National Lawyers Guild Calls for the US to Disavow the Legitimacy of Elections in Honduras

NEW YORK - November 30 - The National Lawyers Guild calls on President Obama and the U.S. Department of State not to recognize the elections in Honduras, which was conducted under the control of an illegitimate coup government.

In the week leading up to Sunday's elections, several NLG members went to Honduras to document conditions there. Tanya Brannan and Kevin Breslin reported numerous repressive measures taken by military and police under command of the Coup government. "While CNN reports a 70% turnout at the elections, even the official Honduran electoral agency admits a mere 1.7 million Honduran voted yesterday," said Brannan. "So even by the government's own admission, some 70% of Hondurans voted not to legitimize the military coup. Can our government do any less?"

Yesterday, member Tanya Brannan stood outside the U.S. Embassy in Honduras in protest of the U.S. government's apparent support of the election. The demonstration drew substantial attention from the Honduran national police, including their elite riot squad, the Cobras, who came out in force. As one bystander observed, "The U.S. government has brought out their helicopters and Honduran riot police to repress a handful of their own citizens trying to exercise their right to free speech. What are they afraid of?"

The National Lawyers Guild has been monitoring the situation in Honduras since the military removed the duly elected president, Manuel Zelaya, on June 28. A climate of fear, intimidation and the suppression of the most basic rights of free association and speech has resulted in the closure of media outlets that are opposed to the coup. There has been widespread militarization, along with assassination, detention, threats, rape, surveillance and harassment of the leadership and supporters of the coup resistance.

Having analyzed the legal and constitutional issues involved and sending delegations to Honduras, the NLG has verified that the election of November 29, 2009 were not free, fair or transparent, and the United States government should join the international community in refusing to recognize its legitimacy. It should speak out forcefully against the coup, close down all U.S. military operations in Honduras, and block all U.S. aid and trade that benefits the illegal coup and its supporters.

In August, the NLG sent a joint delegation to Honduras with the Association of American Jurists and International Association of Democratic Lawyers to meet with members of the Honduran Supreme Court and other government officials supporting the coup and leaders of the coup resistance and social movements. Their preliminary report, including an analysis of the constitutional issues, is available on the website of the NLG International Committee: http://www.nlginternational.org/com/main.php?cid=1.
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The National Lawyers Guild is dedicated to the need for basic and progressive change in the structure of our political and economic system. Through its members--lawyers, law students, jailhouse lawyers and legal workers united in chapters and committees--the Guild works locally, nationally and internationally as an effective political and social force in the service of the people.

http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2009/11/30-12

While CNN reports a 70% turnout at the elections, even the official Honduran electoral agency admits a mere 1.7 million Honduran voted yesterday," said Brannan. "So even by the government's own admission, some 70% of Hondurans voted not to legitimize the military coup. Can our government do any less?"

They expose all of the lies the golpistas told about Zelaya's "crimes"--lies that were relentlessly promulgated in the corpo-fascist press with NO research and verification (as the Lawyers' Guild undertook)--such as that Zelay was trying to extend his own term of office (a lie told over and over and over again by the LYING press). And now the lawyers expose yet another lie--also being promulgated by the LYING press--that 70% of Hondurans voted, while the OPPOSITE is the truth.

It is not enough just to be aghast at these lies, and to protest them wherever we can, but we must also ask WHY the corpo-fascist' news' monopolies have been such lying S.O.B.'s on this subject. This kind of psyops/disinformation campaign--so similar to the media campaign against Chavez, with its relentless, bald-faced lying consistent throughout the media--is the harbinger of war.

"Truth is the first casualty of war," as an ancient Greek playwright is supposed to have been the first to say. (But it is apparently older than that.) First, truth gets speared through the heart, then people. We are seeing the first casualty--the death of the truth--in these 'Big Lie' propaganda campaigns.

Honduras is a prime Pentagon strategic asset for surrounding Venezuela's main, northern oil reserves and operations adjacent to Colombia (seven new US military bases, with NO LIMIT on the number of US soldiers and 'contractors' who can be sent to Colombia) and the Carribbean (Honduran base and port facilities secured; two new US military bases in Panama; the US 4th Fleet reconstituted in the Caribbean).

Honduras is the traditional "stepping stool" for US wars in the region. It had to be maintained, along with a toady fascist government to give it a gloss of Honduran consent. If the prime purpose for this was not war, then there is insufficient reason for the huge embarrassment to the Obama administration that the Honduran coup represents, and the egregious lying about it by the US government and the corporate media. The Pentagon even assisted the coup by permitting the plane carrying the kidnapped president out of the country to stop and refuel at the US airbase in Soto Cano, Honduras.

Events like those surrounding the Honduran coup are not innocent, random, unfocused events. They have a purpose. What can it be? The Obama administration's stated goals of "peace, respect and cooperation" in Latin America are now dead. The deceit and backstabbing of Zelaya, and abandonment of the Honduran people, are known throughout the region. Why was Obama's stated policy so wantonly sacrificed to oust a president who had only six months left to his term?

There has to be something VERY BIG at stake--an overriding reason for this blatant dismantling of a democracy, and the intense disinformation that has accompanied it, and the US just throwing away its chance for new prestige in the region--and I think it all points to war, of which the first casualty is, notoriously and forever, the truth.

That US air base in Honduras was a specific matter of controversy in the leadup to Zelaya's ouster. Zelaya wanted to convert it to a commercial airport. Nikolas Kozloff tells the tale here, adding a fact I didn't know--that Zelaya was going to fund the conversion with financial aid from Venezuela and the Venezuela-organized trade group ALBA.

http://www.counterpunch.org/kozloff07222009.html

"Zelaya, Negroponte and the Controversy at Soto Cano: The Coup and the U.S. Airbase in Honduras, by Nikolas Kozloff, 7/22/09

"The mainstream media has once again dropped the ball on a key aspect of the ongoing story in Honduras: the U.S. airbase at Soto Cano, also known as Palmerola. Prior to the recent military coup d’etat President Manuel Zelaya declared that he would turn the base into a civilian airport, a move opposed by the former U.S. ambassador. What’s more Zelaya intended to carry out his project with Venezuelan financing." (MORE)

What becomes very clear in this account is that the US wanted NO civilian interference at its Soto Cano air base. Zelaya offered the US military a site better suited to drug interdiction (--that utterly phony excuse for US military activities in Latin America). They refused. And soon Zelaya got his house shot up, and got dragged out of his bed at gunpoint, by the Honduran military, and put on a plane to Soto Cano and thence to Costa Rica.