22758: radtimes: Did the Bush Administration Allow a Network of Right-Wing Republicans to Foment a Violent Coup in Haiti? (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: radtimes <resist@best.com>

  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/20/1327215
Tuesday, July 20th, 2004
Did the Bush Administration Allow a Network of Right-Wing Republicans to
Foment a Violent Coup in Haiti?
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We speak with Max Blumenthal contibutor to Salon.com and author of a new
investigative piece that examines the role of the United States in
destabilizing the democratically-elected government of Jean
Bertrand-Aristide through the International Republican Institute, a
federally-funded, nonprofit political group backed by powerful Republicans
close to the Bush administration. [includes rush transcript]
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Haiti's unelected Prime Minister Gerard Latortue is in Washington today to
attend a two-day conference at the World Bank headquarters to urge
international donors to help the new U.S.-backed Haitian government. The
World Bank has estimated about $1.3 billion is needed to help rebuild the
country which is the poorest in the Americas.
The allocation of funds will be guided by the Interim Cooperation Framework,
an assessment of Haiti"s financial needs completed earlier this month by the
European Commission, the Inter-American Development Bank, the United Nations
and the World Bank.

Critics warn that the program's failure to involve Haitians in the planning
could end up sending nearly all the funds into the pockets of foreigners and
Haitian elite, with little reaching the people in need. A protest is being
organized outside the meeting today.

U.S. Treasury Undersecretary John Taylor said the United States would
contribute $232 million and the Inter-American Development Bank $400
million. But what many people don't know is that U.S. federal funds have
been flowing into Haiti for the past six years. A federally-funded group
called the International Republican Institute, or IRI, has funneled some $3
million into Haiti to destabilize the democratically-elected government of
Jean Bertrand Aristide.

The IRI, a nonprofit political group backed by powerful Republicans close to
the Bush administration, initiated the destabilization of Aristide's
government by imposing harsh sanctions, training Aristide's political
opponents and encouraging them to reject internationally-sanctioned
power-sharing agreements. Haiti's political crisis eventually escalated into
violence until Aristide was overthrown in February of this year in what he
calls a modern-day kidnapping in the service of a coup backed by the United
States.


Max Blumenthal, contributor to Salon.com and author of the new piece "The
Other Regime Change: Did the Bush administration allow a network of
right-wing Republicans to foment a violent coup in Haiti?"

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AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Max Blumenthal, a contributor to salon.com,
author of the new piece, "The Other Regime Change: Did The Bush
Administration Allow a Network of Right Wing Republicans to Foment a Violent
Coup in Haiti?" Welcome to DemocracyNow!, Max Blumenthal.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: It's good to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: Good to have you with us. Why don't you start out in the same
way that you began your piece, "The Other Regime Change." Talk about Stanley
Lucas, who he is, and what kind of support those that were involved in
toppling the democratically elected president Aristide, came to power?

