28973: (comment) Chamberlain: 28933: Dailey re 28908 John Holmstead (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

John Holmstead writes:
> Everyone, including the widow and RSF, put forth the theory that Aristide
had given Toussaint orders to have Haiti's most prominent journalist
assassinated.

Montas and RSF have never said this.  They have simply hinted (if that) at
the possible involvement in some way of "Tabarre" (the presidential
entourage) and focused on Aristide's documented, consistent (and
successful) efforts to undermine the murder investigation.  Can the
Aristide people tell us why on earth he should want to do this?



Dailey writes:
> Ann Auguste had the charges against her dropped. So did Louis-Jodel
Chamblain.  All this proves is that the Haitian judicial system is easy to
manipulate, something we knew already.

Indeed.  When the person released (Auguste) is on your side, the justice
system is said to be working brilliantly, when the person is your enemy
(Chamblain), it's suddenly the worst system ever.  An old trick.  As we
know, justice in Haiti -- who gets put in jail or let out -- depends almost
entirely on who's in power, with in this case (Auguste), perhaps a decent
delay so as not to make that too obvious...



Potemaksonje@yahoo.com, commenting on the Barahona article in Counterpunch,
says triumphantly that:
> NED funding (Example: Cuba program) were only put on the RSF website
after Diana Barahona exposed them in her past article on Counterpunch.

The Center for Free Cuba subsidy has been listed in RSF's
publicly-available (see website) annual accounts since _2002_, yet Barahona
"exposed them" in 2005 ??  In 2004, this grant was 1.3% of RSF's total
funding, but I suppose that's good enough to suggest RSF is under strict
hourly orders from the CIA...

Barahona (May 17, 2005) is also pleased to elevate the status of one
Thierry Meyssan (grandly called "president of the Paris daily, Red
Voltaire"), a French online activist best known for his conspiracy theories
about everything, notably that no plane crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11
and that the photos of it were forged...  Barahona says he too "revealed"
the Cuba grant -- three years after it had been publicly known...

She also quotes "Jean-Guy Allard," a slavish Havana-based hack who once
wrote a long article about RSF boss Robert Ménard and other journalists
flying to LA and being refused entry when all the time Ménard had never
left Paris...



> Lucie Morillon, RSF's Washington representative, confirmed they are
indeed receiving payments from the Center for a Free Cuba, and that the
contract requires them to inform Europeans about the repression against
journalists in Cuba and to support the families of journalists in prison.

Barahona's implication is that the reporting of this repression and support
for the families of prisoners is sinister and should not be done.



> But (Morillon) denied that the anti-Cuba declarations on radio and
television, full-page ads in Parisian dailies, posters, leafletting at
airports and an April 2003 occupation of the Cuban tourism office in Paris
were
aimed at discouraging tourism to the island.

The campaign, as I recall, was simply to make those tourists who _did_ go
to Cuba, aware of the state of press freedom there.



Potemaksonje@yahoo.com says:

> No evidence shows Aristide ... promoted necklacing. ...  An accepted myth
reported over and over again transforming itself into the accepted
narrative.

Aristide clearly did advocate necklacing (though not in so many words).
Read his 28 September 2001 speech (two days before his overthrow) and two
earlier ones alluding to it (in July and August).  He later claimed that
when he spoke (Sept 28) of "an instrument in your hands ... it smells good,
it feels good, give them what they deserve!" he was simply talking about
the Constitution...  Nobody in his audience would have remotely understood
it as meaning the Constitution, and neither did he.  As a footnote, I
remember very well a private conversation with him in 1988, when he was
still a priest, in which he told me Macoutes should be killed.  I'm not
judging him, just reporting what he said.



Barahona (Aug 1, 2006) says of RSF:

> "the group manufactured propaganda against the popular democratic
government of Haiti.

As I remember, it simply reported the many attacks on journalists and
installations by Aristide gangs and called on the authorities to do
something about them.



> RSF branded the Haitian president a "predator of press freedom" after
linking him, without any evidence whatsoever, to the murders of journalists
Jean Dominique and Brignol Lindor.

But the killers of Lindor openly boasted they were Aristide people
(everyone knew that anyway in Petit-Goave) and that they killed him.  They
weren't arrested (which is probably why they felt confident enough to admit
what they'd done).



> It prominently featured photographs of the journalists' bodies on its
website, turning them into poster victims of Aristide's alleged repression
against the press.

Alleged, when the killers have admitted it...?



> Note the intentional mistranslation of Lavalas (which means flood, not
avalanche), and the way RSF tied the gang of killers to "Aristide's Lavalas
movement"

See above.  The best translation of Lavalas is "avalanche" (a 'cleansing'
mass of mud/water that rushes down the mountain sweeping all before it).  A
flood is only water, often just sitting there.  What on earth was
"intentional" about the choice of word?  It was simply a mistranslation.
But... if one is a "card-carrying" member of the Rewriters of History,
worshipping at The Church of the Perpetual Conspiracy, anything goes...



> Jean Dominique was murdered in April of 2000, many months before Aristide
was even elected

Barahona needs to do some basic research on Haiti (a country evidently
little known to her).  She would then know the enormous power of Aristide
at that time, under Préval I.  But she seems content to quote fervent
propagandists for Aristide by way of "evidence."



> Necklace slander: The "necklace" allegations, as noted by Erwin Stotzky
in his book Silencing the Guns of Hait, referred to a 1991 speech given by
Aristide at the UN in which he vowed to "turn the streets red" employing
the well-known kreyol protest mechanism of burning tires, with no explicit
reference to "necklacing" or any method of violence.

He never made any such speech to the UN.  His famous pre-coup speech was on
28 Sept, when he got back to Haiti (see above).  But he never said he'd
"turn the streets red."  Stotzky, for all his academic cloak, is a
shameless propagandist.  Another own-goal for The Rewriters of History.



> Three suspects (Ti Lou, Guimy and Markington) were arrested in connection
with Dominique's murder under the Aristide government but they mysteriously
escaped in a "prison mutiny" under Latortue's watch in February of 2005 and
were never apprehended.

There are "mysterious" escapes all the time in Haiti during prison riots
(which are not themselves usually puzzling).  Several key suspects in the
Dominique case escaped from prison during Aristide's government too.
Nothing new.



        Greg Chamberlain