisionist view on that point on Aug. 30:

“KSM’s limited and negative experience in the United States — which included a brief jail stay because of unpaid bills — almost certainly helped propel him on his path to becoming a terrorist,” according to an intelligence summary, the Post reported. “He stated that his contact with Americans, while minimal, confirmed his view that the United States was a debauched and racist country.”

A telling revision perhaps extracted from one of Mohammed’s 183 waterboarding sessions – and certainly politically more convenient in that it obscured Mohammed’s other explanation implicating “U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.”

But let’s look for a moment at the “debauched and racist” part. Could Mohammed be speaking some truth here – and not just about his college days of the 1980s?

Would the Washington Post’s editors be so supportive of the “war on terror” if captives from a more favored ethnic or religious group were stripped naked before members of the opposite sex, put in diapers, immobilized with shackles in stress positions for long periods, denied sleep and made to soil themselves?

In my view, racism comes very much into play here. If Mohammed and other detainees looked more like us, would it be so easy to demonize and waterboard them? [See, for example, Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush’s Interrogators Stressed Nudity.”]

Unguarded Moments

At rare moments, however, hard truths about the 9/11 motivations slip out – although not in high-profile presidential speeches nor in Washington Post op-eds. For instance, at a public hearing in June 2004, 9/11 Commissioner Lee Hamilton asked a panel of government experts, “What motivated them [the hijackers] to do it?”

The CIA analyst in the group is seen in some panic, directing his eyes toward the other panelists in the all-too-obvious hope that someone else will answer the politically loaded question. FBI Supervisory Special Agent James Fitzgerald rose to the occasion, saying:

“I believe they feel a sense of outrage against the United States. They identify with the Palestinian problem; they identify with people who oppose oppressive regimes, and I believe they tend to focus their anger on the United States.”

For Hamilton and his colleagues that proved to be a politically incorrect answer. Ergo, you will not find that testimony in the 9/11 Commission Report. And notably absent from the report’s recommendations is any suggestion as to how one might address the question of Israeli treatment of Palestinians and U.S. support for it.

In their book Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, Chairmen Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton are unusually candid in admitting that this issue was so sensitive and contentious that they chose the course of least resistance.

Despite the findings of the Commission staff – and FBI Agent Fitzgerald – that the hijackers were not motivated by religious ideology, many of the Commissioners much preferred attributing the attacks to Islam than to U.S. policy toward Israel.

Kean and Hamilton explain that those commissioners were dead set against identifying Israel as a major factor motivating the terrorists, because someone might get the idea that Washington should reassess its policy.

But it’s a legitimate and urgent question: Would a more determined commitment by the U.S. government to secure an independent state for the Palestinians and to alleviate their suffering undercut the appeal of al-Qaeda and other extremist groups to young people in the Muslim world?

Or put differently, why should ardent supporters of Israel in the U.S. Congress behave in such a way as to make the Muslim world view the United States as disinterested in the plight of the Palestinians and thus increase the danger of future attacks against the United States, as well as against Israel?

The Goldstone Report

The rest of the world and most Americans opposed the Israeli strikes on Gaza last December and January that resulted in the killing of 1,400 Palestinians, with 13 Israelis also killed. And there was wide criticism of the silence not only of the Bush/Cheney administration, but also of President-elect Barack Obama.

The UN-authorized investigation by the widely respected South African jurist, Richard Goldstone, himself a Jew, pointed to war crimes by both Israel and Hamas, although the inquiry’s harshest criticism landed on Israel for the staggering civilian death toll.

This finding led Israel’s Likud government to activate its powerful U.S. lobby, which pressed the House of Representatives to denounce the Goldstone report, which the House did on a 344-36 vote.

In a wondrous display of pot-and-kettle, House members branded the Goldstone report “irredeemably biased.” Democratic House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer called the report “unbalanced and unfair and inaccurate.”

These so-called “friends of Israel” either don’t know or don’t care that this sort of resolution only makes matters worse regarding American attempts to defuse the explosive anger building across the Middle East. It is a gift to al-Qaeda.

This U.S. pandering to the Likud Lobby – and the implicit suggestion that the lives of 1,400 Palestinians don’t much matter – also is bad for the people of Israel. Indeed, it may prove suicidal, by delaying the geopolitical imperative for Israel to make peace with its Arab neighbors and thus avert some future catastrophe.

Closer to home, by further identifying itself with – and justifying – Israeli repression of the Palestinians, the United States helps breed more Khalid Sheikh Mohammeds and Ramzi Yousefs, more young terrorists determined to make Washington and the American people pay a price.

