Wayne Madsen Report: Haiti
www.waynemadsenreport.com

U.S. troops in Haiti to prevent Aristide's return
January 15-17, 2010

President Obama, in keeping with his CIA lineage, has permitted the Pentagon under Robert Gates to take charge of the humanitarian relief efforts in Haiti. As Cuban and Venezuelan field hospitals were already rendering first aid and trauma care to Haitians injured in the mega-quake, Obama was gathered at a White House photo op with Vice President Joe Biden and other Cabinet officers to state that U.S. military reconnaissance aircraft would fly over Haiti to assess the situation from the air. A U.S. P-3 Orion spy plane from Comalapa air base in El Salvador was dispatched to conduct the surveillance operation, an act that was already being accomplished by earth satellites, the images of which were available on Google Maps.

As Obama was garnering praise from such sycophantic White House outlets as the largely-discredited Washington Post, an 37-person Icelandic search-and-rescue team was pulling trapped earthquake victims from the rubble of collapsed buildings in Port-au-Prince. Iceland, a nation bankrupted by Obama's banker pals on Wall Street and in the City of London, was able to react in a way that the slumbering and oafish dying super-power, the United States, could not -- with action aimed at providing immediate assistance to the Haitian people.

Obama's generals and admirals, who are mostly more concerned about their appearance than in taking charge and moving out, were still scratching their heads about where to land the U.S. Marines and 82nd Airborne. In fact, military aircraft carrying weapons and other war supplied crowded the airport aprons at Port-au-Prince airport that could be used by planes from other countries carrying much-needed food, water, and medical supplies. Argentine doctors already on the scene in Haiti complained that they were running out of simple sewing kits being used as stitches for the injured who had undergone surgery.

When U.S. Special Operations forces hit the ground at Port-au-Prince airport they pointed their weapons at desperate Haitians at the airport perimeter who wanted help not a gun pointed in their faces. Russia, Spain, Mexico, Chile, and Guatemala were rushing in food and water for Haiti.

Meanwhile, Obama was phoning former President George W. Bush to ask for his a former President Bill Clinton to launch a fund drive for Haitian earthquake relief. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was partly behind engineering the 2004 coup that deposed democratically-elected Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, attended a Haitian relief fundraiser at a Washington hotel called "W." The symbology could not have been worse -- it was Bush who showed the world that he was totally disinterested in the 2004 Asian earthquake and tsunami and hurricane Katrina in 2005 that decimated New Orleans and surrounding areas.

Apparently, the so-called media-savvy Obama failed to realize the revolting nature of asking Bush to do anything related to Haiti when people remembered his lack of action over Katrina. Bodies of African-Americans floating in the streets of New Orleans became juxtaposed with the bodies of Afro-Haitians piling up in the streets of Port-au-Prince. But, of course, Obama is the "Max Headroom" of America's political leadership -- a talking head -- whose rhetorical flourishes speak louder than principles or concrete action.

Aristide, from an exile in South Africa imposed by the United States, France, and Canada, vowed to return to Haiti to be with his people in their time of stress and despair. Aristide, a former Roman Catholic priest, served the people of the Haitian slum of La Saline and he understands best the plight of his people. On the other hand, Rene Preval, the U.S. stooge who was placed in power twice by the CIA and the U.S. Southern Command to replace Aristide, once in a fraudulent election [Preval won in 1995 with 88 percent of the vote in a 25 percent voter turnout] and the other in a coup, could only complain to CNN's Sanjay Gupta about not having any place to sleep for the night, "I cannot live in the palace. I cannot live in my own house, because the two collapsed."

Preval has been reaping all sorts of "free trade" deals that caused Haiti's agrarian population to stream into Port-au-Prince to work in the sweat shops heralded as "progress" by the likes of George Soros and his gang of thieves on Wall Street. Because of Port-au-Prince's swelled population of sweat shop workers, the death count from the earthquake will be much higher as the result of collapsed tenements that housed more people than they were designed for.

