Hillary Clinton’s Six Foreign-Policy Catastrophes
Eric Zuesse
Many commentators have mentioned (such as here and here and here and here)
that Hillary Clinton left behind no major achievement as the U.S.
Secretary of State; but, actually, she did. Unfortunately, all of her
major achievements were bad, and some were catastrophic. Six countries
were especially involved: Honduras, Haiti, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine.
The harm she did to each country was not in the interest of the
American people, and it was disastrous for the residents there.
Hillary
Clinton at every campaign debate says “I have a better track-record,”
and that she’s “a progressive who gets things done.” Here’s what she has
actually done, when
she was Secretary of State; here’s her track-record when she actually
had executive responsibility for U.S. foreign-affairs. This will display
her real values, not just her claimed values:
SUMMARY OF THE CASE TO BE PRESENTED
The central-American nation of Honduras
is ruled today by an extremist far-right government, a fascist
junta-imposed government, because of what Hillary Clinton and Barack
Obama did in 2009. The lives of all but the top 0.001% of the population
there are hell because of this.
The matter in Haiti was similar but less dramatic, and so it received even less attention from the U.S. Press.
Furthermore,
under Secretary of State Clinton, failures at the U.S. Department of
State also caused the basis for a hatred of the United States to soar in
Afghanistan after the U.S. has drawn down its troops there. This
failure, too, has received little coverage in the U.S. press, but our
nation will be paying heavily for it long-term.
Hillary Clinton was the Administration’s leading proponent of regime-change, overthrowing Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. That worked out disastrously.
Clinton was also the Secretary of State when the 2006-2010 drought was causing massive relocations of population in Syria
and U.S. State Department cables passed along up the chain of command
the Assad government’s urgent request for aid from foreign governments
to help farmers stave off starvation. The Clinton State Department
ignored the requests and treated this as an opportunity to foment
revolution there. It wasn’t only the Arab Spring, in Syria, that led to
the demonstrations against Assad there. Sunni jihadist fighters streamed
into Syria, backed by the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey. The
U.S. was, in effect, assisting jihadists to oust the non-sectarian,
secular Shiite leader of Syria and replace him with a fundamentalist
Sunni dictator.
The groundwork for a coup d’etat in Ukraine
was laid by Hillary Clinton, when she made her State Department’s
official spokesperson Victoria Nuland, who had been the chief
foreign-affairs advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney. Nuland then
became the organizer of the 20 February 2014 coup in Ukraine, which
replaced a neutralist leader of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, with a
rabidly anti-Russian U.S. puppet, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, and a bloody civil
war. Nuland is obsessed with hatred of Russia.
On top of all that, Hillary Clinton is incredibly corrupt. And she treats subordinates like trash.
No
well-informed Democrat will vote for her in the Democratic Party
primaries. Here is what voters in the Democratic primaries need to know
before they vote:
——————
HONDURAS
On
28 June 2009, the Honduran military grabbed their nation’s
popular democratically elected progressive President, Manuel Zelaya, and
flew him into exile.
The AP headlined from Tegucigalpa the next day, “World Leaders Pressure Honduras to Reverse Coup,”
and reported: “Leaders from Hugo Chavez to Barack Obama called for
reinstatement of Manuel Zelaya, who was arrested in his pajamas Sunday
morning by soldiers who stormed his residence and flew him into exile.”
Secretary Clinton, in the press conference the day after the coup, “Remarks at the Top of the Daily Press Briefing”,
refused to commit the United States to restoration of the
democratically elected President of Honduras. She refused even to commit
the U.S. to using the enormous leverage it had over the Honduran
Government to bring that about. Here was the relevant Q&A:
Mary
Beth Sheridan. QUESTION: Madam Secretary, sorry, if I could just return
for a second to Honduras, just to clarify Arshad’s point – so, I mean,
the U.S. provides aid both under the Foreign Assistance Act and the
Millennium challenge. So even though there are triggers in those; that
countries have to behave – not have coups, you’re not going to cut off
that aid?
SECRETARY
CLINTON: Well, Mary Beth, we’re assessing what the final outcome of
these actions will be. This has been a fast-moving set of circumstances
over the last several days, and we’re looking at that question now. Much
of our assistance is conditioned on the integrity of the democratic
system. But if we were able to get to a status quo that returned to the
rule of law and constitutional order within a relatively short period of
time, I think that would be a good outcome. So we’re looking at all of
this. We’re considering the implications of it. But our priority is to
try to work with our partners in restoring the constitutional order in
Honduras.
QUESTION: And does that mean returning Zelaya himself? You would insist on that in order to –
SECRETARY CLINTON: We are working with our partners.
She
refused to answer the question, even though Zelaya had been an ally of
the U.S., a progressive democrat. (Though Republicans decried Zelaya for
pushing land-reform, the fact is that Honduras is virtually owned by two dozen families,
and drastically needs to drag itself out of its feudal system. Doing
that isn’t anti-American; it’s pro-American. It’s what Zelaya was trying
to do, peacefully and democratically. Our
nation’s Founders fought a Revolution to overthrow feudalism – British –
in our own country. Hillary was thus being anti-American, not just
anti-democratic, here.) This is stunning. The U.S had even been outright
bombed by fascists, on the “day that will live in infamy,” December 7,
1941; and, then, we spilled lots of blood to beat those fascists in
WWII. What was that war all about, if not about opposing fascism and
fascists, and standing up for democracy and democrats? A peaceful
democratic U.S. ally had now been overthrown by a fascist coup in
Honduras, and yet Hillary Clinton’s response was – noncommittal?
The
coup government made no bones about its being anti-democratic. On July
4th of 2009, Al Giordano at Narcosphere Narconews bannered “Honduras Coup Chooses Path of Rogue Narco-State,”
and he reported that, “Last night, around 10 p.m. Tegucigalpa time, CNN
Español interrupted its sports news programming for a live press
conference announcement (‘no questions, please’) by coup ‘president’
Micheletti. There, he announced that his coup ‘government’ of Honduras
is withdrawing from the Democratic Charter of the Organization of
American States. … The Honduras coup’s behavior virtually assures that
come Monday, the US government will define it as a ‘military coup,’
triggering a cut-off of US aid, joining the World Bank, the
Inter-American Development Bank, PetroCaribe, the UN and the rest of the
world in withdrawing economic support for the coup regime.” But that
didn’t happen. The U.S. just remained silent. Why was our Secretary of
State silent, even now?
It
certainly couldn’t have been so on account of her agent on the ground in
Honduras, the U.S. Ambassador to that country: he was anything but
noncommittal. He was fully American, not at all neutral or pro-fascist.
Here was his cable from the U.S. Embassy, reviewing the situation, for Washington, after almost a month’s silence from the Administration:
From: Ambassador Hugo Llorens, U.S. Embassy, Tegucigalpa, Honduras, 24 July 2009.
To: Secretary of State, White House, and National Security Council.
“SUBJECT: TFHO1: OPEN AND SHUT: THE CASE OF THE HONDURAN COUP”
This lengthy message from the Ambassador closed:
“The
actions of June 28 can only be considered a coup d’etat by the
legislative branch, with the support of the judicial branch and the
military, against the executive branch. It bears mentioning that,
whereas the resolution adopted June 28 refers only to Zelaya, its effect
was to remove the entire executive branch. Both of these actions
clearly exceeded Congress’s authority. … No matter what the merits of
the case against Zelaya, his forced removal by the military was clearly
illegal, and [puppett-leader Roberto] Micheletti’s ascendance as
‘interim president’ was totally illegitimate.”
On the same day when the Ambassador sent that cable, AFP headlined “Zelaya ‘Reckless’ to Return to Honduras: Clinton,”
and reported that our Secretary of State criticized Zelaya that day for
trying to get back into his own country. “‘President Zelaya’s effort to
reach the border is reckless,’ Clinton said during a press conference
with visiting Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. … Washington
supports ‘a negotiated peaceful solution to the Honduran crisis,’
Clinton said.” It wasn’t “the Honduran coup” – she wouldn’t call it a
“coup” – it was “the Honduran crisis”; so, she accepted the junta’s
framing of the issue, not the framing of it by Zelaya and everyone other
than the fascists. She wanted “a negotiated peaceful solution” to the
forced removal at gunpoint of Honduras’s popular democratically elected
President. Furthermore, Hillary’s statement here was undiplomatic: if
she had advice for what the elected President of Honduras ought to be
doing, that ought to have been communicated to him privately, not
publicly, and said to him by suggesting what he ought to do, not by
insulting what he already was doing, publicly calling it “reckless.”
