Honduran coup info.

The Honduran coup was headed by a man named Vazquez, who is reportedly a graduate of the notorious School of the Americas in Fort Benning Georgia, which has trained many of Latin America’s worst criminals/human rights abusers over the last few decades.  Also, many of the groups backing the coup receive money from the US government via the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID.  The US military is also in the Honduras and trains the Honduran military. 

Eva Gollinger gives a good account of the coup and some general information on the background in this article:

Such an initiative has never taken place in the Central American nation, which has a very limited constitution that allows minimal participation by the people of Honduras in their political processes. The current constitution, written in 1982 during the height of the Reagan Administration’s dirty war in Central America, was designed to ensure those in power, both economic and political, would retain it with little interference from the people. Zelaya, elected in November 2005 on the platform of Honduras’ Liberal Party, had proposed the opinion poll be conducted to determine if a majority of citizens agreed that constitutional reform was necessary. He was backed by a majority of labor unions and social movements in the country. If the poll had occured, depending on the results, a referendum would have been conducted during the upcoming elections in November to vote on convening a constitutional assembly. Nevertheless, today’s scheduled poll was not binding by law.

In fact, several days before the poll was to occur, Honduras’ Supreme Court ruled it illegal, upon request by the Congress, both of which are led by anti-Zelaya majorities and members of the ultra-conservative party, National Party of Honduras (PNH). This move led to massive protests in the streets in favor of President Zelaya. On June 24, the president fired the head of the high military command, General Romeo Vásquez, after he refused to allow the military to distribute the electoral material for Sunday’s elections. General Romeo Vásquez held the material under tight military control, refusing to release it even to the president’s followers, stating that the scheduled referendum had been determined illegal by the Supreme Court and therefore he could not comply with the president’s order. As in the Unted States, the president of Honduras is Commander in Chief and has the final say on the military’s actions, and so he ordered the General’s removal. The Minister of Defense, Angel Edmundo Orellana, also resigned in response to this increasingly tense situation.

But the following day, Honduras’ Supreme Court reinstated General Romeo Vásquez to the high military command, ruling his firing as “unconstitutional’.  Thousands poured into the streets of Honduras’ capital, Tegucigalpa, showing support for President Zelaya and evidencing their determination to ensure Sunday’s non-binding referendum would take place. On Friday, the president and a group of hundreds of supporters, marched to the nearby air base to collect the electoral material that had been previously held by the military. That evening, Zelaya gave a national press conference along with a group of politicians from different political parties and social movements, calling for unity and peace in the country.

As of Saturday, the situation in Honduras was reported as calm. But early Sunday morning, a group of approximately 60 armed soldiers entered the presidential residence and took Zelaya hostage. After several hours of confusion, reports surfaced claiming the president had been taken to a nearby air force base and flown to neighboring Costa Rica. No images have been seen of the president so far and it is unknown whether or not his life is still endangered.

Zelaya’s wife gives this account:

President Zelaya’s wife, Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, speaking live on Telesur at approximately 10:00am Caracas time, denounced that in early hours of Sunday morning, the soldiers stormed their residence, firing shots throughout the house, beating and then taking the president. “It was an act of cowardice”, said the first lady, referring to the illegal kidnapping occuring during a time when no one would know or react until it was all over. Casto de Zelaya also called for the “preservation” of her husband’s life, indicating that she herself is unaware of his whereabouts. She claimed their lives are all still in “serious danger” and made a call for the international community to denounce this illegal coup d’etat and to act rapidly to reinstate constitutional order in the country, which includes the rescue and return of the democratically elected Zelaya.

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/4554

This Counterpunch article also gives good background information.

http://www.counterpunch.org/kozloff06292009.html

Where is the outrage in the US press?  Why is this less outrageous than what we are seeing in Iran?  It is good that Obama is condemning the coup, but I think he could exert more pressure and eventually influence the reinstatement of Zelaya.  Such is the power of the office of the US President as has been demonstrated in the removal of Suharto of Indonesia from power for example.

Murder and torture and not done by the US! Stop the presses… oh forget it, it’s just Israel.

All people of conscience abhor the violence we see coming out of Iran, regardless of the electoral fraud issue.  It is easy to abhor it when it is splashed all over our newspaper front pages and making the headlines of the nightly news.  Iran is our enemy, part of the axis of evil, and thus it is easy for us to dig up their dirt and point our fingers.

However, there is a similar situation which has been occurring in the middle east for years and years (only it is much more brutal and damaging) and we are able to ignore it with great discipline.  Israel recently massacred 1400 people in Gaza and our nation, including our brave President Obama, was able to hold it’s tongue and keep the carnage off of the front pages.  The videos were not as visible.  There were exceptions, but in general, for all intents and purposes, the dead children were not seen except for in the alternative media. 

