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How an Obscure Michigan State Professor Who Worked For the CIA Played a Leading Role in Facilitating U.S. Intervention in Vietnam
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/11/04/how-an-obscure-michigan-state-professor-who-worked-for-the-cia-played-a-leading-role-in-facilitating-u-s-intervention-in-vietnam/

Ngo Dinh Diem, South Vietnam's premier from 1954 to 1963, was a Cold War version of Volodymyr Zelensky, an American-subsidized ruler who was fawned upon by leading U.S. politicians and the U.S. media despite causing the ruin of his own country.

Lyndon B. Johnson at one point compared Diem to Winston Churchill—though privately admitted: "Shit, Diem's the only boy we got out there."[1]

Diem's disastrous rule set the stage for the escalation of American involvement in the Vietnam War. His repressive policies fueled the growth of the National Liberation Front (NLF) guerrillas—aka Vietcong—which U.S. troops were sent to fight against.

Wesley R. Fishel was a political science professor at Michigan State University (MSU) in the early 1950s, with a background in U.S. military intelligence, who developed a close relationship with Diem and served as a key lobbyist for him and liaison between him and the U.S. government. For many years, Fishel headed an MSU program that trained South Vietnam's police to help bolster Diem's regime and provided training to South Vietnamese civil servants in government administration.

Fishel's crucial role in leading the United States into the Vietnam War is chronicled in a book by historian Joseph G. Morgan, Wesley Fishel and Vietnam: A Great and Tragic American Experiment (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021).

Morgan is a historian at Iona University who previously wrote a book on the American Friends of Vietnam (AFV), a lobby group that Fishel helped found which supported expanded U.S. aid to Ngo Dinh Diem in the 1950s. Financed in part by the CIA, the lobby's members included prominent political figures of the era, including John F. Kennedy.

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Morgan wrote that the AFV "had a lot to do with getting the U.S. into the Vietnam War." Besides lobbying for U.S. aid to Vietnam, it "created an ideological framework justifying America's intervention in Vietnam and the Saigon government's harsh treatment of political opponents as a necessary reaction to the communist menace."[2]

Fishel, identifying as a Cold War liberal, was a mover and shaker in the AFV. For most of Diem's time in power, Fishel was his chief American publicist. He wrote many articles in prominent U.S. journals supporting him, including one in the CIA-subsidized liberal anti-communist New Leader with the tortured title "Vietnam's Democratic One-Man Rule."

In that piece, Fishel claimed that Diem enjoyed all the powers of a dictator but had chosen to rule democratically, establishing a government that "now is assuredly one of the most stable and honest on the periphery of Asia."

Fishel went on to complain how many Western critics applied Western standards when "the people of Southeast Asia are not, generally speaking, sufficiently sophisticated to understand what we mean by democracy and how they can exercise and protect their own political rights."[3]

These remarks reflected a blatant colonial mentality and provided an apologia for heavy-handed U.S. political interference in South Vietnam and Diem's jailing and assassination of political opponents, some after he had passed a law that allowed for secret military tribunals followed by the death penalty.

Stocky in build, clean shaven and short (he was 5'4" tall), Fishel grew up in a Jewish family in Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1920s and 1930s, and studied international relations at Georgetown and Northwestern with a specialty in Asian affairs.

In 1941, Fishel joined the U.S. Naval Reserve and began military intelligence training in Japanese languages, taking up a post as an analyst at the Joint Intelligence Center, Pacific Ocean areas, where he worked under Admiral Chester W. Nimitz translating Japanese tactical documents and planting loudspeakers in front of Japanese positions at Iwo Jima in an effort to persuade the Japanese to surrender.

After the war, Fishel earned a Ph.D. in international relations at the University of Chicago where he wrote a dissertation on the termination of America's extraterritorial privilege in China.[4]

In a 1950 essay published in The Western Political Quarterly, Fishel ironically stated that Viet Minh leader Ho Chi Minh had "severed his connection with international communism" and that his Viet Minh movement "reflected the strength of Vietnamese nationalism."[5]

Fishel subsequently changed his view, however, in depicting Diem as a representative of a viable anti-communist nationalism that he believed the U.S. should try to nurture.

