Hondo Hillary - 8

Reagan’s Raiders



Beginning with Haiti, we can work back to the Reagan years; and we will see that many of the coup cadre under review on Honduras worked for both Reagan and the Bush dynasty.



Roger Noriega, then Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. We’ve reviewed his biographical sketch, so we know he got his bones in Nicaragua, in the Reagan administration’s campaign to destroy the Sandinista government. Dubbed “Iran-Contra” by the press, that campaign was being run by a now familiar coterie of felons which included Elliot Abrams, John Negroponte, John Poindexter, and Otto Reich.

The Vice President during this episode was George Herbert Walker Bush, former Director of Central Intelligence.

Reagan’s Office of Public Diplomacy was run by Otto Reich, who zealously planted half truths, innuendos and outright fabrications in the press – for instance, that the Sandanista government was receiving a shipment of MIG fighter-bombers.

Early in George W. Bush’s administration, Bush nominated on Reich to be Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs during a legislative recess, but the returning Senate refused to renew Reich’s appointment. In August 2001, the job went to Mr. Noriega; but like so many of the Iran-Contra vets, Reich went back into the government, working under Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice from a special office (created just for him) called “Special Envoy for Western Hemisphere Initiatives.”

Reich needs moving around form time to time. He leaves messes. Toward the middle of the second Reagan administration when the huge cocaine element of Iran-Contra broke into view, Reich’s deep involvement with CIA assassin Felix Rodriguez and terrorist Luis Posada Carriles became too obvious for the administration’s comfort, and off he went. In 1986 he got his Embassy in Caracas.

Reich’s first mission from Bush II was his disinformation campaign against Hugo Chavez’ government in Venezuela.

John Negroponte is another Cocaine-Contra figure with a great resume for disinformation. In 1981, USA Ambassador to Honduras, Jack Binns, made the error of reporting that the Honduran military was engaged in death-squad activity. This did not sit well with the Reagan administration, who never met a right-wing Latin American reactionary it didn’t like. Binns was fired and his job went to Negroponte. Between 1981-1985, Negroponte’s diplomatic tenure, there was a direct correlation between the level of military violence – especially that of the specially US-trained “intelligence” unit called Battalion 3-16 – and the level of military assistance provided to Honduras by the US taxpayer: an increase from $4 million to $77.4 million. This was when Honduras was being used as a launch platform for the Nicaraguan Contras.



When the Senate later questioned Negroponte in the course of the Iran-Contra investigation, Negroponte said he had no knowledge of Battalion 3-16 or its activities, indicating that he was either dead drunk for four years or not actually staying in Honduras where he was the ambassador (or, of course, that he was lying through his teeth).

Through this whole sordid period of death squads, the murders of nuns and Catholic clerics, arms-and-cocaine swaps, and felony-as-executive-branch-policy, the regional boss was Elliot Abrams, described by friend and foe alike as a snarling macho prick. Convicted for his role in Iran-Contra as Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs, Abrams was soon pardoned by George H. W. Bush. Later, Bush the Younger named Abrams Senior Director of the National Security Council’s “Office for Democracy, Human Rights and International Operations.”

In 2003, Peter Kornbluh of the National Archives told a Newsday reporter:

The resurfacing of the Iran-Contra culprits has been nothing short of Orwellian in this administration. These are not 21st-century appointments. They are retrograde appointments, a throwback to an era of interventionism when the U.S. was the big bully on the block.

There was some speculation that the Bush II appointments – most intimates of the Miami-based Cuban right-wing – were a form of reciprocation for Cuban assistance with the Florida-based judicial coup that put George W. Bush into the Oval Office. But the very Republican genealogy of this cadre suggests it was more substantial than that.

During the Bush II years, it would be Roger Noriega coordinating the details of President Aristide’s forcible removal from office, with Otto Reich running the anti-Aristide disinformation campaign in the Organization of American States (OAS), himself fresh back from his failed coup against Venezuela.

