Honduras Coup (and the General & the Christian Fundamentalists)

I learned at Al Giordano’s The Field that Honduran coup General Romeo Vásquez Velásquez (two-time graduate of SOA/WHINSEC) is the special guest of the Miami Covenant Church at a special convention (at Miami convention centre) titled- The Kingdom Government in Miami, in association with IV Congress MIGA partners, July 22-25.

Erin Rosa– MIGA in Spanish iniatials stands for Ardent Glory Intercontinental Ministry, founded in 1995 by Jaime Chavez, who bills himeslef as the “spiritual counselor” to the Honduran Armed Forces and General Romeo personally.

Here’s the promo vid, Romeo appears at the 19 second mark-

And here’s the poster with him  in his military uniform (second row, at left)-

Click to enlarge

So what is this Christianist Kingdom government stuff, well it is how it sounds, it’s theocracy, rule by fundies- government according to God’s Law (and of course it has its white supremacist offshoot). So another example of Christianists chumming up with the military to impose their rule. If the general appeared at the loony fest it would mean the US allowed him entry and did not arrest him….It might not be Obama’s coup but it is looking to be Washington’s coup. More at this DK diary, hopefully someone can confirm whether he was in Miami or not. Also via a comment there-

Truthout– On July 9, US Ambassador Hugo Llorens in Tegucigalpa told an emergency School of the Americas (SOA) Watch delegation that the US had suspended military aid to Honduras as of the moment that Micheletti swore himself in as president. However, three members of the delegation had stopped by the Palmerola military base where over 500 US soldiers are based and “witnessed an apparently normal buzz of activities, including helicopter flights and interchange of Honduran and US soldiers.” The delegation spoke with a US official on duty at the base who told them that nothing had changed since the coup.

About that base, because of air safety issues with the civilian airport Zelaya wanted to use the US base as a civil airport-

Throwing fuel on the fire Assistant Secretary of State John Negroponte, a former U.S. ambassador to Honduras, said that Honduras could not transform Palmerola into a civilian airport “from one day to the next.” In Tegucigalpa, Negroponte met with Zelaya to discuss Palmerola. Speaking later on Honduran radio the U.S. diplomat said that before Zelaya could embark on his plans for Palmerola the airport would have to receive international certification for new incoming flights. According to Spanish news agency EFE Negroponte also took advantage of his Tegucigalpa trip to sit down and meet with the President of the Honduran Parliament and future coup leader Roberto Micheletti

Oh yes Negroponte! Chavez said Obama was a prisoner of empire, is it not time a President asserts his authority and stops those in Washington from fomenting coups if he is really against such activity?

However the people of Honduras are perhaps not going to to so easily misruled-

Al Giordano:- There is a three-ring circus distracting the global media from the authentic struggle – the one waged by the Honduran people, from below – and today none of the ringmasters dressed themselves in glory.

In ring one, we had Coup “president” Roberto Micheletti, who blinked when his troops did not arrest President Manuel Zelaya, who set foot on his country’s soil today at the border crossing – Los Manos – where we suggested he would yesterday.

In ring two, we had Zelaya, who himself blinked – inexplicably, from this community organizer’s lens, objectively viewed, a setback for his cause and his people – by not continuing his walk toward Tegucigalpa after the coup regime blinked. A few more steps forward and he would have either called the regime’s bluff, and continued marching, or he would have ended up in prison, inspiring the people to go the extra yardage necessary to topple the coup.

And in ring three, we had US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who claimed that Zelaya’s actions today were “reckless.” Today Clinton proved, once and for all, that she is not competent to do the job of foreign minister. What an asshole. It is Clinton who demonstrated that she is reckless about democracy. The actions she called “reckless” were those of a Honduran citizen and elected president doing no more than trying to rejoin his own feet with his own land. What makes her behavior today so obviously inept and deserving of eternal contempt is that she used such strong words to criticize a guy who, when push came to shove, did exactly what she had recommended, when Zelaya backed down. The only reckless thing he did was shrink from putting the next foot in front of the other.

Obscured from view by the circus: the mobilizations of an increasingly organized Honduran people. Today’s saga underscores that, in the end, the outcome is up to them, and from this pen we will redouble our efforts to make sure that their courage and sacrifice do not go unseen or unheard.

And he also reports the latest revelations on Radio Globo, is the coup unravelling?

Earwicga has a statement from Central America Women’s Network (CAWN), excerpt-

Honduran women’s organisations and individual women from rural and urban areas have come together to resist and protest peacefully in response to the coup and the events that followed. On 29 June they released a public statement calling for the return of the rule of law and respect for human rights by peaceful means, and they have not stopped their communications, despite frequent power cuts. The mainstream news channels are strictly controlled, so their reports provide crucial information by their immediacy and by giving a voice to ordinary people, especially women.