It requires no logical leap to conclude that Likud-friendly lawmakers — the Steny Hoyers, the Howard Bermans, the Ileana Ros-Lehtinens of this world — could scarcely think up a better way to raise the threat level from terrorists who feed on festering sores like the calamity in Gaza.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He worked as an Army intelligence officer and CIA analyst for almost 30 years, and is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). He spent a few weeks in Israel and the occupied territories in summer 2008.

The Bob Ney-CIA-Iran story continues to unfold

On September 17, 2006, WMR ran the following story and suggested that Representative Bob Ney (R-OH)'s prosecution was part of a larger effort by neoconservatives and the Israel Lobby to "take out" all those who were providing a back channel to Iran, including Ney. Our report follows:

On Jul. 14 and Aug. 8, WMR reported on convicted Ohio Rep. Bob Ney's longtime intelligence role for the CIA. More details are emerging about that role. The following is what WMR reported last month on the Ohio Republican: "WMR has learned that covert Iranian backchannels employed by a current member of the U.S. House of Representatives in support of [Valerie] Plame's Brewster Jennings & Associates network were thoroughly compromised by the White House leak. The member of Congress, who, like Plame, had been an earlier CIA 'non-officialcover (NOC) energy consultant' in the Middle East during the late 1970s and early 80s, and who was familiar with the early weapons of mass destruction proliferation involving the A. Q. Khan network of Pakistan, Libya, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, was compromised and he and his connections to the Brewster Jennings & Associates intelligence network and Iranian government contacts were made known to adversarial intelligence agencies. The staff of the member whose covert Iranian contact network was compromised was targeted and tainted with Jack Abramoff money, putting the U.S. Representative in extreme political jeopardy." WMR can now report that according to congressional sources in Washington and well-placed sources in Columbus, Ohio, including high-level Democratic sources, the congressman in question is Republican Rep. Bob Ney, who yesterday announced that he was dropping out of his race for re-election. Because neo-con elements opposed to any negotiations between the United States and Iran discovered Ney's involvement in CIA backchannels to Tehran they decided to use Abramoff's illegal political money and favors conduit to steer money and non-monetary gifts to Ney's staff and eventually to Ney himself. With Ney's departure from Congress, his role as an intermediary between Washington and Tehran is severely diminished. After Ney'sstint as a CIA "NOC" in the Middle East, he returned to Ohio to run against former US Representative and then-Ohio state representative Wayne Hays. Hays resigned from Congress amid a sex scandal involving Elizabeth Ray in 1976. Ney, who beat the coal industry-connected Hays in his run for the state House of Representatives in 1980, also received the backing of the unions in a traditionally Democratic district. Ney eventually became the chairman of the powerful US House of Representative Administration Committee, an office referred to as the "Mayor of Capitol Hill." After Ney's stint as a CIA "NOC" in the Middle East, he returned to Ohio to run against former US Representative and then-Ohio state representative Wayne Hays . . . In May, Ney's former chief of staff Neil Volz pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy involving his role in getting Ney to support several Abramoff initiatives that benefited Abramoff's Indian casino, Israeli-connected wireless company, Northern Marianas clothing manufacturer, and other clients. According to a Democratic Party official in Ohio, it was always well known that Neyhad "special protection" stemming from his CIA past. A House of Representatives source revealed that Abramoff's interest in Ney was accentuated by Ney's involvement as a CIA Counter-proliferation Division (CPD) backchannelto Tehran. However, under General Michael Hayden's iron fist, the CIA continues to purge and put into the cold those involved with Brewster Jennings, the CPD, and questioning fanciful Bush administration weapons of mass destruction claims." The Department of Justice, in its charges against Ney, failed to mention the name of the Syrian-born arms trader from whom Ney pleaded guilty to accepting casino chip bribes -- in return for getting him a U.S. visa -- and a sanctions waiver on the sale of U.S. aircraft parts from his front company in Larnaca, Cyprus for later sale to Iran. The reasons for the mystery surrounding Ney's Middle East interlocutors are that they point to high-level corruption within the Bush Justice Department -- corruption that is tied to covering up the role of U.S. and Russian Mafia state and non-state players in assisting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction throughout the Middle East and South Asia. The Syrian, Fouad al Zayat, whose Larnaca-based company, FN Aviation (later changed to FAZ Aviation), is based in Russian-Israeli mobbed-up Cyprus and has an office in London, is known as a high-rolling gambler called "The Fat Man" in