And so we see the same people moving back and forth over the map, and through time.

We know the IRI is a Republican Party instrument. Above the IRI in the chain of command, as it were, is the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). It has a Democratic subsidiary, so it appears very bipartisan. But, again, the NED itself was Reagan’s creature, and the Reagan administration itself was explicit that the NED was a refinement in covert operations.

The NED was set up in the early 1980s under President Reagan in the wake of all the negative revelations about the CIA in the second half of the 1970s. The latter was a remarkable period; spurred by Watergate – the Church committee of the Senate, the Pike committee of the House, and the Rockefeller Commission, created by the president, were all busy investigating the CIA.

Seemingly every other day there was a new headline about the discovery of some awful thing, even criminal conduct, the CIA had been mixed up in for years. The Agency was getting an exceedingly bad name, and it was causing the powers-that-be much embarrassment. Something had to be done. What was done was not to stop doing these awful things. Of course not.

What was done was to shift many of these awful things to a new organization, with a nice sounding name – The National Endowment for Democracy.

The idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities. It was a masterpiece. Of politics, of public relations, and of cynicism.

-William Blum

The NED has four affiliates in the United States: the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the US Chamber of Commerce, and the AFL-CIO. The NED counterparts to these four entities are the International Republican Institute, the Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the Center for International Private Enterprise, and the American Center for International Labor Solidarity. There is strong and growing opposition within the AFL-CIO to ACILS, which is a throwback to the bad-old-days of Cold War business-unionism.

The job of the NED is to funnel funds, training, and support to political groups in other countries in order to ensure political outcomes that are favorable to the US. Their most tried and true method has been to build, train, finance, and control political alliances as “oppositions” to popular governments considered too “left” for the US. If that sounds like the IRI’s doings, it’s because it is. The IRI just focuses more. The entire NED organization is committed to the Dollar-Wall Street Regime, and to neoliberalism as its lifeblood.

Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, was quite candid when he said in 1991:”A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” In effect, the CIA has been laundering money through NED.
(Ibid.)

The Clinton State Department budget has more money for NED “democracy promotion” campaigns in its 2010 budget than the Bush administration had during its full eight years.



In 2010, there was a failed coup attempt against Ecuador’s government. President Correa was temporarily expelled to a US military base. Ecuador joined ALBA, and Ecuador's president closed an American military base there, saying it could be opened again when the US allowed an Ecuadoran military base in Miami.

The Helms School

US policy right now is in the hands of the ideologues. You cannot overestimate the relevance of these people in shaping US policy. In a sense the Helms school of Haitian strategy is at work here.

- Larry Birns, as director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs

Roger Noriega’s public antipathy for Aristide began while Aristide was in office the first time, when Noriega was working as a senior advisor to the OAS. This public opposition to Aristide – and Noriega’s connections with Miami’s reactionaries – led to an appointment to the staff of the arch-racist Senator from my very own North Carolina, Jesse Helms.

Though seldom noted, race figures heavily into the world view of our protagonists, including the members of the Latin American comprador-surrogate elite. Color still massively divides Latin American society.
Helms was a personal friend to and open supporter of Salvadoran death-squad commandante Roberto D’ Aubuisson, believed to have planned the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, one of the many outrages that occurred in Latin America on the Reagan watch.

Active opposition to Aristide by Helms and Roger Noriega began at the very moment of Aristide’s surprise election victory in 1990, when he overwhelmingly defeated the US-backed Haitian presidential candidate, Marc Bazin, a World Bank executive. This election made Aristide the first democratically elected president in Haitian history.

Helms’ antipathy to Aristide is double-edged: Helms regarded any form of independence, any popular agitation, any policy that makes inroads against the power of the rich, to be “communist.”

Helms frequently referred to Aristide as a “Haitian Castro,” employing the ever reliable guilt by association with a pre-demonized figure trick. And Jesse Helms just plain didn’t like Black people. Foreign, black, Catholic, or left of him – the only thing missing for the pure embodiment of evil according to Helms would be if Aristide were gay.