‘the law does not require you to intervene’

A businessman who was held and mistreated in the United Arab Emirates following the London bombings believes he has evidence that British consular officials asked permission from the UK’s own security services to visit him while he was detained. Heavily redacted documents seen by the Guardian appear to indicate that the request to visit Alam Ghafoor was made to an unidentified British intelligence officer and not to officials in the UAE.

Ghafoor is one of several British men who allege there has been British complicity in their detention and torture while abroad. The businessman, who is 38 and from Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, was detained and tortured while on a business trip to Dubai following the London bombings in July 2005.

Ghafoor and his business partner, Mohammed Rafiq Siddique, flew to the UAE on 4 July. They were dragged out of a restaurant as they dined on 21 July. The two British Muslims say they were threatened with torture, deprived of sleep, subjected to stress positions and told they would be killed and fed to dogs.

Ghafoor has obtained copies of correspondence from consular officials to the Foreign Office in London while he was in custody that show those officials were asking someone other than the UAE authorities for permission to see him. Who that person is, and who they represented, is unclear, as their name was censored before the copies were handed over. Some of the reports were so heavily redacted by the time Ghafoor received them that the only words not blanked are his name.

MI5 and MI6 officers who question terrorism suspects they know are being tortured, are acting in line with a secret government interrogation policy, drawn up after the 9/11 attacks. The policy states: “we cannot be party to such ill treatment nor can we be seen to condone it” and that “it is important that you do not engage in any activity yourself that involves inhumane or degrading treatment of prisoners.” It also advises intelligence officers that if detainees “are not within our custody or control, the law does not require you to intervene” to prevent torture.

The Solidarity of the Colonised

The Indigenous Youth Delegation to Palestine, the first-ever delegation of its kind, is scheduled for August 2009. Youth leaders from grassroots indigenous groups in the US, namely Seventh Native American Generation (SNAG) Magazine, Huaxtec, and Native students at Haskell University, will travel to Palestine at the invitation of five Palestinian youth centers. After more than two years of communicating through the internet, these young people will have the opportunity to learn firsthand from each other by sharing tools of empowerment and education.

The trip to Palestine is part of an ongoing process to connect the shared experiences of Indigenous peoples across the world, to build solidarity, justice and peace. The group will create print media, blogs, video, photo essays, and other forms of media to share their stories and involve their communities in building a national and international movement for indigenous rights.

The US young people, all of who are from low-income, urban, Native American communities have already done a remarkable thing: They have raised all the money for their plane fares.

MECA has given the Palestinian organizations in YSN $18,000 for the youth training they are doing, and to prepare for the delegation.

Now, just one month from the start of the delegation, YSN still needs to raise $12,000 more for food, transportation and accommodations in Palestine.

Click here to make a contribution.
Be sure to put YSN in the “on behalf of” field in the form.

War Is The Atrocity Generator

Bear in mind this is police investigating military/military police so not exactly an independent of the establishment process (and the GMP have their own secrets of involvement in torture)-

A military investigation into one of the most notorious incidents of the Iraq conflict, in which British soldiers allegedly murdered and mutilated unarmed Iraqis, has been severely criticised by police called in to assess its credibility.

A new inquiry has found that the Royal Military Police – who are responsible for investigating claims of wrongdoing by soldiers – failed to collect forensic evidence, ignored key witnesses and did not ask Iraqi witnesses relevant questions as they investigated the “Battle of Danny Boy” and its aftermath.

The 120-page Greater Manchester police report into the RMP’s Special Investigation Branch (SIB), which has been obtained by the Observer, concludes that some interviews with Iraqi detainees may have been conducted in an effort to justify their arrest, not to probe human rights abuses. The report is expected to be significant for a judicial review that will examine the Iraqi claims next week.

The army investigation centred on a firefight between soldiers from the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment (PWRR) and insurgents at a road checkpoint known among the troops as Danny Boy, near Majar al-Kabir in Maysan province, on 14 May 2004. The next day the bodies of 20 Iraqis were returned to their families.

Several Iraqi witnesses claimed that some of the 20 were taken as prisoners to Camp Abu Naji, an army base in Amara, to be interrogated and tortured, before being killed. Evidence of torture and mutilation allegedly included close-range bullet wounds, the removal of eyes and stab wounds, according to evidence presented by human rights lawyers.

And this is the week seven years ago when-

Matthew Rycroft, aide to Blair foreign policy guru David Manning, was taking minutes at the Downing Street meeting on July 23, 2002, minutes he immediately circulated to Blair and other participants. The minutes observed quite bluntly that “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”