London gambling parlors. The London gambling dens are known to act as major money laundering enterprises for arms smugglers and other mob activities. FN Aviation's British director, Nigel Winfield, a thrice-convicted felon, paid for Neyto take a three-day trip to London in February 2003, a month before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. According to well-placed congressional sources, Ney was using the dodgy London arms network to determine whether neocon-supplied intelligence reports that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs had any merit. However, Ney had also stumbled across incriminating evidence tying top Bush administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, to the WMD proliferation network -- the same intelligence discovered by covert CIA agent Valerie PlameWilson and her Brewster Jennings & Associates (BJ&A) network in their investigation of arms smuggling routes through Cyprus, South Africa, Turkey, and former Soviet Central Asian states. Zayat's money laundering reportedly coincided with BJ&A's investigation of WMD money laundering and sanctions-busting activities in Switzerland, Cyprus, and the Isle of Man. Ney's links to the Middle East arms bazaar also provided the CIA with an important backchannel into Tehran, Damascus, and Baghdad -- a backchannel not wanted by the neoconswho were anxious to bomb all three capital cities. UPDATE:Zayat, a Syrian Christian nicknamed "The Fat Man," has retired but continues to act as a consultant for Samata Enterprises in Nicosia, Cyprus, which is also his primary residence. Ney is said to have agreed to cooperate with Justice prosecutors in return for a sentence of 27 months in prison and a $500,000 fine. In reality, Gonzales' prosecutors are more interested in how much Ney discovered about links between top GOP and White House officials and the arms smuggling business involving Iran, Iraq, and the Zayat, Abdul Qadeer (AQ) Khan, and other shady networks connected to neocon and Russian-Israeli Mafia activities. By finding out what Ney knows, Cheney and his neocon provocateurs will be able to neutralize any embarrassing information on their proliferation activities prior to the November 7 election. In fact, during the DOJ investigation of Ney, the congressman, aware that wireless communications in the House was in the hands of Israeli-owned MobileAccess Communications (formerly Foxcom Wireless), studiously avoided communicating with sensitive sources through any member of his staff. FN Aviation's chief lobbyists in the United States, people whose activities were of interest to Ney (and Brewster Jennings and the CIA) were Roy Coffee and David DiStefano, both of whom work for failed Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers' old law firm, Locke Liddell & Sapp. According to the Jan. 24, 2006, Dallas Morning News, Coffee, who was a one time deputy campaign manager for then-Texas Governor George W. Bush, and DiStefano, pressured Ney to lobby the State Department to grant an export license for the sale of U.S. spare aircraft parts by FN Aviation to Iran. Coffee has been called Bush's "eyes and ears on K Street," a reference to the lobbyist district of Washington, DC. WMR has been told that Ney was passing the information he was getting on FN Aviation's activities, as well as other intelligence, to BJ&A. After BJ&A's cover was blown by Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and Richard Armitage (who was worried that the CIA would discover his own involvement in shady deals in Azerbaijan), Ney's intermediary activities also became known to the White House and the Special Prosecutor named to investigate the leak of the classified CIA information to the media -- Patrick Fitzgerald. UPDATE: Although Coffee and DiStefano, who served as Ney's chief of staff from 1994 to 1998, were investigated in the Justice Department probe of Abramoff, they were never charged. Fitzgerald's decision not to prosecute Karl Rove and to seek the lesser charges of perjury and obstruction of justice against Cheney's former Chief of Staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby stems from Fitzgerald's own conflicts-of-interest in the CIA case. Ney and BJ&A were uncovering past and embarrassing links between the Russian-Israeli mob and key players in the Bush administration. Zayat's myriad aircraft firms in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan are based in the same locations as those of Russian Mafia arms smuggler (and favored Pentagon contractor) Viktor Bout. Bout's Kyrgyzstan companies -- Phoenix Aviation and Inter Transavia, both connected to U.S. private military contractors operating in Iraq and Africa -- and Zayat's Kyrgyz-based aviation company, Aqua Transit, share the same airfield in the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek. Zayat's Samaya Investments Ltd. comfortably resides in Tashkent, Uzbekistan along with firms controlled by the Uzbek-speaking Bout. Bout and Zayatshare more than centralAsian airports and capitals in common -- they both have high level contacts in the Bush administration, contacts that reach right into the Oval Office. When she was National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice interceded with Sharjah authorities not to arrest Bout. She informed U.S. intelligence to "look