Miami Herald makes up story on Zelaya, Washington Post and New York Times spread it

WMR usually does not comment on propaganda masked as news emitted daily by the corporate media, but the September 24 report in the Miami Herald deserves to be panned for its flagrant attempt to portray ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya as a foolish “conspiracy theorist.”

After sneaking back into Honduras with the help of loyal elements in the Honduran military, Zelaya has been besieged by Honduran police and military forces inside the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa. The Honduran junta has sporadically cut off electricity, water, and food supplies to the embassy, a violation of international law on the inviolability of diplomatic missions.

The Herald reported on a telephone interview with Zelaya and said the Honduran leader said he was being subjected to “high-frequency radiation” from Israeli mercenaries who are supporting the Honduran junta. The paper also reported that Zelaya said that the Israelis were using “mind-altering” gas and radiation. In actuality, that is not what Zelaya stated in his conversation on September 24 with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who was attending the UN General Assembly session in New York. Chavez said he spoke to Zelaya by phone at 1:00 pm EDT and the Honduran leader said a piece of equipment on the rooftop of a neighboring home had been recovered and brought into the embassy by Zelaya loyalists. When Zelaya checked the gear’s serial number on the Internet, it turned out the equipment was a cell phone jamming device manufactured in Israel.

What Zelaya stated to Chavez and presumably to the Miami Herald is that the junta and its Israeli private security company advisers were jamming the cell phones of those holed up inside the embassy. Zelaya never spoke of radiation death rays but that is the impression the Herald gave and it was quickly picked up by various neocon and Zionist-controlled media outlets, including the usual suspects that continuously debase this web publication, to describe Zelaya as an anti-Semitic lunatic. The same tactics by the neocon media have been used to mask propaganda as news in falsely reporting on comments and actions of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, Libya’s leader Muammar Qaddafi, Bolivia’s President Evo Morales, and Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez. The neocon blogosphere and the George Soros-funded faux progressive outlets were all quick to claim that Zelaya’s “mental state” justified the military coup against him in June.

In a September 25 editorial, the Washington Post, controlled by neoconservative and pro-Israeli interests in the same fashion as the Miami Herald is controlled by right-wing Cuban exile interests, Latin American oligarchs, and Miami’s large Zionist Jewish community, deviously fed off the Herald’s unsubstantiated report on Zelaya’s comments by lending credence to the myth of Israeli “ray beams” and “poison gas.” The Post, echoing its co-ideologists at the Herald, wrote that Zelaya was “reduced to making hysterical accusations about being bombarded with radiation and toxic gases by ‘Israeli mercenaries.’” Zelaya and Chavez are constantly attacked by both papers while they hold up Colombia’s narco-terrorist President Alvaro Uribe as a shining example of democracy.

The New York Times also got into the act in a September 25 story in which it claimed Zelaya made his ”outrageous” statements about Israeli commandos planning to assassinate him and the Herald’s ”poison gas and radiation” canard in phone calls to the Radio Globo station in Honduras. However, the Herald’s contributing reporter told this editor in New York that Zelaya made his claims in two telephone interviews conducted exclusively with the Miami Herald. The reason for the difference between the Herald, Post, and Times reports is clear: the Zelaya statement is not true but a propaganda operation that resulted in different slants on the same concocted story about “poison gas and radiation.” El Pais of Spain also reported on an interview with Zelaya in which there was no claims made by Zelaya of mind-altering beams or poison gas.

The Herald also reported that Zelaya told them that he was being subjected to toxic gases. In fact, the Honduran military has used tear gas to disperse the crowds of Zelaya supporters outside the embassy grounds and the tear had wafted into the embassy through the windows and air conditioning system, resulting in breathing problems for Zelaya, the Brazilian diplomatic staff, and Zelaya’s family and supporters.

One of the Herald’s only true reports is from eyewitnesses outside the embassy who said that the Honduran military used a high-pitched sonic device on the embassy. Such sonic weapons have also been used by police and military forces against protesters at the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh.

It is also factual that an Israeli security company was hired by the coup leaders in June to train Honduran police how to handle pro-Zelaya protesters on the streets. The charge of Israeli involvement was made by Andres Pavon, the head of Honduras’s human rights committee. There are reports that the Israeli company operating on behalf of the coup leaders is Delta Security. Israeli military advisers have been in Honduras since the 1980s when they arrived in the country with the approval of then-US ambassador John Negroponte to train Nicaraguan contra guerrillas based in the country. The Israelis also trained Honduran military units, as well as paramilitary death squads. The Israeli Likud support for the Hondurans and contras earned the condemnation of Yitzhak Rabin, who would later become prime minister of Israel and the first Israeli leader to die from an assassin’s bullet — a Binyamin Netanyahu supporter’s bullet. Rabin told the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, ”What do we have with Honduras? , , , Israel’s military interference in Central America only complicates and damages her position, image, and her interests with the few friends she still has.”

Two Israeli companies — NetLine Communications Inc., headquartered on Menachem Begin Street in Tel Aviv, and Special Electronics Security Products — are leading manufacturers of cell phone jamming equipment used by police and military forces around the world. NetLine manufactures a remote-controlled cell phone jammer that jams all cell phone standards simultaneously, including GSM, CDMA, TDMA, and Nextel. There are reports that what was found on the roof of the building next to the Brazilian embassy was a C-Guard cell phone jammer manufactured by NetLine of Tel Aviv.

WMR can report that the Miami Herald story about Zelaya being subjected to “mind-altering” rays was the product of a New York-based Israeli propaganda network that acts in lockstep with the Israeli government on every occasion when Israel is caught involved in foreign adventurism and espionage. The Miami Herald, which employs a number of Spanish-speaking reporters, did not verify that Zelaya’s words were translated correctly from Spanish to English but the tactic being used against Zelaya is familiar Israeli propaganda. A Mossad front in Washington called the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) is well-known for mistranslating the comments of Arab leaders, as well as Iran’s Ahmadinejad and feeding the mistranslations to the corporate media, which avidly reports on the translations as factual news items.

Wayne Madsen
Online Journal