Date: May 24, 2016 at 6:06:51 AM EDT

To: "Steven.Anthony" <Steven.Anthony@dodig.mil>, Rebecca Chavez

<rebeccabillchavez@gmail.com>, IC-IG-HOTLINE-TEAM
ICIGHOTLINE@dni.gov>, Glenn.Fine@dodig.mil
Subject: Fwd: 2009 Honduran Coup: My Statement to Mr. Fine on Active
Involvement of CHDS

Statement of Martin Edwin Andersen to Department of Defense Inspector

General Glenn Fine,
on the Hands-On Role of Senior CHDS/ U.S. Southern Command Staf
in the 2009 Honduran Coup, May 23, 2016

"Damn those who with their words defend the people,

and with their deeds betray them."
Mexican liberator Benito Jurez

The morning of September 11, 2001 Secretary of State Colin Powell

went on record with the adoption by the Organization of American
States in Lima, Peru of the Inter-American Charter that the United
States would never again engage in toppling an elected government in
the Hemisphere by means of a military coup. Eight years later,
after a coup d'tat overthrew Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, the
still newly minted President Barack Obama, my Commander in Chief,
told the country that action, a violation of the Charter, was illegal.

If so, some of my senior colleagues at U.S. Southern Command should

have been punished for their hands-on role in the coup. To the best of
my knowledge none were, even as Honduras now crashes and burns as
the most violent country in the Western Hemisphere. In fact, though
part of a 2014 request for investigation by then Senate Armed Service
Committee Chair Carl Levin, in a letter last year to Maryland Senator
Benjamin Cardin the Department of Defense Office of Inspector
General claimed that allegations unnamed . personnel were
involved in a 2009 coup in Honduras and that the CIA was aware of
this, are not appropriate for the DoD IG to address.

The truth is that, before your arrival as the Inspector General, the DoD
IG offices claim, that they did not have names, was false. One of
numerous misrepresentation in cases like mine, already documented
by reporters from McClatchy DC (http://goo.gl/rN6Zpg) and good government
groups like the Government Accountability Project, they also told senior
Members of Congress interested in getting to the bottom of the
wrongdoing that my work as a whistleblower in the case in which a
fellow professor at Southcoms William Perry Center for Hemispheric
Defense Studies (CHDS) at the National Defense Universitysomeone
who was indicted in late 2013 for his alleged role in the torture and
murder of seven detainees in Augusto Pinochets Chile also was old
news, and thus did not require to be further investigated.

As you will remember, DoD IG foot dragging prior to your arrival

resulted in the Office of Inspector General of the Intelligence
Community late last year remanding the Levin request back to your
quality assurance team for their attention.

I need to be somewhat circumspect concerning sources and methods

in how I tell this story as I wait for a real investigative effort to be
undertaken, but here is what I know:

"The United States supports a resolution approved by the

Organization of American States on Wednesday calling for
Zelaya to be reinstated, went the official U.S. line in the
days after Zelaya was overthrown. A senior administration
official said at the time that the deposed presidents
expulsion was unconstitutional and illegal and cannot be
tolerated.

In regard to the military, since the swearing-in of the

claimant to the presidency, the United States has cut off
contact with those who have conducted the coup, and we
have reduced, to the extent possible, all other contact,
the Senior Administration Official One reported in a July 1,
2009 teleconference background briefing. On the military
side, we still maintain contact necessary for operational
and safety issues and humanitarian affairs, but otherwise
were standing down on our different cooperation
programs.

In fact, perhaps still unbeknownst to the State Department, part of the

real-time coup quarterbacking occurred just blocks from Capitol Hill; I
know, I worked as an assistant professor for national security affairs
and as the strategic communicator for Southcoms education center
at National Defense University. Despite my public affairs role, and
even as they began to discuss it, I was kicked out of CHDS senior staff
meetings as they worriedly focused on putting a lid to cover up on how
colleagues had helped the coup effort to succeed.