Such a statement from her was clearly not meant as advice to help
Zelaya; it was meant to – and did – humiliate him; and diplomats around
the world could see this. Manifestly now, Hillary Clinton supported the
fascists. However, her boss, the U.S. President, stayed silent.
During the crucial next two weeks, Obama considered what to do. Then, on 6 August 2009, McClatchy newspapers bannered “U.S. Drops Call to Restore Ousted Honduran Leader,” and
Tyler Bridges reported that Zelaya wouldn’t receive U.S. backing in his
bid to be restored to power. Though all international organizations
called the Honduran coup illegitimate, and refused to recognize the
leader chosen by its junta, the Obama Administration, after more than a
month of indecision on this matter, finally came out for Honduras’s
fascists. According to James Rosen of McClatchy Newspapers three days
later, the far-right Republican U.S. Senator Jim DeMint had “placed a hold on two nominees to senior State Department posts to protest
Obama’s pushing for ousted Honduran President Manuel Zalaya’s return to
power, which the administration backed away from last week.” Obama,
after a month of silence, caved silently. Instead of his using the bully
pulpit to smear the fascist DeMint publicly with his fascism, Obama
just joined him in it, silently. Why?
Perhaps it was because the chief lobbyist
hired in the U.S. by the Honduran aristocracy (whose thugs had
installed this new Honduran government), was Hillary’s old friend, Lanny
Davis. As slate.com had said on 27 August 2008, headlining “A Day in
the Life of Hillary’s Biggest Fan”: “When it comes to defending Hillary Clinton, Lanny Davis has no rival.” He was the fascists’ fixer, inside the Obama Administration. On 9 July 2009, The Hill bannered “Hondurans Lobby Against Deposed Leader,”
and reported that Honduras’s equivalent of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce
(which was controlled by those two-dozen families) had hired “Lanny
Davis, the former special counsel to President Bill Clinton,” and that,
“The lobbying blitz began [6 July] Monday, one day before Zelaya met
with Clinton as part of his push to be reinstated.” Lanny Davis had had
his input to Hillary even before President Zelaya did. Moreover, The Hill
reported that, “17 Republican senators, including Minority Leader Mitch
McConnell (Ky.) [and DeMint] wrote Secretary Clinton and asked her to
meet with officials from the interim government of Honduras.” America’s
Republican leadership were immediately and strongly supporting
Honduras’s fascists. This Republican Senators’ letter
attacked “the rush to label the events of June 28th a coup d’etat,” and
said that it instead reflected “‘the universal principle that people
should choose their own leaders.’ In a 125-3 vote, the Honduran Congress
approved of the actions taken to remove Mr. Zelaya from office and
install Mr. Micheletti.” (The article “2009 Honduran coup d’état”
at wikipedia says that after the military seized the President on June
28th, “Later that day, the Honduran Congress, in an extraordinary
session, voted to remove Zelaya from office, after reading a false
resignation letter attributed to President Zelaya.” A link to the forged
letter was provided. To Republicans, that is how democracy is supposed
to operate, not a “coup.” Just masked men with machine guns, and then
forged documents and well-connected foreign lobbyists.)
So, the Honduran aristocracy (mainly the Facussé, Ferrari, Canahuati, Atala, Lamas, Nasser, Kattan, Lippman, and Flores, clans)
had purchased a line straight to the U.S. Secretary of State, via Mr.
Davis. And Obama caved. On 13 August 2009, Mark Weisbrot of the Center
for Economic and Policy Research headlined a Sacramento Bee op-ed “Obama Tacitly Backs Military’s Takeover of Honduran Democracy” and
he reported that the Administration’s recent “statements were widely
publicized in the Honduran media and helped to bolster the dictatorship.
Perhaps more ominously, the Obama administration has not said one word
about the atrocities and human rights abuses perpetrated by the coup
government. Political activists have been murdered, independent TV and
radio stations have been shut down, journalists have been detained and
intimidated, and hundreds of people arrested.” There was now, again as
under Bush, widespread revulsion against the U.S. throughout Latin
America. Also on the 13th, Dick Emanuelson, at the Americas Program of
the Center for International Policy, headlined “Military Forces Sow Terror and Fear in Honduras,”
and he described in Honduras a situation very much like that which had
occurred in Argentina when the generals there took over in 1976 and
rounded up and “disappeared” leaders who constituted a threat to the
aristocracy’s continued rule in that country.
The
U.S. was now the only power sustaining the Honduran junta’s government.
Hillary had said “We are working with our partners,” but she lied. It
turned out that the U.S. was instead working against “our partners” – against virtually all of the world’s democratic nations. Brazil Magazine headlined on August 13th, “Brazil Urges Obama to Tighten the Vise on Honduras to Get Zelaya Back,” and
reported that Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva had urged
President Obama to come out publicly for the “immediate and
unconditional” restoration of Zelaya to office. It didn’t happen,
however; and on Friday, August 21st, Mark Weisbrot thus bannered in
Britain’s Guardian, “Obama’s Deafening Silence on Honduras: Seven
weeks after the coup in Honduras, the US is hindering efforts to
restore President Manuel Zelaya to power.” Weisbrot documented lies from
the Obama Administration regarding the coup; and he noted, “The one
thing we can be pretty sure of is that no major US media outlet will
look further into this matter.” He was assuming that the U.S. had a
controlled press, and it seems that he was correct, except for the
McClatchy Newspaper chain, which courageously reported on the Honduran
horrors.
Obama was lying – not even acknowledging that the coup was
a coup – even though (as Weisbrot pointed out) “on Wednesday, Amnesty
International issued a report documenting widespread police beatings and
brutality against peaceful demonstrations, mass arbitrary arrests and
other human rights abuses under the dictatorship. The Obama
administration has remained silent about these abuses — as well as the
killings of activists and press censorship and intimidation. To date, no
major [U.S.] media outlet has bothered to pursue them.” America’s
aristocracy were clearly supporting Honduras’s.
Nearly a hundred scholars signed a public letter saying that if only the U.S. were to come out clearly against the coup, “the coup could easily be overturned,”
because only the U.S. was keeping the coup regime in power (via banking
and other crucial cooperation with the coup government). The U.S. was
key, and it chose to turn the lock on the Honduran prison, and leave its
victims to be murdered.
During
the following months, as the shamefulness of America’s position on this
became increasingly untenable, Obama seemed to be gradually tilting
back away from the coup in Honduras. However, Senator DeMint and some
other Republicans travelled to Honduras and spoke publicly there against
the U.S. Government, and endorsed the coup-installed Honduran
leadership. DeMint headlined in Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, on 10 October 2009, “What I Heard in Honduras,”
and he wrote: “In the last three months, much has been made of a
supposed military ‘coup’ that whisked former Honduran President Manuel
Zelaya from power and the supposed chaos it created. After visiting
Tegucigalpa last week and meeting with a cross section of leaders, … I
can report there is no chaos there. … As all strong democracies do after
cleansing themselves of usurpers, Honduras has moved on.” All
governments in the hemisphere except the U.S. labeled the coup a
“coup,” but DeMint and other top Republicans such as Mitch McConnell
simply denied that it was. DeMint received ovations in Washington, at
the far-right Heritage Foundation, which he now heads. This U.S. Senator
condemned
Zelaya there as “a deposed would-be Marxist dictator,” and he referred
to the junta as “friends of freedom.” He condemned Obama by indirection,
as being the enemy, who led “an American foreign policy unmoored from
our commitment to human rights and human freedom and tied instead to the
President’s personal ambition,” perhaps communist. Obama remained
silent, in the face of these lies against both Zelaya and himself.
The
assertion by Republicans that the coup was not a “coup” was a blatant
lie. Everyone worldwide except America’s Republicans referred to it as a
“coup.” Furthermore, Ambassador Llorens in Tegucigalpa was constantly
speaking with leaders (but only leaders) of business, religious, civic,
and other organizations throughout Honduras, and everyone he spoke with
stated his position in regards to the “coup.” For example (from the
Embassy cables), “Monsignor Juan Jose Pineda,
the Auxiliary Bishop of Tegucigalpa … stated that the Church had not
taken sides in relation to the coup d’etat,” but “vociferously condemned
the poor treatment of the Church by what he believed to be elements of
the anti-coup movement.” And the leaders of two conservative political
parties “argued that anti-coup protests
have not been peaceful.” Only America’s Republicans lied that it hadn’t
been a “coup.” Not even Republicans’ friends in Honduras, the fascists
there, did. It was a coup. Republicans simply lied, as usual. (This is
why Fox “News” has been found in every study to have the most-misinformed audience of any major news medium – they’re being lied to constantly.)