In the South, where political hegemony has been exercised ever since the Nixon presidency, there is a long standing belief that unions, race-mixing, and communism are identical, and this remained Helms’ view. One of the Ku Klux Klan’s principal appeals forty years ago (when Hoover’s FBI was very much at home with the good ole boys) was that they were a bulwark against communism – which they opposed because communists promoted racial “mongrelization.”

Maybe Roger Noriega shared Mr. Helms’ special political pathology. But it’s more likely that he is driven by his self-perception as a guardian of the empire in Latin America, and shaped by his origins in that particular region of the South… that is, Miami – ever a swamp of political intrigue.

The former U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White, was among those fired by Reagan for speaking out on human rights violations. Just days before the present coup d’etat culminated with Aristide’s removal and detention by the U.S. Marines, White commented: “ Roger Noriega has been dedicated to ousting Aristide for many, many years, and now he’s in a singularly powerful position to accomplish it.” Shortly thereafter, he did.

Recalling the Helms-Noriega efforts to prevent Aristide’s return to Haiti in 1994, Dr. Heather Williams wrote in “Haiti as Target Practice”:

How the US Press Missed the Story:

As senior staff member for the Committee on Foreign Relations of the U.S. Senate, and advisor to Senator Jesse Helms and John Burton, he [Roger Noriega] was party to a three-year campaign to defame Aristide and prevent his return to power; all the while CIA-backed thugs left carnage in the streets daily in Port Au Prince. In his capacity in the State Department since 2003, and for two years before that as the U.S. Permanent Representative to the OAS, he has aggressively advertised his intention to oust Aristide a second time. For example, in April of last year, speaking at the Council of the Americas conference in Washington, he linked U.S. policies in Haiti to those in Venezuela and Cuba … He added that” President Chavez and President Aristide have contributed willfully to a polarized and confrontational environment. It is my fervent hope,” he added ominously, “that the good people of Cuba are studying [this].”

While there is no doubt that the Reagan administration was a shaker and mover in Latin America and the Caribbean, to really get at the roots of covert operations and coups d’etat in the United States, we have to go back just a bit further.

Plan Condor

In 1948, the CIA inaugurated its “Office of Policy Coordination,”(OPC) headed up by Frank Wisner, a Wall Street lawyer. The OPC’s responsibilities included, in its own words,

[P]ropaganda, economic warfare, preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation procedures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.

In the wake of the economic crisis caused by Vietnam, the US colonial playground called Latin America took on a new significance. The story of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s involvement in the 1973 CIA-supported coup d’etat against democratically elected President Salvador Allende in Chile is well known. What is not so well remembered is that John Negroponte was the US Ambassador to the UN in 1972, as was George Bush the Elder in 1973. Bush took over the CIA in 1975. At that time, DCI Bush launched Plan Condor, designed to wipe out political opposition to US-supported regimes in Latin America. As part of Condor, the green light was given to the then-fascist government of Argentina to slaughter 30,000 political opponents between 1976 and 1983.


Who were some of the shakers and movers for Plan Condor? Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, the future Cuban-American bombers of a civilian passenger airliner.

The Argentinean military would eventually help train Negroponte’s Honduran Battalion 3-16, an officially-sanctioned death squad inside the Honduran Army.
So the Republican genealogy of the coups of the 2000s is clear, as is the longstanding alliance between Republican foreign policy operators in Latin America and the preponderance of Miami-based Cuban-American agitators within the core cadre.

Battalion 3-16

Battalion 3-16 … was the name of a Honduran army unit responsible for carrying out political assassinations and torture of suspected political opponents of the government during the 1980s.

-Wikipedia

Trained initially by members of the Argentine military, when Argentina was a military dictatorship ridding itself of some 30,000 meddlesome citizens at home, Battalion 3-16 also received training from Pinochet’s Chile. When the war for the Malvinas happened, the CIA became the unit’s more direct benefactor, training the unit’s members on bases in Honduras and the United States; where the Department of Defense also brought many members through the then-named “School of the Americas.”

