More on the Honduran Battle for Washington

In a previous post, I posted a Real News Network video piece on the Honduran Battle for Washington.

Further to this Machetera reports on an "Op-Ed that appeared in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal under Roberto Micheletti’s signature" in her article "Otto Reich’s propaganda factory still churning out the goods".

The signs are that Otto Reich is up to his neck in it, but it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if he was in cahoots with Lanny Davis.

One just has to look at Lanny Davis bio. He was appointed as a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of the law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe from Patton Boggs where he specialised "in legal crisis communications in high-profile cases...Davis frequently provides strategic legal and crisis management counsel, including media relations strategy, to corporations and individuals..."Lanny focuses on helping clients win both in the courtroom, and in the court of public opinion," said Ralph H. Baxter, Jr., Orrick's chairman and CEO. "Lanny's arrival significantly enhances our ability to assist clients who are facing a situation in which their reputation is at risk,"

One of Davis' more recent clients was Rep Jane Harman who was embroiled in the AIPAC spying case caught on tape trafficking in influence and he "serves as an adviser and spokesman for the Israel Project, a hawkish, pro-Israel group," that describes its mission as being "devoted to educating the press and the public about Israel while promoting security, freedom and peace."

There's a lot of money here in US aid, with over $150 million hanging in the balance...and Al Giordano's article lays bare some of those behind Davis, while midcoastman at Daily Kos also mentions Chiquita, the US fruit company that employed paramilitaries in Colombia to get rid of pesky leftists wanting a decent wage and even used its own ships to smuggle weapons to the same paramilitary groups. (Chiquita also had clear ties to Narco-Para-President Uribe: "payments were made through "intermediaries" in a Colombian government-sponsored program known as Convivir, a network of rural security cooperatives established by the military to police rural areas and provide intelligence on leftist insurgents...The Convivir connection is especially important now, as current President Álvaro Uribe was a key sponsor of the program while governor of Anitoquia department. Antioquia's banana-growing Urabá region is also the locus of Chiquita's Colombia operations. As president, Uribe has implemented similar programs involving the use of civilian informants and soldiers.")

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Check out Machetera's latest post "Billy Joya cranks up the killing machine in Honduras": "A bomb exploded today at one of Honduras’s most combative unions, at the same time that three agents from the DNIC (National Office of Criminal Investigation) were captured by those attending the burial of the young brickmason Pedro Magdiel Muñoz Salvador."