Fishel was introduced to Diem in Japan in 1950 by his mentor Komatsu Kiyoshi whom he met while participating in a UCLA program involving the education of U.S. military personnel based in Japan. Komatsu had written a book advocating for an independent Vietnam under Japanese tutelage and formed a close friendship with Cuong De, a member of the Vietnamese royal family who promoted an anti-communist alternative to the Viet Minh and knew Diem.[6]

Morgan points out that various historians suggest that Fishel was acting as an agent of the CIA in his initial meetings with Cuong De and Diem.[7]

Morgan states that Fishel is known to have willingly collaborated with the CIA and acted as an intelligence operative for the U.S. Army in the summer of 1950 when he was assigned as a lieutenant to the military intelligence section of the General Headquarters of the Far East Command.[8]

Fishel at this time carried out military assignments of a "secretive nature," including reporting on the activities of Cuong De and Diem for U.S. intelligence.[9]

Dallas Coors of the U.S. embassy in Saigon referred to Fishel as the "source of the very interesting intelligence reports submitted by the Embassy in Tokyo of Prince Cuong De and his conversations with Bishop Thuc and Ngo Dinh Diem."[10]

As Fishel progressed in his academic career, he received grants to carry out research for the U.S. State Department and military in the service of the Cold War on psychological warfare, information programs, and atrocity propaganda.

Morgan says that, in the early 1950s, Fishel approached the CIA about the possibility of compiling an annotated bibliography of material concerning the Chinese economy, and carried out a study of alleged communist atrocity propaganda accusing American forces of employing germ warfare in the Korean War—which recent historical investigations have shown to be true.

Fishel co-wrote an article with another MSU faculty member, Herbert Garfinkel, expressing doubt about the truth of the germ warfare accusations, falsely claiming that communist authorities refused to let outside groups enter their territory to judge the merits of their allegations.[11]

Fishel became especially close to Diem after the latter became South Vietnam's prime minister following his appointment by French puppet emperor Bao Dai and victory in rigged elections overseen by the CIA.

Vietnam was temporarily divided under the 1954 Geneva Accords—which the U.S. never signed—that called for elections in 1956. However, the Eisenhower administration never followed through on these elections because, as Eisenhower stated in his memoir, Ho Chi Minh would have received at least 80% of the vote.

As the U.S. pumped in millions of dollars in military and economic aid to try to entrench Diem's rule in South Vietnam, Fishel served as Diem's unofficial adviser, having breakfast with him and members of his entourage in the presidential palace many mornings.

Fishel worked out of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon with Edward Lansdale, another key adviser to Diem, who specialized in psychological warfare.

The MSU project that Fishel headed was publicly exposed in a 1966 Ramparts magazine article that was featured on the magazine's cover with Madame Nhu—Diem's sister-in-law and a power-broker in his regime—in an MSU cheerleader's uniform.

After conducting interviews with disaffected MSU faculty members, notably economist Stanley K. Sheinbaum, Ramparts writers Warren Hinckle, Sol Stern and Robert Scheer displayed how Fishel and MSU had compromised their academic integrity by functioning as technical advisers and publicists for a sordid dictatorship that had come about because of the U.S.

Most pernicious was the MSU police training program, which introduced new methods of fingerprinting, helped South Vietnam's police force develop an identity card program to monitor political activity, and provided firearms and other policing technologies used in a repressive campaign against Diem's opponents and the nascent guerrilla movement.[13]

The most controversial aspect of the program involved the university's decision to allow CIA personnel to be hired as faculty to give counter-espionage and counter-insurgency training to the Sureté, a repressive personal instrument of Diem's controlled by his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu.[14]

The use of the MSU program as a cover for the CIA had been set up by the White House[15] and makes further clear Fishel's CIA affiliation.

