20262: Esser: Return Aristide to Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

The Black Commentator
http://www.blackcommentator.com

Mar 11 2004
No. 81

Return Aristide to Haiti
Try Bush as Global Pirate

The Bush men have the Madness Touch. Their very presence warps
conventional notions of reality.

Thus, the new “prime minister” of Haiti appears as surprised as the
rest of his countrymen when conveyed the title by an “eminent” rump
of persons chosen by the occupying power. The man picked for the job
on Tuesday, business consultant Gérard Latortue, doesn’t even arrive
in Haiti from his home in Boca Raton, Florida, until Wednesday. U.S.
Marines believe they have killed Haitian gunmen in battle, but seem
unconcerned as to their identities. Half a world away, the
constitutional head of state, elected with overwhelming popular
support in a process deemed free and fair by the entire international
community, is held captive by an African military dictator after
being kidnapped by the world’s superpower in cahoots with the former
colonial master of his country.

The world searches for terminology to describe the high crimes of the
Bush regime in Haiti and the Central African Republic, and of course,
Iraq – even as endless additional criminal contingencies take shape
in the planning rooms of the Pentagon. The Bush men seem determined
to methodically teach the planet that Washington is a threat to the
very concept of international order – that they are Pirates.

Evidence that George Bush is leader of a rogue, pirate state
accumulates daily, for the world to examine in the raw. Yet the
racist cabal (and its Black operatives) seem not to understand that
Haiti’s President Jean-Bertrand Aristide cannot be demonized like
Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. The nightmare image is seared into the global
retina: the frail ex-priest and his wife, kidnapped from their home
and delivered to the tender mercies of coup-making African generals. 

If the Bush men are on an international consciousness raising
mission, they are succeeding. Whatever perverse logic guides their
actions – and we have seen such logic at work in the world, before,
when small groups of men tested their “will” against the survival
instincts of the planet – they are in fact summoning a future
“tribunal” whose mandate must expand to match the crimes of the
American perpetrators. There will be a response to this avalanche of
atrocities that “are so harmful to international interests that
states are entitled – and even obliged – to bring proceedings against
the perpetrator, regardless of the location of the crime or the
nationality of the perpetrator or victim," to borrow the words of
Mary Robinson, former United Nations high commissioner for human
rights.

Crime in full view

The Bush men repeatedly overreach in their quest for world hegemony,
perceiving that the domestic price for dealing death and humiliation
to darker peoples is cheap. A poll shows that only one-third of
Floridians are opposed to U.S. actions in Haiti. The terrifying
odyssey to which Mildred Aristide – a Black First Lady and American
citizen! – has been subjected does not resonate in a society that,
nonetheless, agonizes over the prospect of Martha Stewart doing a
short stretch in prison. Yet outside the white American bubble, the
Aristides’ ordeal is seen as the toying of a mouse by a cat: brutish,
cruel and – because Bush is not a cat, but a man – evil. Black
America is reminded of the nature of the all too familiar beast.

“If you tell Charlie Rangel that my wife and children are gonna die
unless I go with you, that is a kidnapping,” said the Harlem
Congressman at a taping of the local television program, Like It Is.
Rangel framed the issue as a no-brainer at congressional hearings on
the Haiti coup:

“The Black's Law Dictionary, 4th Edition, says that ‘at common law,
kidnapping is the forcible abduction or stealing and carrying away of
a person from his own country to another.’ On Saturday night/Sunday
morning the United States Government engineered the forcible removal
of the lawfully elected President of Haiti from his own country and
arranged that he be carried away to another.”

When the victim is a head of state, and his country is the booty, the
crime is piracy on a superpower scale.

Piracy is not strictly a crime of maritime or aviation hijacking.
International law began as a collective response to piracy. Legal
scholar Louis Sohn wrote that “the first breakthrough” in punishing
international crime “occurred when international law accepted the
concepts that pirates are “enemies of mankind” and that piracy is “an
offense against the law of nations.” Mexican General Santa Anna
routinely referred to the slave-holding Texans as “land pirates.” The
Bush regime flaunts “the law of nations” as a matter of policy – an
all but self-proclaimed pirate state.