General Gustavo Alvarez Martínez commanded the unit, and co-authored the current Constitution of Honduras with Ambassador John Negroponte.

Even after revelations about 3-16’s activities, the unit continues to this day, under the designation “Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence Branch.”

In summarising declassified U.S. documents showing telegrams (cables) sent and received by Negroponte during his period as U.S. Ambassador to Honduras, the National Security Archive states that “reporting on human rights atrocities” committed by Battalion 3-16 is “conspicuously absent from the cable traffic” and that “Negroponte’s cables reflect no protest, or even discussion of these issues during his many meetings with General Alvarez, his deputies and Honduran President Robert Suazo. Nor do the released cables contain any reporting to Washington on the human rights abuses that were taking place.

-Wikipedia (Battalion 3-16)

Billy Joya

One of the chief figures with Battalion 3-16 is Billy Joya. Beginning his military career at 14 years old, Billy Fernando Joya Améndola rose through the ranks of the state security apparatus until he was a National Security Advisor to President Zelaya, and was appointed chief of state security after the coup. Zelaya himself believes Joya to be one of the coup’s main architects, and says that Battalion 3-16 is being reconstituted in its old guise to consolidate it.
Events after the coup suggest that Zelaya is right. Bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, and threats have been relentlessly deployed against anti-coup figures and organizations ever since the coup last year. Joya became the post-coup state security tsar for Honduras in 2009.

The main agency that specializes in setting up terror networks to augment official forces in Latin America has been the CIA. Off-the-record operations and off-the-books funding gives then great latitude; and the Agency hasn’t been an intelligence agency for decades. Less than 20% of its budget is for intelligence gathering, and most of that is in support of its own covert operations, which is the lion’s share of the budget.

The CIA had a strong role in establishing, training, equpping and financing Battalion 3-16. The U.S. Ambassador to Honduras at the time, John Negroponte, met frequently with General Gustavo Alvarez Martínez. In summarising declassified U.S. documents showing telegrams (cables) sent and received by Negroponte during his period as U.S. Ambassador to Honduras, the National Security Archive states that “reporting on human rights atrocities” committed by Battalion 3-16 is “conspicuously absent from the cable traffic” and that “Negroponte’s cables reflect no protest, or even discussion of these issues during his many meetings with General Alvarez, his deputies and Honduran President Robert Suazo. Nor do the released cables contain any reporting to Washington on the human rights abuses that were taking place.”

-Wikipedia (Battalion 3-16)

The CIA sponsored death squads and secret police in numerous client states. Latin America and the Caribbean received special attention in this regard, particularly in the 80s under Reagan, but with continuity under ex-CIA Director and President George Herbert Walker Bush.

Given its emphasis on covert operations, generally in support of right-wing forces, the Agency’s culture reflects its operations in its politics. As the right-wing in American politics, the Republican Party is well-represented within the Agency, both leadership and rank-and-file.


Special Forces shares WWII’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS) lineage with the CIA. My own immersion in that culture bore this out: overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male, and overwhelmingly Republican. I was in Colombia, working as an advisor in 1992, when Bill Clinton won the election. We were bunked up with another special ops unit, and the announcement of the Clinton victory was met with jeers and howls of protest, accompanied by homophobic epithets. This was to become his unit, as Commander-in-Chief. And it did not like him. The same cultural norms apply to the CIA.

The year prior, the CIA had facilitated its first coup against Haiti’s President Aristide, just eight months after he took office. Within a year, the Republican CIA would fire a shot across Clinton’s bow.

The Harlan County Incident

During the 1992 election, Bill Clinton excoriated George W. Bush for his incarceration of Haitian refugees in the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Playing to his black constituents, whom Clinton would betray in his later policies at every turn, Clinton also pointed quite justifiably to the hypocrisy of allowing (mostly) white Cubans automatic entry into the US, while indefinitely detaining black Haitians.