but don't touch" with regard to Bout. And Alberto Gonzales' Justice Department, while convicting Ney, has yet to go after Zayat's lobbyist, Coffee, George W. Bush's former deputy campaign manager and "eyes and ears" on K Street. And there is continued Department of Homeland Security disinterest in the activities of Bout's Syrian associate Monzer al Qasser, who has been involved with his brother Ghassem in arms and drug smuggling and counterfeiting of $100 U.S. notes. Interpol has long been interested in the al Qassers' weapons smuggling and counterfeiting activities but the official U.S. Secret Service replies have echoed Rice's "look but don't touch" orders. Monzer Al Qasser's weapons smuggling activities, selling former East Bloc arms and using secret bank accounts in Luxembourg and Switzerland, cross the path of Viktor Bout's supply of weapons to the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and pro-Al Qaeda Islamist elements in the Balkans. The supply of arms from Mafia smugglers to Muslim guerrillas in Bosnia and Kosovoalso involve the financialnetworks employed by the Bosnia Defense Fund, a 1990s weapons-purchasing slush fund set up at Riggs Bank in Washington, DC and the Central Bank of Bosnia in Sarajevo by Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. WMR has learned of a significant Washington, DC-based lobbying and smuggling operation involving Al Qasser and Bout. This operation appears to be sanctioned by high-level Bush administration officials. Key bad actors in the real "Path to 911 [and Iraq]" -- Bush, Cheney, Bin Laden, Rice, Libby, Rove, Fitzgerald, Gonzales and Bout. And their targets. And there is even more to this story. Bout was a supplier of logistics and arms to both the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan. As WMR has reported, a classified French intelligence report obtained by WMR shows that Bin Laden remained under the operational control of the CIA and Britain's MI-6 until 1995. According to U.S. intelligence sources, Fitzgerald, working for then-US Attorney for Southern New York James Comey, failed to translate from Arabic and Farsi and present to the grand jury and jury in the trials of 1993 World Trade Center bombers several important telecommunications intercepts. The intercepts proved that Bin Laden, who was based in Sudan at the time and living on the largesseof the Saudi-backed Sudanese government, was directly involved in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Suspiciously, the attack took place only a few weeks after Bill Clinton was sworn in an President. Sudanese and Bin Laden involvement in the bombing was proven by NSA-decrypted messages sent between the Sudanese Mission to the UN and the Sudanese Foreign Ministry in Khartoum. According to a former Sudanese government officials, the NSA possessed a backdoor into the encryption equipment Sudan's Foreign Ministry purchased from a Hamburg, Germany firm named PK Electronics. Fitzgerald also covered up key evidence that a US Army Special Forces non-commissioned officer, Ali Mohammed, was in direct contact with Bin Laden in Afghanistan while still on active duty and reporting to the U.S. Special Forces command in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. It is believed by many legaland intelligence observers that the Washington, DC U.S. District Court grand jury's decision to indict Karl Rove last May was derailed after Attorney General Alberto Gonzales confronted Fitzgerald with his past prosecutorialmisconduct in the 1993 World Trade Center trials. Therefore, an unusual "SEALED vs. SEALED" indictment of the grand jury against Rove remains sealed to this day and Rove attorney Robert Luskin maintains a veil of secrecy around a 10-page letter, dated June 12, 2006, that stated that Fitzgerald did not intend to charge Rove in the leak of Valerie PlameWilson's name and identity to a number of journalists. Nor did Fitzgerald charge either Rove or Libby with the underlying crime of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act -- an act cited by federal appellate Judge David Tatel in a February 2005 as having "serious" national security implications. In fact, Tatel wrote that Valerie PlameWilson "worked for the CIA in some unusual capacity relating to counterproliferation." In fact, Mrs. Wilson and her CIA network were targeting the very same smuggling and money laundering networks that were aided and abetted by Cheney and his neocon influence network. It is now clear that Fitzgerald has been playing what the French call a "double jeu" -- a "double game." Eager to protect his and then-New Jersey federal prosecutor Michael Chertoff's own cover-up of the U.S. intelligence links to the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, Fitzgerald folded when confronted with the threat of exposure from Gonzales, who was acting on behalf of Cheney, Rove, and Bush. Cheney's and Libby's ties to Russian-Israeli mobsters like Marc Rich, a major global smuggler in his own right, and their involvement in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to form the conditions to promote a casus belli for neocon war goals were the real reasons behind the Cheney's operation to expose Mrs. Wilson and her BJ&A network and Abramoff's and Gonzales' entrapment of CIA asset Ney in a double cross sting operation.