In a June 1961 article in The New Republic, "A Crumbling Bastion: Flattery and Lies Won't Save Vietnam" two disaffected MSU faculty, Milton Taylor and Adrian Jaffe, charged that Fishel, as MSU's chief adviser, lived extravagantly in Saigon in a pretentious home guarded by a sentry box and that served as a venue for hosting lavish parties.[16]

Fishel thus emerges as a character right out of Eugene Burdick and William J. Lederer's novel, The Ugly American, which criticized Americans who lived like colonials in Third World countries and interacted mostly among themselves, causing them to become detached from the lives of the Third World natives they were supposed to be helping.[17]

The cruelty of Diem's regime was detailed in accounts by Australian journalist Wilfred G. Burchett who quoted from Buddhist bonzes who described how Diemist forces imposing forced relocation edicts under the Strategic Hamlet program would enter their villages and demolished homes, killed the buffalo and pigs and beat up, imprisoned and tortured anyone who did not comply.

One bonze said that the so-called Vietcong (NLF) "existed because of the crimes of the Diemists" and were "our own people" who were "forced to take to the jungle to defend themselves...when they came to our villages at night for food, they would pay, unlike the Diemists who loot and kill."[18]

Fishel himself began to break from Diem following the infamous Buddhist immolations in 1962 triggered by Diem's savage repression of the Buddhists and Vietcong, or NLF.

Fishel was hired at this time by the Kennedy administration as a State Department consultant and supported the CIA coup against Diem, establishing lists of potential successors and making contacts with them.[19]

In March 1966, Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky awarded Fishel the Kim Khanh Medal, the Republic of Vietnam (RVN)'s highest civilian award for his "priceless effort to help Vietnam fight communism and ignorance and disease."[20]

After returning to his teaching career at MSU, Fishel continued to advocate for greater American support in establishing a stable non-communist government in South Vietnam.

America's departure from Indochina, he wrote in The Washington Post in June 1964, would "consign the Vietnamese, the Lao, and their neighbors to the limbo of Chinese domination for generations to come."[21]

Fishel continued to attend AFV conferences in this period and aided in the publication of political pamphlets that it sponsored, including Problems of Freedom: South Vietnam Since Independence and Vietnam: Is Victory Possible?, and edited the book, Vietnam: Anatomy of a Conflict (Itasca, IL: F.E. Peacock Publishers, 1968), which was designed to counteract anti-war authors.[22]

According to respected correspondent Bernard B. Fall, Fishel's writings included factual inaccuracies, expressed incredible naiveté about the relationship between the Saigon government and its people, and clashed with "everything credible written on the subject."[23]

Edwin E. Moise, a Harvard student and future historian of the Vietnam War, condemned a letter signed by Fishel supporting the Vietnam War in The New York Times for "saying things that aren't so" and for showing "devotion to the slogans and fantasies of national propaganda."[24]

When the Johnson administration called for a domestic "counter-offensive on college campuses to combat the pacifist demonstrations," Chester L. Cooper, the National Security Council official responsible for dealing with domestic reaction to the war, enlisted Fishel to defend Johnson administration policies at teach-in events.[25]

At the 1965 National Teach-in at the Sheraton Hotel in Washington, D.C., Fishel defended the legitimacy of the South Vietnamese state and expressed concern about the fate of the people of South Vietnam if the U.S. withdrew and the communists took over.[26]

Adopting a combative style, Fishel attacked critics of the war by declaring: "I find it difficult to understand why we are so eager to hand sixteen million people of the Republic of Vietnam [RVN] over to the communists."[27]

Fishel became a target of anti-war protesters when he returned to teaching at MSU and at Southern Illinois University (SIU), Carbondale, where he was hired to set up a Vietnam Studies center in 1969/1970 with a grant from USAID (MSU's president from the 1950s, John Hannah, was then USAID's administrator).[28]

Students would enter Fishel's classes to heckle him, put up "wanted" posters indicting him for murder, and carried out a mock war crimes tribunal where students plastered a dummy of him with pies in the face after finding him guilty of crimes against humanity because of his support for Diem and the escalation of the Vietnam War.[29]

As part of his support for the war, Fishel was involved in a program to adopt a Vietnamese hamlet that would receive support from an American citizen—an idea conceived by Edward Lansdale, a master of public relations.[30]

Fishel had helped promote the original concept of "strategic hamlets," whereby South Vietnamese peasants were located into hamlets policed by U.S. forces in an attempt to isolate the NLF, though the program had backfired as South Vietnamese peasants did not want to move from their ancestral lands and relief aid intended for the hamlets was often stolen by corrupt officers in the South Vietnamese army.

