Is The US Funding Haitian "Contras"?

[donsu]

http://www.blackcommentator.com/36/36_guest_commentator.html

Several grassroots political activists from Haiti's Lavalas movement recently sat in a small room watching television on the first day of the Bush administration's war against Iraq. For about half an hour they shifted between Quebec's RDI and France's RFI Caribbean broadcasts in French. The room suddenly broke into excited chatter as images of thousands upon thousands of housewives, union activists and students demonstrating against the war with Iraq filled the screen. The protestors heralded from such far away cities as Berlin, Bern, Karachi, Madrid, Milan, San Francisco and Washington.

Jasmine, a 36 year-old women's organizer and local Lavalas representative, turned to me and asked everyone if we could change the channel to CNN and would I provide a rough translation in English. We sat in "shock and awe" for nearly an hour as "military expert" after "military expert" provided sanitized explanations of U.S. military strategy and the effects of several types of missiles raining hellfire down upon Baghdad's population. The commentary of these "experts" was broken only by official White House briefings, replays of the bombs falling, and interviews with journalists "embedded" with the advancing military troops soon to be unleashed on the orders of President Bush.

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I couldn't help but think there might be something to this comparison as I remembered that Ambassador Otto Reich, President Bush's Envoy for Western Hemisphere Initiatives, had arrived in Haiti the same week bombs began falling on Iraq. Reich came as part of a delegation representing the Organization of American States and the Caribbean Community Council with the intention of brokering an agreement between the Haitian government and the Washington-backed "opposition" to Lavalas. Otto Reich is a known quantity when it comes to controlling the press and manipulating events to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives in Latin America and the Caribbean.

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Otto Reich? Is this the same Otto Reich who once used taxpayer dollars under the Reagan administration, from within his shadowy Office of Public Diplomacy, to cajole the U.S. press into supporting the Contra war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua? According to The National Security Archive, a staff report by the House Foreign Affairs Committee (September 7, 1988) summarized various investigations of Mr. Reich's office and concluded that "senior CIA officials with backgrounds in covert operations, as well as military intelligence and psychological operations specialists from the Department of Defense, were deeply involved in establishing and participating in a domestic political and propaganda operation run through an obscure bureau in the Department of State which reported directly to the National Security Council rather than through the normal State Department channels.... These private individuals and organizations raised and spent funds for the purpose of influencing Congressional votes and U.S. domestic news media."

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It is said that if you repeat something often enough people will begin to see it as the truth. One example of this is a story that appeared in the Economist last November. The story, entitled "Frustration boils over: The Aristide regime is holding off its enemies - but for how long?" cited a figure of 15,000 participants in an anti-government rally in Haiti's second largest city Cap Haitien. The editorial board wrote, "On November 17th some 15,000 people marched in Cap Haitien, and a former Haitian army officer with coup experience, Himmler Rebu, urged Mr. Aristide to resign." In truth, initial reports from the Associated Press quoted local radio stations as estimating the crowd at 60,000 but AP was forced to lower the estimate to 15,000 by the end of the day. Reuters quoted unnamed police sources to have estimated the crowd at 8,000 while local officials put the number at 4,000. The Economist instantly transformed the figure 15,000 into reality despite the fact that estimates of attendance at the November 17th rally were inconsistent. The numbers game isn't as important here as the mainstream press's ability to transform inconsistency into fact for an unsuspecting audience.
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(this is a long article worth reading)
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anything Reich has a hand in can't be good or legal.

the Iraqi and Haitian people have a lot in common - the boot of the bloody hands bushgang.

[DenverDem]

1. Of course we're behind it.

Given the players in this administration how could anything like this happen in our hemisphere without the stench of bushler all over it.

[tom_paine]

2. Did Hitler fund American Nazi symapthizer groups?

The answer to both questions is "Yes."

[donsu]

3. things come full circle, don't they?

nt