[Peace-discuss] Robert Naiman interviewed on Counterspin / Wikileaks about Honduras / We should have known that the U.S. government internally saw it as clear cut

[Karen Medina]

Robert Naiman interviewed on Counterspin about WikiLeaks-Honduras:
(mp3 and text from the interview:
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4208 )


ROBERT NAIMAN

CounterSpin: The latest WikiLeaks documents have elicited a range of
media reactions. WikiLeaks' Julian Assange should be tried for
espionage, or he should be executed. The documents are a grave assault
on U.S. democracy, or they tell us absolutely nothing new. There's
another line of thinking that suggests the lesson is that U.S.
diplomats are doing good work. As one L.A. Times columnist put it, the
cables "don't show unauthorized war, fraudulent procurement practices
or unexpected assassination. They don't show America forming
significant alliances with sworn enemies or visiting unexpected deceit
on friends."

Well, that's a pretty low bar. But one WikiLeaks lesson mostly eluding
the media concerns the 2009 coup in Honduras. The diplomatic cables on
that event portray the U.S government as reaching one rather
definitive conclusion about the illegality of that coup—a conclusion
they didn't press much in public. So how much does this revelation
tell us about a story the media so thoroughly botched in real time?
Robert Naiman is policy director for the group Just Foreign Policy,
and he's put some of those pieces together. He joins us now by phone.

Welcome back to CounterSpin, Robert Naiman.

Robert Naiman: Good to be with you.

CS: Well, for the sake of a reminder: in 2009, this left-leaning
president of Honduras Manuel Zelaya was removed from office in a
military coup. The story we were told was that he was trying to
engineer some sort of vote in order to remain in office, in violation
of the constitution of the country. So while a coup seemed extreme,
the real danger here was this Hugo Chávez-style autocrat trying to
cling to power. Now, in the WikiLeaks document there is a diplomatic
cable from our embassy in the country, and what does it tell us,
exactly?

RN: It tells us that according to the view of the embassy a month
after the event, after investigating the event, and investigating the
law, they gave their summary view of what happened and its legality
and its constitutionality. And the document is an exemplar of moral
clarity. The ambassador said there is no doubt that the events of June
28, constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup. The subject of
the cable was "Open and Shut: The Case of the Honduran Coup." This
cable, this was the topic, the focus: what happened, was it legal, was
it constitutional? This cable went through the arguments being given
by supporters of the coup and said none of them has substantive
validity under the Honduran constitution. And it referred to what the
military did as kidnapping and abducting President Zelaya.

So this is totally clear cut, and it's very different from the story
certainly that U.S. news consumers, newspaper readers had during this
period after the coup, where supporters of the coup in the United
States-including Republican members of Congress and media talking
heads— were saying, well, now, it's complicated, President Zelaya
broke the law, and he took unconstitutional action, and it's not clear
it's a coup, it's not clear it's a military coup.

And the State Department itself a month after this cable was sent, in
an August 25 press conference was telling reporters that State
Department military lawyers were still studying the events and the law
to determine whether a "military coup" had taken place. Because that
was the trigger under U.S. law for cutoff of U.S. aid; U.S. law
requires U.S. aid to be cut off to a government if there is a military
coup.

But this document, this July 25 document, highlights—this secret cable
that we now have—highlights that this August public policy was total
nonsense because there wasn't any ambiguity. And a month earlier, our
ambassador—and this is part of the ambassador's job is to report from
the country back to Washington what's going on here—the embassy had
already reviewed the evidence, had come to this crystal clear
conclusion that a military coup had taken place.

So U.S. aid should have been cut off immediately, and the reason that
it wasn't clearly was that officials in Washington were pursuing a
different game, trying to engineer a diplomatic compromise that would
allow President Zelaya to come back but with sharply curtailed powers,
and so on and so forth.

So there was a big contradiction between the world as the U.S. embassy
knew it—namely, there's been a military coup, it's clear cut—and the
world as presented to the public by the State Department a month later
saying well, these events are murky, and reality is in between.
And this is what was reflected in U.S. press coverage, saying oh well
reasonable people can disagree about what happened, and the reality is
murky.

In fact, that legacy persists today. So there was just a report in the
Hill about Lanny Davis being hired by the now-Honduran government, and
it refers to the events by saying many called it a coup. Well, you
know, that's a legacy of well, people disagree and some people called
it a coup and some people called it something else. That's a legacy
that was created by these two different realities: the reality that
the embassy of Honduras knew as reflected in the secret cable that we
now have and what was presented to the public by the U.S. government.
In that Los Angeles Times piece it claimed that there's no examples of
deceiving our allies, but this is an example of deceiving the American
people. What the American people got from news media was very
different from the reality as the embassy of Honduras knew it.

CS: When we talk about what media are expecting or looking for in
these WikiLeaks cables, you see a lot of references to well, it's
nothing that we didn't know already or it just retells us stories we
already know. As you're pointing out, actually this cable is telling
us something that we didn't know or at least it conflicts with the
official line on something. How much coverage did this cable get in
the media in the last couple of days?

RN: It got some coverage. CNN had a very good piece, which not only
reported the cable but got the story right. The lead paragraph of the
CNN story was the contradiction between what the embassy was telling
top government officials and what the public line of the U.S. was,
namely it's murky as opposed to it's clear cut. McClatchy had a story
which missed that completely. The headline was, you know, "All Sides
Committed Crimes," which is not the story, and then it just reported
the cable without putting it in the context of what happened in U.S.
policy—what was the contradiction between this cable and what U.S.
policy was during the time that this cable was written.

CS: There is this idea that—from people who are critics of releasing
these cables—that this going to harm the ability of U.S. officials to
conduct foreign policy, which requires the ability to say one thing in
private and another thing publicly, this is part of the work of
diplomats and of our foreign policy. Broadly speaking, bigger than
Honduras, how do you respond to that idea that these are things that
we just shouldn't know?

RN: Well, this is an example of something that we should have known.
We should have known that the U.S. government internally saw it as
clear cut. And more generally, we should know when the—if U.S. policy
in its official justification is based on descriptions of reality that
are not true, then we should know that because we should be trying to
have a policy that's based on reality as it is. And, of course, you
know, if you believe that U.S. foreign policy should be determined
democratically because it's something the U.S. government does and we
live in a democracy, then people have to have access to the
information about what's really going on.

If the war in Afghanistan, if top government officials are telling
each other that U.S. policy has failed, we need to know that. We can't
have a discussion about what the policy should be based on somebody
telling us that the policy is working if in fact top U.S. government
officials are telling each other that the policy has failed.

CS: We've been speaking with Robert Naiman from the group Just Foreign
Policy. You can follow their work at JustForeignPolicy.org.

Robert Naiman, thanks for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

RN: Good to be with you.