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Today's
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March 1, 2004
Heather Williams
Haiti as Target Practice: How
the US Press Missed the Story
February 28 / 29, 2004
Stephen Green
Serving
Two Flags: Neo-Cons, Israel and the Bush Team
Gary Leupp
Another Senseless Bush Battle: Defining and Protecting Marriage
William A. Cook
Israel:
America's Albatross
Ron Jacobs
Kucinich: Good Fight; Wrong Battlefield
Ben Tripp
A Nosegay of Posies: Queer Weddings at Last!
Leilla Matsui
Dances with Crucifixes
Mike Whitney
Dismantle
the Military Goliath
Yoel Marcus
Down and Out in the Hague
Uri Avnery
The Dancing Bear
Linda S. Heard
Britons and Americans Condemned to a Hobson's Choice
Al Krebs
Unmasking a Secret American Empire: Land, Water & Cotton
Stan Cox
Life (Pat. Pend.): Genetic Commandeering
JG
The Haiti Boomerang: "After The Looting & Pillaging,
Your Hunger Will Remain"
Rick Giombetti
Censorship at the Seattle P-I on Forced Psychiatry
Keith Hoeller
The Bankruptcy of Mental Health Insurance Parity
Dave Zirin
Colorado Football: Buffalo Swill
NADERAMA
Alan Maass
Nader and the Politics of Lesser
Evils
Michael Donnelly
Regime
Rotation: Anybody But Bush...Again?
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Exeunt Serenaders; Enter Nader
Doug Giebel
So Nader's Running? Get Over It
Bruce Jackson
An Open Letter to Naderites
CounterPunch Wire
Stalinists for Kerry! and Other Roars from the Crowd
Poets' Basement
Davies, Scarr, Kearney & Albert
February 27, 2004
Thomas C. Mountain
A
White Jesus During Black History Month?
Laura Carlsen
Americans
Abroad: Bush is Persona Non Grata
John B. Anderson
Nader's Campaign Brings Back Memories: Creating an Open Electoral
Process
Jason Leopold
Spying
on Kofi Annan
John Chuckman
Nader,
Risk and Hope
Standard Schaefer
An
Interview with Michael Hudson on Putin's Russia
Ray McGovern
Punished
for Honest Intelligence
Saul Landau
The
Haiti Redux
Website of the Day
Bush: Why I'm Running for Re-election
February 26, 2004
Brandy Baker
Is Nader
on to Something?
Jacques Kinau
AEI
to Colombia: "Can't Give You Anything But Guns, Baby"
Norman Solomon
Bugging Kofi Annan: UN Spying
and the Evasions of US Journalism
Greg Weiher
A Purloined Letter: the Zarqawi Gambit
Walt Brasch
Janet Jackson, Bush & No. 542: There are No Halftime Shows
in War
Shadi Hamid
The Music World Explodes in Anger
Norman Madarasz
As Canadian as Corruption
Chris Floyd
Bullets and Ballots
Virginia Tilly
The
Deeper Meaning of the Wall
Amy Goodman / Jeremy
Scahill
Haiti's
Lawyer Says US is Arming Haiti's Anti-Aristide Paramilitaries
Website of the Day
Clear Channel Sucks
February 25, 2004
Dr. Susan Block
Saddam's
Sex Therapist and the Rape of Free Speech
Bruce Anderson
Treacherous Bastards: The Greens and the Dems and Nader
Ron Jacobs
Our Power is on the Streets and
in Our Hearts
Mike Whitney
Bush
and Gay America: the Politics of Duplicity
Sam Husseini
Jesus in 100 Words
John L. Hess
Kick Off or Flub?
Sam Hamod
Bush's Newest Red Herring
Cockburn / St. Clair
Winning
with Nader
Website of the Day
VotePact
February 24, 2004
Ralph Nader
Why
I'm Running for President
Greg Moses
Rally
the Mob! Bush, Gay Marriage and the Constitution
Douglas O'Hara
The
Merchants of Fear: Smearing Nader
Phillip Cryan
Frozen in Time: The WSJ's Paranoid
Lens on Latin America
David Lindorff
John Kerry's China Connection
Jason Leopold
Cheney's Shame: Halliburton Faces New Charges
Gary Younge
Haiti: Throttled by History
Kromm, Masri & Purohit
Why No Democracy in Iraq?