Betrayed and utterly disrespected, the Caribbean community of nations
refused to take part in the U.S.-led occupation of Haiti. Caricom is
“extremely disappointed'' at the involvement of “Western partners''
in the removal of Aristide, said Jamaican Prime Minister P.J.
Patterson. Having invaded Grenada in the lesser Antilles in 1983, the
U.S. now shows an appetite for the greater Antilles, as well.  The
Pirates have returned to Caribbean waters with a vengeance. “The
situation calls for an investigation of what transpired and we
believe that it should be done under the auspices of some independent
body such as the United Nations,'' said Patterson, speaking for 14
Caricom countries. (Haiti is also a member.)

Pirates are no respecters of national sovereignty, by definition. “I
imagine that [Caribbean heads of state] are very much aware that if
it can happen to Aristide, it can also happen to them or any other
small country,” said veteran Jamaican journalist and educator John
Maxwell. This is doubtless the message that Secretary of State Colin
Powell and his boss intended to transmit – a threat to once again
violate “the law of nations.”

The 53-nation African Union, whose member states are regularly
hectored by France, Britain and the United States to respect the rule
of law, this week joined Caricom in calling for a UN investigation of
Aristide’s ouster, which “set a dangerous precedent for duly elected
persons.”

“The African Union has decided to undertake immediate consultation
with both CARICOM and eventually the United Nations in order to
discuss the conditions for a quick return to constitutional
democracy” in Haiti, said the AU.

A matching set of conspirators

Buoyed by the continental support, Aristide’s lawyers began preparing
a broad legal counter-assault, based on the assumption that, although
the Bush Administration rejects the rule of law, most the rest of the
world does not.  In recognition of the American-French imperial
partnership, Aristide teams drew up a list of defendants in both
countries. According to Australia’s Herald Sun newspaper, chief
Aristide lawyer Ira Kurzban charges “Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Assistant Secretary of
State Roger Noriega and Luis Moreno, the deputy chief of mission of
the US Embassy, were behind Aristide's February 29 removal and forced
him and his wife into exile in the Central African Republic.”

In Paris, Aristide counsel Gilbert Collard charged four luminaries
with “complicity in abduction'': Thierry Burkard, France's ambassador
to Haiti; Yves Gaudel, the former ambassador; envoy Regis Debray; and
Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin's sister, Veronique. She and
Debray visited Aristide in December to demand his resignation, said
attorney Collard, indicating the French end of the conspiracy was in
full swing prior to Haiti’s bicentennial celebrations.

To cover all the legal bases, Ira Kurzban also sent U.S. Attorney
General John Ashcroft a formal request for an investigation of the
Presidential couple’s abduction, noting that Mildred Aristide is a
U.S. citizen.

Captors claim to speak for Aristide

The rush of activity came on the heals of bizarre events in Bangui on
Sunday and Monday, as the Central African Republic’s military
government attempted to simultaneously act as French client, prison
warden, and gracious host – an impossible task for a gaggle of
coupsters.

Reporters were told to expect a Sunday press conference featuring
President and Mrs. Aristide. Instead, heavily armed soldiers burst
into the conference room demanding the cameras and recorders be
turned off. Then Mrs. Aristide was brought in and made to sit in a
corner in silence, looking “very distressed,” according to a CNN
reporter on the scene. President Aristide never appeared. “A
Government spokesman read a statement, supposedly from President
Aristide, in which he thanked the CAR for their kindness.  Mme.
Aristide was then taken away," said the CNN guy, who filed only one
report describing the madness before his network sanitized the whole
affair.

On Monday morning President Aristide was allowed to hold a press
conference at the Central African Republic’s Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, in which he gave details of the “political kidnapping” by
the United States and declared, “I am the democratically elected
president and I remain so. I plead for the restoration of democracy''
in Haiti.

“Aristide spoke with reporters despite a pointed, public request by
Foreign Minister Charles Wenezoui that he avoid talking about Haitian
politics or unidentified “friendly countries,” the Associated Press
reported. “Aristide said he had been ‘well looked after’ by his
Central African hosts, backtracking on his lawyers' statements that
he was ‘a prisoner’ in Bangui.”

But a prisoner he clearly was. In a 30-minute interview with
Pacifica’s Democracy Now! program, Aristide said the U.S. “preferred
the Haitian people to move from coup d'etat, to coup d'etat.”
Nevertheless, “I pay tribute to the government of Central Africa for
the way they welcomed us. It was gracious, human, good, and until
now, this is the kind of relationship which we are developing
together. I thank them for that once again.” Then he was told to get
off the phone. “Now, time is gone. Unfortunately I need to stop
because they just asked me to leave.”