On November 13, "The Cable," an on-line publication of Foreign Policy, a division of Newsweek, published a piece that further exposed the neocon operation against not only Ney but also Trita Parsi, the head of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), and a key Iran policy adviser to the Obama administration. Parsi is an Iranian-Swede who holds a U.S. residency permit.

"The Cable" reported that The Washington Times, in a November 13 article by Eli Lake was highlighting Parsi's alleged links to the Iran government and pointed out that NIAC's advisory board includes Thomas Pickering, a former Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs during the Clinton administration, and, until his appointment as deputy assistant secretary of state for Iran, John Limbert, a former U.S. hostage in Tehran.

In his report, Lake asserts that Parsi and NIAC may have operated as undeclared lobbyists for Iran and cites the fact that Parsi failed to register as a lobbyist pursuant to the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Yet Lake also reports that Parsi and another Iranian expatriate, Siamak Namazi, organized NIAC in 2002 as an Iranian-American version of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Namazi has served as a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, headed up by former Representative Lee Hamilton (D-IN), and as an economist at the National Endowment for Democracy and has attended a number of Middle East energy conferences, the same types of conferences that attracted the attendance of Brewster Jennings & Associates and its top non-official cover CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson.

Namazi and his family are key players in Middle East finance and politics. They are involved in the operation of the Atieh Group and its affiliates, Atieh Roshan, Atieh Bahar, and Atieh Associates, as well as other energy companies.

Lake fails to mention that AIPAC, with a long and documented history of ties to Israeli intelligence, has never registered under the FARA as a lobbying organization for the government of Israel, although there is an insistence that NIAC should register under FARA.

In 2007, an Iranian-American named Hassan Daioleslam charged that NIAC was a lobbying agent for Iran. In fact, NIAC had received grants from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Parsi sued Daioleslam for defamation. "The Cable" revealed in its article that Daioeslam was working, according to court documents, with Ken Timmerman, a neocon journalist who has close ties to the Israel Lobby and is executive director of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran, a neocon contrivance that also involves such neocon operatives as Peter Rodman and Joshua Muravchik.

One of the documents published by "The Cable" is a memo allegedly sent from Parsi's House of Representatives e-mail address to Coffee and Ney's chief of staff DiStefano, in which a new Iranian lobby, designed to work closely with NIAC, is proposed. However, the meno cited by "The Cable" has a constantly updating date, which calls into question the validity of the document since the article in "The Cable" is dated November 13, 2009 and the date of the memo is reflected as the current date. Moreover, Ney resigned from his seat on November 3, 2006, making it virtually impossible for Parsi to have sent the e-mail from Ney's office on any date after November 3, 2006.

Parsi claims to have passed an Iranian offer to negotiate with the Bush administration in May 2003 and passed it to Ney, who then, in turn, passed it to Karl Rove at the White House. The offer, which included an Iranian proposal to normalize relations with Israel, in addition to the United States, was reportedly in a letter passed by the Swiss ambassador to Iran, Tim Guldimann, from the Tehran authorities, via Ney, to the White House. However, Rove was being advised by the arch-neocon and virulent anti-Iranian government operative Michael Ledeen, who was a supporter, along with Richard Perle, of the Iranian terrorist organization, the Mojaheddin-e-Khalq (MEK), who were no friends of either Parsi or NIAC. Ney has since stated that he believes his prosecution was a political pay-back from the neocons over his back channel communications with Iran.

Parsi, in an October 5, 2008, article in The Washington Times, which later was involved in the campaign to discredit him, stated that the MEK, the favorite Iranian opposition group of Perle and Ledeen, openly celebrated the September 11 terrorist attacks from their base at Camp Ashraf inside Iraq.

E-mails obtained by Parsi's attorneys during the discovery process indicate that Parsi, Namazi, and NIAC were all targets in a neo-con operation involving Newsmax's Kenneth Timmerman, Daioleslem, and Lake of The Washington Times. On April 2, 2009, Daioleslam sent an e-mail to Timmerman, who is also President of the Middle East Data Project, Inc., asking two questions:

"1- Is it politically correct to attack the Rockefeller foundation [sic]?

2- Is the CA senator going for reelection? In this case, we coul use her support to NIAC."

Daioleslam adds, "Ken, I strongly believe that Trita Parsi is the weakest part of the Iranian web because he is related to Siamak Namazi and Bob Ney. I believe that destroying him will be the start of attacking the whole web. This is an absolute integralpart of any attack on Clinton or Obama. I hope your friends understand this crucial point."

In an August 27, 2008, e-mail to Daioleslam, Timmerman states that there is no link between Parsi and to Joseph Biden or Barack Obama but that there is a Hassan Nemazee link. Nemazee is the chairman of Nemazee Capital and a multi-millionaire Iranian-American investment banker. Nemazee, along with Zbigniew Brzezinski, irritated the neocons in early 2008 when they met in Damascus with Syrian President Bashar Assad, the same week that Hezbollah military commander Imad Mugniyeh was blown up in a car bomb in Damascus.

Two days before the interchange of e-mails between Daoileslam and Timmermann, Nemazee was arrested and charged by the US Attorney for the Southern District of Manhattan for trying to obtain a $74 million fraudulent loan from Citigroup.