Southcoms political syphilis is a tragic gift that indeed keeps on giving,

as Honduras has become one of the worlds most
dangerous countries.
Earlier this year, Honduran indigenous environmental activist Berta
Cceres, a winner of the world-renowned Goldman Environmental
Prize, was murdered in her home, followed days later by
the assassination of a key colleague. Three years before, as National
Public Radio reported:

"Honduras is a major stop for drug traffickers; corruption is

rampant. Many experts say things got markedly worse
after the 2009 coup The fallout of that coup continues
today. ... After ousting Zelaya, the coup government sent
the army and police into the streets. They began arresting,
beating and even killing anyone who protested against the
new government. According to an official truth commission,
they were responsible for at least 20 deaths in the
immediate aftermath. ...

'After the coup, a lot of the line taken here by pro-coup

people was that the coup was the restoration of
democracy, and they sold that in Washington,' says Fulton
Armstrong, a former CIA analyst who worked as a senior
staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during
the coup. He watched the U.S. response unfold.

'But when you look at what was actually happening in

Honduras, [Zelaya] really was a continuation of a halting
but definitely forward-moving consolidation of
democracy,' he says." (Italics added.)

I myself was no great admirer of Zelaya, as I mentioned in a Sunday,

June 28th e-mail I sent to Frank Mora, the Obama Administrations
newly installed political appointee as Deputy Assistant Secretary of
Defense for the Western Hemisphere. Focusing on my own strategic
communications duties, I added: Military intervention and Zelayas
subsequent removal, however are not the tools of democratic
renovationand these will be repudiated unquestionably by the OAS
and, individually, by virtually all governments in the region.

My concern here is, and why I am writing, is of a more

narrow strategic communications variety. I think it is
imperative, if it has not been done already, that a brief be
prepared of U.S.and particularly DoDrelationships with
(the armed forces head and graduate of the controversial
U.S. School of the Americas) Gen. Romeo Velasquez
Velasquez and his closest aides. Therefore it might be
useful for an inventory to be conducted immediately of
 contacts with Gen. Velasquez Velasquez and his inner circle
both before January 20th (when President Obama was
inaugurated) and after. (O)nly by being able to fully and
fairly characterize the type and frequency of interaction
with Velasquez Velasquez and his associates can an honest
and appropriate story line be created

I ended the memo to Mora with, in retrospect, an overly nave

assumption: U.S. interests will be best served, I believe, if our
government can fully and effectively put to rest any rumors or
innuendos from the very beginning.

Within days I found that another senior (and far-right) CHDS staff
member, a vicious and vocal critic of Obama, and his minions had
coordinated meetings for uniformed Honduran coup representatives on
Capitol Hill, including the office of at least one now-retired Senator, and
other places in our nations capital, even as deadly mop up
operations took place in Tegucigalpa and in the countryside.

I had already tangled with the Centers primary golpista before, as he

called colleagues of ours homos and fags, claiming that the
Pentagon under President George W. Bush was run by a gay mafia,
and singling me out as a communist. His chief aide was one of those
who claimed that even Southcom tepid human rights programs were
communist crap, as well as someone who agreed just months before,
the coup after anti-torture Obamas inauguration, with another senior
colleague who vigorously argued behind closed doors that an
increasingly violent Mexico should, in response, adopt Argentine dirty
war techniques.

After two mortified colleagues let me in on the dirty secret of CHDS

involvement in the Honduras coup, I found I was forced to leave senior
staff meetings when it was about to be discussed. Through my own
contacts I found that two CIA officials and one agent who had found
out about the CHDS clandestine role were furious when they knew
what had been done. Concern at the Center ran so deep that one of
the discussions focused on how one of the three furious Agency people
might be bought off so as not to cause troublesomething that,
given my own probing about what was happening, I do not believe they
were actually able to do.

Upon learning of the CHDS role in Honduras, I found myselfsomeone

who had already been given the U.S. Office of Special Counsels Public
Servant Award for my work as national security whistleblower at the
Criminal Division of the Department of Justiceto be in a terrible bind
not of my own making. Key involvement in the Honduras coup and
behind the scenes advocacy of death squads by people who literally
met privately with hundreds of active-duty Latin American military
officers each year was accompanied by my discovery that another
CHDS colleague had worked for Pinochets DINA death squad
operation. It was DINA that had killed an exiled foreign minister,
Orlando Letelier, and his American assistant, Ronni Moffitt, in a car
bombing near the White House, one of the gravest terrorist attacks in
our nations capital before 9/11.

