Even were the Honduran coup legal, this probably is not:

Rosamaria Valeriano Flores was returning home from a visit to a public health clinic and found herself in a crowd of people dispersing from a demonstration in support of the ousted president, Manuel Zelaya. As she crossed the central square of the Honduran capital, a group of soldiers and police officers pushed her to the ground and beat her with their truncheons.

She said the men kicked out most of her top teeth, broke her ribs and split open her head. “A policeman spit in my face and said, ‘You will die,’ ” she said, adding that the attack stopped when a police officer shouted at the men that they would kill her.

Ms. Valeriano, 39, was sitting in the office of a Tegucigalpa human rights group last week, speaking about the assault, which took place on Aug. 12. As she told her story, mumbling to hide her missing teeth, she pointed to a scar on her scalp and to her still-sore left ribs.

Since Mr. Zelaya was removed in a June 28 coup, security forces have tried to halt opposition with beatings and mass arrests, human rights groups say. Eleven people have been killed since the coup, according to the Committee for Families of the Disappeared and Detainees in Honduras, or Cofadeh.

The number of violations and their intensity has increased since Mr. Zelaya secretly returned to Honduras two weeks ago, taking refuge at the Brazilian Embassy, human rights groups say.

If they coup plotters are trying to sway world opinion, hiring armies of lobbyists isn’t going to help when these sorts of stories get out.

Jonathan Adler cites to the hack James Kirchick, who in turn points to a report by the Law Library of Congress that supposedly finds that the coup was legal:

In conclusion, the report, which was prepared by the Congressional Research Service’s Senior Foreign Law Specialist, determines “that the judicial and legislative branches applied constitutional and statutory law in the case against President Zelaya in a manner that was judged by the Honduran authorities from both branches of the government to be in accordance with the Honduran legal system.”

So in other words, according to the Honduran legislative and judiciary branches, the Honduran legislative and judiciary branches behaved in a legal manner in deposing Zelaya from office. And according to the Bush administration, everything the Bush administration did in the war on terror was legal. If the critics of a policy of non-praise of the coup plotters are looking for evidence to bolster their arguments, they should really try to do better than this.

Snark aside, I do agree with Adler that if Koh has authored a memo for the State Dept. that reaches a different conclusion, and the Obama administration is relying upon that conclusion to guide their policy towards Honduras to any degree, then yes they should let us see that memo, if only so I may use it to further highlight the ridiculous-ness of right-wing critics of the Obama administration.