The coup of a year earlier (1991) was consolidating apace with its slaughter of Aristide loyalists and grassroots organizers, and CIA complicity in the coup was becoming gradually more visible with a leak here and a whisper there.

Then the economy tanked after George H. W. Bush had made his famed “read my lips” remark, and Bill Clinton was elected.

Faced with the reality of Haiti’s desperation and the volume of refugees fleeing the Cedras-Francois regime, and faced with the reality of Florida politics and the possibility of 100,000 or more penniless people crashing onto its shores, Bill Clinton’s first foreign policy embarrassment was being forced by his circumstances to treat the fleeing Haitians even more harshly than the Bush regime had.

My own unit in 1993 (3rd Special Forces Group) was preparing for an invasion of Haiti to re-install a reined-in Aristide, but the debacle in Somalia put the whole plan on hold for a year. While Haitians had originally elected Aristide because of his opposition to predatory neoliberal policies, Clinton now convinced Aristide to support those same policies in order to stop the killing.
Clinton knew very well that a US invasion would not be accepted by the people of Haiti without Aristide – their first democratically elected President, whom they now saw as the personification of their aspiration for genuine independence.

Aristide was to be re-installed on October 30, 1993, according to an agreement between Cedras and Clinton called the Governor’s Island accords. The USS Harlan County, carrying the military and State Department facilitators, arrived in Port-au-Prince on October 11th. But the officials who were designated to meet the craft had been replaced by a handful of FRAPH thugs (some of them drunk) waving pistols and threatening to fire on anyone who disembarked. So the USS Harlan County, an American warship, was turned about and sent home by a band of intoxicated bullies with Colt .45s. This was a tremendous foreign policy embarrassment for President Bill Clinton, who was at a loss to explain the situation to the public.

This bizarre incident was rendered even more fantastic by the nonchalant presence of the American John Kambourian on the docks, unafraid and unthreatened by the ostensible anti-American gang. Kambourian was leaning on his vehicle with a kind of Delphic smirk throughout this whole weird interlude. Documentary film maker Katherine Kean was on hand and secretly videotaped him.

Kambourian was the CIA’s man on station. He had been sitting in the car with UN representative Vickie Huddleston, and the FRAPHists made a kind of show of banging on the hood and shouting, “Kill whites!” for the cameras. Neither Huddleston nor Kambourian seemed alarmed, nor did Huddleston attempt to leave. It was only later, when they didn’t realize Kean had a running camera, that Kambourian exited the car to catch some air and suppress a smile at the little performance. The FRAPH, after all, were Kambourian’s boys.

Present during the 1993 USS Harlan County fiasco was the chief of the FRAPH, Emmanuel “Toto” Constant.

Only later would the public learn that Constant was on the CIA payroll before, during, and after the 1991 coup d’etat. Little wonder Kambourian was so comfortable relaxing outside during the Harlan County “riot.” Constant was taken in by the United States to live comfortably in Queens, NY collecting Happy Meal toys and (by many accounts) spending happy hours with his local cocaine dealers. His threats to expose his CIA relations pressured the US into protecting him from extradition.

Note that in this episode the CIA was subverting its own Director. There is no indication that R. James Woolsey, the newly appointed DCI was complicit in Kambourian’s fake riot; in fact, it would be surprising if he were. He was a Clinton appointee, and like the next Clinton DCI, John Deutch, he served on the Boards of Directors of various big Defense contractors. The transparently orchestrated sabotage of Clinton’s Haiti policy was probably the work of the field agents within the CIA who move up to become station chiefs.

Bush the Elder – former Director of Central Intelligence – had his vengeance on Bill Clinton with the Harlan County incident. Clinton was likely reluctant to call anyone’s bluff on issues related to the CIA, just as Obama is loathe to confront his own military-security-intelligence establishment, where the Republican Party remains hegemonic.

