20910: Holmstead: American Review 1997 (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

FROM: John Holmstead   <cyberkismet4@yahoo.com>


Marilyn is absolutely right about Novak's less then
stellar record when it comes to Haiti.


The Friends of Robert Novak
How a pillar of American punditry advocated
for Latin American drug traffickers

by Carol Cantor


THERE'S THIS STORY:
It was announced in early March 1997 that Michel
Francois, the former chief of police of
Port-au-Prince, Haiti, had been indicted in the United
States for drug smuggling. Francois, who has been
extradited from Honduras, is described by justice
officials as a key figure in the cocaine trade for the
last decade, closely connected with Colombian drug
cartels.

Francois was chief of police under the Haitian junta
regime of Raoul Cedras, the regime that took power by
ousting Haiti’s elected president, Jean-Bertrand
Aristide--and the regime that was in turn ousted when
American troops led an occupation of Haiti that
restored Aristide to power. Francois's fairly modest
title was deceptive: he was not simply a police
functionary. In fact, he was generally considered the
power behind Cedras' throne, the fist of a
bloody-handed junta.

Francois' trial should be worth keeping an eye on.
Haiti was a major cocaine transit point between South
America and the U.S. While he was sending massive
quantities of cocaine to America, Francois was the
head of Haiti's anti-drug agency--an agency that the
CIA helped set up. So the trial could bring out some
interesting and embarrassing facts.


AND THEN THERE'S THIS STORY:
The fate of Haiti became grist for the pundit mill
during 1993 and 1994,
when the Clinton administration was faced with the
task of forcing the junta out. Would Clinton actually
deploy troops there? What would be the political costs
of doing so, and would he be willing to bear them?

Right-wing pundits and politicians in America
generally denigrated Haiti's exiled elected president,
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and attempted to prevent his
re-installation. There is much that could be said of a
campaign that, by encouraging the junta to reject a
negotiated exit, made the invasion inevitable. But as
for politicians, they are like the rest of us in some
ways: they have to roll the dice and take their
chances, and at some point they're accountable, if we
care to hold them to account. So the role of
politicians is
in a way less interesting than that of pundits--and in
the case of Haiti, the role of one pundit in
particular: Robert Novak.

Novak's voice in the Haiti "debate" was singular. He
didn't content himself, as others did, with citing
discredited CIA reports that questioned Aristide's
sanity. From early on, Novak was not only
anti-Aristide but explicitly pro-junta, sympathetic to
Raoul Cedras and Michel Francois. "Why So Hard on
Haiti's Military?" he wondered in a Washington Post
column of 10/21/93.

Novak made numerous trips to Haiti while the junta was
in power, coming back with reports on the staunch
determination of the Haitian military to fight off an
American incursion, reports he based on the interviews
he conducted with junta leaders wherein they outlined
their strategy for dealing with a potential American
occupation.

The telling thing about these columns is how much
they're like any other Novak column. Novak, as
pundit-watchers know, is a servant with a particular
assignment. He's a message-carrier, mostly from one
clique of Republicans to another. He's the guy who
tells Jack Kemp not to get so enamored of "the blacks"
that he forgets about the plutocrats; the guy who is
tasked to identify the Official Party Scapegoat for
disasters like the Dole campaign; the one who runs up
the flag for the new boy considered most likely to
give tax breaks to the correct caste.

Novak carries messages, rumors, and warnings. Many of
Novak's Haiti columns were, in fact, warnings carried
by Novak from the Haitian junta to the Clinton
administration, warnings about the terrible things
that would happen if American troops set foot in
Haiti. Warnings like this: "At that meeting, Cedras
discussed the passive-resistance strategy described to
me by one of the industrialists present: 'When the
Americans come, members of the army and police will go
home, take off their uniforms and put them in the
closet. People in the streets can run wild. The
looting will be like you had in Los Angeles. Can you
imagine your Marines shooting down our civilians?' "
(Novak, Washington Post, 5/12/94). Like most of
Novak's columns, these were intended to have
particular effect on a particular audience. They were
intended to warn the Clinton administration away, and
thus keep the Haitian junta in power.

The claims that the junta had a plan of resistance and
that American troops would be shooting down mobs of
Haitians continued until just before the invasion.
"The President's advisers believe that Cedras and his
two colleagues proscribed by the United Nations, Brig
Gen. Philippe Biamby and Lt. Col. Michel Francois,
will flee the country once the Americans land. But
Biamby and Francois may well take to the bush as
guerrilla leaders. Francois, the hard-boiled
Port-au-Prince police chief, is particularly proud of
his ability to conceal his identity." (Novak, The
Washington Post, 9/12/94).