In defending U.S. policy, Fishel would often invoke his own expertise and that of other government-funded intellectuals, conveying his belief that "policy had to be made by experts" and that outsiders were not qualified to judge it.

Paradoxically, Fishel never developed fluency in the Vietnamese language and was derisive toward regular Vietnamese people, basing his perspective on the viewpoint of Washington insiders and members of Diem's inner circle.

Fishel further had a child-like view of his own country's supposed benevolence in foreign affairs, believing that American policy had been carried out in Vietnam with good intentions.

Noam Chomsky had Fishel in mind when he wrote a scathing indictment of American intellectual complicity with the Vietnam War, American Power and the New Mandarins (1967).

Chomsky wrote in the book that intellectuals are "in a position to expose the lies of government," but "all too many gave it their service."

Fishel was characteristic of the "scholar-experts" whose work in Southeast Asia reflected "the mentality of the colonial civil servant, persuaded of the benevolence of the mother country." He and others like him were "frauds" who "did much to justify the application of American power in Asia, whatever the human cost," according to Chomsky.[31]

Fishel remained a staunch apologist for U.S. foreign policy in the Vietnam War until the end, casting it as a noble attempt to halt communist aggression.

When President Richard Nixon ordered the famous 1972 Christmas bombing of Hanoi that killed thousands of civilians, Fishel described it as an example of "forceful persuasion designed to get communists back to the negotiating table."[32]

By this point, many of the original supporters of the AFV had turned against the war and were dismissive of Fishel's arguments in support of the war.

Gilbert Jonas, an aide to Diem and campaign staffer for John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential campaign who had been in the AFV, wrote that Fishel and others like him, "the guys who should've been critical, the academically trained ones, became totally uncritical, totally supportive without seeing what was going on, what was happening, right before their eyes, and that was a really bad thing for them and us, as a country and for Vietnam as a country."[33]

Unfortunately, today's academic landscape is dominated by many clones of Wesley Fishel who vie with each other for government research grants and access to power, and uncritically align themselves with U.S. policy while denigrating its detractors in neo-McCarthyite terms.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia and current Stanford University Professor Michael McFaul comes to mind as a Fishel-type who serves as a publicist for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky while pushing a hard-line policy against Russia that has led to disastrous results.

One can only hope that a similar student awakening occurs as in the 1960s and that McFaul and his compatriots will be lampooned by a contemporary version of Ramparts, and hounded by anti-war protesters, as Fishel was.

Latin American Governments Pay a Price For Challenging Israel's Genocidal War
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/11/01/latin-american-governments-pay-a-price-for-challenging-israels-genocidal-war/

Governments in Latin America have been at the forefront of opposition to Israel's genocide in Gaza, and several of those which have done so suddenly face new threats, even including attempted coups. Adrienne Pine, a professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, said during a recent webinar hosted by the Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition that "anybody who stands with Palestine is going to be attacked in Latin America by the U.S. and by Zionists." 

Recent events appear to show the truth of her remarks.

Of the 165 countries that recognize Israel, only four have officially cut diplomatic ties with the country since it began its Gaza offensive, and all of them are Latin American: Bolivia, Belize, Colombia and Nicaragua (Venezuela severed its ties with Israel in 2009 while Cuba broke off relations during the Yom Kippur War of 1973). 

A further eight countries have withdrawn their diplomats from Tel Aviv since October 7, 2023, of which Chile, Brazil, and Honduras are from Latin America.
 
This article looks at the experience of three governments in the region which have strongly opposed Israel's genocidal war—Nicaragua, Honduras, and Colombia. All are suffering attacks that appear to be either in direct retaliation for their actions or which suspiciously coincide with them. All three have progressive governments which have historic reasons for challenging Israel, adding to their condemnation of its recent actions.

Israel's ties with Latin America are longstanding. As well as extensive trading relationships, Israel has often backed repressive regimes or undermined progressive governments. In "Israel's Latin American trail of terror" Aljazeera summarises its grisly history in the region, from training death squads in El Salvador to supplying the arms used to massacre Guatemalan campesinos. 