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, to tell you about Stanley Lucas, and he is the program
officer for the International Republican Institute, or I.R.I.'s Haiti
program. I.R.I. is active in 50 countries worldwide on a mission to "promote
democracy". In many of their programs, through their means, what they have
demonstrated is something quite different. They have demonstrated -- I.R.I
has demonstrated a penchant for backing opponents in regimes deemed hostile
to the U.S. and specifically to conservative interests, and I.R.I.'s program
in Haiti has been probably its most bellicose thanks to Stanley Lucas. In
Haiti there's two sectors of Haitian society that are the traditional
obstructionists to progressive change. Number one, that's the industrial
sector of the mulatto elite who run the sweatshops and lead the civil
society wing of Aristide's opposition. And two, there's the military, which
guarantees the conditions by which the elite can operate their sweatshops.
Aristide disbanded the military in 1995, so, you know, the military hates
him. Stanley Lucas is a bridge between these two sectors. He was schooled in
Haiti's finest schools with members of the mulatto elite. At the same time,
he comes from a wealthy land owning family close to the Duvalier regime,
which ruled Haiti with an iron fist for decades. His family is close to the
military. Two of Stanley Lucas's cousins massacred -- organized a massacre
of 250 peasants, in 1987, who were protesting for land reform after the
Duvalier regime crumbled. The massacre -- it was a terrible massacre
documented by Amnesty International and described to me by someone who
witnessed it firsthand. You would think that someone from this background
wouldn't be able to get a position at a group like the International
Republican Institute that promotes democracy. However, Stanley Lucas is a
valuable asset to them. He is a judo master who allegedly trained the
military in counter insurgency tactics after the Duvalier regime collapsed.
He was hired in 1992, but I don't know why he was hired. When I asked
I.R.I.'s communications director why he was hired, he refused to tell me
why, or what his duties consisted of between 1992 and 1998. A lot of people
I spoke to suspect that Stanley Lucas is a CIA asset, including former
ambassador -- former U.S. Ambassador in the region. So, when Stanley Lucas
was hired in 1992, the country was controlled by a military junta called
FRAPP, which had ousted Aristide in 1990 -- in the first coup in that
country. Frappe was busy massacring thousands of Aristide supporters. One
off the recorded sources, who lived with Lucas, working with Lucas, in
Haiti, told me he saw documents indicating that while Lucas was working for
I.R.I., he was being paid by Michelle Francois, who was a notorious FRAPP
leader. Stanley Lucas is an impeccable dresser, a smooth operater and a
lady's man with a broad smile and childlike demeanor that will put his
enemies at ease. You have behind that facade an evil man who has been given
way too much power. In my piece, I compared him to Achmed Chalabi, because
Stanley Lucas is a card-carrying Republican who managed to ingratiate
himself with powerful Republicans in Washington. He lobbied for the
opposition to Aristide and managed to tie quite a bit of funding to them and
introduced a number of Aristide's most virulent opponents to powerful
Republicans in Washington. When I.R.I.'s campaign to destabilize Haiti began
in earnest in 1998 with a $2 million grant in mostly taxpayer money from the
U.S. Agency for International Development, Lucas hosted some of Aristide's
most virulent opponents in political training sessions. What he did was he
merged all of these disparate groups into one big party called the
Democratic Convergence. Now, the Democratic Convergence is not a traditional
political party, it's more like the political wing of a coup, because the
strategy that it took was to forego the democratic process entirely. Boycott
elections and initiate what seemed like an endless sequence of provocative
protests. Between 2000 and 2002, the Democratic Convergence rejected over 20
internationally sanctioned power sharing agreements which heightened the
tension and provoked more violence. At the time, the U.S. Ambassador, who
was named Brian Dean Curran, a Clinton appointee, who was a highly respected
career diplomat, uncovered evidence that Stanley Lucas was the one
encouraging the Democratic Convergence to reject the compromises and to stay
out of the democratic process. When he presented this evidence to the U.S.
Agency for International Development, and he asked them to block Stanley
Lucas from the program, Bush's Assistant Secretary for the Western
Hemisphere, Roger Noriega, apparently stepped in, and within four
months—Lucas was barred for four months, but after four months, he was back.
So, when he -- when Lucas returned to the program, he retaliated against
Ambassador Curran. What he did was he spread salacious rumors in
Port-au-Prince in -- and in Washington about Curran's personal life. If I
repeated these rumors, it would make Dick Cheney look like Ward Cleaver.
It's unheard of for someone like Lucas to actually sabotage a U.S.
Ambassador. Lucas threatened two embassy officials and told them they would
be fired once the real -- "Real" U.S. policy was implemented. In 2003,
Curran was forced to resign in disgust because of Lucas's activities and the
fact that Bush administration seemed to give Lucas their tacit approval. A
number of embassy officials I spoke to were removed from Haiti by Roger
Noriega for opposing what Stanley Lucas was doing in part. So this whole sad
episode that led up to the coup was allowed to occur because of Bush's
policy of studied neglect in South America.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Max Blumenthal who has written a piece in
salon.com called "The Other Regime Change." We'll be back with him in a
minute as we talk about Haiti and move on in our look back at conventions
past. Today we'll be focusing on the conventions of 1964, and 1968. Stay
with us.

AMY GOODMAN: This is DemocracyNow!, the War and Peace report. I'm Amy
Goodman. The unelected Prime Minister of Haiti, Latortue is in Washington.
There are protests outside the meeting that is being called of international
donors to support Haiti right now. We are joined on the phone by Max
Blumenthal, an investigative reporter with salon.com, who has done a piece
called "The Other Regime Change." "The Other Regime Change" looks at what
has happened in Haiti. Did the Bush administration allow a network of Right
Wing Republicans to foment a violent coup in Haiti? We are talking about
Stanley Lucas, who heads up the International Republican Institute. What
about U.S. Congress members? You talk about senator Dodd asking questions
about who is the liaison with the I.R.I. in Haiti.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah. There were a number of confrontations between senator
Dodd, who happens to have one of the -- you know, one of great researchers
in Congress working for him, who probably knows some things about Stanley
Lucas that I'd like to know. Dodd has had a number of heated confrontations
with Roger Noriega, Bush's Assistant Secretary of State for the Western
Hemisphere, during Noriega's confirmation. Dodd asked Noriega, you know, do
you know Stanley Lucas. Are you in contact with him? Noriega sort of ducked
the question. It was a good question because we saw -- you know, we saw the
perils of the collaboration between Roger Noriega and Stanley Lucas about a
year after Noriega's confirmation. To give background on Roger Noriega, he
is a former staffer to Jesse Helms, who initiated some of the most draconian
sanctions against Haiti, in an effort to sabotage Aristide and by extension,
the Clinton administration, who returned Aristide to power by force in 1994.
You know, after the coup, there were a number of questions that Dodd had for
Noriega about -- about whether -- you know, Stanley Lucas was barred from
the I.R.I.'s program like he was supposed to be, and Roger Noriega didn't
have a good answer. Another question that Dodd asked Roger Noriega was
whether Stanley Lucas had worked with Guy Philippe. Guy Philippe is the face
on the violent wing of the coup. You know, at the time the destabilization
program was --

AMY GOODMAN: Max, we have 30 seconds.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Now, Guy Philippe is the U.S. trained former police chief
who led the coup into Port-au-Prince. I.R.I. issued a press release stating
they have never dealt with Guy Philippe. I reached Guy Philippe in an
interview by cell phone. He told me that he and Stanley Lucas were long-time
friends. An embassy official told me on condition of anonymity that he
witnessed Lucas conferring with Guy Philippe in Ecuador in 2001, which is
where Philippe lived at the time and was trained by U.S. Forces. So I think
this raises serious questions about whether the International Republican
Institute actually collided with the violent insurgents who attacked the
presidential palace and drove Aristide out by force.

AMY GOODMAN: Max Blumenthal, I want to thank you for being with us. His
piece is at salon.com, "The Other Regime Change."
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