VHeadline's Washington DC-based commentarist Chris Herz writes: It's becoming pretty plain that the Honduran coup d'etat was, and is, being supported from Washington. Also, that even if CIA and US Air Force personnel were the original instigators, they were joined after the fact by the US State Department ... President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are at least accomplices after the fact!

Apparently no one here in Washington D.C. expected the people of Tegucigalpa to react as strongly as they have in favor of 'Mel' Zelaya, and this public spectacle of an aroused people being shot down and dispersed by the police and army has been pretty embarrassing for Washington ... especially to have this going on while the people of Teheran protest their own corrupt and anti-democratic government.

Images of the violence in Honduras have been carefully limited in US corporate media. But even here the Internet outlets are doing their journalistic duty. Additionally Telesur (sadly not available in English) and the rest of world media have been active.

This has been enough to force the Obama government, speaking through Hillary Clinton, to avoid backing the golpistas outright, instead referring the matter for arbitration to Costa Rica. The idea is if Zelaya does return to his presidency that as much time as possible will be consumed in negotiation and that the criminals not be legally punished for their treason and murders. Then, hopefully, the election of a conservative can be managed next winter ... and everything will be as it "should be" in this province of the empire. A-OK!

These people are all barking mad. They still think that the USA (bankrupt and with nothing to offer anyone beyond our borders save killing and repression) can and should still call the shots in the Americas.

Tomas Borge of Nicaragua has had a fine and most cogent comment on the situation ... he has described the armies of the region as hopelessly alienated from their people -- mere servants of the local oligarchies and the North American empire. He points out that in this age of the world no country in this hemisphere is in danger from another. His answer is to dissolve these forces as Costa Rica did so long ago.

But this is not a good solution either. For there does, indeed, remain one aggressor nation which is governed by a bunch of lunatics who even in social, political and fiscal bankruptcy somehow believe themselves to be the final arbiters of what the neighbors may or may not do. And in Colombia and apparently in Honduras there is an ample reservoir of crazed militarists who who hesitate not in killing their own, and on the signal from Washington will invade and destabilize their neighbors.