Israel has often acted as a surrogate for Washington when the U.S. doesn't want to "get its hands dirty". In Nicaragua, it supplied arms to the "Contra" forces that attempted to overthrow the Sandinista revolution in the 1980s. In Honduras, it helped prevent President Mel Zelaya from returning to power after he was ousted in the 2009 coup. 

When the country then became a "narcostate", its President Juan Orlando Hernández (now serving a lengthy prison term in the U.S. for drug-trafficking), became Israel's closest ally in the region. In Colombia, it sold massive quantities of arms to paramilitary groups which destabilized the country during decades of widespread violence.

Nicaragua is a "platform for terrorism"
Israel's history means it is well placed to retaliate when Latin American governments attack it as genocidal. The example of Nicaragua is the clearest. The country was the first to join the action taken by South Africa in bringing Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at the beginning of this year. 

It followed this by taking its own ICJ case against Germany, for supplying arms to Israel. The ICJ's provisional ruling had the initial effect of reducing the flow of German weapons until Israel later signed a "commitment" that they would not be used in violation of the genocide convention. 

Most recently, on October 11, President Daniel Ortega announced the breaking of diplomatic relations with Israel, calling Prime Minister Netanyahu a "son of the devil" and comparing him to Hitler.

The attempted retribution was swift. Four days after Ortega's speech, the Israeli consul in neighboring Costa Rica, Amir Rockman, gave an interview in which he claimed that "Iranian interests and, in particular, those of the terrorist organization Hezbollah, are installed in Nicaragua." 

He further claimed that "radical Iranian forces and terror groups operate freely" in Nicaragua, although he was not asked for, nor did he provide, any evidence. 

Given that some 3,000 kilometers separate Nicaragua from the U.S. border, the usefulness to a "terror group" of being able to operate in a small Central American country is far from clear.
 
Right-wing outlets opposed to the Sandinista government gleefully elaborated on what Rockman said. Mijal Gur-Aryeh, Israel's ambassador in Costa Rica, told La Prensa that "Nicaragua had been converted into a platform for terrorism in the region." A few days later she added that Hezbollah had "bases" in Venezuela and Bolivia as well as Nicaragua.

This enabled one of the best-known opponents of Nicaragua's Sandinista government, Felix Maradiaga, to call for the Sandinista party to be declared a terrorist organization. "In the short term, this could aggravate the delicate economic situation in Nicaragua," he said. "But I firmly believe that any temporary sacrifice will be smaller than the bigger benefit of weakening a regime which has used the country as a platform for extreme and illegal activities."

Nicaragua's Sandinista government rejected Israel's allegations on October 21. While there is, as of yet, no evidence that Israel's claims have resonance in Washington, if Nicaragua were to be designated a "state sponsor of terrorism" (SSoT) the effects could be very serious. 

It could potentially do even more harm to its economy than the current raft of US. sanctions, affecting its rapidly growing tourism industry and perhaps much more. A warning is provided by the severe damage done to Cuba's economy after it was added to the SSoT list, which added to the already considerable damage caused by the longstanding U.S. blockade. 

An SSoT designation also gives license to U.S. and other Western law enforcement agencies to persecute those working in solidarity with a listed country, as has already happened to those supporting Palestine (with solidarity groups often falsely accused of supporting Hamas).

Nicaragua survived an attempted coup in 2018, and Ortega has made no suggestion that a second coup is on the cards. However, both Honduras and Colombia have made such recent claims. We consider Honduras next.

A new "coup attempt" in Honduras?
Adrienne Pine's comments about attacks on countries supporting Palestine followed on from her description of Israel's role in supporting the neoliberal regime that ran Honduras from 2009 until the Libre party finally ousted it in the 2021 election. 
 
This included spending $342 million on importing Israeli military equipment. In a reversal of her predecessor's policy, progressive President, Xiomara Castro, has expressed strong support for Palestine. She has recalled her ambassador from Israel and in September, at the meeting of the UN General Assembly, condemned the genocide in Gaza. In what was seen by Washington as a further provocation, Honduras was one of the first countries in Latin America to recognize Nicolas Maduro's victory in Venezuela's July 28 election. 