Steve Perry
Tangled Up in Red and Blue: Beware the Electoral College
February 23, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israel's Apartheid Wall on Trial
at The Hague
Kurt Nimmo
Richard Perle, Executioner: "Heads Should Roll"
Jonathan Franklin
US Soldier Seeks Refugee Status in Canada
Al Krebs
The Liberal "Intelligentsia" v. Nader
Josh Frank
Nader's Nadir? Not a Chance
Bruce Jackson
Nader, Another View: "He's as Evil as Bush"
Gary Leupp
A Misguided
Attack, The Passion, Rabbi Lerner and the Gospels
February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
February 19, 2004
Cecilie Surasky
Anti-Semitism
at the World Social Forum? That's Not What I Saw
Ray McGovern
Iraq
Hawks and Deceptive Intelligence: Did They Really Think They'd
Get Away With It?
Tariq Ali
How Far
Will Bush Go in Iraq?
Ralph Nader
Whither
the Nation?
Wayne Madsen
Would Kerry Purge the Neo-Cons?
Norman Solomon
The Collapse of Dean's Cyber-Bubble
Christopher Brauchli
Cheney, Halliburton and the NYT
Mike Whitney
Bush's Iraq Strategy: "I Hope They Kill Each Other"
Lewis Carroll
Bush the Mighty Helmsman from Yale
Website of the Day
Sex Toy Horoscope
February 18, 2004
William Wilgus
Bush:
AWOL and Dereliction of Duty
William Blum
Mush-Minded
Liberals
Dave Lindorff
Bush's China Syndrome
Greg Weiher
Why
is Kerry Getting a Pass?
Mike Griffin
Killing the Messenger: the AFL-CIO's Attack on Harry Kelber
Mark Hand
Kerry Tells Peace Movement to "Move On"
February 17, 2004
Mike Ferner
The
Countryside Murders in Iraq
Mokhiber / Weissman
Corporation
as Psychopath
Marjorie Cohn
DrakeGate:
a Victory for Free Speech
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's
Endgame: a Review of Chalmers Johnson's "Sorrows of Empire"
Greg Bates
Nader Ambush: a New Low for The
Nation
Ximena Ortiz
A Bush
Doctrine, of Sorts
Gary Leupp
Whatever Happened to Gen. Khazraji?
Sen. John Kerry
"The Cause of Israel is the Cause of America"
Steve Perry
Kerry
1, Drudge 0
February 16, 2004
James Johnston
Huddling
with the Cheeseheads in a NASCAR World
Sara Eltantawi
To
Wear the Hijab or Not
Bruce Anderson
Kevin
Cooper and the Midnight Needle
Elaine Cassel
Feds
on Campus: the Drake Subpoenas
Rahul Mahajan
Bush,
Is the Tide Finally Turning?
Kevin Cooper
The Ritual of Death
Stan Cox
Goodbye, Howard Dean
Larry David
My War
Steve Perry
Bush and the Guard: the Cover-Up's the Thing
Website of the Day
Prison Patriots: Help This Vital Film Get Made
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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for More Stories.
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March
1, 2004
Haiti as Target Practice
How
the US Press Missed the Story
By HEATHER WILLIAMS
"The fact that the group in charge
of Haiti policy today in the State Department has been literally
gunning for Aristide since before his initial election as a champion
of democracy in 1990 has been left all but unmentioned by the
US press."
Now that bodies are littering the streets of Cap
Haitien and Port Au Prince, major print news outlets have seen
well enough to send a handful of cameramen and correpondents
to send back news of the crisis. Even so, the campaign of violence
that has finally ousted Haitian President Aristide has been investigated
and reported to the American public with appalling indolence.
The official reasoning appears to be that if Haiti is the hemisphere's
eternal basket case-a dismal repository of poverty where there
is no future-- how on earth could its past possibly matter?
