19526: Dailey: Aristide's last hours as President (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Peter Dailey <phdailey@msn.com>

Thanks to Ira Kurzban, Aristide's grossly incompetent and ridiculously
overpaid ex-lobbyist, we now have a picture of Aristide's last hours as
president. Far from kidnapping the mercurial ex-priest, the Americans
offered him a chance to save his skin and he jumped at it.

According to Frank Davies (KRT) after the television broadcasts Saturday of
"rioting and looting by pro-Aristide gangs," Aristide's remaining
international support pretty much evaporated. "When he called out his thugs
into the streets last week to kill and loot, that was it. The French said
enough. We said enough," reported an embassy official involved in the
discussion

According to Ira, on Saturday the President received a call from U.S.
officials stating that "we are not going to do anything to stop these guys
(insurgents) and they are going to kill you" It seems to have been one of
those days. Kurzban points out that "a heavily armed SWAT-like National
Police unit of some 60 men had basically stopped taking orders" and when the
Steele Corp. called the Embassy and asked whether the Marines would come to
their rescue if the Palace fell, they were told not to count on it.

There was one further bit of magouy for which the French were apparently
responsible rather than the Americans. President & Mrs. Aristide boarded the
jet under the impression they were going to Johannesburg, not realizing that
the treacherous Villepin had fixed it so that they would be taken to the
Central African Republic instead.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide will go down in Haitian history as the only president
ever to be toppled by a coup d'etat twice!

Peter Dailey

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