The real news emerged after Aristide met with a delegation of
supporters that had been turned away the day before. The group
included representatives of former Attorney General Ramsey Clark’s
International Action Center, the Haiti Support Network, Aristide
lawyer Brian Concannon, and Kim Ives, a Creole-speaker with the
publication Haiti-Progress. Ives offered this extraordinary account
of the March 8 conversation:

"In the course of the discussions with President Aristide, it became
clear that the timing of the coup coincided with several
international developments that could have shifted the relationship
of forces in the Haitian government's favor. While the U.S.
government escalated pressure on Aristide to resign in that last
week, the government of South Africa had sent a planeload of weapons
that was set to arrive on Sunday, February 29. Venezuela was in
discussions about sending troops to support Aristide. There was also
gathering international support and solidarity for the maintenance of
constitutional democracy in Haiti. African American leaders were
receiving increasing media attention as they denounced the efforts
towards a coup. Two prominent U.S. delegations, one led by members of
the Congressional Black Caucus and another led by former U.S.
Attorney General Ramsey Clark, were set to arrive within days. We can
see that there were various converging influences of aid about to
come. This accounts in large part for the timing of the coup, it
explains why the U.S. had to rush in and remove Aristide."

So, did the Bush men lie so badly in the aftermath of the coup
because they were forced to plot in haste? Or is it that they don’t
really give a damn about public opinion? New York Rep. Charles Rangel
tends to think the latter: “Regardless of the question their response
will be, ‘What difference does it make? We got rid of Aristide.’”

The traveling President of Haiti

The confusion regarding South Africa’s willingness to grant asylum to
Aristide stems from disinformation straight from the lips of Colin
Powell – the best liar in the administration, given the material he
has to work with. In the days after the abduction, Powell and his
subordinates attempted to depict South Africa as reluctant to accept
Aristide, as if he were an international albatross. The Haitian
President, of course, had had no intention of leaving Haiti and,
therefore, never thought to ask any nation for asylum before being
bundled away to Bangui.

Danny Schecter, the respected News Dissector of the web site of the
same name, reported that it was Colin Powell who tried to book
Aristide to South Africa.

ANC leader Pallo Jordan, chairman of the Parliament's Foreign Affairs
Committee sent me an article he's written which offers some
information not published in the US. Here are some excerpts:

"While the plane was on the tarmac, Colin Powell made a number of
phone-calls, one to President Mbeki, requesting asylum for Aristide.
No one in the South African government leaked the information about
that request to the media….

"It is equally clear that the pleas of Caricom notwithstanding,
Washington chose to assist the rebels to get rid of Aristide, first
by inaction, then by shipping him out of the country. Secretary of
State Powell will forgive us for regarding his assurances to the
contrary with profound skepticism. It's a mere twelve months ago that
he was giving us equally impassioned assurances of US good
intentions. Today we all know that he either misled us or told us
deliberate lies.”

On Wednesday, March 9, the African Union as a body embraced Aristide.
The Associated Press filed this curious report, which we will
explicate, momentarily:

The organization representing 53 African nations should arrange the
long-term asylum plans of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a South African
official said Wednesday after meeting with the exiled former Haitian
leader.

South Africa Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Aziz Pahad told The
Associated Press that the African Union should arrange asylum plans
for Aristide, who arrived in the Central African Republic on March 1.
He flew from Haiti the day before on a U.S.-provided jet.

“He's already here and the question of whether he is going to another
African country, it's an African Union decision,'' Pahad said without
elaborating….

The AU said it would accept Aristide receiving asylum in Africa, but
it did not say in which nation he might ultimately settle. Central
African Republic officials have said Aristide may stay in this
country, if he asks.

In addition to the ridiculous reference to the “U.S.-provided jet” –
as if the Americans had arranged an aerial chauffer service for
Aristide! – the AP reports that “South Africa was the country most
often mentioned as his destination, a U.S. official said.” In fact,
Powell and the other Bush men were the only people claiming, falsely,
that Aristide had been seeking refuge in South Africa.