On 5 October 2009, Jason Beaubien of NPR headlined “Rich vs. Poor at Root of Honduran Political Crisis,” and
he reported that, though Honduran conservatives were charging that
Zelaya secretly intended to make Honduras into a communist dictatorship,
the actual situation in Honduras was, as explained by an economics
professor there, that “power in Honduras is in the hands of about 100
people from roughly 25 families. Others estimate that Honduran elite to
be slightly larger, but still it is a tiny group.” This professor “says
the country’s elite have always selected the nation’s president. They
initially helped Zelaya get into office, and then they orchestrated his
removal” when President Zelaya pressed land- and other- reforms. If
communists would ever come to power in Honduras, it will be because of
fascists’ intransigence there, not because of progressives’ attempts to
end the hammer-lock of the local feudal lords.
Adolf
Hitler similarly used a popular fear of communism to persuade
conservative fools to vote for himself and for other fascists; but
fascists and communists are alike: enemies of democracy. This hasn’t
changed. Nor has The Big Lie technique that fascists still use.
Then, on 6 October 2009, The New York Times bannered “Honduran Security Forces Accused of Abuse.” (“Abuse” had also been the term that the Times
and other major media employed for torture when George W. Bush did it,
but now they applied this euphemism to the outright murders perpetrated
by Honduras’s junta.) Such “abuse” was “news” to people inside the
United States, but not to the people in other nations around the world,
where the horrors in Honduras were widely publicized. Also on October
6th, narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield headlined “Poll: Wide Majority of Hondurans Oppose Coup d’Etat, Want
Zelaya Back,” and Al Giordano reported “the first survey to be made
public since a July Gallup poll showed a plurality of Hondurans opposed
the coup d’etat.” This poll of 1,470 randomly chosen Honduran adults
found 17.4% favored the coup, 52.7% opposed it. 33% opposed Zelaya’s
return to power; 51.6% favored it. 22.2% wanted the coup-installed
leader to stay in power; 60.1% wanted him to be removed. 21.8% said the
National Police were not “engaging in repression”; 54.5% said they were
repressing. Furthermore, the survey found that “the two national TV and
radio stations shut down by the coup regime happen to be the most
trusted news sources in the entire country.” Finally, approval ratings
were tabulated for the twenty most prominent political figures in the
country, and Zelaya and his wife were rated overwhelmingly above all
others, as, respectively, #1 and #2, the two most highly respected
public figures in Honduran politics.
An American visitor to Honduras posted online photos of the country
prior to Zelaya’s Presidency, and he described them: “It took me awhile
to get used to the sight of heavily armed guards and policemen
everywhere. … Every supermarket we visited had an armed guard, carrying a
shotgun, patrolling the parking lot. Most restaurants or fast food
establishments we visited, such as Pizza Hut, had an armed guard in the
parking lot. … Only 30% of the people have wealth. The other 70% are
poor. Being rich in Honduras can be dangerous. That is why most rich
people live in walled or fenced compounds. … And they all have armed
guards on the grounds.” This is the type of society that Wayne LaPierre and other officials of the NRA describe as the ideal
– every man for himself, armed to the teeth. Republicans, like
Honduras’s aristocrats, want to keep such a Paradise the way it is; but
the vast majority of Hondurans do not – they want progress.
Naturally,
therefore, the U.S.’s Republican Party was overwhelmingly opposed to
Zelaya, and were thus opposed to the Honduran public, who didn’t like
their feudal Paradise. Obama remained remarkably silent on the matter.
The Obama Administration brokered a supposed power-sharing deal between
Zelaya and the coup government, but it fell apart when Zelaya learned
that Obama actually stood with the fascists in letting the coup
government oversee the imminent election of Honduras’s next President –
which would give the “election” to the fascists’ stooge. On 5 November
2009, the Los Angeles Times headlined an editorial “Obama Must Stand Firm on Honduran Crisis: A
U.S.-brokered deal to return Honduran President Manuel Zelaya to office
is unraveling, and the Obama administration seems to be wavering.” They
closed by saying: “If the Obama administration chooses to recognize the
[winner of the upcoming] election without Zelaya first being reinstated
[with powers to participate in overseeing the vote-counting], it will
find itself at odds with the rest of Latin America. That would be a
setback for democracy and for the United States.” But it’s exactly what
Obama did. On 9 November 2009, McClatchy Newspapers bannered “Honduran Deal Collapses, and Zelaya’s Backers Blame U.S.” Tyler
Bridges reported that Senator DeMint now dropped his objections to a
key State Department appointment, when the appointee, Thomas Shannon
(and also Secretary of State Hillary Clinton herself), made clear that
the Obama Administration agreed with DeMint. Thus, “Zelaya’s supporters,
who’ve been organizing street protests against the [coup-installed]
Micheletti regime, are down to their final card: calling on Hondurans to
boycott the elections.”
On 12 November 2009, the Washington Post bannered “Honduras Accord Is on Verge of Collapse,” and
quoted a spokesperson for U.S. Senator John Kerry, head of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, saying: “The State Department’s abrupt
change in policy last week — recognizing the elections scheduled for
November 29th even if the coup regime does not meet its commitments
under the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord — caused the collapse of an accord
it helped negotiate.” (Let’s hope that Kerry will turn out to be a
better Secretary of State than his predecessor was.)
A week later, on November 19th, the Latin American Working Group bannered “Honduras: Things Fall Apart,” and summarized the joint culpability of the Obama Administration, and of the Honduran fascists.
On 29 November 2009, the Heritage Foundation bannered “Heritage in Honduras: ‘I Believe in Democracy’,”
and Big Brother propagandized: “Today the Honduran people are voting in
an historic election with consequences for the entire region.
Heritage’s Izzy Ortega is on the ground as an official election observer
speaking with Hondurans practicing their right to vote. Watch his first
interview below.” A typical reader-comment posted there was “I want WE
THE PEOPLE back in the United States. For once in my life I’am jealous
of another country!” Conservatives wanted fascism in the U.S.A. – not
only in Honduras. Of course, the aristocracy’s stooge was “elected” in
Honduras. (Zelaya wasn’t even a candidate in this “election.” Most
democratic countries throughout the world did not recognize the results
of this “election.” However, the U.S. did; and so did Israel, Italy,
Germany, Japan, Peru, Costa Rica, and Panama.)
By contrast, on the same day, Costa Rico’s Tico Times headlined “Peaceful March Faces ‘Brutal Repression’ in San Pedro Sula” Honduras.
Mike Faulk reported that, “About 500 people marching peacefully in the
northwestern city of San Pedro Sula were repressed by tear gas and water
cannons on Election Day today.” The next day, Agence France Presse
headlined “Conservatives Win Honduran Election,” and reported that
“Conservative Porfirio Lobo has claimed a solid win. … The United States
was quick to underline its support.” Barack Obama was the leading
(virtually the only) head-of-state supporting the Honduran fascist
transfer of power to their new “elected” Honduran President. The major
“news” media in the U.S. deep-sixed what was happening in Honduras, but
the Honduran situation was widely reported elsewhere. Typical of the
slight coverage that it did receive in the U.S., the Wall Street Journal bannered on November 26th, “Honduras Lurches Toward Crisis Over Election,” and
their “reporter,” Jose de Cordoba, opened, “Honduran President Manuel
Zelaya’s push to rewrite the constitution, and pave the way for his
potential re-election, has plunged one of Latin America’s poorest
countries into a potentially violent political crisis.” Rupert Murdoch’s
rag never reported the gangster-government’s violence. Moreover, Zelaya
had never pushed “to rewrite the constitution”; he had wanted to hold a
plebiscite on whether there should be a constitutional convention held
to rewrite the nation’s existing Constitution, which everyone but the
Honduran aristocracy said contained profound defects that made democracy
dysfunctional there. The editors of the former U.S.S.R.’s newspaper Pravda would have chuckled at Murdoch’s “reporting.” By contrast, for example, blog.AFLCIO.org had headlined on 16 November 2009, “Trumka: Free Elections Not Possible Now in Honduras.” The
American labor movement was reporting on events in Honduras, but had
been defeated by the U.S. aristocracy increasingly since 40 years
earlier (Reagan), and therefore no longer constituted a major source of
news for the American people. Richard Trumka was the AFL-CIO President,
but was by now just a marginal character in the new fascist Amerika.
On 9 January 2010, the Honduras Coup 2009 blog translated from a Honduran newspaper published that day, and headlined “Honduras Is Broke.”
Honduras’s Finance Minister, Gabriela Nuñez, was quoted as saying that
international aid must keep coming in order for the nation to continue
paying its bills, and that avoiding default is “a work from week to
week.”
