Alpha 66 and Miami on the job in Tegucigalpa

From Cubadebate:

• There’s no doubt that Hillary Clinton was the one who solicited the interview with Globovision.
• There’s no doubt that all the questions were planned.
• There’s no doubt that the time and the place of the meeting (immediately after her meeting with President Manuel Zelaya) were part of the message.
• There’s no doubt that this interview is part of the campaign against Venezuela described by Angel Palacios in the following article:

The Campaign of Hatred Against Venezuela

By Angel Palacios/Honduras Resiste

Translation: Machetera

Along Morazán Boulevard, the “Zona Rosa” of the Honduran capital where you need to have money…and plenty of it, to live, the newspaper “El Heraldo” has plastered posters at the stoplights carrying the most important news according to the paper’s editorial line.  They say: “Chávez planned an aerial provocation.”

Nothing new.  The campaign to demonize Venezuela, President Chávez and the Bolivarian process has been a tonic for the usurper government and its allies since weeks before the coup d’etat.  On the radio and tv broadcasts controlled by the putschists, it’s normal to hear Chávez and Venezuela mentioned as associated with supposed actions of interference, invasion, attacks, conspiracies.

Reporters for the Truth deconstructs Hillary’s Busy Day

From Aporrea.org - translation by Machetera

July 8, 2009 – In a communique addressed to our editorial staff, the organization “Journalists for the Truth” denounced the intentions behind yesterday’s interview of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by Globovision mafia representatives.

The note states:

“The interview between the U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, and representatives of the privately held Globovision TV news channel provides evidence that this station is a political partisan of the ultra-rightwing opposition to the government of President Hugo Chávez Frías, and the only one recognized by Barack Obama.

It is notable that the State Department is receiving spokesmen from a television channel that is undergoing administrative review and sanctions in our country, for its presumed violations of our laws and our Constitution.

Obama’s non-non-interference pledge

Spanish translation by Atenea Acevedo available here.

Obama’s Non-non Interference Pledge

With apologies to Gertrude Stein.

Oh, the irony.

Today, at the “New Economic School” in Moscow, Russia, which President Obama himself pointed out was “founded with Western support,” Obama recurred to a phrase we’ve come to hear from him with some frequency: “Let me be clear.”

Now let me be clear: America cannot and should not seek to impose any system of government on any other country, nor would we presume to choose which party or individual should run a country. And we haven’t always done what we should have on that front. Even as we meet here today, America supports now the restoration of the democratically-elected President of Honduras, even though he has strongly opposed American policies. We do so not because we agree with him. We do so because we respect the universal principle that people should choose their own leaders, whether they are leaders we agree with or not.

But the President’s actions are anything but clear.  If people are still confused about how to “read” Obama, Machetera has a suggestion. Watch what he does, not what he says.

Micheletti: First, get the cartoonist! And the baby!

These are the people the putschists in Honduras fear the most.  They fear them so much they put them at the top of the arrest list.

It’s Allan McDonald, a Honduran cartoonist, and his 17 month old daughter, who were arrested at 3 a.m. Monday morning and taken to a hotel where they shared their detention with two foreign journalists and the Venezuelan consul.  The Honduran military hasn’t gotten around to sports stadiums yet, apparently.  Hotel does not equal food, in case you were wondering.  McDonald and his daughter were given water, nothing else, during the nearly 24 hours they were under arrest.

Meanwhile back at McDonald’s house, in the best Nazi tradition, the military busied itself tearing the place apart and building a bonfire for all of McDonald’s cartoons and his art supplies.  The news report that appeared at YVKE Mundial (originally from hablahonduras.com) follows:

Cuban ambassador targeted in Honduras

A curious detail has emerged from the coup underway in Honduras, thanks to the Cuban News Agency (and thanks to Magbana for pointing it out).

During a press conference at the venue of the Cuban Foreign Ministry (MINREX) in Havana, Rodriguez [Cuba's Foreign Minister] also condemned the military’s violation of the diplomatic immunity of Cuba’s Ambassador to Tegucigalpa Juan Carlos Hernandez, who was kidnapped and beaten along with Honduran Foreign Minister Patricia Rodas in the presence of the Venezuelan and Nicaraguan ambassadors.