There is nothing strange going on whatsoever between Aristide and his
close allies in the South African government. It is the U.S. that
wants to “park” Aristide somewhere, to create the impression of a
permanent fait accompli in Haiti. Aristide has purposely made his
plans vague because he insists that he is still President of his
country, and in all likelihood he will avoid the appearance of having
come to rest by traveling the globe in pursuit of a just outcome.
Every junior diplomat understands the way this game is played –
certainly, Colin Powell does, which is why he worked the phones so
hard attempting to arrange a permanent-looking exile for Aristide.
And this is why South Africa speaks very carefully on the subject,
understanding that the Americans are waiting to exploit any slip in
language.

The African National Congress government of South Africa has no
reason to fear domestic fallout from association with Aristide, who
is at present Black Enemy Number One of the racist superpower. That’s
a badge of honor among the ANC’s base. Only Americans believe
American nonsense.

TRUTH Act

Black Congresspersons Barbara Lee (D-CA) and John Conyers (D-MI) on
Monday introduced the TRUTH Act, an acronym for The Responsibility to
Uncover the Truth about Haiti. “The Bush administration's efforts in
the overthrow of a democratically elected government must be
investigated,” said Lee. “All of the evidence brought forward thus
far suggests that the administration has, in essence, carried out a
form of regime change, a different variation than it took in Iraq,
but still regime change.” The bill calls for a bipartisan (five each
from both parties) TRUTH Commission modeled on California Rep. Henry
Waxman’s Weapons of Mass Destruction panel. “The American people and
the international community deserve to know the truth,” Rep. Lee
explained, “and this bill will offer the opportunity to investigate
the long-term origins of the overthrow of the Haitian government and
the impact of our failure to protect democracy." Lee and Conyers want
to know:


1. Did the U.S. Government impede democracy and contribute to
the overthrow of the Aristide government?
2. Under what circumstances did President Jean-Bertrand Aristide
resign, and what was the role of the United States Government in
bringing about his departure? 
3. To what extent did the U.S. impede efforts by the
international community, particularly the Caribbean Community
(CARICOM) countries, to prevent the overthrow of the
democratically-elected Government of Haiti?
4. What was the role of the United States in influencing
decisions regarding Haiti at the United Nations Security Council and
in discussions between Haiti and other countries that were willing to
assist in the preservation of the democratically-elected Government
of Haiti by sending security forces to Haiti?
5. Was U.S. assistance provided or were U.S. personnel involved
in supporting, directly or indirectly, the forces opposed to the
government of President Aristide?
6. Was U.S. bilateral assistance channeled through
nongovernmental organizations that were directly or indirectly
associated with political groups actively involved in fomenting
hostilities or violence toward the government of President Aristide?

The TRUTH Act is supported by 23 other members of Congress. It
closely resembles a seven-point line of questioning compiled by
former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark (see “The Coup Must Not
Stand,” English translation, Hait-Progres, March 3). The similarities
are not surprising, since the broad outlines of the crime are visible
to the entire world. “The U.S. Congress must investigate,” said
Clark, “if the Bush administration policy of unilateral wars of
aggression, violations of international law and the U.S. Constitution
and regime change is to be stopped before the U.S. loses its last
friend and creates a wave of terrorism that will engulf the planet
for years.”

Jesse Jackson saw the same “U.S.-engineered coup against Aristide”
observed by everyone else on Earth – with the exception of those
hopelessly damaged by cognition-crippling racism. Most of the facts
are clear and agreed upon by “both sides,” said the civil rights
leader. “Nothing more is needed to establish that the Bush
administration was directly implicated in a coup of the elected
government of Haiti. The only disagreement is in the details:

”Was the CIA, which had long ties to the leaders of the rebels, aware
of the planned rebellion before it was launched? Did it assist or
'nod' ' to the rebels when asked? Did it know of the flow of arms to
the rebels? If it knew, did it do anything to intercept or
impede that flow, or to warn the Haitian government or the regional
allies?

“It is vital that Congress hold hearings on what the CIA and the
State Department and the Defense Department knew and how they acted
on that knowledge.

”But even without any further evidence, there is sufficient
agreement on the facts to establish that this administration aided
and abetted the coup against Aristide. And now it is working to put
back in power the very Haitian elites that its ideologues had
supported from the beginning.”

