In Zelaya's caravan, notes the BBC, is Venezuelan Foreign Minister, Nicolas Maduro.

And in Washington, Roy Chaderton, the Bolivarian Republic's ambassador to the Organization of American States went ballistic in Zelaya's defense.

The social changes in Venezuela, which received the people's approval through a long and continuous string of elections and popular consultations of a magnitude that had never occurred before in Latin America, have contributed to the awakening of a continent that was, in any case, bound to reject exclusion, social injustice and the dictatorship of the media, a media that has become a new way of waging war. However, it is now the peoples who will say the last word.

The Bolivarians live for this sort of political theater while Hillary no doubt wishes it would all go away.

Ousted Honduaran President Manuel Zelaya is returning home, this time on the ground. This may not end well.

The coverage of a new GAO report on Venezuela is a classic example of how weak journalism and politics mislead the public about the realities of the illicit drug trade.

The Washington Post story on Sunday sounded alarming.

Since 1996, successive U.S. administrations have considered Venezuela a key drug-trafficking hub, the Government Accountability Office report says. But now, it says, the amount of cocaine flowing into Venezuela from Colombia, Venezuela's neighbor and the world's top producer of the drug, has skyrocketed, going from an estimated 60 metric tons in 2004 to 260 metric tons in 2007. That amounted to 17 percent of all the cocaine produced in the Andes in 2007.

Venezeula angrily rejected the charges, calling the report "a tool for political blackmail that lacks scientific objectivity and serious methodology."

Yesterday, CNN made Venezuela's performance sound even worse

The Venezuelan government contributed [emphasis added] to a more than fourfold increase in cocaine flow between 2004 and 2007, in part by providing a safe haven for Colombian drug traffickers while reducing counternarcotics cooperation with U.S. officials, the General Accounting Office study said.

But if you read three other GAO reports on drug trafficking in the Western Hemisphere in the past two years on Mexico, Colombia, and eight other transshipment countries (all PDFs)--and there's no reference to these reports in the Post or CNN coverage--a very different picture emerges.

 It is a picture of a series of journalistic shortcomings, including:

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Last week, I did my part to hold the CIA accountable.

I filed my sixth (!) declaration in connection with Morley v. CIA, my ongoing lawsuit against the agency seeking records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

My case is far removed from the House Intelligence Committee's investigation of the mysterious assassination program recently canceled by CIA director Leon Panetta. It has nothing to do with Attorney Eric Holder's controversial consideration of  whether to prosecute CIA officers for illegal interrogation methods. It is irrelevant to what Rep Rush Holt (D.-NJ) has proposed: a congressional investigation of the CIA as "intense and comprehensive as the probe conducted more than 30 years ago -- in the wake of the Watergate scandal -- by a special committee headed by U.S. Sen. Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat." (Hat tip to Spencer.)

But my Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, now in its sixth year, is a microcosm of the same basic question facing the White House, Congress and the American public: can the CIA be made to obey the law?

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Former U.N. Ambassador Thomas Pickering's visit with senior Hamas officials, first reported in the United States by the Washington Post, highlights the efforts of a veteran U.S. diplomat to change the course of U.S. policy in the Middle East.

I first encountered Pickering more than 20 year ago at a U.S. diplomatic residence in El Salvador, then in the midst of a deadly civil war. Pickering, a tall man with the pasty demeanor of somebody who spends entirely too much time at diplomatic receptions, entered flanked by  six security men cradling Uzi submachine guns. As U.S. Ambassador, Pickering was then facing a very real conspiracy to assassinate him, organized by the country's leading right-wing politician, Roberto D'Aubusisson who was notorious for murdering political rivals. Pickering deflected questions about published reports of his imminent demise with a mordant joke and launched into a reasonable-sounding rationale for the Reagan administration's policy of support for a government with an atrocious human rights record.

He acknowledged the criticism of indignant liberal congressman and worked to meet it,  articulating a soft-spoken and hard-headed defense of an awful policy. I was skeptical but six years later, as U.N. ambassador, he had the credibility to facilitate peace talks between the government and leftist guerrillas that finally ended the civil war.

Pickering is perhaps best known for helping the first President Bush assemble the multinational coalition in 1991 that supported the first Gulf war to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. That was a real joint venture of common interest, unlike the evanescent "coalition of the willing" touted by his more righteous successor, John Bolton, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Pickering's way achieved better results, not the least because he persuaded the Japanese and the Saudis to foot the bill.