Israel has set up a regime of terror and torture and is so practiced at it that it occurs everyday.  One of the recent egregious incidents is the account of the Palestinian journalist, Mohammed Omer.  It has been over a year now that he returned from receiving the prestigious Martha Gelhorn award for journalism in England… only to be tortured by the Shin Bet at the border, and put into the hospital.  His ill-treatment was vehemently denied and lied about by the official Israeli lying apparatus.  However, his story continues to be told along with witness testimonies and medical records to back him up.  One year after the incident of his torture, he writes:

Since 2003, I’ve been the voice to the voiceless in the besieged Gaza Strip for a number of publications and news programs ranging from The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs to the BBC and, Morgenbladet in Norway as well as Democracy Now! These stories exposed a carefully-crafted fiction continuing control and exploitation of five-million people. Their impact, coupled with the reporting of others served to change public opinion in the United States and Europe concerning the dynamics of Israel and its occupation of Palestine .

After receiving the Martha Gellhorn prize I returned home through the Allenby Bridge Crossing in the Occupied West Bank between Jordan and Israel. It was here I was detained, interrogated, and tortured for several hours by Shin Bet and border officers. When it appeared I may be close to death an ambulance was called to transport me to a hospital. From that day my life has been a year of continued medical treatments, pain — and a search for justice.

One of the amazing recollections of his ordeal is this:

When Associated Press reporter Karin Laub called me on my cell phone for an interview after my ordeal, I detailed how I was stripped and held at gunpoint. Her reply? “Go on,” she stated. “This is normal about what we hear happening at Ben Gurion Airport . It’s nothing new.”

Nothing new.  Normal.  This is what happens all the time in the middle east and it doesn’t appear on the front pages or make the nightly news.  It doesn’t cause protest around the world.  It doesn’t get Obama up on his soap box, pontificating about human rights abuses and freedom.  (Of course, he’s too busy killing kids and the elderly at Pakistani funerals to be worrying about this sort of thing.)

Read the rest of Omer’s recollections here:

http://www.agenceglobal.com/Article.asp?Id=2042

Obama says it’s wrong to kill protesters in Tehran, but thinks it’s ok to kill kids and old people at a funeral.

Why does Obama think it is right to condemn Iran for cracking down on protesters with violence, but at the same time, it’s ok to kill dozens of people at a funeral?

There was no prominent militant commander among the 60-plus people killed in missile strikes by a US drone on funeral prayers in the violence-stricken South Waziristan on Tuesday.

People who helped in shifting the injured to hospital in Miramshah in North Waziristan told The News that the dead included 40 low-level militants and 35 local villagers.

They said majority of the people had left for their homes after attending the funeral prayers of the slain militant commander, Khwaz Wali Mehsud, and only relatives and close friends of the commander stayed there when the drone fired two missiles at them.

Commander Khwaz Wali was a close associate of Baitullah Mehsud and had died in a drone attack on Tuesday morning. Besides him, five other suspected militants were killed and seven others injured in the attack.

Later, when the villagers and the militants gathered for funeral prayers of the commander, two drones appeared and fired two missiles on the gathering, killing over 60 people on the spot.

Like other Mehsud people, family members of the slain militant commander had also fled their home and settled in the distant Dera Ismail Khan to evade losses in the military operation against Baitullah Mehsud in the region.

Among the 35 villagers who died in the drone attack on funeral, 10 were children aged five to 10 years and four local tribal elders. The sources at the ill-equipped Agency Headquarters Hospital in Miramshah said 58 people had been taken to the hospital, most of them in critical condition. Appeals were made through loudspeakers, asking the people to donate blood for the injured people at the hospital.

The Miramshah bazaar was immediately closed and shopkeepers and tribesmen in large numbers thronged the hospital for donating blood. The doctors said they could not manage the crowd that had come there for donating blood for the injured people.

According to the doctors, most of the injured brought to them were aged people. Tribal journalist, Nur Behram, who visited the Lattaka village, where the funeral prayer was attacked, told The News by telephone from Miramshah that gloom overwhelmed the deserted towns and its dwellers. He said majority of the people had already left their homes and villages due to the military operation and only elders remained there.

Behram said the villagers were critical of the Pakistan government for allowing the US to target their funeral prayers, where neither militant commanders were present nor the funeral was being offered at any training centre. He claimed majority of the people killed in the last drone attack were relatives of Commander Khwaz Wali.

