Sunday, July 12, 2009

Honduran Junta Foreign Minister Refers to Obama as "the little black sugar plantation worker " & Latin América’s Neda & CIA's Habit of Lying

Today's Menu:

Honduran Coup Foreign Minister Racist remarks about Obama

Anti-Democratic Coup in Honduras ignored by US Media

Latin América’s Neda

CIA 's History of Lying to Congress , the President & the American people


Racist & Elitist Honduran Junta Foreign Minister Enrique Ortez Colindres Refers to Obama as "the little black sugar plantation worker " & "a little black man who doesn't know where Tegucigalpa is" and "a little black man who doesn't know anything about anything."

and: "I have negotiated with queers, prostitutes, leftists, blacks, whites. This is my job, I studied for it. I am not racially prejudiced. I like the little black sugar plantation worker who is president of the United States." Enrique Ortez Colindres


...“The liberating army we need in the Americas today is one of leaders who come together in peace, in the spirit of cooperation,” Arias continues. “We need an army of doctors and teachers, of engineers and scientists. We need a force that recognizes that only through development and liberty, through education and health care, through better priorities and wiser investments, can we achieve the stability we seek.”
Quote from Oscar Arias President of Costa Rica referring to Honduran situation.

" It appears that President Obama has no desire to demand any change in the current system of intelligence community oversight. That’s unfortunate, and dangerous to our Democracy." Sherwood Ross

Sherwood Ross In his article below points out that contrary to popular opinion & the Republicans & the US media there has never been adequate oversite of the CIA & the intelligence community by the US government . The CIA he points out has had a habit or a tradition of misleading the Congress & even the Whitehouse. Unfortunately President Obama has bought into this policy as we have seen of always defending the CIA even when it acts as a rogue department setting its own agenda even keeping presidents in the dark about its covert sometimes illegal operations.


anyway here's a video of Ortez via YouTube & Daily Kos:



Q: Do you think the "gringos," as you call them, would permit an invasion of Honduras promoted by Chavez?

A: They permit anything. The United States is no longer a defender of democracy. In the first place, the president of the republic [the U.S.], with all due respect to the little black man, doesn’t know where Tegucigalpa is. We’re the ones who know where Washington is and we’re the ones who are obliged, as a small country, a democratic pygmy, to clarify the concepts for him and read to him, maybe in his language, what’s going on.
Honduran Foreign Minister Calls Obama

Honduras: "El negrito del batey" by cadejo4 at DailyKOs.com, July 8, 2009

...racist comments by Enrique Ortez Colindres, "foreign minister" for the de facto regime sworn in following the June 28 military coup in Honduras...Ortez has called President Barack a "little black man" at least three times in public interviews since the coup.

...A third quote by Ortez Colindres...

"He negociado con maricones, prostitutas, con ñángaras (izquierdistas), negros, blancos. Ese es mi trabajo, yo estudié eso. No tengo prejuicios raciales, me gusta el negrito del batey que está presidiendo los Estados Unidos."

Translation: "I have negotiated with queers, prostitutes, leftists, blacks, whites. This is my job, I studied for it. I am not racially prejudiced. I like the little black sugar plantation worker who is president of the United States."

The U.S. ambassador to Honduras, Hugo Llorens, responded in the strongest possible terms yesterday...

In other press statements, Ortez Colindres has called President Obama "a little black man who doesn't know where Tegucigalpa is" and "a little black man who doesn't know anything about anything." Hondurans opposed to the de facto regime have posted at least six videos of one of his comments to YouTube...


Anyway ,Given these remarks by a member of the recently installed Junta in Honduras one can better understand why the Republican Party & US conservatives & their Media Echo-chamber are in favor of the newly installed regime. Birds of a Feather & all that...

The Republicans are also elitists in their ideology & a tad racist but will use various issues & groups to try to expand their base unconcerned about how extremist those groups might be . Their main concern though is to protect the rights & property of the Rich & Powerful & the well connected at the expense of the average American citizen. Obama should stop trying to appease these Republicans & Conservatives & start doing the right thing & not just talk about it ad nauseum .
For instance cut off any aid to Honduras especially military aid since the new government is not the legitimate government according to US law no aid is to be given to such a government.

