By Kevin Casas-Zamora, Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution’s Foreign Policy, Latin America Initiative

(Ed. Note:  The Brookings Institute, we are told, is one of the most ‘mainstream’ think tanks in Washington, D.C.  So we found it interesting to see them publish the article below, which is implicitly critical of the way the U.S. handled itself during the “soft” coup in Honduras last year and which urges the U.S. to withhold international loans pending the creation of a credible “Truth Commission” to investigate the killings and torture that occurred after President Manuel Zelaya was forcibly removed from office. 

‘It would be wonderful for us to be able to carry our Mapuche culture across different borders’

The world can expect more U.S. inspired “soft coups” like Honduras

By Rick Rozoff

March 24th of this year was the 30th anniversary of the assassination of Oscar Arnulfo Romero, the Roman Catholic archbishop of El Salvador.

His killing drew attention to the murderous rampages of death squads in that nation and throughout Central America as no other slaying had, although hundreds of thousands of civilians were slaughtered in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras before and during the 1980s by paramilitary formations usually led by graduates of the U.S.'s School of the Americas and covertly funded by the same nation's Central Intelligence Agency.

(Ed.’s Note: Two essays regarding Gen. Petraeus’ suggestion that what is good for Israel is not necessarily good for U.S. troops, a suggestion that broke a Washington D.C. taboo).

The Significance of Petraeus' remarks

By Saad N. Jawad

Although some have quibbled with what exactly he said, there is little doubt that General David Petraeus, the commander of the U.S. Central Command who also served as commanding general of the multinational forces in Iraq from January 2007 to September 2008, was voicing broad US dissatisfaction with Israel and its policies vis-a-vis the Palestinians when he was recently quoted as saying that the Arab-Israel conflict is fomenting anti-US sentiments in the Arab world.

By Robert Wright

(Ed. Note:  The United States has been on a ferocious, slippery slide down into corporate fascism ever since a very cynical President George W. Bush decided to use the 9/11 tragedy to buttress his less-than-sparkling political career. War makes a lot of people a lot of money (the “military industrial complex” that President Dwight Eisenhower warned about) and Bush/Rove played the “fear” card to the maximum to get their patriotic brethren to the polls. And to destroy 200 years of civil liberties and freedoms.

(The U.S. corporate media, of course, was happy to play messenger for its political and corporate patrons.