Nemazee is a big Democratic Party political donor, having chaired John Kerry's 2004 New York presidential campaign's finance committee and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign finance committee, and was nominated by President Clinton to be the U.S. ambassador to Argentina but the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in the hands of Republicans, sent to nomination back to the White House saying Nemazee had no diplomatic experience.

The August 27, 2008, exchange of e-mails between Timmermann and Daioleslam suggest that there was a conspiracy by neocons to take down Nemazee, along with Parsi, Namazi, and NIAC.

The August 27 e-mail from Timmerman to Daioleslam states that Nemazee "IS the big fish here, but as of now we have nothing to hang him with." Timmerman also suggests to Daioleslam that he can put him "in touch with people at The Washington Times."

Daioleslam replies the same day by e-mail and states "Namazee [sic] is part of a web. The best way to attack this web is to bring down the weakest part of it Trita Parsi."

Timmerman replies: "The missing link that we MUST fill in is between hassan [sic] Nemazee and the regime." He added, referring to Nemazee, "Here is a case where, if you're going to attack the King, make sure you kill him. Otherwise, he's just an Iranian-American who's made it big, and is playing politics with the big boys. And it's not a story."

On September 21, 2009, the U.S. Attorneys Office for Southern Manhattan, reported by WMR in the past to be a beehive of corruption, announced a further indictment of Nemazee for running a $292 million Ponzi scheme that benefited the political campaigns of a number of Democratic politicians, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Senator Charles Schumer of New York. The indictment of Nemazee was announced by US Attorney Preet Bharara, born in Ferozapur, India and moved to the United States as an infant with his Sikh father and Hindu mother who were both born in what is now Pakistan and fled the Muslim-ruled nation to India leaving their property and possessions behind. Needless, to say, with someone with Bharara's built-in biases, it is not difficult to find someone better to hammer Iran and Iranian-American believed to be conduits to Tehran than Bharara.

It was no surprise, therefore, that Bharara and his prosecutors in Manhattan, known for their close links to AIPAC and Israeli organizations, moved on the New York-based Alavi Foundation, a non-profit Iranian organization that reportedly made donations to Bill Clinton's foundation. On November 12, the US Attorneys Office moved to seize the assets of Alavi Foundation's interest in a 36-story office tower in Manhattan. The government sought to seize the building from the 650 Fifth Avenue Company, a joint venture between Alva and Assa Corporation, both linked by the prosecutors to the government of Iran and the Iranian government-owned Bank Melli. Prosecutors also moved to seize a number of Sh'ia mosques around the United States in a virtually unprecedented move by the government against religious institutions.

The Saudis and Yemenis are currently piggybacking on Israeli and neocon claims that Iran is funding terrorist groups abroad. The Al-Huthi clan rebellion in the Yemeni mountains on the Yemeni-Saudi border is now being claimed by Yemen and the Saudis to have the financial backing of Iran and Lebanon's Hezbollah, as well as wealthy Shi'a families in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Dubai. The move by the Justice Department against the Alavi Foundation, Shi'a mosques, and Bank Melli in New York is actually welcome news in both Sana'a and Riyadh.

One of the chief government officials who has targeted Iranian investments in the United States is Stuart Levey, the Undersecretary of Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. Levey is a holdover from the Bush administration, where he served in the Treasury Department and in the Justice Department under Attorney General John Ashcroft.

What is apparent is that the Obama Justice Department appears to be a continuation of the Bush Justice Department with all those who favor dialogue with Iran being singled out for prosecution by politically-motivated U.S. Attorneys who are meting out the worst treatment to Iranian-American supporters of Obama and other Democrats. Meanwhile, documented cases of conspiracies to take down Iranian-American moderates, conspiracies linked to known activists and agents for Israel and right-wing Jewish organizations who use forged documents -- their signature stock-in-trade -- remain untouched by the Justice Department prosecutors and FBI G-Men.

Letter from Zelaya to Obama, last night (Original in Spanish)

PRESIDENCIA DE LA REPUBLICA

Del Escritorio
del Señor Presidente

Tegucigalpa, 14 de Noviembre de 2009

S. E.
BARACK OBAMA
PRESIDENTE EEUU
Washington D.C.

Estimado Presidente Obama:

Cuando nos reunimos por primera vez el 8 de julio con la Secretaria de Estado Clinton después del Golpe de Estado se dejo claro ante mí y ante el mundo la posición de la administración Obama de condenar el Golpe de Estado, desconocer sus autoridades y exigir el retorno del estado de derecho con la restitución, al cargo de Presidente electo por el pueblo. La posición oficial de su gobierno y sus representantes que patrocinaron y firmaron las resoluciones de la ONU, OEA. En el que el tercer punto exige mi restitución inmediata y segura.