Indeed, Novak's urgent transmission of the junta's
messages continued even after the invasion troops were
on the ground. A particular peak of absurdity was
reached in a column called "Cedras for President?"
(Novak, The Washington Post, 9/22/94), written after
American troops had landed but before Cedras had left
the country. "Just how far the actual settlement in
Haiti is from what was envisioned at the White House
is shown by the fact that Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras not
only intends to stay in his country after he steps
down as commander-in-chief but is being seriously
urged by close supporters to run for president in
1996."

It was all bluff, of course. The junta leaders left
Haiti a few weeks after the invasion. (The
"hard-boiled" Francois left before the others, fleeing
to the Dominican Republic.) The only plan that these
supposed military men had in place was to run away.
This was hardly surprising to anyone who was working
from reality instead of from the pathetic shreds of
self-romanticization with which the junta tried to
cover its atrocities and that Novak appeared to buy
wholesale. Since Biamby and Francois had no support
outside of the tiny caste of Haitian wealthy, they
could hardly expect anyone to join them in
"the bush" for a guerrilla war. And Cedras could
hardly expect to win anything like a fair election.

Novak's Haiti columns also suggested that claims by
the Haitian resistance (and the Clinton
administration) of atrocities committed by the junta
against Haitian civilians were so much "unverified
propaganda," as he put it at one point--and black
folks' liberal hogwash at that:


"The rationale for Clinton’s tougher stance, demanded
by the Congressional Black Caucus, must be more than
an abstraction of saving democracy. Sanctions and even
military intervention would have to be based on
rescuing Haiti from a human rights disaster where the
Haitian army kills innocent civilians.
Actually, the military and police presence here seems
exceptionally low, as I observed Sunday and Monday
while spending 31 straight hours in a four-wheel
vehicle traveling through the Haitian back country.
Everywhere, I asked
politically neutral people about official violence
...." (Novak,
The Washington Post, May 12, 1994)


And the "politically neutral people," a hospital
administrator and two foreign missionaries, assured
Novak that there was no violence against
civilians--oh, except violence initiated by Aristide
supporters.
At the time this column was written, Aristide
supporters were being killed daily in Haiti. It is
simply a documented fact that the junta did kill
thousands of people, while Aristide's supporters
(perhaps 80 percent of the population) were unarmed
and terrorized. And this isn't a "retrospective
fact"--the violence committed by the junta was being
observed and documented as
it occurred.

But it's also the case that the junta's role in the
cocaine trade was known at the time that Novak was
flacking for Cedras, Francois, and their associates.
Any informed observer would have known that junta
members and supporters had been implicated in drug
trafficking. Many Haitians believe that the
anti-Aristide coup (and much else in Haiti) was a
matter not just of politics but of
narco-politics--that Aristide was overthrown largely
because he'd attempted to choke off the Haitian
Connection. Novak, however, need have looked no
farther than his own newspaper to get a hint. "U.S.
Investigates Allegations of Haitian Drug Trafficking,"
read the headline of a Washington Post article of
5/21/94. The article, by Pierre Thomas, named Michel
Francois as one of the targets of the investigation.

Novak, as noted, is a messenger boy. In his role as
messenger for the tax-cuts-for-rich-people wing of the
Republican Party, he carries rumors helpful to the
cause and warnings to anyone in the party who might
threaten it. And in his role as American mouthpiece
for the Haitian wing of a drug cartel, Novak carried
warnings to an administration seen to threaten the
continuity of cocaine trade profits.

Novak was an apologist for a regime whose brutalities
he could have, should have, must have known about. And
he was a servant and mouthpiece of a drug cartel, when
he could have, should have, must have known exactly
what it was that he was serving. That's certainly how
it looks from here, out in the world.

But Novak's a pundit, remember? Dead Haitians, cocaine
pouring into America courtesy of the junta and the
"pillars of old Haitian families" that supported
it--that's, like, real stuff, out here, in the world.
That's not what pundits deal with. Not Novak and not
his colleagues, whether they play "liberal" or
"conservative" roles in Washington's Pundo Theater. If
anybody in the insular pack of pundo-journalists had
thought about real stuff, even had a living awareness
of the existence of real stuff, they might have
wondered why the hell was Novak working so hard on
behalf of murderous cocaine merchants, and whether
coke money was paying for his trips to Haiti. Is
anybody on The Capitol Gang asking Robert Novak about
Michel Francois? * * * *

(c) 1997. Material in this article is copyrighted by
The Allodium. All rights reserved. Material may not be
reproduced without editorial permission.



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