But those who view Haiti's current violence
as merely one of an eternal humanitarian crisis in temporary
overdrive miss the story. It is no simple tale of a corrupt regime
collapsing under the weight of popular anger and bad management.
A cursory glance at events of the last fourteen years suggests
that the fall of the Aristide regime was a foregone conclusion
at the entrance of President George W. Bush and the installation
of a cabal of appointees with a grim record of utilizing official
and covert channels to destabilize uncooperative governments
in the Western Hemisphere. What is immediately ominous about
the current crisis in Haiti is the likely prospect that leaders
of armed groups making a final assault on the capital will play
important roles in a post-Aristide order. Such armed groups include
the Tontons Macoutes, the gunmen who viciously supervised repression
under both father and son Duvaliers' dictatorships until 1986.
They also include members of the disbanded Haitian army that
held power for three years following the coup against President
Aristide in 1991, and the FRAPH death squads that mowed down
the ranks of democratic civil society during that period, leaving
over 3,000 dead and thousands more in exile. What is also now
worrisome about this crisis is what it likely indicates about
the intentions of the U.S. State Department and security apparatus
elsewhere in the Caribbean.
Now that Aristide's government, protected
by a flimsy police force and a smattering of civilian gangs,
has collapsed, quiet references in news stories and opinion pieces
suggest that editors are wishing that perhaps they had a few
more questions along the way about what indeed was going on in
Haiti. Notably, until mid-February of this year The New York
Times instructed its readers, for weeks on end, with no evidence
whatsoever, that the armed groups referred to generically
and occasionally quite sympathetically as "rebels"
represent a home-grown anti-Aristide opposition. For weeks the
New York Tinmes used AP and Reuters dispatches to present the
Haitian crisis as one simply of domestic protest and unrest.
It wasn't until February 15 that the NYT's own reporter, Lydia
Polgreen bothered to mention that the group marching on Gonaïves
known a the Cannibal Army was led by "sinister figures from
[Haiti's] past," including the infamous Louis-Jodel Chamblain,
a soldier who led death squads in the 1980s through the mid-1990s
and was convicted in absentia for his involvement in the murder
of Antoine Izméry, a well-known pro-democracy activist.
Also unexplored by the same reporters were reports that the groups
terrorizing Gonaïves had come from across the border, from
the Dominican Republic. Given this knowledge, it is curious that
no reporter then bothered to inquire how these groups obtained
ample caches of brand-new M-16s, M-60s, armor piercing weapons,
all-terrain vehicles, and rocket-propelled grenade launchers-equipment
far beyond the reach of the Haiti's own impecunious security
forces.
Was the story too dangerous to investigate?
Was the situation indecipherable? Was the prospect of a weak
regime giving way to another in the hemisphere's poorest country
just not a story worth the time and effort? The tragedy of this
episode is that much of it was abundantly transparent. Running
a sixty-second web search on any of the principals involved leads
one to a fetid two-decade history of CIA and U.S. ultra-right
subterfuge in Haiti. The fact that the group in charge of Haiti
policy today in the State Department has been literally gunning
for Aristide since before his initial election as a champion
of democracy in 1990 has been left all but unmentioned by the
press. Also forgotten is the fact that members of the armed groups
burning their way through Haiti's cities today include groups
that, (according to myriad sources including sworn testimony
before Congress by U.S. officials, reporters, and reports of
Haitian recipients of covert aid,) were funneling drugs to the
U.S. while in the pay of U.S. intelligence agents.
The point is not that the public has
been lied to by the government. Governments lie, particularly
this administration. The point is that even those on the left
who are indignant about systematic misinformation elsewhere have
not bothered to jog their memories on Haiti to smell the sulfur
emanating from this episode,. The press apparatus reporting
on the Caribbean is either too broken or too racist to remember
that Haiti's anguish is connected to forces quite beyond poor
judgment or even bad will by President Aristide. The ease with
which armed thugs have upended a civilian regime, eliciting only
murmurs of disquiet from onlookers abroad who ought to know better
is cause for worry. Surely zealots in charge of U.S. foreign
policy have taken note. If it's this easy to destabilize Haiti
, Cuba will unquestionably appear a more viable target for direct
intervention in the not-so-distant future.