A few months later, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs headlined on 5 March 2010, “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Does Latin America,”
and reported that, “While in Buenos Aires, she carelessly stated, ‘The
Honduras crisis has been managed to a successful conclusion … It was
done without violence.’ This is being labeled as a misguided statement
considering the physical violence including murders, beatings, torture
that the coup government used in order to repress the opposition. Many
of these tactics are still being used. This diplomatic stumble is
expected to draw significant attention to the multiple errors in the
U.S. approach.” Moreover, while there, she was “announcing that the
Obama administration will restore aid that had been previously
suspended.” The commentator said that this drew attention to “a
political decision that once again may have served to isolate the U.S.
from much of Latin America.” Furthermore, “While in Costa Rica, …
Clinton said the post-coup [Honduran] government … was, in fact,
democratically elected,” which made a mockery of the term “democracy.”
That election was perhaps even less democratic than the “elections” in
Iran have recently been, but it was remarkably similar, with the main
difference being that in Honduras the aristocracy controlled the
“election,” whereas in Iran the theocracy did. Anyway, Hillary approved.
On 1 May 2010, Britain’s Guardian headlined regarding Honduras, “Cocaine Trade Turns Backwater into Hideout for Brutal Assassins:
The Central American nation is on the brink of becoming a fully-fledged
narco-state,” and reported that, “Corrupt police and drug gangs are
blamed, with the government unable or unwilling to crack down on them.”
The Herald of Tegucigalpa, El Heraldo,
headlined on 26 January 2011, “Presidente Asigna Medalla de Honor al
Mérito a J. J. Rendón,” and reported that President Porfirio Lobo had
decorated with the Order of Merit the master-propagandist who had
deceived enough Honduran voters to “elect” Lobo (with the assistance of
vote-rigging and terror). That was the same “John Rendon” (or actually
Juan José Rendón) who had been hired by the George W. Bush
Administration to deceive the American public into invading Iraq in
2003. This time, he was working for Barack Obama, instead of for George
W. Bush, but it was fascism just the same.
Without
Obama, Honduras’s fascists would have been defeated. Obama’s refusal to
employ either his financial and banking power or his bully pulpit, and
Hillary’s outright support of the fascist junta, together sealed the
deaths of many thousands of Hondurans. The U.S. thus, single-handedly
among all nations, kept Honduras’s newly-installed fascist regime in
power. A U.S. professor who specialized in Honduras, Orlando Perez, said
that Obama did this probably because he concluded “that Honduras’ political, military and economic elite wouldn’t accept Zelaya’s return”;
in other words, that Obama wanted to serve Honduras’s aristocracy,
regardless of the Honduran public, and even regardless of the increased
contempt that Latin Americans would inevitably feel toward the U.S. from
this matter.
The results for Hondurans were hellish. On 11 April 2011, McClatchy Newspapers bannered “Honduran Police Ignore Rise in Attacks on Journalists, Gays,” and
reported that within just those almost-two years, Honduras had become
“the deadliest country in the hemisphere,” because of the soaring
crime-rate, especially against homosexuals and against journalists. The
new fascist government tacitly “sends a message to the criminals, the
paramilitaries and the hit men that they can do as they please.”
Hondurans were by then five times likelier to be murdered than Mexicans
were. Honduras’s aristocrats, however, were safe, because they hired
their own private security forces, and also because the government’s
security-apparatus was controlled by the aristocracy. Only the public
were unprotected.
Fox “News” Latina bannered, on 7 October 2011, “Honduras Led World in Homicides in 2010,” and (since Rupert Murdoch’s Fox is a Republican front) pretended that this had happened because Latin America
was violent – not because Fox’s Republican friends had had their way in
policy on Honduras, and had thus caused the Honduran murder-rate to
soar. (During the latest year, whereas homicides had declined in all of
the other high-homicide nations, homicides had skyrocketed 22% in
Honduras – and that’s why Honduras now led the world in homicides, but
Fox “News” didn’t mention any of these facts.)
The
actual problem was that the U.S. had a Republican government under
nominal “Democratic” leadership, both at the White House and at the
State Department (not to mention at Treasury, Justice, and Education).
Obama not only gave Rupert Murdoch a nice foil to gin-up his
hate-machine; he also gave Murdoch the most politically gifted
Republican in the country: Obama, a Republican in “Democratic” clothing.
It certainly was so with regard to Honduran policy, in which Obama
seemed to be following Hillary Clinton’s lead to the right.
On 21 October 2011, the Nation bannered “Wikileaks Honduras: US Linked to Brutal Businessman,”
and Dana Frank reported that, “Miguel Facussé Barjum, in the embassy’s
words, is ‘the wealthiest, most powerful businessman in the country,’
one of the country’s ‘political heavyweights.’” He owned a 22,000-acre
palm-oil plantation, including lots of vacant land that thousands of
peasants or “campesinos” wanted to farm and make their homes. “The
campesinos’ efforts have been met with swift and brutal retaliation,”
hired killers – a cost of doing business (like exterminators).
Furthermore, wikileaks cables from during George W. Bush’s Presidency
indicated that “a known drug trafficking flight with a 1,000 kilo
cocaine shipment from Colombia … successfully landed … on the private
property of Miguel Facusse. … Its cargo was off-loaded onto a convoy of
vehicles that was guarded by about 30 heavily armed men.” The plane was
burned and bulldozed into the ground, and the U.S. Ambassador said that
this probably couldn’t have happened without Facussé’s participation.
But now, the U.S. was actually on the side of such people. Not only was
the U.S. continuing as before in Honduras, but “The US has allocated $45
million in new funds for military construction,” including expansion of
the U.S. air base that had participated in the 2009 coup.
Other wikileaks cables indicated that someone from the U.S. Embassy met
with Facussé on 7 September 2009. Furthermore, “A new US ambassador,
Lisa Kubiske, arrived in Honduras this August. She is an expert on
biofuels – the center of Miguel Facussé’s African palm empire.”
Moreover, on 13 August 2009, hondurascoup2009.blogspot had headlined “Get to Know the 10 Families that Financed the Coup,”
and cited a study by Leticia Salomón of the Autonomous University of
Honduras, which said that, “A fundamental person in the conspiracy was
the magnate Miguel Facussé, decorated by the Colombian Senate in 2004
with the Orden Mérito a la Democracia, and who today monopolizes the
business of palm oil and in 1992 supported the purchase of land from
campesinos at less than 10% of its actual value.” Furthermore, the coup
“was planned by a business group lead [led] by Carlos Flores Facussé,
ex-president of Honduras (1998-2002) and owner of the newspaper La
Tribuna, which together with La Prensa, El Heraldo, TV channels 2, 3, 5
and 9 were the fundamental pillar of the coup.” Moreover, on 10 February
2010, the Honduras Culture and Politics blog headlined “Mario Canahuati Goes to Washington,” and
reported that Honduras’s new Foreign Minister, Mario, was related to
Jorge Canahuati, “owner of La Prensa and El Heraldo,” and also to Jesus
Canahuati, who was the VP of the Honduran chamber-of-commerce
organization that hired Lanny Davis. Meanwhile, Mario’s father, Juan
Canahuati, owned textile factories that assembled clothing for major
U.S. labels, and which would thus benefit greatly from the fascists’
roll-back of Zelaya’s increase in the minimum wage. (Other articles were also posted to the web, listing mainly the same families behind the coup.)
So,
as such examples show, the aristocracy were greatly enriched by the
Honduran coup, even though the non-criminal (or “legitimate”) Honduran
economy shriveled. By supporting this new Honduran regime, Obama and
Hillary assisted the outsourcing of clothes-manufacturing jobs, etc., to
such police-states. International corporations would be more
profitable, and their top executives and controlling stockholders would
reap higher stock-values and capital gains and bigger executive bonuses,
because of such fascist operations as the 2009 coup. If workers or
campesinos didn’t like it, they could leave – for the U.S., where they
would be competing directly against the poorest of our own country’s
poor.
An article
quoted Jose Luis Galdamez, a journalist for Radio Globo (a Honduran
station briefly shut down by the junta) explaining how that nation’s
elite impunity functions: “The rich simply send you out to kill … and
then kill with impunity. They never investigate into who killed who,
because the groups in power control the media, control the judiciary,
and now control the government [the Executive Branch] again.” This is to
say: In Honduras, hired killers are safe. The Government represents the
aristocracy, not the public; so, aristocrats are free to kill.
America’s congressional Republicans like this “Freedom.” It’s maximum
liberty – for aristocrats: the people these “Representatives” actually
serve.