In June 2010, Lanny Davis wrote a hit piece against the left for The Hill, entitled “Progressive threat to the left.” Nothing new there. Davis has always been a corporate DNC flak. What was interesting in the commentary was a (Freudian) slip he made in his text, where he was recommending Obama create a “Sister Souljah moment” in shutting down the left wing of the Democratic Party.

Two events last week involving elements of the Democratic Party who call themselves the “true progressives” show a danger they represent to the progressive change they say they want to effect. Together they offer President Barack Obama an opportunity for a “Sister Souljah moment” – perhaps to save the Democratic Party majority in both houses of Congress, as well as his progressive agenda in the last two years of his administration.

-Chris Bowers

Lanny Davis, if the reader recalls, is now the principle lobbyist for the post-coup government in Honduras.

Davis goes back a long way with the Clintons. He was Bill’s lawyer when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, and he was a key campaign strategist for his close personal friend Hillary Clinton. They have been friends since they met in Yale Law School. His animosity for Barack Obama, the man who spoiled his best friend’s first coronation, is well-known. He was the campaign consultant who went racial against Obama in the primaries, a hatchet-man to mobilize white voters to Hillary’s camp, after her South Carolina racial gaff pushed the African American vote into Obama’s column.

Hillary Clinton is a genuine conservative ideologue, not that far removed from Jesse Helms.  Look at her voting record and her actions.  Never ever listen to what she says, because she speaks in public only instrumentally.

In 2006, Rupert Murdoch held a fundraiser for her. She was a war supporter, and a friend to the military-industrial-secuity-intelligence complex. Conservative commentators wrote to suggest a 2008 crossover vote for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Primary, and many Republican voters responded with primary support for Clinton. She is friendly to Wall Street and hostile to unions. Her pro-choice credentials are one of the few things that force many Democrats to cling to her.  The last defense of Clinton as a presidential candidate in any debate where her actual record becomes part of the debate is, "What about the Supreme Court?"  There is only one issue where she might part from Republicans about court appointments, and that is Roe v. Wade.  For those who see this as the single overarching issue of all time, her deadly predispositions against people abroad are secondary.

Clinton’s Man in a Cloak

The Cormac Group, now, the illegal regime is being represented by top notch lobbyist and Clinton attorney Lanny Davis, who is using his pull and influence in Washington to achieve overall acceptance – cross party lines – of the coup regime in Honduras.

-Eva Golinger, 2009

Two weeks after the coup in Tegucigalpa, Eva Golinger, writing from Venezuela, gave the following checklist – supported in a long narrative – of key points regarding US involvement in the coup.

• The Department of State had prior knowledge of the coup.

• The Department of State and the US Congress funded and advised the actors and organizations in Honduras that participated in the coup.

• The Pentagon trained, schooled, commanded, funded and armed the Honduran armed forces that perpetrated the coup and that continue to repress the people of Honduras by force.

• The US military presence in Honduras, that occupies the Soto Cano (Palmerola) military base, authorized the coup d’etat through its tacit complicity and refusal to withdraw its support of the Honduran military involved in the coup.

• The US Ambassador in Tegucigalpa, Hugo Llorens, coordinated the removal from power of President Manuel Zelaya, together with Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon y John Negroponte, who presently works as an advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

• From the first day the coup occurred, Washington has referred to “both parties” involved and the necessity for “dialogue” to restore constitutional order, legitimizing the coup leaders by regarding them as equal players instead of criminal violators of human rights and democratic principles.

• The Department of State has refused to legally classify the events in Honduras as a “coup d’etat”, nor has it suspended or frozen its economic aid or commerce to Honduras, and has taken no measures to effectively pressure the de facto regime.

• Washington manipulated the Organization of American States (OAS) in order to buy time, therefore allowing the coup regime to consolidate and weaken the possibility of President Zelaya’s immediate return to power, as part of a strategy still in place that simply seeks to legitimate the de facto regime and wear down the Honduran people that still resist the coup.

