20136: Dailey: Questions re 19890 (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Peter Dailey <phdailey@msn.com>


If there is anyone able to shed any light on this I would be very interested
in hearing from them, either on or off list.

Buried near the end of this account in #19890 of Kurzban, Dellums,
Ross-Robinson and the rest of Aristide's "Dream Team" of lobbyists and pr
people,  and the $7.3 million they managed to extract from the Haitian
Treasury was a reference to Al Cardenas, a name I was not previously
familiar with.

Some of you may recall that at about this time last year, a number of FL
politicians began to call for amendments to the 1987 Constitution. Although
the nature of these amendments was unspecified, there was much speculation
that they involved changes that would allow Mildred Aristide to succeed her
husband. At the funeral of Antoine Adrien, William Smarth and Father
Dominique delivered a very pointed rebuke to the FL bigwigs seated in front
of them.

No more was heard of this until three days before the end of the legislative
session on September 1, when a proposal was introduced to amend the
constitution to abolish the army, replace the tri-partite system of mayors
with a single individual, and permit persons holding dual nationality to
serve as president. The constitution specifies that any such amendments be
approved by 2/3 of the members, and the Deputies quickly assented. The
Senate is composed of three representatives of each of the nine departments
for a total of 27. Consequently, it would require 18 votes to carry this
measure. However, due to the much advertised resignation of the disputed FL
senators and other circumstances, only 19 senators were sitting, and when
Dany Toussaint and Prince Pierre Sonson refused to assent, FL was left with
only 17 votes when parliament disbanded.

Although FL announced that it was interpreting the constitutional
requirement to mean 2/3 of those senators then sitting, and that it would
present the so-called Minouche Amendments for ratification by a
joint-sitting of the parliament in January, several difficulties presented
themselves. One was that the constitution specified that any such amendment
would not go into effect until after the next presidential election. The
other was that it seemed extremely unlikely that elections would take place
in time to meet the constitutional deadline.

Now, the report at #19890 states that "the Haitian government in April 2003
also signed a $35,000-a-month contract with the Florida law firm of Tew
Cardenas, for the firm to negotiate an election of the country's
constitution, which was to be held in January. 'Our scope was to coordinate
these elections,' said Al Cardenas, a partner in the firm and former
chairman of the Florida Republican Party. The effort was halted in the fall,
he said, after factional politics in Haiti sank the plan."

Did the reporter mean that Cardenas was hired to coordinate prospective
legislative elections, or a constitutional referendum? If the later, it was
another $300,000 gone west, since the constitution specifically states that
it cannot be altered by referendum. Perhaps this was what the $350,000 in
the Tabarre wall safe was for.

Peter Dailey

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