Meanwhile, prominent Afghan Taliban commander, Maulvi Sangeen denied reports of his death in the drone attack in South Waziristan. He called The News from an undisclosed location to prove he was alive. “We have nothing to do with internal fighting in Pakistan. Our job is to fight Jihad against the occupation forces in Afghanistan,” said the Taliban commander.

He said neither he had travelled to South Waziristan to attend the funeral nor suffered any loss. Commander Sangeen said he will soon issue avideo statement to prove that he was safe. Maulvi Sangeen is affiliated with top Afghan Taliban Commander Sirajuddin Haqqani and is in-charge of Paktika province in Afghanistan.

Also, sources close to dreaded militant commander and master trainer of suicide bombers, Qari Hussain, denied his loss in the drone attack. Pleading anonymity, the sources said Qari Hussain was far away from the place of the attack.

http://www.thenews.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=22926

72% of Americans want a government run health insurance program!

Now here’s what I’m talking about.  Check out the numbers from this latest poll by the NY Times and CBS:

But the Times/CBS poll found 85 percent of respondents wanted major healthcare reforms and most would be willing to pay higher taxes to ensure everyone had health insurance. An estimated 46 million Americans currently have no coverage.

Seventy-two percent of those questioned said they backed a government-administered insurance plan similar to Medicare for those under 65 that would compete for customers with the private sector. Twenty percent said they were opposed.

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE55K00220090621

A short note on Obama’s speech.

Nice to see Obama admit in public that the US overthrew Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953, which fact, along with the support of the Shah, has sort of culminated in our recent standoff with Iran over the last 30 years. 

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=97071&sectionid=351020502

Now, it would be nice if he would start confessing to every other coup we’ve ever been involved in.

Some of the elements of his speech today were pretty laughable such as his castigating Hamas for not renouncing violence.  Is there any reason to ask Hamas to renounce violence when Israel just pounded Gaza killing 1300 Gazans?  The fact of the matter is that we’ve always wanted for the US and our client states to have a monopoly on violence.  Anyone else is just a terrorist. 

Additionally, demanding Hamas recognize Israel is a silly thing to ask since Israel doesn’t recognize Palestine and East Timor doesn’t recognize Indonesia and Taiwan doesn’t recognize China etc.  If we are going to start asking countries to recognize other countries, especially the ones that are taking your land and call part of your land their country… we’d better get started soon, because the list is pretty long. 

Despite his recent insistence that Israel freeze settlement expansion (only a small part of Israel’s daily crimes against Palestinian Arabs) Obama is still a staunch ally of Israel and his refusal to talk to Hamas is good evidence of that.  He will talk to everyone else, even recently saying he will talk to Hezbollah.  Why not talk to Hamas?  Remember, 64% of Israelis polled last year think that Hamas should be engaged diplomatically.  Barack won’t do it because of AIPAC.

Single payer health care needed now

Wow.  This is incredible:

Medical bills are involved in more than 60 percent of U.S. personal bankruptcies, an increase of 50 percent in just six years, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday.

Amazing to me is that of these bankrupt people whose bankruptcy involved medical bills, 75% of them have health insurance!

More than 75 percent of these bankrupt families had health insurance but still were overwhelmed by their medical debts, the team at Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School and Ohio University reported in the American Journal of Medicine.

The researchers further noted:

“Using a conservative definition, 62.1 percent of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical; 92 percent of these medical debtors had medical debts over $5,000, or 10 percent of pretax family income,” the researchers wrote.

“Most medical debtors were well-educated, owned homes and had middle-class occupations.”

The researchers, whose work was paid for by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, said the share of bankruptcies that could be blamed on medical problems rose by 50 percent from 2001 to 2007.

“Unless you’re Warren Buffett, your family is just one serious illness away from bankruptcy,” Harvard’s Dr. David Himmelstein, an advocate for a single-payer health insurance program for the United States, said in a statement.

http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSTRE5530Y020090604

We need a single payer plan or Medicare for all, in order to deal properly with this problem.  Programs that the Obama administration are developing involve keeping private insurers intact and mandating that all people buy health insurance.  This sort of plan won’t work as has been amply exemplified in numerous states attempts to implement such a program.  Massachusetts is the latest state to try and fail.  Under Mitt Romney (Mormon brother, political enemy) this sort of a plan was instituted in Massachusetts but has had many problems.  You can read all about the failure of the Mass. plan here:

http://www.pnhp.org/mass_report/mass_report_Final.pdf

I am a member of Physicians for a National Health Program and find their website a valuable tool for discerning the facts in the debate over what course our country should take with regards to health care.  You can find that site here:

http://www.pnhp.org/

In spite of recent polls which show that the majority of physicians and of the public favor single payer health care, the topic is not even anywhere near the agenda in the Obama administration.  The insurance companies are too powerful to allow that sort of talk.