A year earlier I first brought up the Garcia Covarrubias case at the

Center, noting that ifas was being allegedthe former top aide to
the Chilean dictator was in fact involved in torture and murder his case
was surely a strategic communications problem and needed to
addressed quickly. In response, I was told that I would be in charge of
an informal investigation, the only caveat being that any initiative I
thought necessary needed to be approved before I traveled down
that path.

As a former special correspondent for the Washington

Post and Newsweek in southern South America, as well as an former
expert witness in the Italian governments own case against Pinochet, I
felt somewhat optimistic, although by this time it was clear
homophobia, sexism, racism and other wrongdoing was rife at CHDS. I
soon found out, however, that everything I suggested doing was turned
down without recourse. It was clear that I was able to do nothing, the
Potemkin initiative really a snow job.

After about a year I was told that I should watch my back because, if I
persisted in insisting that the case be investigated, the Center would
find a way to get rid of methis during the worst economic downturn
since the Great Depression. Ultimately, I was told to provide an e-mail
saying that, despite my investigation, I had found nothing. Fearing
for my family, and mindful of the fact that officially I had not been
allowed to do more than Google research, I complied.

Then, a month after the Honduras coup, I authored a petition to

President Obama signed by 20 other national security whistleblowers
on the need to greatly improve public employee free speech rights.
Again I was told that if I knew what was good for me, never to engage
in something like that either.

As someone who campaigned tirelessly for Obama in 2008 I waited

anxiously for the cavalry to arrive at NDU. Remembering how Federal
authorities benched Al Capone not on murder charges, but rather on
tax evasion, I began to take more detailed notes on the corruption,
racism, sexism and homophobia that oozed from Southcoms own
educational institution. Behind the scenes I helped my Oxford-
educated fellow professor, Jim Zackrison, edit his own DoD IG
complaint of gross malfeasance. It was the first of a number of IG
requests that went for naught, of the type gross malfeasance within
that supposedly vigilant watchdog that was later made part of the
public record by McClatchy DC.

Unfortunately, despite six years of outstanding annual job

evaluations, that cavalry never arrived, even when my colleagues
passed around an e-mail portraying First Lady Michelle Obama, the
wife of the Commander-in-Chief as an orangutan. Meeting secretly in
the office of a former U.S. Ambassador to Honduras, a small group at
the Center schemed to get action to be taken against such racist
manifestations against the wife of the Commander in Chief.

For my troubles, I received a lecture from one of my superiors who told

me, for a second time, that his mother did not like blacks and used the
n word, but that did not make her a racist and that I should back
off. Despite five years of outstanding annual performance
evaluations, I was then shown the door, nearly two years before they
got rid of Garcia Covarrubias, about whose case CHDS officials loudly
cited their respect for his rights.

A later AR 15-6 "self-investigation" was done by CHDS, using a

supposedly outside investigator and a procedure that never should be
used with civilian DoD employees.

Finally, when the Center for Public Integrity got ahold of it using a
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request it was discovered that even
the reports domesticated investigative hound had written that "many
employees did want to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, citing
the examples of Mr. Martin Andersen .... When asked to provide specific
examples of retribution for speaking out against the center, employees
again would not provide specifics."

The palpable and documented level of fear alone should have caused
the case to be sent immediately to a professional government
investigative entity, which of course it was not.

For U.S. Southern Command, the questions remain:

Are not the clandestine and unpunished involvement in the Honduran

coup, as well as the promotion of torture and murder, challenges to the
rule of law as well as fundamental American values?

Andif that is trueQuis custodiet ipsos custodes?

___________________________________________________
Sen. Patrick Leahy @SenatorLeahy
VIDEO: Senator Patrick Leahy On The Life of #BertaCaceres #Honduras
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cjIxYtOGj0

Senator Patrick Leahy retweeted

MartinEdwinAndersen @InsightCaptain
Chilean accused of murder taught 13 years for #SOUTHCOM
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article16508918.html
urged dirty war 4 Mexico