Following both these moves, Castro has come under intense pressure on different fronts which, she says, amounts to an attempted coup. In response, she has ended the extradition treaty between her country and the United States (the same treaty that allowed her predecessor, Hernández, to be sent for trial in New York). Castro herself has direct experience of a coup, since it was her husband, Mel Zelaya, who was deposed as president in 2009 by the U.S.-backed military and forced out of the country. It is hardly surprising that she is alert to the possibility of a second one.

Who orchestrated the coup attempt? Suspicion falls on Washington's ambassador in Tegucigalpa, Laura Dogu, who has a track record in this respect. She was the ambassador in Nicaragua prior to the 2018 coup attempt, and since coming to Honduras in 2022, has made strong links with capitalist-class opponents of Castro's Libre party, just as she did in Managua with business leaders hostile to the Sandinista revolution. 

As Pine explained in the webinar, Dogu tried to paint Honduras's links with Venezuela as related to drug trafficking, and a few days later fuel was added to this fire by the publication of a video showing a drug baron in discussion with Castro's brother-in-law, allegedly about providing election campaign funding. The video was released by Insight Crime, a thinktank funded by USAID, the Open Society Foundation and similar bodies allied with Washington.

While Xiomara Castro's victory in the 2021 election was decisive, and she still enjoys strong working-class support, there are abundant risks to her presidency. She faces a tumultuous congress, her vice-president resigned and is now her opponent, and both the military and the police forces are still contaminated by the corruption and impunity they enjoyed under previous neoliberal governments. 

Murders of community leaders who stand in the way of big business continue. The most recent was September's killing of esteemed community leader Juan López. As James Phillips writes in CovertAction, the crime "highlights the inability (weakness) of the Castro government in the face of the powerful corruption that still poisons much of the political economy and daily life of the country." Castro specifically mentioned the case and her determination to solve it in her speech to the UN.

Castro has not yet been able to break the strong links between the Honduran military and Israel (much less its links with the U.S.). Indeed, it was revealed in April that Honduras was still buying Israeli military equipment of the kind used in Gaza, and that Honduran police officers have been receiving training in Israel. The news came from the Israeli ambassador, presumably intended to embarrass Castro.

Colombia: "The coup has begun"
Colombia's President Gustavo Petro is probably Israel's strongest critic in Latin America. He not only denounces the Israeli regime as "genocidal," but has described its actions in Gaza as comparable to Auschwitz. He broke diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv in May this year, provoking an immediate call from Washington urging him to change his mind, accompanied by warnings that this put at risk Colombia's development and security. 

Colombia's ambassador to the U.S. recently spoke to Jacobin about the significance of his country's severance of ties with Israel. He noted that previous governments would have made sure to "...brief the United States before it made any public announcement on any policy issue. But this time, when we severed ties with Israel, we didn't tell the US."

Yet Petro's increasingly strident denunciations of Israel, including (in September) likening its military offensive in Gaza to "the horrors of the Holocaust," and then saying that Netanyahu and his government "embody Nazism," brought a major backlash. Washington responded by saying that "We cannot accept this. We cannot tolerate this" and the U.S. ambassador in Bogota labelled Petro as anti–Semitic. Nevertheless, like Xiomara Castro, Petro doubled down on his denunciations of Israel when he spoke at the UN General Assembly, saying "When Gaza dies, all of humanity will die." 

Like Honduras, Colombia had close ties with Israel under its previous governments. Petro's predecessor, Ivan Duque, signed a free trade agreement with Israel in 2020. Colombia's trade with Israel became second only to Brazil's in the continent, with the principal export being coal. Petro halted coal exports in August this year, noting that the fuel was being used to make bombs to kill Palestinian children. 

On October 1, Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro warned of a planned coup in Colombia, accusing its former president Ivan Duque of working with Washington to carry it out. Then on October 9, President Petro claimed that "the coup had begun", citing the attempt by the National Electoral Council to bring his presidency to an end via an investigation into alleged illegalities in his election campaign finances, allegations which he strongly contests. 

It then emerged that, not long before the last election, Ivan Duque purchased Israeli "Pegasus" software and used it to spy on political opponents. While this leak (like the similar one in Honduras) may have been intended to remind Petro of his military's continuing connections with Israel, it appears to have backfired. Petro has accused Duque of using state money illegally and of money laundering, citing as evidence that half of the $11 billion dollar payment was unaccountably sent to Israel by plane, in cash. Nevertheless, the news strengthened the impression that Petro, like previous presidents, is surrounded by corruption.