A partir del 28 de junio de 2009 mi secuestro por los militares y destierro a Costa Rica. El Congreso de la República emitió un decreto ilegal donde ordena “Separar al ciudadano José Manuel Zelaya del cargo de Presidente Constitucional de la República” sin facultades constitucionales para hacerlo, y sin el debido procesos sin ser citado a ningún juicio.

Desde la primera reunión con la secretaria Hillary Clinton me propusieron la mediación del Presidente de Costa Rica Oscar Arias a pesar de que considero que es contraproducente dialogar con personas que tienen un arma en sus manos, acepte considerando el auspicio de EE.UU y de la comunidad internacional.

En un comunicado de fecha 04 de septiembre del presente año la Secretaria de Estado Hillary Clinton expresaba a lo siguiente: “La conclusión positiva del proceso iniciado por Arias sería la base adecuada para proceder con una elección legítima”

De todos es conocido que el Régimen de Facto sin la visita a Honduras del sub. Secretario de Estado para el Hemisferio Occidental, Thomas Shannon, Daniel Restrepo y Craig Kelly no hubieran firmado el Acuerdo. Todos sabemos por qué se rompió el acuerdo, Tegucigalpa – San José. El propio Presidente Oscar Arias en aras de la verdad declaro que: “Micheletti nunca tuvo voluntad de colaborar y que por el contrario se estaba burlando de la comunidad internacional y sólo buscaba dilatar el tiempo para nunca entregar el poder a quien corresponde”.

El Ex Presidente Ricardo Lagos, miembro prominente de la Comisión Internacional de Verificación en sus declaraciones confirmo esto, al manifestar: “El Señor Micheletti lo rompió”, “Micheletti hizo cosas que no debía haber hecho como decir yo formare un gobierno de unidad sin Zelaya” lo que hizo fracasar este acuerdo negociado.

El propio día en que se instalaba en Tegucigalpa la Comisión de Verificación, del
acuerdo sorprendieron las declaraciones, de funcionarios del Departamento de Estado donde modifican su posición e interpretan el acuerdo unilateralmente con las declaraciones siguientes“…las elecciones serían reconocidas por Estados Unidos con o sin restitución…”; El régimen de facto celebro este cambio y utilizaron estas declaraciones para sus objetivos, e inmediatamente terminaron por incumplir y violar el Acuerdo Por lo anteriormente expuesto nos manifestamos de la siguiente manera:

Que el Acuerdo Tegucigalpa-San José queda sin valor ni efecto por incumplimiento unilateral del gobierno de facto. Este fue concebido para implementarse en forma integral y simultánea; pues no se contemplaron como doce acuerdos separados, fue un solo acuerdo con doce puntos el cual tenía un solo propósito, restaurar el orden democrático y la paz social, y con esto se revirtiera el golpe de estado, lo que implica el seguro retorno del Presidente de República elegido legítimamente por voto popular. Y con esto, propiciar un clima de reconciliación nacional y un siguiente proceso electoral
constitucional, limpio, con garantías de participación igualitaria y libre para todos los ciudadanos de Honduras Que las próximas elecciones se debían desarrollar en un marco de legalidad y respaldo internacional especialmente de la OEA y ONU y que fuera de esas condiciones políticas y de derechos ciudadanos mínimos para garantizar un resultado apegado a la libertad y a la transparencia.

En esto, quiero anotar que la nueva posición de los funcionarios del Gobierno de los Estados Unidos esquiva el objetivo inicial del diálogo de San José, relegando un acuerdo con el Gobierno legítimamente reconocido hacia un segundo plano, y tratando de trasladar este acuerdo hacia un nuevo proceso electoral sin importar las condiciones en que se desarrolle. Entre otras, con recursos públicos están siendo autorizados por funcionarios públicos no reconocidos legalmente e imputados a un documento de Presupuesto que no ha sido autorizado por Presidente legítimamente reconocido.

En estas condiciones, este proceso, y por lo tanto sus resultados serán sujetos de impugnación y no reconocimiento; lo cual pone en grave riesgo la estabilidad futura de las relaciones entre Honduras y el resto de naciones que reconozcan sus resultados.

Como lo ha señalado el Secretario General de la OEA José Miguel Insulza, no existe un ambiente político, para elecciones, como lo ha observado y apuntado la Congresista Norteamericana Jane Sharkorky en su visita a Honduras, se observa un ambiente comprobado de violación a los derechos humanos en Honduras.