• Secretary of State Clinton and her spokesmen stopped speaking of President Zelaya’s return to power after they designated Costa Rican president Oscar Arias as the “mediator” between the coup regime and the constitutional government; and now the State Department refers to the dictator that illegally took power during the coup, Roberto Micheletti, as the “interim caretaker president”.

• The strategy of “negotiating” with the coup regime was imposed by the Obama administration as a way of discrediting President Zelaya – blaming him for provoking the coup – and legitimizing the coup leaders.

• Members of the US Congress – democrats and republicans – organized a visit of representatives from the coup regime in Honduras to Washington, receiving them with honors in different arenas in the US capital.

• Despite the fact that originally it was Republican Senator John McCain who coordinated the visit of the coup regime representatives to Washington through a lobby firm connected to his office, The Cormac Group, now, the illegal regime is being represented by top notch lobbyist and Clinton attorney Lanny Davis, who is using his pull and influence in Washington to achieve overall acceptance – cross party lines – of the coup regime in Honduras.

• Otto Reich and a Venezuelan named Robert Carmona-Borjas, known for his role as attorney for the dictator Pedro Carmona during the April 2002 coup d’etat in Venezuela, aided in preparing the groundwork for the coup against President Zelaya in Honduras.

• The team designated from Washington to design and help prepare the coup in Honduras also included a group of US ambassadors recently named in Central America, experts in destabilizing efforts against the Cuban revolution, and Adolfo Franco, ex administrator for USAID’s Cuba “transition to democracy” program.

Lanny Davis and John McCain, the Chair of the International Republican Institute and water boy for AT&T. I can’t speak for anyone but myself here, but that is just an extremely interesting pair. Both with this connection to the Department of State and the coup in Honduras. Zachary Roth, writing in July 2009:

It seems like just yesterday that Lanny Davis was making the rounds of every news outlet that would have him, talking up Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House — and/or pushing the Reverend Wright story.
Not too long after, the former Clinton White House counsel popped up to do damage control for hawkish Democratic congresswoman Jane Harman over the AIPAC leak story.

And now the hardest working conservative Democrat in show business has a new gig: lobbying against the Honduran leader recently deposed in a military coup.

The Hill reports that Davis has been hired by the Honduran branch of CEAL, the Latin American equivalent of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to urge US lawmakers to support, rather than oppose, the military removal of President Manuel Zelaya, Honduras’s democratically elected president.

One of Davis’ clients was the military government of Pakistan under Perez Musharraf. Davis is definitely a big money man, and bullet-and-baton regimes seem not to ruffle him in the least. But he is treated by the media as a kind of “objective” analyst. Glenn Greenwald writes,

If Lanny Davis were just another Beltway lobbyist/lawyer piggishly feeding off our political system by serving whatever corporate interests happen to rent him, all of this would be too common to bother noting. But Davis parades around as — and is treated by media organizations as being — some sort of political pundit as well. He’s presented by numerous media outlets as an independent analyst who opines on the news of the day — yet does so almost exclusively in order to promote the interests of those who are paying him, relationships which are often undisclosed.

This is what makes Davis a perceptioneer nonpariel. He is cloaked.

Connect the Dots

John Negroponte links Clinton to the American coup cadre; and Lanny Davis connects her with the Hondurans. Lanny Davis and John McCain are connected by their McCormac Group cooperation in post-coup perception management after the coup; and John McCain and Hillary Clinton are connected via the State Department/IRI relationship. McCain is connected to Negroponte via Carmona-Borjas, Arcadia Foundation, and Negroponte’s friend Otto Reich.

This is networking.





Clinton’s third finger in the pie was, of course, US Ambassador to Honduras Hugo Llorens, her direct representive in that nation, reporting directly to her. It becomes apparent, looking at this meshwork of relations, that there was only one person who was in both the legal and organizational position to exercise executive authority over US participation. That person was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. To determine the exact content of her responsibility we need to study the coup itself.

NEXT EPISODE - the coup itself