On 18 November 2011, Mark Weisbrot in Britain’s Guardian headlined “Honduras: America’s Great Foreign Policy Disgrace,” and
he reported that, when the junta’s man “Porfirio Lobo took office in
January 2020, … most of the hemisphere refused to recognize the
government because his election took place under conditions of serious
human rights violations. In May 2011, an agreement was finally brokered
in Cartagena, Colombia, which allowed Honduras back into the
Organization of American States. But the Lobo government has not
complied with its part of the Cartagena accords, which included human
rights guarantees for the political opposition.” The frequent murders of
non-fascist political and labor union leaders “in broad daylight” (so
as to terrorize anyone who might consider to replace them) had
continued, despite the accords. Weisbrot noted that, “when President
Porfirio Lobo of Honduras came to Washington last month, President Obama
Greeted him warmly” and Obama said, “What we’ve been seeing is a
restoration of democratic practices and a commitment to reconciliation.”
How nice. However, Lobo did comply with one aspect of the Cartagena
agreement: he let Manuel Zelaya and his wife back into Honduras.
Honduras
was now (even more than before Zelaya) under a “libertarian” government
– a government that respected only property-rights of approved people,
no personal or other rights for anyone (such as Facussé’s propertyless
campesinos). Paul Romer, the husband of Obama’s former chief economist
Christina Romer, was joining with other libertarians to promote the idea of a totally “free market” model city in Honduras. On 10 December 2011, Britain’s libertarian ECONOMIST magazine bannered “Hong Kong in Honduras,” and “Honduras Shrugged [a play on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged]:
Two Start-Ups Want to Try Out Libertarian Ideas in the Country’s New
Special Development Regions.” Then, on 6 September 2012, Britain’s Guardian bannered “Honduras to Build New City with Its Own Laws and
Tax System.” However, the entrepreneur aiming to develop this new
Honduran city freed from the law, the grandson of the far-right
economist Milton Friedman, Patri Friedman, headlined at his Future
Cities Development Inc., on 19 October 2012, “Closing Statement From Future Cities Development, Inc.”
and he announced that though “passing with a vote of 126-1” in the
Honduran legislature, his project was ruled unconstitutional by a judge,
because it would remove that land from the Honduran legal system. Patri
had been fundraising for this project ever since he had publicly
announced at the libertarian Koch brothers’ Cato Institute, on 6 April
2009, “Democracy Is Not The Answer,”
and he then said, “Democracy is rigged against libertarians.” He ended
his statement by announcing “my proposal,” which was to “build new
city-states,” where there would be no democracy, and only the investors
would have any rights at all – an extreme gated community. Just months
later, the new Honduran President, a libertarian like Patri, invited him
to do it, but this judge killed the idea.
Inasmuch as Honduras was becoming too dangerous for Americans, the AP headlined on 19 January 2012, “Peace Corps Pullout a New Blow to Honduras,” and
reported that, “The U.S. government’s decision to pull out all its
Peace Corps volunteers from Honduras for safety reasons is yet another
blow to a nation still battered by a coup and recently labeled [by the
U.N. as] the world’s most deadly country.” Three days later, on the
22nd, Frances Robles of the Miami Herald, headlined “Graft, Greed, Mayhem Turn Honduras into Murder Capital of World,”
and reported the details of a nation where aristocrats were protected
by their own private guards, the public were on their own, and all new
entrants into the aristocracy were drug traffickers and the soldiers and
police who worked for those traffickers. Narcotics were now by far the
most booming industry in Honduras, if not the only booming industry
there post-coup. Robles reported, “Everybody has been bought,” in this
paradise of anarchism, or libertarianism (i.e.: in this aristocratically
controlled country).
On 12 February 2012, NPR headlined “Who Rules in Honduras? Coup’s Legacy of Violence.” The
ruling families weren’t even noted here, much less mentioned, in this
supposed news-report on the subject of “Who Rules in Honduras?” However,
this story did note that, “Many experts say things got markedly worse
after the 2009 coup.” (That was a severe understatement.)
Jim
DeMint, who has since left the Senate, and who recently took over as
the head of the far-right Heritage Foundation where he had formerly been
a star, got everything he wanted in Honduras, and so did Hillary
Clinton’s friend Lanny Davis – the aristocrats’ paid hand in the affair,
on the “Democratic” side. (The aristocrats had many other agents
lobbying their friends on the Republican side.) Honduras’s public got
only hell. Four days later, on February 16th, Reuters headlined “Honduras Under Fire After Huge Prison Blaze,” and
reported: “Survivors of a Honduran jailhouse fire that killed more than
350 inmates [some not yet tried, much less convicted], accused guards
of leaving prisoners to die trapped inside their cells and even firing
on others when they tried to escape.”
This
was how law operated, in a supremely fascist nation. Dwight Eisenhower
and the Dulles brothers had done a similar thing to the Iranians in
1953, and then to the Guatemalans in 1954; Obama now, though passively,
did it to the Hondurans. When Ike did it in Iran, who would have guessed
at the whirlwind that would result there 26 years later, in 1979?
(Ironically, when Ike did it, the mullahs were delighted that the
elected Iranian President, Mossadegh, whom they hated, had been
overthrown. America now reaps their whirlwind.)
This
is the type of hypocritical leadership that has caused the United
States to decline in public approval throughout the world under Obama –
ironic after his Nobel Peace Prize awarded within just months of his
becoming President. On 10 December 2010, Gallup bannered “U.S. Leadership Ratings Suffer in Latin America,”
and reported that approval of “the job performance of the leadership of
the United States” had declined since 2009 in 14 of 18 nations in the
Western Hemisphere. It had declined steepest in Mexico, Argentina,
Honduras, and Venezuela. Honduras, however, was the only country where
approval of the U.S. was now even lower than it had been under George W.
Bush in 2008. This Honduran plunge since the 2009 coup had been that
steep. Then, on 19 April 2012, Gallup headlined “U.S. Leadership Losing Some Status,”
and reported that across 136 countries, approval of the U.S. had peaked
in 2009 when George W. Bush was replaced by Obama, but that “the U.S.
has lost some of its status” since 2009, and that the “U.S. Image Sinks
in the Americas,” down one-quarter from its 2009 high, though still not
yet quite as low in most countries as it had been under Bush. Then,
three months later, on June 13th, the PewResearch Global Attitudes
Project headlined “Global Opinion of Obama Slips, International Policies Faulted,” and
reported that favorable opinion of the U.S. had sunk during Obama’s
first term. It declined 7% in Europe, 10% in Muslim countries, 13% in
Mexico, and 4% in China. However, it increased 8% in Russia, and 13% in
Japan. It went down in eight countries, and up in two, and changed only
2% or less in three nations.
The global fascist push to eliminate Zelaya’s Presidency had first been well outlined by Greg Grandin in the Nation on 28 July 2009, headlining “Waiting for Zelaya.”
He wrote: “The business community didn’t like Zelaya because he raised
the minimum wage. Conservative evangelicals and Catholics – including
Opus Dei, a formidable presence in Honduras – detested him because he
refused to ban the ‘morning after’ pill. The mining, hydroelectric and
biofuel sector didn’t like him because he didn’t put state funds and
land at their disposal. The law-and-order crowd hated him because he
apologized on behalf of the state for a program of ‘social cleansing’
that took place in the 1990s. … Zelaya likewise moved to draw down
Washington’s military presence; Honduras, alone among Central American
countries, hosts a permanent detachment of US troops.” Later that same
year (2009), John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, came out with his new Hoodwinked, in which he said (p. 213):
“I was told by a Panamanian bank vice president who wanted to remain
anonymous, ‘Every multinational knows that if Honduras raises its hourly
[minimum-wage] rate, the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean will
have to follow. Haiti and Honduras have always set the bottom.’” The
increase in Honduras’s minimum wage was widely cited as having probably
been the coup’s chief source.
