So, here you have the top lawyer for the nation's armed forces admitting that what happened on June 28th was illegal. And then he uses the classic defense that this extrajudicial coup was necessary to avoid violence -- sometimes that pesky constitution just doesn't cut it, I guess:

''What was more beneficial, remove this gentleman from Honduras or present him to prosecutors and have a mob assault and burn and destroy and for us to have to shoot?'' he said. ``If we had left him here, right now we would be burying a pile of people.''

So, he says, if Zelaya had been taken into custody and imprisoned in Honduras, there would have been mob violence demanding Zelaya's reinstatement. While I don't discount that possibility, nevertheless it seems like a stretch to justify moving the entire operation from one of arresting a president who was allegedly performing an illegal action (in this case, holding a referendum on whether or not the nation should later hold a vote to change the constitution) and engaging in an action that Latin American countries have seen too many times: deposing a democratically elected president with military force and sending him packing. As we well know here in the United States, the constitution and its provisions cannot just be dumped aside in times of crisis. And the fact is, Zelaya's alleged offense was simply not egregious enough to justify the crime that the military's top lawyer now admits was committed.

Just to be clear that I am not misrepresenting the words of Col. Inestroza in the Miami Herald article: he does not call Zelaya's removal a coup, and he insists that the act of removing the president was lawful. What he admits was illegal was the act of shipping Zelaya to a foreign country in the dead of night rather than detaining him to stand trial.

History will not exonerate this strike against democracy in Honduras. This struggle between the military and the president should have been settled without resorting to actions that this military officer has now admitted were illegal.

Lest anyone forget that the military has its own political interests at stake:

Inestroza acknowledged that after 34 years in the military, he and many other longtime soldiers found Zelaya's allegiance to Chávez difficult to stomach. Although he calls Zelaya a ''leftist of lies'' for his bourgeoisie upbringing, he admits he'd have a hard time taking orders from a leftist. ... ''We fought the subversive movements here and we were the only country that did not have a fratricidal war like the others,'' he said. ``It would be difficult for us, with our training, to have a relationship with a leftist government. That's impossible. I personally would have retired, because my thinking, my principles, would not have allowed me to participate in that.''

So there you go Honduras. The military says that you may have any government you'd like, as long as it isn't leftist.

UPDATE (10:32 am EDT): Sorry about the poll. I should have known better than to try and use properly accented characters for the Spanish words! I guess everyone can figure it out. The messed up words are, of course, Si and Pie de Limon.