Anyway the US & the CIA have been backing dictatorships & Military Juntas since at least the 1950s & Obama seems to be following the same pattern. The Coup in Honduras which ousted President Zelaya was in all probablity given the "Green Light" by the CIA if not also by the Obama Whitehouse .

Americans seem to prefer Military Juntas & dictatorships rather than allow a country to have a government of its own choosing with policies which reflect the will of the people. But in America as we are constantly told only the rich & powerful have a right to rule the country though political parties might change & the Presidents might change the status quo must be maintained at all costs. President Obama may have started out wanting to change the way things are done in Washington but the lobbyists & the self-serving elected politicians are little interested in such change.

One wonders if Obama now finds himself with little room to maneuver as he is surrounded by these influence peddlers & elected officials & the Washington Establishment who are so used to corruption that they resist any change . Or is Obama just another run of the mill politician after all is said & done. So Obama continues with a number of the same policies which Bush initiated from harsh interrogation techniques AKA prisoner abue & torture ; indefinite detention even for those who are found innocent; misinforming the American public & the world on the numbers of people detained in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan & secret sites run by US personnel around the globe besides all those who have sent to countries where they can be tortured by proxy ; meanwhile continuing the propaganda war against Iran & threatening to destroy the country like America did to Iraq & increasing the number of troops in Afghanistan in the Escalation of the war reminding one of Vietnam ie trying to win an already lost war - if America can't win then it will punish the citizens of Afghanistan & Pakistan by killing as many citizens as they can & destroying what little they have. Will the American Military turn the region into another Cambodia in which any sort of civil society is destroyed allowing for a new bunch of thugs to take over. Like Empires before them the American Empire does not tolerate dissent & does not recognize the sovereignty of other nations or peoples.

Latin América’s Neda:The Killing of Isis Oved Murillo by Roberto Lovato - Of América at Information Clearing House

The differences between coverage and official treatment here in the U.S. of the situation in Iran and the situation in Honduras couldn’t be starker.

Check out this video and see for yourself what most U.S. media and many elected officials in the U.S. are mum about

Warning: this video is extremely graphic, gut wrenchingly so





U.S. Needs To Heed Arias On Latin Issues by Sherwood Ross at Media With Conscience, July 10, 2009

Stop Military Aid To Region

Oscar Arias, the president of Costa Rica and the man who will serve as mediator of the crisis in Honduras, writes in an OpEd piece this morning (July 10th) in the Miami Herald, “This coup demonstrates, once more, that the combination of powerful militaries and fragile democracies creates a terrible risk.”

Arias never once mentions the role of the United States in destabilizing democracy across Latin America but he doesn’t have to. Uncle Sam is the world’s Numero Uno arms dealer. What Arias does say is: “This year alone, the governments of Latin America will spend nearly $50 billion on their armies. That’s nearly double the amount spent five years ago, a ridiculous sum in a region where 200 million people live on fewer than $2 a day and where only Colombia is engaged in an armed conflict.”

The Pentagon’s Latin influence, always powerful, has been gaining steadily for years and few Americans appear either to know, or to care, what’s been going down the tubes South of the Border. In the five years ended in 2003---under both Presidents Clinton and Bush---U.S. military aid to the region more than tripled, Jim Lobe wrote on “Common Dreams.” “While the militarization of U.S. aid in Latin America actually began under former President Bill Clinton….trends established then have become more pronounced under Bush,” Lobe wrote, citing a report by the Latin America Working Group Education Fund. “Despite pervasive problems of poverty in Latin America, the United States’ focus on military rather than economic aid to the region is increasing,” he quoted Lisa Haugaard of LAWGEF as stating.

You can get the Pentagon’s slant on why Latins must be armed to the teeth from Stephen Johnson, installed two years ago by the Bush regime as Assistant Defense Secretary for the Western Hemisphere. Reuters quotes him as saying (May 21, 2007): “Right now funds for security assistance are slim and what programs we can offer are limited by complicated sanctions. That leaves a vacuum for powers like China and Russia to fill.” This statement is fairly hilarious considering that Russia can scarcely defend its borders and the sinister Chinese are keeping the U.S. economy afloat by lending us billions. (And what’s “slim?”)