Zelaya offered an explanation as to why the U.S. helped the fascists. On 31 May 2011, “Democracy Now” radio headlined “Exclusive Interview with Manuel Zelaya on the U.S. Role in Honduran Coup,”
and Zelaya revealed that when he was abducted from his house, “We
landed in the U.S. military base of Palmerola,” before being flown from
there out of the country, and that “Otto Reich started this.” Reich had been the fanatical far-right Cuban-American
who ran U.S. Latin-American policy for the Republican Reagan and both
the father and son Bush Administrations, including Iran-Contra against
Nicaragua (which helped Iran’s mullahs), and the fascist 2002 coup
against Venezuela’s popular elected President Hugo Chavez, which coup
was then peacefully overturned and reversed, due to worldwide
repudiation of the junta everywhere except the U.S. Government. Zelaya
said that the coup against himself had been organized via both Reich and
the previous, George W. Bush-appointed, U.S. Ambassador to Honduras, Charles Ford,
who had subsequently been appointed to “the U.S. Southern Command … in
order to prepare for the coup d’etat” in Honduras. Zelaya didn’t
personally blame Obama. “Even though Obama would be against the coup,
the process toward the coup was already moving forward. … They are even
able to bend the arm of the President of the United States, President
Obama, and the State Department.” Zelaya portrayed a weak President
Obama, not a complicit one. If this was true, then Lanny Davis was
pushing against a weak leader, not against strong resistance within the
then-new Democratic U.S. Administration. Hillary Clinton’s press
conference the day after the coup reflected unconcern regarding
democracy, not (like with Republicans such as Sen. DeMint) outright
support of fascism. The situation that was portrayed by Zelaya was a
U.S. Government that was heavily infiltrated by fascists throughout the
bureacracy, and a new Democratic President and Secretary of State who
had no stomach to oppose fascists – an Administration who were mere
figureheads.
On 15 March 2012, Laura Carlson, at Foreign Policy In Focus, bannered “Honduras: When Engagement Becomes Complicity,”
and she opened: “U.S. Vice President Joe Biden traveled to Honduras on
March 6 with a double mission: to quell talk of drug legalization and
reinforce the U.S.-sponsored drug war in Central America, and to bolster
the presidency of Porfirio Lobo. The Honduran government issued a
statement that during the one-hour closed-door conversation between
Biden and Lobo, the vice president ‘reiterated the U.S. commitment to
intensify aid to the government and people of Honduras, and exalted the
efforts undertaken and implemented over the past two years by President
Lobo.’ In a March 1 press briefing, U.S. National Security Advisor Tony
Blinken cited ‘the tremendous leadership President Lobo has displayed in
advancing national reconciliation and democratic and constitutional
order.’ You’d think they were talking about a different country from the
one we visited just weeks before on a fact-finding mission on violence
against women. What we found was a nation submerged in violence and
lawlessness, a president incapable or unwilling to do much about it, and
a justice system in shambles.”
Carlson
went on to note: “Land grabs to transfer land and resources from
small-scale farmers, indigenous peoples, and poor urban residents into
the hands of large-scale developers and megaprojects have generated
violence throughout the country. Many of the testimonies of violence and
sexual abuse that we heard from Honduran women regarded conflicts over
land, where the regime actively supports wealthy interests against poor
people in illegal land occupations for tourism, mining, and
infrastructure projects, such as palm oil magnate Miguel Facusse’s
actions.” She noted: “The United States helped deliver a serious blow to
the Honduran political system and society. The United States has a
tremendous responsibility for the disastrous situation.” And she closed:
“There’s no excuse for spending U.S. taxpayer dollars on security
assistance to Honduras as human rights violations pile up.” She called
this “A Coup for Criminals.”
What
Iran and Guatemala became to the historical record of Eisenhower’s
Presidency, Honduras will be to that of Obama. Sometimes even a small
country, even a banana republic, can leave a big black mark on a
President’s record. Though Czechoslovakia was just a small and weak
country, it’s even what Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain is
primarily remembered for nowadays – his yielding it to the fascists in
1938.
In November 2013, the Center for Economic Policy Research bannered a study, “Honduras Since the Coup,” and among the highlights they reported were:
“Economic
growth has slowed since the 2009 coup. From 2006-2008 average annual
GDP growth was 5.7 percent. In 2009 Honduras’ GDP, as with most
countries in Central America, contracted due to the world recession.
From 2010-2013, average annual growth has been only 3.5 percent.”
“Economic
inequality, which decreased for four consecutive years starting in
2006, began trending upward in 2010. Honduras now has the most unequal
distribution of income in Latin America.”
“In the two years after the coup, over 100 percent of all real income gains went to the wealthiest 10 percent of Hondurans.”
“Poverty
and extreme poverty rates decreased by 7.7 and 20.9 percent
respectively during the Zelaya administration. From 2010-2012, the
poverty rate increased by 13.2 percent while the extreme poverty rate
increased by 26.3 percent.”
“The unemployment situation has worsened from 2010-2012.”
Crime
rates and other non-economic factors were unfortunately ignored in this
study, but it indicated clearly that, from at least the economic
standpoint, the public in Honduras suffered while the elite did not.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had done to Honduras something rather
similar to what George W. Bush and his team did to Iraq, but with this
major difference: Zelaya was a good and democratic leader of Honduras,
whereas Saddam was a tyrant (though Iraq was even worse after his reign
than during it). This “Democratic” U.S. Administration turned out to
support fascism, much as its Republican predecessor had done.
The
soaring murder-rate after the U.S.-supported coup caused a soaring
number of escapees from the violence; they’re flooding into the U.S. now
as illegal immigrants.
——————
HAITI
In
Haiti, the situation is similar as an example of the U.S. backing
aristocrats, so as to keep the masses in poverty and for American
aristocrats to profit from doing so. On 1 June 2011, the Nation headlined “WikiLeaks Haiti: Let Them Live on $3 a Day,” and
Dan Coughlin and Kim Ives reported that, “Contractors for Fruit of the
Loom, Hanes and Levi’s worked in close concert with the US Embassy when
they aggressively moved to block a minimum wage increase for Haitian
assembly zone workers, the lowest-paid in the hemisphere, according to
secret State Department cables. … The factory owners told the
Haitian Parliament that they were willing to give workers a
9-cents-per-hour pay increase to 31 cents per hour to make T-shirts,
bras and underwear for US clothing giants like Dockers and
Nautica. But the factory owners refused to pay 62 cents per hour, or $5
per day, as a measure unanimously passed by the Haitian Parliament in
June 2009 would have mandated. And they had the vigorous backing of the
US Agency for International Development and the US Embassy when
they took that stand.” Hillary Clinton’s State Department pushed hard to
reverse the new law. “A deputy chief of mission, David E.
Lindwall, said the $5 per day minimum ‘did not take economic reality
into account’ but was a populist measure aimed at appealing to ‘the
unemployed and underpaid masses.'” An “Editor’s Note” from the Nation
added: “In keeping with the industry’s usual practice, the brand name
US companies kept their own hands clean, letting their contractors
do the work of making Haiti safe for the sweatshops from which
they derive their profits — with help from US officials.” Those
“officials” were ultimately Clinton and Obama. On 3 June 2011, Ryan
Chittum at Columbia Journalism Review headlined “A Pulled Scoop Shows U.S. Fought to Keep Haitian Wages Down,” and
he added some perspective to the story: “Hanesbrands CEO Richard
Noll … could pay for the raises for those 3,200 t-shirt makers with
just one-sixth of the $10 million in salary and bonus he raked in last
year.” And then, when the U.S. turns away “boat people,” trying to
escape the “voluntary” slavery of the Haitian masses, the standard
excuse is that it’s done so as to “protect American jobs.” But is that
really where Hillary Clinton gets her campaign funds?
——————
AFGHANISTAN
On 26 July 2009, Marisa Taylor bannered at McClatchy Newspapers, “Why Are U.S.-Allied Refugees Still Branded as ‘Terrorists?’,” and
she reported that “DHS [Department of Homeland Security] is working
with other agencies, such as the State Department, to come up with a
solution” to the routine refusal of the United States to grant U.S.
visas to translators and other local employees of the U.S. in Iraq and
Afghanistan who wanted to move to the U.S. and who had overwhelming
reason to fear retaliation from anti-Americans in their home countries
after we left. The State Department did nothing. Then, Human Rights
First headlined on 13 August 2009, “Senator Leahy on ‘Material Support’ Bars,” and
reported that, “In a powerful statement submitted for the Congressional
Record on August 5, 2009, Senator Leahy (D-VT) reaffirmed his
commitment to ‘restore common sense’ to the bars to refugee and asylum
status based on associations with what the Immigration and Nationality
Act defines as terrorism,” which was “written so broadly” that it
applied even to “children who were recruited against their will and
forced to undergo military training, doctors (acting in accordance with
the Hippocratic oath) … and those who fought against the armies of
repressive governments in their home countries.”
The State Department failed to act. On 2 February 2013, the Washington Post bannered “Alleged Terrorism Ties Foil Some Afghan Interpreters’ U.S. Visa Hopes,” and
Kevin Sieff in Kabul reported that, “As the American military draws
down its forces in Afghanistan and more than 6,000 Afghan interpreters
seek U.S. visas, the problem is threatening to obstruct the applications
of Afghans who risked their lives to serve the U.S. government.” What
kind of lesson is this teaching to interpreters and other local
employees of the U.S. missions in unstable foreign countries? Helping
the U.S. could be terminally dangerous.
