| WORLD |
Obama’s «Diplomacy» Masks His Bullying at Jamaica and Panama Summits
source: StrategicCultureFoundation
''...Obama’s brief Bouterse includes the efforts on behalf of the CIA that Stanley Ann Dunham, Obama’s mother, took in trying to overthrow Bouterse in the 1980s. Bouterse had overthrown the previous civilian government in a coup and he steered his nation into the pro-Cuba and socialist Third World camp. Mrs. Dunham, then an employee of the CIA-linked Ford Foundation in New York and a fluent speaker of Javanese, which is, other than Dutch, the main commercial language of Suriname, worked closely with the Surinamese expatriate community in New York to undermine Bouterse...."
...''Obama
capped off his remarks in Panama by saying America’s «days of meddling»
in Latin America are over. That will come as a surprise to Suriname,
Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay, Honduras, Haiti, Brazil,
Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Nicaragua,
all of which have seen more than their fair share of meddling from the
CIA, the DEA, and the Pentagon during the Obama administration.''
| Wayne MADSEN | 12.04.2015 | 00:00 |
U.S.
President Barack Obama had a number of awkward encounters with Latin
American and Caribbean leaders at the Caribbean Community and Common
Market (CARICOM) summit in Jamaica and the Summit of the Americas in
Panama. Present in Jamaica were leaders like Dominica’s Prime Minister
Roosevelt Skerrit. Skerrit had denounced Obama’s policy of sanctions
against Dominica’s ally Venezuela and Washington’s calling the
government headed by President Nicolas Maduro a threat to U.S. national
security. Obama and his advisers were awkwardly forced to «walk back»
the national security threat charge against Venezuela during both summit
venues.
Many
of Venezuela’s friends at the CARICOM Summit were equally disturbed by
the Obama administration’s «bullying» of not only Venezuela but that
nation’s Caribbean allies in the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of
Our America (ALBA), the alternate Latin American/Caribbean alliance
formed by the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez to provide the
hemisphere with a counterweight to the U.S.-dominated Organization of
American States (OAS). ALBA includes as members many of the nations
whose leaders met with Obama at the CARICOM summit. These included the
prime ministers of Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St.
Kitts-Nevis, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
However,
America’s chief bullying target in Jamaica and Panama was not
Venezuela’s president but Suriname’s president Desi Bouterse, the
current chairman of the Guyana-based CARICOM, a position that rotates
between leaders of the member states every six months. Although Bouterse
temporarily chairs CARICOM, he decided at the last minute to forgo
traveling to Jamaica for the leaders’ summit between Obama and CARICOM,
an organization for which Bouterse remains the titular head until June
2015. It is certain that Obama, who disinvited Bouterse from a U.S.
mission reception for heads of state and government at the United
Nations General Assembly annual meeting in 2010, let it be known to
CARICOM that he did not want the Surinamese leader present at the
Montego Bay, Jamaica summit venue.
Bouterse’s
sudden change of plans was because the United States began proffering
to certain media outlets the idea that Bouterse could be arrested in
Jamaica on a Europol arrest warrant that was issued for cocaine
trafficking before he was elected president in 2010. Bouterse was
charged with illegally shipping 474 kilograms of cocaine to South
Holland. In 2000, a Dutch court sentenced Bouterse to 11 years in prison
in absentia. Until he became president of Suriname and gained
diplomatic immunity, Bouterse refrained from traveling internationally.
The American charge that Bouterse and his son have used Suriname as a
narcotics transit point was put to shame when just prior to the Jamaica
and Panama summits, the Suriname police destroyed 109 kilograms of
cocaine. That came after the police destroyed 430 kilograms of cocaine
in January. However, the charge of narcotics smuggling is a familiar
U.S. strategy used to undermine foreign, especially Western Hemisphere
leaders. Similar charges were leveled by Washington against Bolivian
President Evo Morales, Venezuela’s Maduro and Chavez, Nicaragua’s Daniel
Ortega, and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa. All the charges were rank
propaganda and were totally without merit.
Maduro,
Ortega, and Correa were all present with Obama at the Panama summit.
However, Suriname was forced to be represented by its permanent
representative to the OAS in Washington, Niermala Badrising. In Jamaica,
Suriname, instead of being represented by the current chairman
Bouterse, the country’s seat was occupied by Suriname’s «special
ambassador» to the United States, Subhas Mungra.
Bouterse’s
attorneys in the Netherlands claim that the narcotics indictment of and
arrest warrant for Bouterse were based on trumped up charges resulting
from false evidence and perjury. The lawyers claim that the drug charge
against Bouterse was politically-motivated because the then-Dutch Prime
Minister, Ruud Lubbers, and his top officials, including Justice
Ministers Winnie Sorgdrager and Ernst Hirsch Ballin and former Attorney
General Joan de Wijk, wanted to please the United States and its Central
Intelligence Agency by abusing the Dutch criminal system. It is
noteworthy that one of the Dutch government’s chief prosecution
witnesses against Bouterse, Belgian drug lord Patrick van Loon, later
recanted his testimony upon which the Bouterse guilty verdict was
largely based.
