Credit where credit is due.
There's been reports that new Crist appointee Senator George Lemieux has held up the nomination of Tom Shannon to the posh post of Ambassador to Brazil. For the record, I'm no fan of Lemieux, more specifically I'm no fan of his ex-boss and mentor Charlie Crist, who should just come out and admit he's a Democrat, but let's ive credit where credit is due: because of Lemieux, Shannon is just gonna have to wait to enjoy caipiriñas with his friend Lula.
For a little history on Tom Shannon:
He has been the senior diplomat for Latin America at the State Department for the last four years. During this time, he's sought to work his charm on the likes of Chavez, Morales, Ortega, Zelaya and Correa (let's call them the Gang of 5), but he wasn't quite charming enough. While they kept him entertained and "engaged", and he sought to shower them with gifts of aid and recognition, they subverted democratic institutions, without a peep from sheep Shannon.
The culmination of his ineffective diplomacy was Honduras, where he sought to protect Zelaya at all costs, despite efforts by the Honduran Congress and Supreme Court to remove him from office for violating the Constitution. It's believed that due to this overzealous protection of the Chavez wannabe, the military was left with little option but to remove him from the country.
But nothing has been more personally insulting than his approach to Cuba. When his protege, Bisa Williams, wanted to spend an extra week in Cuba -- when she was supposed to have been there only a few days for postal talks -- to jam with Juanes, Shannon gave the nod. When USINT decided not to invite dissidents to its celebration of the castro's "artists and intellectuals", Shannon gave the thumbs up. When castro complained about the news ticker, Shannon took it down. When castro complained about USINT distributing books to dissidents, Shannon cut it off, acquiescing to castro's censorship. When the Gang of 5 asked Shannon not mention the Inter-American Democratic Charter in the OAS Cuba resolution, as they don't want to uphold it either, Shannon said yes sir.
So, yeah, Lemieux may be a place holder for Crist - at least, that's what Crist and co are hoping anyway - but at least he aint sitting there twiddling his thumbs.
Thank you for this additional information on Shannon with respect to Cuba Val. I already had a very poor opinion of him, especially for the role he played in the early hours following the removal of Zelaya, when Shannon practically set the tone for the entire State Department and U.S. foreign policy in calling it a coup. I'm still not sure who said what first, but within hours of Zelaya's ouster both Shannon and U.S. Ambassador Hugo Llorens said it was a "coup" and within hours after that it became a "military coup," neither of which were true.
But there is something about Honduras which continues to bother me quite a bit, by which I refer to the refusal of the State Department to release the legal analysis prepared by their own international law experts on the circumstances leading up to Zelaya's ouster. The Congressional Research Service released their own analysis in August, prepared by Senior Foreign Law Expert Norma C. Gutierrez, and she judged that Honduran institutions had functioned correctly and acted within Honduran constitutional law, right up to the point when they expelled Zelaya from the country, which was illegal.
Our State Department's policy is quite different. Contrary to what the CRS analysis offers, our State Department has referred to it as a military coup. And we know that the State Department has prepared their own legal analysis, but they will not release it to the public. We do not even know whether the State Department may be pursuing a policy contrary to what their own legal experts found. I put up a post on this topic last Thursday in which I called the State Department policy "absurd," and I was especially critical of the failure to release their legal analysis. How can they not tell us what their legal experts say when so much is at stake?
I cannot imagine that such a course would be taken on Honduras without the guidance of Thomas Shannon, the Asst. Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs. And after what I just read above about Shannon and Cuba--some of this was new to me--I believe even more firmly that his career should be followed more closely. Thomas Shannon is no servant of the American people. I don't care what his resume says.
StJacques
StJacques Online: A Freedom Blog