This is one of several similarities between Petro's situation and that of Xiomara Castro in Honduras. First, there are questionable attempts to link Petro with drug cartels via accusations against his relatives. 

Second, like his Honduran counterpart, he faces constant right-wing resistance to his attempts at radical transformation of his country, up to and including "lawfare" against his presidency itself. 

And in a third similarity, the weakness of Colombia's justice system in tackling corruption was illustrated by the fact that a case against Chiquita Brands International for financing paramilitaries could only be brought to its recent conclusion in a U.S. court, just as happened in Honduras in the case against former president Hernández. Of course, the two countries also share a long history of close ties between their security systems and the U.S. military, including the hosting of large U.S. military bases.

Why are so few countries willing to challenge Israel?
If Latin America is in the vanguard of resistance to Israeli genocide, it is nevertheless geographically remote from West Asia and its resistance is largely symbolic and far from being of decisive significance. 

Reflecting on this in Naked Capitalism, Nick Corbishley asks, "why are so few countries willing to take meaningful diplomatic or economic actions, including imposing targeted sanctions, against a rogue state that has not only slaughtered tens of thousands of Gazan civilians but is hell-bent on creating a regional conflagration in the Middle East?" In response, he suggests four explanations:

1 - Fear of U.S.-led retaliation—such as South Africa has faced since its action against Israel at the ICJ.

2 - Fear of economic reprisals—such as the threats made against Ireland, that it would lose the high-tech industries that underpin much of its economy because of its criticisms of Israel.

3 - The risk of Israel suspending sales and support services for its high-tech weaponry—which happened to Colombia as soon as it ended coal exports.

4 - The threat of Israeli retaliation against ministers or even leaders of governments who fall out of line on Gaza and other issues—as happened in all three countries examined here, with possible further threats arising from the widespread availability of Israeli Pegasus software and its potential for revealing embarrassing information about Israel's opponents.
 
Israel is a formidable foe, and not only on the battlefield. The Guardian revealed its nine-year surveillance and intimidation of no less a body than the International Criminal Court. At the moment, hard evidence of Israeli attempts to undermine progressive Latin American governments is limited, but the potential is obvious. It is likely to be most effective against government's whose political position is precarious. 

Gustavo Petro perfectly understands the reasons why so few countries have stood firmly against Israel's genocide. In a discussion with other progressive Latin American leaders, he said that the Western powers are giving a warning to the rest of humanity: "What happens to Palestine will happen to any of you, if you dare make changes without our permission."

On a Saturday in 2015 (or maybe 2014), a middle-aged woman who happened to be Depressed, told her mother on the phone that she was "thinking about ending it all".

This got a SWAT team on her.

They Tased her, Pepper-sprayed her, and turned a Depressed woman into a Suicidal woman.

15 men vs. one middle aged woman.

That's Rural Oregon, and I suspect the entire rural US.


The direct connection between PissraHell and a militarized US police force - I guess there are some.

end of Blame Russia.

start Blame China, Blame Iran.

but obviously both are 110% Israel loyal.

in 2020, it was the "anything but Trump" vote.

in 2024, it was the anything but Biden vote - Biden being who they voted for, to run away from Trump.

So American voters ran to the guy they ran from in 2020 - because the alternative to the guy they ran from in 2024 ... oh it's hard to figure out.

Satire from Kevin Barrett:
New York Times Hails American Fuhrer
https://kevinbarrett.heresycentral.is/2024/11/new-york-times-hails-american-fuhrer/

The Steal was enormous
WE suffered thru covid to get the paedo pete in the white house

The danger with U238 is the Dust.

I hope they're handing out lots of serious dust masks.

Did you know that somehow the election of Trump has STRENGTHENED the dollar ?

A wierd reaction.  It seemed like Kamala was much more collaborative - with NATO etc.

PissraHell government is like a separation column on a high or low pressure chromatograph.

It is DESIGNED to push the most Psychopathic politicians to the control positions.