Nevertheless,
Bouterse has reason to fear the United States, and, in particular,
Obama. Obama’s brief Bouterse includes the efforts on behalf of the CIA
that Stanley Ann Dunham, Obama’s mother, took in trying to overthrow
Bouterse in the 1980s. Bouterse had overthrown the previous civilian
government in a coup and he steered his nation into the pro-Cuba and
socialist Third World camp. Mrs. Dunham, then an employee of the
CIA-linked Ford Foundation in New York and a fluent speaker of Javanese,
which is, other than Dutch, the main commercial language of Suriname,
worked closely with the Surinamese expatriate community in New York to
undermine Bouterse.
In
2013, Bouterse’s son, Dino Bouterse, was indicted and imprisoned in New
York after being literally kidnapped by U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA) agents in Panama. The possibility that Obama and
the host nation, Panama, may stage another arrest, that of President
Bouterse, at the summit caused his cancellation, even though Suriname’s
capital of Paramaribo is to host the next Summit of the Americas in
2018.
The
kidnapping of Dino Bouterse was similar to the entrapment operations by
DEA used against Russian weapons merchant Viktor Bout who was similarly
«shanghaied» from Thailand to the United States in 2010 after being
arrested in a DEA sting in Bangkok in 2008. The same tactic was used to
kidnap Russian pilot Konstantin Yaroshenko from Liberia to the United
States. Dino Bouterse was the head of the Suriname Anti-Terrorist Unit
and was charged by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of
Manhattan, an office where Israel maintains undue influence, of trying
to set up a Hezbollah «terrorism» network in Suriname and Latin America
and being engaged in drug smuggling. Connecting progressive Latin
American governments to aiding terrorism is an old Israeli trick that
has been used by Jerusalem as a disincentive for Latin American support
for the national sovereignty of Palestine and Lebanon.
As
far as calls for President Bouterse’s arrest on an international
warrant are concerned, those demands mostly emanate from the
Netherlands’s far-right wing leaders like Geert Wilders and Raymond De
Roon. They wanted Bouterse arrested in South Africa while he was
attending the 2013 funeral for Nelson Mandela. Wilders is also Israel’s
chief anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant cheerleader in the Dutch
parliament.
General
John F. Kelly, the chief of the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) based
in Miami, has charged that Suriname is a source for guerrillas fighting
for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in the Middle East.
Not content with going after the Bouterse family, the Obama
administration and its Pentagon lackeys want to paint Suriname as a
center for Islamist terrorism in the Western Hemisphere. This same
tactic has been used by the U.S. and Israel with regard to Venezuela and
the Tri-Border region of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. Responding to
the spurious charge by Kelly that Suriname citizens have joined ISIL
training camps in the Middle East, Melvin Linscheer, the director of the
Bureau for National Security (BNV), said, «As far as we know there are
no Surinamers there». Linscheer said that if Dutch citizens of
Surinamese background were traveling to ISIL camps, «that is a problem
that concerns the Netherlands, not us».
The
U.S. ambassador to Suriname, Jay Anania, has been caught by the Desi
Bouterse government of providing material assistance to Bouterse's
political enemies in the country. Anania is yet another interventionist
U.S. ambassador who see themselves more as Roman-style pro-consuls than
diplomatic envoys.
After
Dino Bouterse’s kidnaping from Panama and rendition to New York, the
ever-dubious U.S. attorney for Manhattan, Preet Bharara, sought and
received a 16-year prison sentence for Bouterse. One could imagine the
tenseness of an Obama-Bouterse encounter if the tables were turned and
Bouterse's government held Malia Obama, the president's oldest daughter,
in a Surinamese prison for a 16-year sentence based on bogus drug
charges after being renditioned from a third country, like Aruba or
Trinidad, while on a spring break holiday.
Obama's
hostile attitude toward Suriname, in part, arises from the Israeli
government’s two major influence peddlers within the White House Latin
America policy apparatus, deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes
and Roberta Jacobson, the Assistant Secretary of State for Western
Hemisphere Affairs. When it comes to sullying the reputations of Western
Hemisphere leaders from Bouterse to Argentina’s Cristina Fernandez de
Kirchner and Ortega to Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff, Rhodes has a powerful
ally in the chief of CBS News, his brother, David Rhodes. In the New
York-Washington media axis that abides by the concept of «monkey see,
monkey do,» anything misreported by CBS News about the two summits in
Jamaica and Panama was eagerly echoed by its media counterparts at NBC,
ABC, CNN, and Fox, as well as by the U.S. bureaus of the BBC, Al
Jazeera, and France 24.
Obama
capped off his remarks in Panama by saying America’s «days of meddling»
in Latin America are over. That will come as a surprise to Suriname,
Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay, Honduras, Haiti, Brazil,
Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Nicaragua,
all of which have seen more than their fair share of meddling from the
CIA, the DEA, and the Pentagon during the Obama administration.
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| Tags: Pentagon Caribbean Latin America Panama US Venezuela Obama |