Reinstate Aristide

[Rootsie]

Former US Attorney General Ramsey Clarke:

"a major principle that the people of the United States must insist upon is no more U.S. interventions."

On February 29th the world woke to the news that President Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti had ‘resigned’ his Presidency and fled the country overnight. Well we saw that coming. The resurrected ‘opposition,’ composed of ultra-right wing death squad torturers, thugs and drug dealers, was seizing power, apparently with the help of the United States. More of the same CIA covert ops, guaranteed to be on the wrong side of every fight since Wolrl War II.

Many years after the fact, stories of CIA-sponsored military coups in Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Congo…have come to light. I have really thought that nothing the US government does in the world could surprise me anymore.

I was wrong. Because 24 hours later, on Monday, Congresswoman Maxine Waters was reporting that she had spoken to President Aristide.  He called her from his prison /hotel in the Central African Republic from a cell phone that had been slipped to him.  He told her emphatically that he had not left Haiti voluntarily, but had been in his words ‘abducted’ by American military personnel who came to him in the middle of the night,guns drawn, after dismissing his own security detail, and told him flat-out that the US would not support him against these rebels, that he would be executed, his wife would be executed, and countless Haitians would die. They led him to an airplane with black-out curtains and deposited him many hours later in a hotel in what he assumed was The Central African Republic, guarded, he said, by American troops. He had not resigned, he said.  The United States, he insisted, had staged a military coup.  They went in to Haiti and physically  removed her duly-elected President..

It took 25 years for the truth to come out about Chile. This neat little trick was pulled off in full view of the entire world. How dare they.

Well here’s how. They pretend they don’t know what in the world those crazy black folks are talking about. Here’s Rumsfeld’s response: "The idea that someone was abducted is just totally inconsistent with everything I heard or saw or am aware of. So I think that - I do not believe he is saying what you say - are saying he is saying."   Well there’s a mouthful. They probably figured Aristide would sooner or later get word out and the fact is, they did not care.  Race most certainly entered into their assessment of ‘plausible deniability.’ The media stepped into line like the goose-stepping ‘good Germans’ they are and played the whole thing off. They had been softening everyone up for weeks with a distorted picture of Aristide and Haiti and history.

The United States was the first republic in the world and had to fight the British Army to achieve that. 13 years later, Haiti became the second. She had to crush Napoleon’s army. And make no mistake: from that day to this Haiti has been punished for the cheeky rebelliousness of those black slaves, given not a moment  of breathing space to live up to her impressive revolution. And now 200 years later the US and France come forward to claim some sickening paternal proprietorship over this shameful little child of theirs, the poorest place in the Western Hemisphere. Please, get the real story. Read about United States attempts to oust Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Read about how country after country in Latin America and the Caribbean was turned into one big torture chamber by United States-trained and installed dictators throughout the 20th and now into the 21st century. The biggest threat to United States interests is popular democracy. Now there's a terrible irony for you.

And please, if you had not noticed before, notice that this conglomeration of corporate interests emblemized by the man 'Bush' have even lost their shame. They don’t even bother to conceal their crimes. The conclusion that can be drawn from this is that they think they have won. They think their New World Order is in the Bag. Well they got away with this one. So they may be right.

Call your Congressmen. Demand that Aristide be reinstated. The fact that that decision is even in American hands is unacceptable.