Kerry and Kucinich views

Senator John Kerry is making some of the right noises on the Haiti
issue, and calls for investigations into Aristide’s overthrow.
According to last Sunday’s (maliciously biased) New York Times:

Had he been sitting in the Oval Office last weekend as rebel forces
were threatening to enter Port-au-Prince, Senator John Kerry says, he
would have sent an international force to protect Haiti's widely
disliked elected leader [!], Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

"I would have been prepared to send troops immediately, period," Mr.
Kerry said on Friday, expressing astonishment that President Bush,
who talks of supporting democratically elected leaders, withheld any
aid and then helped spirit Mr. Aristide into exile after saying the
United States could not protect him.

"Look, Aristide was no picnic, and did a lot of things wrong," Mr.
Kerry said. But Washington "had understandings in the region about
the right of a democratic regime to ask for help. And we contravened
all of that. I think it's a terrible message to the region,
democracies, and it's shortsighted."

Kerry knows all about the Bush regime’s Latin America and Caribbean
team. A number of the current coup-makers were deeply involved in
Reagan- and Bush Sr.-era arming of Nicaraguan contras, fattening
military dictators and protecting cocaine dealing by both, back when
Kerry chaired the Senate Committee on Drugs, Law Enforcement and
Foreign Policy, in the Eighties. For a time it seemed as if the Kerry
Commission might vigorously pursue the CIA-crack cocaine scandal, but
he eventually lost interest.

Dennis Kucinich, as we have come to expect, runs a much better line
on Haiti, but he will not become president. Kucinich also calls for
an investigation into Aristide’s removal.

”But that investigation should not be left in the hands of the Bush
Administration. I don't trust the Bush Administration, and I don't
think you do either. That investigation must be undertaken by the
United Nations, the OAS, and the Caribbean community. And I would
further suggest that that investigation extend to the roles that the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund played in creating the
framework for failure….

“We must all be mindful and very, very aware of the attempts that
will be made – as they were in Iraq – to install the Haliburtons and
the Bechtels as the "rebuilders" of Haiti. There may not be oil, but
there will be cash. And whenever there is, you know who will be the
first ones to cash in. If the United States is in control, that means
George Bush is in control. And we’ve seen over and over again what
that means.”

The truth is that whether George Bush or John Kerry is “in control,”
American foreign policy structures are designed to undermine popular
movements and governments at every point of contact. George Bush did
not create the Haitian (or Venezuelan, or Argentinian, or Bolivian)
miseries – he simply added a more demonic layer of horror. These U.S.
foreign policy “structures of subversion” are institutionally
connected to the Democratic Party and organized labor, and must be
dismantled, root and branch.

Trojan Horse endowment

The National Endowment for the Democracy is a slick, 1983 Reagan
administration invention, a “reform” purportedly designed to make
U.S. foreign policy more transparent in the wake of Seventies
revelations of massive CIA subversion of foreign governments and
political movements. As William Blum put it in his 2000 book, “Rogue
State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower,” “the idea was that
the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing
covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma
associated with CIA covert activities…. It was a masterpiece. Of
politics, of public relations and of cynicism.”

“Trojan Horse” is an apt description of the NED which, rather than
curtail CIA activities, created (yet another) institutional link
between the political subversion arm of the U.S. government and the
Republican and Democratic parties, the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce-affiliated Center for International Private Enterprise, and
the AFL-CIO, which divide among themselves most of the NED’s budget.
Although $35 million is an unimpressive portion of the federal budget
(George Bush proposes to double the amount this year), the NED has
proven a highly effective mechanism for hands-on American
manipulation of the politics of targeted nations. In Venezuela and
Haiti, it has empowered and emboldened murderous, fascist-minded
elites. Blum explains how it works:

In a multitude of ways, NED meddles in the internal affairs of
foreign countries by supplying funds, technical know-how, training,
educational materials, computers, faxes, copiers, automobiles, and so
on, to selected political groups, civic organizations, labor unions,
dissident movements, student groups, book publishers, newspapers,
other media, etc.  NED programs generally impart the basic philosophy
that working people and other citizens are best served under a system
of free enterprise, class cooperation, collective bargaining, minimal
government intervention in the economy, and opposition to socialism
in any shape or form.  A free-market economy is equated with
democracy, reform, and growth; and the merits of foreign investment
are emphasized.