At least four lines of inquiry were left
nearly untouched in the last four weeks of reporting of Haiti.
First, no one bothered to ask who the
rebels were and why they were advancing on major cities. If in
fact they represented a broad opposition, as reporters readily
implied or stated openly, why were the rebels unable to furnish
the barest credible details of their demands, their civilian
bases of support, and their connections to leaders of civil society
groups? Despite literally weeks of lead time, no Haitians in
positions of authority, no public figures, and no Haitian intellectuals
living here or on the island emerged in press stories as sources
of reliable information. Haitians who were quoted in news stories
tended to be taxi drivers presumably shuttling skittish reporters
from hotel to dinner, or randomly-chosen opponents of Aristide
on the street. Predictably, such individuals expressed generic
discontent with the government. Thus, even though a number of
more respectable political opponents of President Aristide were
claiming that armed groups outside the capital were not acting
on their behalf, the story by default became a spurious tale
of an embattled people challenging a repressive and incompetent
government. Stories closer to the truth supported by evidence
were likely never taken up because such messiness would necessitate
a greater number of column inches than editors were going to
allot to Haiti.
The second instance of media negligence
was the near-universal acceptance of the idea in the English-language
press that Aristide's government had lost all popular legitimacy
due to reported irregularities in the 2000 parliamentary elections.
This is an extraordinary leap given the monkey business plaguing
U.S. elections of the same year. According to Tom Reeves, the
admittedly poorly-attended elections were not the stuff of grand
vote larceny. "All sides," he wrote in a very fine
article last fall in Dollars and Sense, "concede that Aristide
won the presidential ballot with 92 percent of the voteThe sole
disagreement is over run-off elections for seven senators from
Aristide's part who obtained pluralities but not majorities in
the first round. The seven senators eventually resigned, making
way for new elections." Nonetheless, these electoral "abuses"
were grounds for the Bush administration and pliant international
partners in Europe to suspend hundreds of millions of dollars
in credit lines and aid to Haiti. Allegations of fraud were used
to permanently block the release of $400 million in already-approved
loans from the Interamerican Development Bank. The IMF, World
Bank, and European Union were also pressed to cut off crucial
lines of credit. Meanwhile, Haiti was brutally taken to task
for its external financial obligations, emptying its coffers
in July 2003 to pay $32 million in debt service arrears. As a
final blow, Haiti's ability to conserve any remaining foreign
reserves was foreclosed by agreements signed with the U.S. government
under President Clinton in 1996. These obliged Haiti to abolish
tariffs on U.S. imports in the name of what was curiously called
"free trade" but was in fact commodity dumping by U.S.
exporters. Under threat of huge fines, Haiti was obliged to accept
the import of foodstuffs priced far below the cost of production.
(Direct subsidies to U.S. farmers since the mid-1990s have averaged
over $30 billion a year.) In a nation where the majority of the
population works in agriculture, this all but shut down production
in the rice-producing northwest of Haiti, as well as among livestock
producers throughout the country. Under these conditions, it
stands to reason that no government could dodge the discontent
of the population.
The third line of neglected inquiry was
the question of who the injured "opposition" was in
Haiti, on whose behalf this official bloodletting took place.
According to Stan Goff, whose thorough article appeared in on
this Counterpunch site on February 9 of this year, the fifteen-party
anti-Aristide coalition known as "Convergence" includes
"every faction of the Haitian dominant class, factions who
are generally at war with one another." Despite anemic support
from the voting public (never approaching even 20 percent in
opinion polls conducted even by the U.S.) what apparently they
were able to converge on was three million dollars a year in
funding in from the International Republican Institute, a Republican-party
backed arm of the National Endowment for Democracy.
Finally, no one has asked questions about
the wildly partisan officials in U.S. State Department now running
U.S. policy in the Caribbean and Latin America. These include
such Blast-from-the-Past supporters of Reagan era highjinks
in Central America as Otto Reich, John Negroponte, Elliot Abrams,
and (before his ignominious departure last summer) John Poindexter.
The most visible in recent weeks on Haiti has been Assistant
Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger Noriega,
a man who has had Aristide in his gunsights for over a decade.
