Forum Post: World Socialist Web Site: Are Obama and NATO plotting a military coup in Greece?
Posted 13 years ago on Nov. 3, 2011, 10:56 a.m. EST by SandyEnglish
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Are Obama and NATO plotting a military coup in Greece?
The 1967 Greek coup was carried out under the guidelines of a NATO contingency plan known as “Prometheus.” This plan was supposedly designed to forestall a communist takeover by the military seizing control and rounding up all those considered subversives.
The junta imposed martial law, suspending basic democratic rights. It soon imprisoned some 10,000 people, including political leaders, trade unionists, social activists, students and others suspected of opposing its counterrevolutionary agenda. Thousands were tortured. The junta’s police beat political prisoners with rubber hoses, shocked them with electricity, sexually violated them and ripped nails from their fingers. One of the junta’s most infamous torturers is said to have kept a red-white-and-blue symbol of US aid on his desk and to have told his victims, “Behind me there is the government, behind the government is NATO, behind NATO is the US. You can't fight us, we are Americans.”
These hideous crimes were carried out with the direct aid and approval of the liberal Democratic administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson.
From the article
"The sudden dismissal of the Greek military’s high command Tuesday night, amid international uproar over a proposal for a referendum on an EU debt plan, has all the hallmarks of an action taken to preempt the threat of a military coup.
"A measure of this political magnitude would not have been take lightly. At the very least, one must assume that Prime Minister George Papandreou had strong reason to believe that his government, and possibly his own person, was facing an imminent threat from the country’s military.
"The Greek minister of defense, Panos Beglitis, a close political ally of Papandreou, summoned the four highest-ranking Greek military officers—the chiefs of the general staff, the army, navy and air force—to a hastily convened meeting to announce that they were being removed from their posts and replaced by other members of the Greek military brass."