El 6 de noviembre pasado, hemos comunicado nuestra negativa a continuar con el dialogo falso, y por lo tanto al expirarse el plazo el texto constituye letra muerta que pierde vigencia, porque un acuerdo se cumple en tiempo y forma, la violación de este por el régimen de facto es para nosotros la condición que determina que el acuerdo dejo de existir. Indudablemente se perdió tiempo precioso en este intento fallido.

La elección presidencial está actualmente prevista para la última semana de noviembre. En este caso, como Presidente Constitucional de Honduras, y como ciudadano que representa y fue elegido por voto democrático del pueblo de Honduras, me veo en la obligación de informar que bajo estas condiciones no podemos respaldarla y procederemos a impugnarlo legalmente en nombre de millares de hondureños y de cientos de candidatos que sienten que esta competencia es desigual y no se presentan las condiciones de participación en libertad.

En Honduras por la represión a que hoy está sometido el pueblo Hondureño, donde no se respeta ni la más alta autoridad el Presidente de la Republica, donde no se ha considerado que en tres años logré los mejores indicadores económicos y la más grande reducción de la pobreza de los 28 años de vida democrática, donde fui derrocado por la fuerza de las armas, nunca fui sometido a un juicio ni al proceso debido y tengo hoy 24 acusaciones y ordenes de captura por narcotráfico corrupción y terrorismo entre otros, y donde la mayor parte de los Ministros de mi gabinete son objeto de persecución política y se encuentran huyendo del régimen en diferentes partes de América.

3500 personas detenidas en cien días, mas de 600 personas heridas y golpeadas en los hospitales, más de un centenar de asesinatos y una incontable cantidad de personas sometidas a torturas cometidas contra ciudadanos que se atreven a oponerse y manifestar sus ideas, de libertad y justicia, en manifestaciones pacificas, todo esto convierten las elecciones de noviembre en un ejercicio anti-democrático por estado de ilegitimidad, por la incertidumbre y la intimidación militar, para grandes sectores de nuestro pueblo.

Realizar elecciones, en las que el Presidente electo por el pueblo de Honduras, a quien reconoce su Gobierno y la Comunidad Internacional, está prisionero, rodeado por militares en la sede diplomática de Brasil, y un Presidente de Facto, que impusieron los militares, rodeado por los poderosos en el palacio de gobierno, será una vergüenza histórica para Honduras y una infamia para los pueblos Democráticos de América.

Este proceso electoral es ilegal porque oculta el golpe de estado militar, y el estado de facto en que vive Honduras no brinda garantías de igualdad y libertad en la participación ciudadana, a todos los Hondureños, es una maniobra electoral antidemocrática repudiada por grandes sectores del pueblo para encubrir los autores materiales e intelectuales del Golpe de Estado.

Las Elecciones son un proceso no son solo un día donde se va elegir, es un debate, es exposición de ideas es igualdad de oportunidades.

En mi condición de Presidente electo por el pueblo Hondureño, reafirmo mi decisión que a partir de esta fecha cualquiera que fuera el caso, YO NO ACEPTO, ningún acuerdo de retorno a la presidencia, para encubrir el golpe de estado, que sabemos que tiene un impacto directo por la represión militar sobre los derechos humanos de las habitantes de nuestro país.

Sr. Presidente en la Cumbre de Países del Continente Americano celebrada en Trinidad y Tobago a principios de este año, donde estuve presente Usted manifestó

“Que dejáramos de acusar a Estados Unidos por lo que hizo en el pasado en el continente y que viéramos hacia el futuro”. El futuro que hoy nos muestran al alterar su posición en el caso de Honduras y favorecer así la intervención abusiva de las castas militares en la vida cívica de nuestro Estado, (causa histórica del atraso y estancamiento de nuestros países en el siglo XX) No es mas que el ocaso de la libertad y un desprecio a la dignidad humana, es una nueva guerra contra los procesos de reformas sociales y democráticas tan necesarios en Honduras.

Presidente Obama, cada vez que se derroca un Gobierno legítimamente electo en América la violencia y el terrorismo nos gana una batalla y la Democracia sufre
una derrota.

Todavía Nos resistimos a creer que este golpe de estado militar en ejecución en Honduras, es ya el nuevo, terrorismo de estado del siglo XXI. Y será el futuro para América latina que nos hablo en Trinidad y Tobago.

Estamos firmes decididos a luchar por nuestra democracia sin ocultar la verdad y cuando un pueblo se decide a luchar pacíficamente por sus ideas, no hay arma, no hay ejército ni maniobra capaz de detenerlo.

En espera de su pronta respuesta, le reitero mi más alta consideración.

JOSE MANUEL ZELAYA ROSALES
Presidente de Honduras