As senior staff member for the Committee on Foreign Relations
of the U.S. Senate, and advisor to Senator Jesse Helms and John
Burton, he was party to a three-year campaign to prevent to defame
Aristide and prevent his return to power; all the while CIA-backed
thugs left carnage in the streets daily in Port Au Prince. In
his capacity in the State Department since 2003, and for two
years before that as the U.S. Permanent Representative to the
OAS, he has aggressively advertised his intention to oust Aristide
a second time. For example, in April of last year, speaking at
the Council of the Americas conference in Washington, he linked
U.S. policies in Haiti to those in Venezuela and Cuba. He congratulated
the OAS for overcoming "irrelevance in the past years"
by adopting the Inter-American Democratic Charter. Article 20,
he said, lays out a series of actions to be takenin the event
that a member state should fail to uphold the essential elements
of democratic life. He added the "President Chavez and President
Aristide havecontributed willfully to a polarized and confrontational
environment. It is my fervent hope," he added ominously,
"that the good people of Cuba are studying the Democratic
Charter."
Given the inability of Haitians at present
to question the direction of whatever succession takes place
in the coming weeks, the question of how fully Noriega and his
fanatical friends will control U.S. foreign policy in the Americas
is crucial. Secretary of State Colin Powell has been cravenly
circumspect in his statements on Haiti, straddling the line between
encouraging Aristide to step down and discouraging those who
would involve the U.S. extensively in any transition effort or
state-building mission. What Powell's late entrance into the
situation suggests strongly is that Latin America and the Caribbean
are considered so insignificant that Noriega and his half-cocked
cronies are generally left to play with matches until the fire
alarm goes off. In this case, Florida voters were that alarm.
Undoubtedly higher-ups in the White House were a bit uneasy at
the prospect of thousands of Haitians fleeing chaos being thrown
back into the sea by the US Coast Guard in an election year.
But the modus operandi of Noriega and company is unmistakeable:
fund an opposition, report every clash as repression against
the population, arm pliable thugs and mercenaries in exile, embargo
the government, precipitate acute crisis, play up the discontent
of a hungry population, and then happily leave it to internationalist
liberals to lead the charge for military intervention on humanitarian
grounds. So with President Aristide neutralized now, it's time
to look elsewhere, maybe west across the sea to Cuba.
Heather Williams
is assistant professor of politics at Pomona College. She can
be reached hwilliams@pomona.edu
Weekend
Edition Features for February 28 / 29, 2004
Stephen Green
Serving
Two Flags: Neo-Cons, Israel and the Bush Team
Gary Leupp
Another Senseless Bush Battle: Defining and Protecting Marriage
William A. Cook
Israel:
America's Albatross
Ron Jacobs
Kucinich: Good Fight; Wrong Battlefield
Ben Tripp
A Nosegay of Posies: Queer Weddings at Last!
Leilla Matsui
Dances with Crucifixes
Mike Whitney
Dismantle
the Military Goliath
Yoel Marcus
Down and Out in the Hague
Uri Avnery
The Dancing Bear
Linda S. Heard
Britons and Americans Condemned to a Hobson's Choice
Al Krebs
Unmasking a Secret American Empire: Land, Water & Cotton
Stan Cox
Life (Pat. Pend.): Genetic Commandeering
JG
The Haiti Boomerang: "After The Looting & Pillaging,
Your Hunger Will Remain"
Rick Giombetti
Censorship at the Seattle P-I on Forced Psychiatry
Keith Hoeller
The Bankruptcy of Mental Health Insurance Parity
Dave Zirin
Colorado Football: Buffalo Swill
NADERAMA
Alan Maass
Nader and the Politics of Lesser
Evils
Michael Donnelly
Regime
Rotation: Anybody But Bush...Again?
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Exeunt Serenaders; Enter Nader
Doug Giebel
So Nader's Running? Get Over It
Bruce Jackson
An Open Letter to Naderites
CounterPunch Wire
Stalinists for Kerry! and Other Roars from the Crowd
Poets' Basement
Davies, Scarr, Kearney & Albert
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