...“The liberating army we need in the Americas today is one of leaders who come together in peace, in the spirit of cooperation,” Arias continues. “We need an army of doctors and teachers, of engineers and scientists. We need a force that recognizes that only through development and liberty, through education and health care, through better priorities and wiser investments, can we achieve the stability we seek.”


And he concludes:


“I urge all leaders in the Americas to see the Honduran crisis for what it is: an urgent call for the profound social and institutional changes our region has delayed for far too long.”(Oscar Arias)

... The U.S. Congress needs to stop unequivocally spending a dime on Latin militaries and instead divert those monies to the areas Arias outlined. And after years of spreading terror and death across Latin America, the CIA needs to be removed from that continent and dissolved. If the American people tried this approach, their reputation and standing would soar across Latin America. Powerful militaries do not make good neighbors.

--

"CIA's History of Lying to Congress" by lisa Pease at Consortium News via Truthout,July 10,2009

...Author Kathryn Olmstead explored the failure of government to properly oversee the Agency in her book Challenging the Secret Government and found three culprits:

First, the House and Senate were unwilling to challenge the CIA on policy, whether from fear, support, or sheer laziness.

Second, Olmstead believes the press, which seemed hell-bent on exposing the excesses of covert action in the wake of Watergate, pulled back for fear reporters had gone too far in bringing down President Richard Nixon. (Olmstead notes only in passing CIA’s longstanding relationships with the media, so well detailed in Carl Bernstein’s landmark article “The CIA and the Media,” published in Rolling Stone in 1977.)

But Olmstead really hits the mark with her third point, criticism of the American people for turning a blind eye to the excesses of the National Security State.

“[T]he American people, acculturated for years to view their country and their leaders as moral and democratic, were reluctant to acknowledge unpleasant truths about their secret agencies, Olmstead wrote. "[A]s William W. Keller has explained in ‘The Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover,’ the liberal state did not like to admit that it had violated its ideology in any way.

“Therefore, the extensive powers of its clandestine agencies were kept secret. This secrecy enabled Americans to assume that the nation’s foreign policy goals were compatible with traditional American ideals.

“But the intelligence investigations brought these secret powers into the open; they forced American to acknowledge that their country had tried to kill foreign leaders, had spied on civil rights leaders, and had tested drugs on innocent people.

“Because this knowledge was very painful, many Americans, including members of Congress, refused to accept it. Secrecy, as journalist Taylor Branch has said, ‘protects the American people from grisly facts at variance with their self-image.’”

and :

The legacy of the investigations of the CIA in the 1970s was the perception, though not the reality, that effective CIA oversight had been implemented.

We’re now seeing that, in reality, almost nothing changed. The troubling insights of the committees that investigated the CIA were all but forgotten. No one went to jail for breaking laws or committing perjury.

(In 1977, former CIA Director Richard Helms was convicted of misleading Congress about the Nixon administration’s covert action to oust Chile’s socialist President Salvador Allende, who died in a 1973 coup. Helms received a two-year suspended sentence and a $2,000 fine, which was paid by friends at the CIA. Until his death in 2002, Helms wore the conviction as a badge of honor, and President Ronald Reagan awarded him the National Security Medal in 1983.)

(In the 1980s, CIA Director William J. Casey delighted in mumbling through his congressional testimony making it nearly impossible for the Intelligence Committee members to understand what he was saying or grasp its import. When the deceptions of the Iran-Contra Affair were exposed in 1986, Casey was accused of misleading Congress but died in May 1987 before any legal action could be taken. Three other implicated CIA officers were pardoned by President George H.W. Bush on Christmas Eve 1992.)

It appears that President Obama has no desire to demand any change in the current system of intelligence community oversight. That’s unfortunate, and dangerous to our Democracy.

How can there be consent of the governed, as our Constitution demands, if the governed, or at least, their representatives, have no knowledge of what they are consenting to?

Should we then demand a new investigation of the intelligence communities? Of course we should, and regularly. But we should also do so with a genuine desire for change.


and so it goes,
GORD.

No comments: