(WMR) -- Although the State Department under Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was a hotbed of neoconservative intrigue and secret operations, not one progressive democratically-elected Latin American leader was ousted by a U.S.-inspired military coup, although there were a number of abortive attempts. However, that situation has changed under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who has given off mixed signals about the military junta that overthrew Honduras�s progressive President Manuel Zelaya late last month.

Clinton met Zelaya at the Organization of American States summit at San Pedro Sula, Honduras, just a few weeks prior to the coup d��tat, which is now reported by both Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Bolivian President Evo Morales to have been carried out with the active support of the U.S. Southern Command in Miami, as well as U.S. military personnel at the Soto Cano/Palmerola airbase, a U.S. base that Zelaya planned to transform into a commercial international airport over the opposition of the U.S. military advisers who lord over the Honduran military. Many of Honduras�s senior officers, including the coup leaders, were trained by the notorious Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in Fort Benning, Georgia, the old �School of the Americas.�

Clinton reciprocated Zelaya�s hospitality by refusing to call the coup against Zelaya a �coup.� Such an utterance would have legally required the Obama administration to cut off all aid, including economic, to Honduras under the US Foreign Assistance Act.

Clinton�s ambassador in Tegucigalpa, Hugo Llorens, a right-wing Cuban exile from southern Florida�s hotbed of reactionary support for Latin American oligarchs, was also accused by Honduran loyalists of supporting the coup.

Clinton began talking out of both sides of her mouth. While calling for the return of Zelaya to the presidency, she also spoke directly to Honduran junta �president� Roberto Micheletti, unrecognized by every other world leader, and then began making noise about two sides to the �coup� story and that Zelaya did not necessarily have to be returned to power. This is quintessential Hillary Clinton: the bald-faced lie with a straight face is her trademark as much as it was with �Tricky Dick� Nixon.

While Clinton engaged in her dalliance with the junta leaders, she also stated that Iran was building a �super embassy� in Nicaragua, where Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, an ally of Zelaya, is president. The claim of an Iranian embassy in Managua was yet another bald-faced lie out of the mouth of Clinton, who is now seen as a gringa tool throughout much of Latin America. It was Clinton�s inane attempt, under the influence of her neocon pro-Israeli advisers, to restore the 1980s Latin American world of the Iran-contra nexus, with a slight twist: rather than Iran paying indirectly for weapons for the anti-Sandinista contras, it was now buttressing the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

It was then announced that Clinton�s presidential campaign adviser Lanny Davis, a consummate Washington, DC, slime merchant and ardent Zionist, became a paid shill for the pro-Honduran junta Honduran Chamber of Commerce, CEAL. Davis is reportedly coordinating his activities with Republican members of the Congress who support the junta, including Cuban-American reactionary Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) and Senator Mel Martinez (R-FL), as well as Otto Reich, George W. Bush�s Cuban-American Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs who worked overtime to overthrow Chavez in Venezuela and Morales in Bolivia.

It would not be the first time that Hillary�s entourage made common cause with Republicans but more on that later.

Another Clinton lobbyist pal, Bennett Ratcliff, was hired on by the coup leaders to advise them in their negotiations with President Zelaya in Costa Rica. Those negotiations were mediated by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias. Arias has his own conflict-of-interest with Clinton. The Costa Rican president, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is quite chummy with the globalist moneybags pal of Clinton, George Soros. Clinton�s other two friends, professional election advisers James Carville and Stanley Greenberg, have promoted the election campaigns of Arias�s pro-free trade allies in Latin America. Zelaya scrapped his participation in such contrivances by allying with the counter-free trade movement spearheaded by Hugo Chavez, the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas or �ALBA,� which also means �Dawn� in Spanish.

Last Wednesday, Clinton sent another troublesome message to the people of Honduras. She gave a major foreign policy address to the Council on Foreign Relations. Her audience included her one-time Iran adviser and anti-Iran hawk and Lanny Davis chum Dennis Ross, now kicked upstairs to the National Security Council, but also a man who epitomizes the dark days of U.S. military and covert involvement in Central America; George W. Bush�s former Director of National Intelligence, ambassador to Iraq, and UN Ambassador John Negroponte, who was also the U.S. ambassador to Honduras during Iran-contra days and literally ran U.S.-sponsored death squads. Clinton was obviously sending a message with Negroponte�s appearance that she feels that revelations that Dick Cheney ran his own death squads around the world are perfectly fine with her.

Clinton has also laid down a gauntlet to the progressive leaders of Venezuela and Ecuador. Ecuador�s President Rafael Correa gave the U.S. military its walking papers from its military airbase at Manta on the Pacific coast. Clinton has responded to Ecuador�s and Venezuela�s desire to see a reduced U.S. military presence in their Andean region by signing off on a Pentagon plan concocted under the aegis of her �new friend,� Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, to establish up to five U.S. military bases in narco-fascist ruled Colombia. Three airbases are planned for Palanquero, northwest of Bogota;Apiay in eastern Colombia, near Venezuela; and Malambo in the north on the Caribbean coast. Two U.S. naval facilities are planned for Malaga Bay on the Pacific and Cartagena on the Caribbean. The military base deal is a direct threat to Venezuela and Ecuador. It also sends a message to the right-wing paramilitaries in Colombia that as far as Mrs. Clinton is concerned, the past is prologue -- the Mena, Arkansas, cocaine pipeline supported by her husband, then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, may soon be open for business again.

Mrs. Clinton has always seemed to have an affinity for fascists and their fellow travelers. She has written of �The Family� Christian cult leader Doug Coe, who provides housing on C Street on Capitol Hill for a number of conservative Republican and a few Democratic congressmen and senators, as �a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God.� However, Coe�s record shows that the only people he wants to �deepen his relationship� with are a number of tinhorn dictators around the world, including past military junta leaders in Honduras, Guatemala, and other Latin American countries.

Hillary Clinton comes off as a progressive but her family background yells out a clear �no� to that notion. According to Bill Clinton, Hillary�s father, Hugh E. Rodham, a Barry Goldwater Republican in the 1960s, casually used the word �nigger� until after Bill Clinton was sworn in as president. One can hear Mr. Rodham coming home from central Chicago to his upper middle class home in Park Ridge, a Chicago suburb, and railing against the �niggers� downtown. How did Hillary respond? Well, the good progressive she was, she volunteered in 1964 to be a �Goldwater Girl� and supported the GOP presidential candidate whose only electoral votes that year were his home state of Arizona and the Deep South segregationist states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. But outside those states, there was another hotbed of Goldwater support: the Park Ridge home of Hillary Clinton.

The French have a saying that applies to exasperating dilemmas represented by Mrs. Clinton: �plus �a change, plus c�est la m�me chose� -- the more things change, the more they stay the same.� 

Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.

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