Israel attacks US intelligence ship and kills 34 US servicemen

42 years ago, June 8th, the USS Liberty was attacked by Israeli jet fighters mercilessly and 34 crew members were killed with 174 crew wounded.  This murderous and unprovoked attack by Israel was covered up immediately by the President and the top Navy Brass.  Wounded crew members were warned that they would be court martialed for even just speaking to their wives of the incident. 

I don’t want to let this incident get swept under the covers any more than it already has and was very glad to see an article at Consortium News about one of the surviving crew members being honored by Congressman Devin Nunes.  The article offers a nice history of the incident in brief.  It can be found here:

http://consortiumnews.com/2009/060109a.html

This day will live on as evidence of the US’s deference to Israel, even when the lives of our own servicemen are murdered by the Zionists.

Clue #1 that tells us we are not all about freedom and democracy.

A subtle piece of evidence that you are not pursuing a war in a foreign country for the democratization and freedom of that country’s people:  You refuse to aquiesce to demands from that country’s leader when he asks you to stop airstrikes in his country that are killing his electorate and their kids.

The United States said on Sunday it would not halt air strikes in Afghanistan as demanded by President Hamid Karzai after civilian deaths, and it denied using burning phosphorus in the attacks.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090510/wl_nm/us_afghanistan

The murder continues.

Afghan police are saying today that over 100 people were killed in this week’s US air strike in Farah Province. 25 to 30 are suspected Taliban, while the vast majority were civilians. A Red Cross investigative team confirmed the findings, saying they had seen “dozens” of bodies in two separate locations and that civilians were still digging through the rubble of their mud-brick homes looking for others.

http://news.antiwar.com/2009/05/06/us-strikes-in-afghanistan-kill-100-mostly-civilians/

Therefore, renounce war and proclaim peace, and seek diligently to turn the hearts of the children to their fathers, and the hearts of the fathers to the children;

–The Lord

http://scriptures.lds.org/en/dc/98/16

Our traditions have been such that we are not apt to look upon war between tow nations as murder… Does it justify the slaying of men, women and children that otherwise would have remained at home in peace, because a great army is doing the work? No: the guilty will be damned for it.

–Brigham Young

http://theradicalmormon.wordpress.com/2007/09/07/war-and-the-gospel-of-jesus-christ-2/

The pharisees’ descendants do still disrespect the blind

In Christ’s time he would sometimes heal the blind so that they could see again…. or for the first time.  In the 9th chapter of the book of John in the New Testament the pharisees used Christ’s healing of a blind man as an opportunity to call Christ a sinner and show cruelty to the now-seeing man by casting him out of the synagogue after he defended Christ.

Now, the descendants of the pharisees in the current state of Israel are disrespecting the blind again.  The amazing Mohammed Omer reports thusly:

Mohammed Al-Sheikh Yousef could save his eyesight if only he could cross the border out of Gaza. He was denied a permit by Israel; he got one from Egypt, but not for someone to accompany him. And he can’t go on his own because he cannot see very well.

“If Mohammed does not get out of Gaza for medical treatment within the next 14 days, he may totally lose his eyesight and be blind for life,” Dr. Mawia Hasaneen, head of the ambulance and emergency service for Gaza hospitals told IPS in a telephone interview.

“In the past few weeks we have received 150 appeals from people in Gaza who are in need of urgent medical care,” says Ran Yaron from Physicians for Human Rights, a human rights group in Israel that campaigns on behalf of Palestinian patients to obtain exit permits for healthcare.

“We submitted 99 applications to the Israeli army on behalf of the patients, but only 15 cases were approved,” Yaron told IPS. “Israel as the occupying power has primary responsibility for the health of the civilians of Gaza because it controls the crossings. It should not use the patients as a political tool.”

The emergency staff often stand by helpless spectators to suffering. “I just received a call from the mother of a four-year-old child from Jabalyia refugee camp in the north, her son has congestive heart failure and respiratory distress,” said Dr. Hasaneen. “As an official I can’t stand watch her child dying simply because medical treatment is not available in Gaza and the borders are closed.” But he has no option but to do just that.

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=46645

At the end of the story in John 9, Jesus says:

  39 ¶ And Jesus said, For judgment I am come into this world, that they which see not might see; and that they which see might be made blind.

  40 And some of the Pharisees which were with him heard these words, and said unto him, Are we blind also?

  41 Jesus said unto them, If ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but now ye say, We see; therefore your sin remaineth.

Let those words speak for themselves.