The NED took American intervention in the domestic affairs of foreign
nations out of the shadows and made it respectable – a brilliant
political coup. Most sinisterly, the Trojan Horse NED subverts the
AFL-CIO and the Democratic Party, acting as a “point of contact”
between these institutions and covert U.S. operatives (although
unionists and Democrats will deny this, and some may actually be
oblivious to the company they keep) and with corporate agents bent on
further exploitation of foreign lands. In Haiti and Venezuela, this
American public-private-labor project became inseparable from
coup-making.

As relentlessly coercive, bipartisan (Clinton Democrats – Bush
Republicans) U.S. “free trade” policies strangle the internal
economies of Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, the NED
buttresses or, if need be, invents local political groupings that
facilitate the American corporate assault on national institutions
and sovereignty – a true Trojan Horse.

In the case of Haiti, the International Republican Institute
component of the NED, under the slogan “party building,” almost
single-handedly constructed the “civil society” political
“opposition” that now advises the U.S. occupiers in Port-au-Prince
(and nurtured the armed elements in their Dominican Republic
sanctuaries, as well). But it was Bill Clinton who put Jean Bertrand
Aristide in a structural straightjacket on his return from exile in
1994, as Noam Chomsky explains in this week’s Zmag, by forcing the
leader of the poor to “adopt the program of the defeated US candidate
in the 1990 elections, a former World Bank official who had received
14% of the vote.

As democracy was thereby restored, the World Bank announced that "The
renovated state must focus on an economic strategy centered on the
energy and initiative of Civil Society, especially the private
sector, both national and foreign." That has the merit of honesty:
Haitian Civil Society includes the tiny rich elite and US
corporations, but not the vast majority of the population, the
peasants and slum-dwellers who had committed the grave sin of
organizing to elect their own president. World Bank officers
explained that the neoliberal program would benefit the "more open,
enlightened, business class" and foreign investors, but assured us
that the program "is not going to hurt the poor to the extent it has
in other countries" subjected to structural adjustment, because the
Haitian poor already lacked minimal protection from proper economic
policy, such as subsidies for basic goods.

It is clear that the Clinton Administration/World Bank/International
Republican Institute position was that the poor – the vast bulk of
the population – were so profoundly marginalized economically as to
count for nothing. Aristide represented, from this point of view, no
one. “Civil society” became a euphemism for the tiny elite – a number
of them fantastically wealthy – who despite their riches were
pampered, coddled and guided through the NED-financed “party
building” enterprise, better described as a nation-destroying
project. Haiti is a ruin.

During recent years the AFL-CIO wing of the NED public-private-labor
partnership in Haiti appears essentially inactive. The only project
posted on its Solidarity Center site is publication of a report that
“describes and analyzes the shameful state of worker rights in
Haiti.” This is probably for the best, given the AFL-CIO’s record in
Venezuela, where NED money funded a labor alliance with filthy rich
fascists bent on establishing a rightwing dictatorship.

In his March 2 Znet article, “What Is the AFL-CIO doing in
Venezuela?” Alberto Ruiz points to continued AFL-CIO funding of the
Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV), whose leadership sided
with the oligarchy in the 2002 attempted coup against President Hugo
Chavez. “The embarrassment suffered by the AFL-CIO over its pre-coup
assistance to the CTV has not deterred it from continuing to aid the
CTV subsequent to the coup. In response to a FOIA request by the
Venezuela Solidarity Committee, documents have surfaced which
demonstrate the AFL-CIO has continued to support the CTV up through
the year 2003 – again with NED monies.”

The NED was poison when first concocted in 1983. It is a morally and
politically corrupting abomination that subverts not only foreign
governments and movements, but also the AFL-CIO, the Democratic
Party, and the American body politic.

Point number six of Congresspersons Lee and Conyers TRUTH Act asks
the question: “Was U.S. bilateral assistance channeled through
nongovernmental organizations that were directly or indirectly
associated with political groups actively involved in fomenting
hostilities or violence toward the government of President Aristide?”

The answer is: Yes, funds from the National Endowment for Democracy
financed hostility and violence against Aristide’s government, and
are funding coup-plotters in Venezuela.

We cannot even begin to make Haiti or anywhere else in the world safe
for human development if we fail to confront U.S. government
structures that subvert national independence. The National Endowment
for Democracy sucks American civil society into its vortex of global
subversion. It must be dismantled, root and branch.
.