——————
LIBYA
And what happened afterwards?
(And what happened before?)
But what happened afterwards is even worse than people know: as Wayne Madsen recently reported,
Hillary’s success at overthrowing Gaddafi served brilliantly the
purposes of the U.S. aristocracy and of the jihadists who are financed by the Saud family and the other fundamentalist Sunni royal faimilies in Arabia.
Even if she doesn’t become President, she has already done enough
favors for those royals so as to be able to fill to the brim the coffers
of the Clinton Foundation.
——————
SYRIA
A record drought in Syria during 2008-2010 produced results like this:
“Two years before the ‘Arab Spring’ even began:
In
the past three years, 160 Syrian farming villages have been abandoned
near Aleppo as crop failures have forced over 200,000 rural Syrians to
leave for the cities. This news is distressing enough, but when put into
a long-term perspective, its implications are staggering: many of these
villages have been continuously farmed for 8000 years.
That source had been published on 16 January 2010.”
The
drought continued on through 2010 and sporadically afterwards, and it
intensified in Syria the already widespread ‘Arab Spring’ demonstrations
against the existing regimes.
Even before the ‘Arab Spring’ demonstrations in 2011, the Syrian government was pleading with foreign governments for food aid, and these pleas were reported to Secretary of State Clinton, but she ignored them.
Obama grabbed this opportunity to dust off an old CIA 1957 plan to overthrow the Ba’athist Party that ruled Syria
— the only secular, non-sectarian, party in Syria, and the only
political force there that insisted upon separation between church and
state. The Ba’athists were allied with Russia, and the U.S. aristocracy wanted to conquer Russia even after the end of communism there in 1990.
Replacing a secular government by a fundamentalist Sunni Sharia law
regime would end Syria’s alliance with Russia; so, Obama worked with
other fundamentalist Sunni dictatorships in the region — Saudi Arabia,
Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, and Turkey — to perpetrate a sarin gas attack in Syria
that they’d all blame on Syria’s Ba’athist leader, Bashar al-Assad,
even though the U.S. and its Arab partners had actually perpetrated it.
On 12 November 2011, Secretary of State Clinton said:
The
failure of the Assad regime, once again, to heed the call of regional
states and the international community underscores the fact that it has
lost all credibility. The United States reiterates its calls for an
immediate end to the violence, for free unfettered access for human
rights monitors and journalists to deter and document grave human rights
abuses and for Asad to step aside.
In
other words: she was already demanding “regime change” in Syria. Back
in 2002, she had similarly demanded “regime change in Iraq,” because the
Ba’athist, Russia-allied, anti-sectarian, Saddam Hussein ruled there.
She did it again in Syria — just as she had done it in Lybia in order to
get rid of the non-sectarian Russia-allied dictator there, Muammar
Gaddafi.
I
worry too much that Secretary Clinton is too much into regime change
and a little bit too aggressive without knowing what the unintended
consequences might be.
Yes,
we could get rid of Saddam Hussein, but that destabilized the entire
region. Yes, we could get rid of Gadhafi, a terrible dictator, but that
created a vacuum for ISIS. Yes, we could get rid of Assad tomorrow, but
that would create another political vacuum that would benefit ISIS.
He
said that defeating the jihadists in Syria should be completed before
the issue of what to do about Assad is addressed. The questioner, David
Muir, asked Clinton whether she agreed with that. She replied:
We are doing both at the same time.
MUIR: But that’s what he’s saying, we should put that aside for now and go after ISIS.
CLINTON: Well, I don’t agree with that.
She
is obsessed with serving the desires of the U.S. aristocracy — even if
that means the U.S. helps supply sarin gas to the rebels in Syria to be
blamed on Assad, and even if it also means that the existing, Ba’athist,
government in Syria will be replaced by a jihadist Sunni government
that serves the Saud family and the other Arabic royal families.
——————
UKRAINE
Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton chose as being the State Department’s chief
spokesperson Victoria Nuland who was previously the Principal Deputy
National Security Advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney from 2003 to
2005, after having been appointed by President George W. Bush as the
U.S. Deputy Permanent Representative to the anti-Russian military club
NATO from 2000 until 2003. Her big passion, and her college-major, as a
person who ever since childhood hated Russia, was Russian studies, and
she “was twice a visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations
— as a ‘Next Generation’ Fellow looking at the effects of
anti-Americanism on U.S. relations around the world, and as a State
Department Fellow directing a task force on ‘Russia, its Neighbors and
an Expanding NATO.’” Although her career started after the Soviet Union
and its communism ended in 1990, it has nonetheless been obsessed with
her hatred of Russia and with her passion for the U.S. aristocracy to
take it over, as if communism hadn’t really been a factor in the “Cold
War” — and she has been promoted in her career on that basis.
V.P.
Cheney liked her “neo-conservatism,” which she shared with her husband,
Robert Kagan, who had been one of the leading proponents for “regime
change in Iraq.” (“Neo-conservatism” is the group of policy
intellectuals who passionately argued for “regime change in Iraq” during
the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush Administrations, and who support
every policy to overthrow the leaders of any nation that’s at all
friendly toward Russia.)
When
Hillary Clinton retired in 2013, Obama made Nuland the Assistant
Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, and Nuland’s first
assignment (she was already at work on it by no later than 1 March 2013, which was before the U.S. Senate had even confirmed her appointment) was to overthrow the democratically elected government of Ukraine because Ukraine is next door to Russia and the U.S. aristocracy has, since communism ended in the Soviet Union in 1990, been trying to surround Russia by NATO missiles, most especially in Ukraine.
President Obama hid from the public his hostility toward Russia until
he became re-elected in 2012 (he even mocked his opponent, Mitt Romney,
for saying, at 0:40 on this video,
that Russia is “our number one geopolitical foe”), but then, once he
was safely re-elected, immediately set to work to take over Ukraine and
to add it to NATO. Then, in his National Security Strategy 2015,
he identified Russia as being by far the world’s most “aggressive”
nation. Hillary Clinton is determined to carry this anti-Russian
hostility through as President, even though she lies as Obama does and
so, similarly, won’t say it during the Democratic primaries. But the
takeover of Ukraine was an Obama operation in which she played an
important role, to set it up.
Here
is the recording of Nuland on 4 February 2014, telling the U.S.
Ambassador in Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, whom to place at the top of the
Ukrainian government when the coup will be completed, which occurred 22
days later. It was to be the culmination of her efforts, which had
started even prior to 1 March 2013.
Here is the broader video of that coup.
Here is the head of the “private CIA” firm Stratfor saying it was “the most blatant coup in history.”
Here
is the electoral map showing the voting percentages in each region of
Ukraine for the election that had chosen the President, “Janukovych,”
whom Obama overthrew in that coup. The region in purple on that map had
voted 90% for “Janukovych.” It’s called Donbass and consists of Donetsk
and Luhansk. It refused to accept the coup-imposed leaders. Obama wanted
the residents there bombed into submission. Here’s a video of that bombing-campaign. Here’s another — specifically of firebombings
(which are illegal). The money for that bombing-campaign came from
taxpayers in U.S. and EU, and also from the IMF, in the form of loans
that saddled Ukraine with so much debt it went bankrupt on 4 October 2015, as determined by a unanimous vote of the 15 international banks that collectively make this decision.
The infamously high corruption in Ukraine went even higher after the
U.S.-EU takeover of Ukraine. After Ukraine’s bankrupttcy, the IMF changed its rules
so that it could continue to lend money there, until the people in
Donbass are either exterminated or expelled. The U.S. President controls
the IMF. For the international aristocracy, the U.S. President is the
most important servant there is. Hillary Clinton wants to become that
servant. It’s why her top twenty financial backers represent the U.S. aristocracy.
OTHER MATTERS
Finally,
it should also be noted that Hillary’s record as the chief
administrator at the State Department was also poor. The State
Department’s own Accountability Review Board Report on Benghazi Attack said:
“In the months leading up to September 11, 2012, security in Benghazi
was not recognized and implemented as a ‘shared responsibility’ in
Washington, resulting in stove-piped discussions and decisions on policy
and security. Key decisions … or non-decisions in Washington, such as
the failure to establish standards for Benghazi and to meet them, or the
lack of a cohesive staffing plan, essentially set up Benghazi.” That’s
failure at the very top. It’s not in Libya. It’s not even in Africa.
It’s in “Washington.”
Who, at the State Department in “Washington,” had “buck stops here” authority and power? Hillary Clinton.