Pickering's willingness to engage with Hamas is of a piece with the views of other former U.S. policymakers from both Democratic and Republican administrations. Jimmy Carter has been the most outspoken about the need for the U.S. diplomacy to engage the militant Islamic group. Former Bush I adviser Brent Scowcroft has endorsed the idea. "Within the foreign policy establishment, this is now a respectable position," said Nathan Brown, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told The National, an online news site based in the United Arab Emirates. 

Pickering's track record makes him a tough target for the Israeli government and its defenders in Washington. They can't say that he is a sentimental liberal like Jimmy Carter who doesn't understand the realities of the region. They can't dismiss him, a la Stephen Walt or John Mearsheimer, as an academic theorist unschooled in the violent ways of geopolitics. They can't dismiss him as an anti-Semite. Well, they probably can. But then they'll have to explain why Ronald Reagan appointed an alleged Jew-hater to be U.S. ambassador to Israel.

Pickering's foray into Mideast diplomacy should be seen as more than a bid to jump-start Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Pickering conceives of engaging Hamas as an aspect of engaging with Iran in order to head off the danger of another war in the Middle East. In March 2008, Pickering and two co-authors wrote a piece for the New York Review of Books laying out a detailed agenda for international control of the Iranian nuclear program as a compromise both sides can live with.

In advocating this approach, Pickering wrote:

The US will have to deal with Iran's fears of regime change, just as Iran must deal with the consequences of the outrageous and inflammatory remarks by its president. Differences over Hamas, Hezbollah, and other regional issues, including threats against Israel, will have to be addressed over the long term, but these matters should be dealt with directly by the US, Iran, and the other parties. Outsourcing US diplomacy to others has not worked and is even less likely to work in the future.

Pickering's meeting with Hamas is another sign that the outsourcing of U.S. foreign policy to the Israelis is coming to an end.

Another theme running thoughout the report of the Inspector Generals report on the Presidential Surveillance Program (PSP), available at Secrecy News, is that while many intelligence community officials described the warrantless wiretapping program as helpful and reasurring,  nobody could actuall cite any specific cases in which the illicitly obtained information contributed to a counterterrorism success.

PSP "played a generally limited role in FBI's overall counterterrorism efforts," the Justice Department IG concluded.

The CIA IG said "much of the PSP reproting was vague or without concext, which led analysts and targetting officers to rely more heavily on ohter informaiton sources and analytic tools which were more easily accessd. and timely than PSP."

In sum, the report concludes
 

Most IC [Intelligence Community] officials interviewed by the PSP IG Group had difficulty citing specific instances where PSP reporting had directly contributed to counterterrorism successes. Although it was difficult for a variety of reasons already discussed to independenty identify instances where PSP reporting contributed to sucessful counterterrorism efforts, there are several cases identified by IC officials and IC documentation where PSP reporting may have contributed to counterterrorism success. These cases cannot be discussed in this unclassified report."

So the alleged success of warrantless wiretapping program is both highly conditional ("may have contributed") and and wholly secret.

The former Speaker, author and possible presidential candidate tells Al-Jazeera that he dooes not support calls for preemptive bombing of Iran. He favors covert operations to sabotage the country's only gas refinery. The goal, Gingrich explained in an on-camera interview, would be to produce "a gasoline-led crisis" in the country which would then led to regime change. "It's in America's interest to have a responsibile Iranian government," he non-sequitired.

"Which you can precipate by provoking a gas crisis with black ops sabotage? asked incredulous interlocutor Avi Lewis.

Newt pivoted away with another Gingrichian sound byte, crunchy to the ear and vapid to the core, recommending "the Reagan strategy in Eastern Europe" for Iran, another non-sequitir.

Gingrich refers the Reagan administration's position of ideological confrontation with the Soviet bloc countries in the 1980s. That stratagy was based on the popularity of the United States in those countries derived in large part on its role in defeating Nazi Germany and supporting the free countries of Western Europe. The U.S. has not such reservoir of goodwill in Iran, thanks to the CIA's 1953 coup and U.S. support for the autocratic Shah until his overthrow in 1979. Also, Reagan never threatened to launch black operations to deny gasoline to the Polish people.

Obama is popular but the world's view of the U.S is largely unchanged, according the worldpublicopinion.org poll released by Pew yesterday."Surely Obama cannot be expected to change global opinion in just six months," says Tom Schaller. "Considering how much damage George W. Bush did to global attitudes toward the United States, if there's any chance for these numbers to improve, Obama's global popularity is a start."

Yes, but in some places, the position of the United States is so isolated it is hard to see how Obama' actions can have much effect. The scary numbers in the poll came from Pakistan where 10 percent of the people think that the United States role in the world is "mainly positive" versus 62 percent who think it is "mainly negative." There's not much Obama can do about this  precarious position.