Note that Rodriguez does not speak of the Venezuelan and Nicaraguan ambassadors being beaten.  Just the Cuban and the Honduran, in their “presence.”

Back from the salt mine

It’s a difficult job, but somebody’s got to do it.

And unlike Ernesto Hernández Busto, those of us who lack a check from Langley have to find other ways of putting food on the table.  But now that Machetera’s bank account is stabilized again, she can turn her attention to things a little closer to her heart.  Like reminding everyone (in case you missed it) that Twitter’s co-founder, Jack Dorsey, was in Baghdad a month ago courtesy of the U.S. State Department, for talks on how to reconstruct the Iraqi information network destroyed by Iraq’s occupiers, and (conveniently) promote Twitter into the bargain. 

You say Varela, Barrons says Barilla

Muahahahaha.

Imagine Machetera’s glee as this drifted into her mailbox (thank you Walter Lippmann!).  As Nelson Valdes points out, in Cuba, barilla means the cheap lightweight wood you use to make a kite, but Machetera likes to think of it as her preferred brand of pasta.  And what better way to remember that dim bulb, or should we say overcooked noodle, Oswaldo Paya, than as the frontman for the Barilla Project?  Whatever happened to Paya anyway?  Poor guy, eclipsed by the newest Washington pasta projects: Yoani Sánchez and Oscar Espinosa Chepe (the latter briefly mentioned in the Barrons article as a founding Barilla member.)  You can only cook pasta so long before it goes to mush.

Yoani the Pentagon babe’s homies write in

Machetera found something odd in her inbox this morning.  A comment – and not just the unintelligible garbage that Machetera receives with depressing regularity, but something that appears to have been somewhat carefully drafted despite the whopper of an error in the first sentence. Rosa Miriam Elizalde’s article on cyber-dissidents apparently struck a nerve.

Instead of approving this in the comments section, Machetera will make it into a post of its own – lucky you, Ernesto Hernández Busto – not everybody gets this treatment.  Of course she reserves the right to answer the craziness as we go along.

Ernesto writes from Spain and has his own blog which you can google yourself if you’re really interested.  It’s nothing so fancy as Yoani’s of course, but maybe if he actually moves to Cuba and starts publishing from there, he too can get in on the Pentagon gravy train and scam an upgrade.

Yoani Sánchez: Pentagon babe

Rosa Miriam Elizalde has finally pointed out what never occurs to Time magazine or Grupo Prisa. Or maybe it has occurred to them – they just can’t bring themselves to admit it.  That blog by the blocked Cuban blogger/whiner ain’t no ordinary blog. Lots o’ cash behind it.

There are other translations of this floating around on the Internet.  Just not as good.

Cyber-command and Cyber-dissidents, More of the Same

Rosa Miriam Elizalde

English Translation: Machetera

Havana – The news has gone around the world.  The Obama administration is putting the final touches on a new cyberspace army.  First the Wall Street Journal and then the New York Times reported that the objective of this cyber-command is to guarantee the security of U.S. military computer networks threatened by the intrusion of hackers, particularly those linked to countries such as China and Russia.

Victims are being offered a single pill in which to swallow the fantasy of an external enemy and the details of the homicidal weapon used to kill it (a cyber-command that will keep watch over the planet and eventually enter into action).  As Tom Burghardt, of Global Research [1] put it, the United States is using the subterfuge of cyber-security as a pretext for cyber-war, a project forged by the North American hawks before September 11, 2001 and one that began to come together in 2003, when a secret document [2] signed by Donald Rumsfeld, the ex-Secretary of Defense, was leaked, in which the order was given to create this special Command.

Chasing the tail of U.S. Cuba policy

Washington’s impossible equation

When the late Phil Agee described his job application process with the CIA in the late 1950′s, he talked about undergoing repeated lie detector tests where he deliberately lied about various things, just for the hell of it.  He resented being judged by a machine and wanted to see if he could beat it.  At first it seemed that he failed.  The tests were repeated.  Again, an unhappy result.  He was sent home.  Just as he was feeling most desperate, sure he would never be hired and on the verge of admitting what he had done and begging forgiveness, he was suddenly approved.  There are only two ways of viewing such a process.  Either the CIA’s application process is inept, or it deliberately recruits liars.