Republicans
are obsessed with the Benghazi failure, because it reflects negatively
upon her but not on themselves. However, Hillary’s real and important
failures reflected negatively upon Republicans also, because these
failures (such as her supporting fascists in Honduras) culminated
actually Republican foreign-policy objectives, and dashed Democratic (and democratic) policy-objectives. This is the real reason why Republicans focus instead upon Hillary’s Benghazi mess.
Hillary
Clinton also was a notoriously poor administrator of her own 2007-2008
presidential primary campaign. Even coming into 2014, some leading
Democrats were afraid that if she were to become the Party’s candidate,
then the entire Party would get “Mark Penned,” which is the euphemism
for her inability to select top-flight people for key posts. Obama had a
far higher-skilled campaign-operation than she did, even though she
started out with an enormous head-start against Obama in 2008.
Back in 2006, the encyclopedically brilliant Democrat Jack Beatty headlined in The Atlantic, “Run, Barack, Run,”
and he contrasted the “enthralling” presence and speaking-style of
Barack Obama to the presence and speaking-style of the Party’s
presumptive 2008 nominee. He said of Clinton: “As she showed in her
speech at the memorial service for Coretta Scott King, Hillary Clinton
is a boring, flat-voiced, false-gesturing platform speaker. She shouts
into the microphone; Obama talks into it. Her borrowed words inspire no
trust – they remind us of her borrowed foundation – and her clenched
personality inspires little affection. Money can’t buy her love, nor
buzz protect her political glass jaw. The question for Democrats is, Who
will break it first? Will it be one of her Democratic challengers –
Obama, Joe Biden, John Edwards – or John McCain?” He was hoping that it
would turn out to be one of the Democrats, especially Obama, so as to
avoid a continuation of the Bush years. He got his wish, even if not his
intended result. (Obama was so gifted a con-man that even the brightest
Democrats, such as Beatty, couldn’t see through his con. Nobody could –
so, the Republicans had to invent an ‘Obama’-demon that was almost
diametrically opposite to the real one, in order to provide a
punching-bag that their suckers would hate. Republicans ended up
punching actually the most gifted Republican since the time of Ronald
Reagan — a black and charismatic version of Mitt Romney, the man who
lost to Obama in 2012 though having created the model both for Obamacare
and for Obama’s policies toward Wall Street, and even toward Russia.)
At
the start of the present campaign, it had seemed almost inevitable that
Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic Presidential nominee in 2016. A
Quinnipiac poll released on 7 March 2013 was headlined “Clinton, Christie Lead The Pack In Early Look At 2016,” and reported that, “Former First Lady, and Secretary of State Clinton wins easily against any” opponent, from either Party.
Her
public statements aren’t consistent, because she changes them whenever
politically convenient to do so; but the statements of a liar are simply
ignored by intelligent people, anyway. Her statements are ignored by
intelligent voters. What matters is her actions, her actual record,
which is lengthy, and ugly. Her record is, moreover, consistent. So, it leaves no doubt as to what her actual policies
are: only fools will listen to anything that a liar such as she is,
says on the stump, because she’s a con-person who is selling,
essentially, a toxic dump, and trying to get top-dollar for it by
describing the pretty land covering it over, and by crossing her fingers
that not many people will smell any stench percolating up from down
below. The only people who can intelligently trust her verbal
commitments are her big donors, who hear those commitments in private,
not in public, and who understand how to interpret them. Her voters are
there merely to be conned, not to be served. She needs them to be the
rug she walks upon in order to get back into the White House, where she
intends to be serving real gold to her big donors, to make their bets,
on her, profitable for them.
And here are her big donors — the people she seeks to serve there.
This
presentation will now close with a brief update on the situation in
Honduras, because that catastrophe was Hillary Clinton’s first one as
the Secretary of State:
On 15 February 2016, Alexander Main, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, headlined an op-ed in The New York Times, “An Anti-Corruption Charade in Honduras,” and he wrote there:
In Honduras,
protests erupted when a local journalist revealed that millions of
dollars of public funds from the country’s health care system had been
funneled to the ruling National Party and the election campaign of
President Juan Orlando Hernández. A handful of administrators and
business executives have been indicted for other corruption in the
health system, but no charges have been brought against Mr. Hernández or
other top party officials over the diversion of funds to the party.
… The country’s security forces are heavily infiltrated by organized
crime — ‘rotten to the core,’ a former police official told The Miami
Herald. Two weeks later, the official was shot dead. Scores of
journalists, lawyers, land rights activists, gay rights advocates
and opposition figures have been assassinated, without consequence for
their killers. …
Sadly,
the American government is ill positioned to offer help. In 2009, the
State Department under Secretary Hillary Clinton helped a military coup
in Honduras succeed by blocking efforts to restore the left-leaning
president, Manuel Zelaya, to power. Since then, Washington’s diplomatic
efforts have focused on shoring up a series of corrupt post-coup
governments. More than 100 members of Congress have called on the Obama
administration to condemn human rights violations by security forces,
and have questioned America’s security assistance to Honduras.
Yet Washington continues to back Mr. Hernández.
Hillary
Clinton did, indeed, have an impact as the Secretary of State, and it
continues to this day, and will live on as a curse, probably for decades
to come — especially in the lands that she played a principal role in
helping to destroy.
She prides
herself on her “experience,” as if having a title, “Secretary of State,”
and performing miserably in that function, qualifies someone to be a
good U.S. President. America’s press hasn’t challenged her on the claim,
either. Thus, many people, who trust both her and the American press,
think that there must be truth to her claim: that she has achieved a
lot, and that what she has achieved was terrific for the American
people, and for the world. They’ve been successfully deceived.
There is an alternative, within the Democratic Party: Bernie Sanders. Here is his experience. And here are his top donors.
CONCLUSION
Only
fools vote for her. Her campaigns are targeting especially fools who
are either female or black or Hispanic, but she (and her financial
backers) will welcome any fool to vote for her, because clearly no non-fool (except those financial backers) will.
PostScript:
This
article was submitted to the major print news-media, and major online
news-media, with the question: “Would you want this as an exclusive?”
None replied even to say something like, “Maybe, give us a week to check
out the linked sources.” None replied at all. Consequently, this
article is now being provided free of charge to the public, and free of
charge to all media to publish, but that’s the choice a journalist must
make in order to present a truthful and reasonably comprehensive picture
of Hillary Clinton’s record as the U.S. Secretary of State. Republican
‘news’ media don’t want this article, because it shows her as being
hardly different from the Republicans on international matters; and
Democratic ‘news’ media don’t want it, because it shows her as being
hardly different from the Republicans on international matters. So, only
the few news-media that are neither Republican nor Democratic, and
are dedicated only to honestly and truthfully informing the public about
the candidates for the U.S. Presidency, will publish it, even if
it’s offered free-of-charge. About foreign affairs, there’s no truth in
any of the large U.S. ‘news’ media: they’re all controlled by the U.S.
aristocracy, who agree in both Parties, and who are united against the
interests of the publics in every nation.
Here
below are the news-media that had received the article, submitted to
them for consideration as an exclusive, and all of which media rejected
this article, without comment, so that you can see that the editors
there know the information that’s revealed here (they have read it here,
even if they didn’t already know it before and simply hid it all along
from their readership). The reason they don’t want their readers to know
these facts is that they don’t want the public to know that (except on
purely groupist issues concerning women, Blacks and Hispanics — her
voting-base) Hillary Clinton is actually a Republican in ‘Democratic’
verbal garb. Neither Republican, nor Democratic, ‘news’ media, want
their readers to know that she’s actually a Republican — even more than
her husband was. Anyway: here, you’ll see that though the information
that has been included in this article is ignored in the reporting by
all of the big reporters and by the talking heads on TV ‘news,’ they’re
not actually unaware of it; they’re simply not allowed to let the public know it.
Those media are: Vanity Fair, National Review, Rolling Stone, Harper’s, BusinessWeek and Bloomberg News, McClatchy newspapers, New York Times, Guardian, Washington Post, Mother Jones, Nation, Progressive, New Republic, New Yorker, Foreign Policy,
Politico, Salon, Huffington Post, and Slate. (If any of your friends
subscribe to or read those, why not pass this along to them, so that
they’ll know what they don’t know about Hillary Clinton. Maybe they
already know how bad the Republicans are, but do they know how bad the
Clintons and Obama really are? Perhaps they don’t know it, from sources
that want them not to know it.)
Any
news-medium that wishes to publish this article without this “PS” is
hereby welcomed to do so, because, at this particular moment, I am more
concerned to get the truth out about Hillary Clinton, than about the
U.S. press.
—————
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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