Dr. Gupta, who was Obama's first choice to be Surgeon-General of the United States, was more interested in using dying Haitians in makeshift hospitals as stage props for CNN's ratings than in rendering medical assistance to the injured. Imagine, being one of the few doctors available to the severely injured and breaking away to go on camera and tell some old fool like Larry King or some Israeli agent of influence like Wolf Blitzer about how awful the situation is in Haiti.

However, Gates and his military brass will ensure that Aristide will not show up to threaten Preval's continuing disastrous leadership of Haiti. It was Gates, who was George H. W. Bush's nominee to be CIA director, who helped plan the military coup that ousted Aristide the first time in September 1991. Gates, at the time, was Bush's deputy national security adviser.

Clinton helped Aristide regain his presidency from the CIA-backed coup leader General Raoul Cedras in 1994. But Clinton's disastrous flip-flopping on Haitian refugees from the Cedras dictatorship plunged his new administration into a major crisis. It is certain that when Haiti's earthquake struck, people like Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel were conducting focus group polls to find out how U.S. assistance to Haiti would be received by the public. Although a clear majority of Americans favor helping the beleaguered people of Haiti, and many feel that Obama's assistance has been extremely slow, Emanuel only seems to be concerned about the handful of Americans, including Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck, who have uttered racist language in reacting to the Haitian tragedy, are worth listening to. But Emanuel does not view things through the enlightened lenses of America's founders but through the religious myopic eyesight of Talmudic interpreters.

Haiti under Aristide and Preval, was forced by Clinton to agree to horribly one-sided "free trade" deals that saw Haiti's workers press ganged into toiling away in Port-au-Prince sweat shops to produce clothing for America's major retailers like Disney. Haiti had no choice -- Clinton imposed devastating economic sanctions against Aristide to force his compliance with the diktats of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Clinton sweetened the pie for his Arkansas rice growing cronies by ensuring that Haiti went from being an exporter of nutritional rice to an importer of expensive bleached and genetically-modified "junk rice" primarily from Arkansas.

When Aristide regained the presidency in 2000, he took immediate steps to improve the lot of the Haitian workers -- he raised the minimum wage to two dollars a day. Bush decided it was time for the CIA and the Southern Command to remove Aristide, which they did with the help of France and Canada. Aristide was exiled to the Central African Republic and then South Africa.

Preval regained office in 2006 after a phony election engineered with the help of the National Endowment for Democracy's International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI), two CIA contrivances acting under the aegis of the U.S. Republican and Democratic Parties, respectively. Soros has adopted Haitian politicians like former Prime Minister Michèle  Pierre-Louis who continue to advocate disastrous "free trade" policies and provides them with funding and travel expenses through his Open Society Institute (OSI).

UN "peacekeeping" forces in Haiti have ensured that Aristide and his Lavalas Party does not regain power. One of the methods the UN uses is periodically raiding pro-Aristide slums and killing Lavalas activists in their homes. Bill Clinton was rewarded last year for his guile and deceit committed against Haiti by being named by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon as the UN's Special Envoy for Haiti.

When Honduran President Manuel Zelaya also raised the minimum wage in his country, the CIA and Southern Command arranged for a military coup to remove him. Obama has now decided to place the Southern Command, headquartered in the right-wing Latin American exilee rat's nest of Miami, to coordinate humanitarian relief in Haiti along with the head of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) a CIA pass-through headed by Rajiv Shah, a one-time political hack for Pennsylvania's corrupt Democratic Governor Ed Rendell.

The perfidy that is America's relationship with Haiti extends to Bill Clinton's wife, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She has appointed her chief of staff Cheryl Mills to oversee America's role in Haiti. Mills has stated: "We actually see our role as ensuring that the leadership of Haiti is able to provide the leadership that the Haitian people properly expect them to provide." That represents an endorsement of the hapless leadership of Preval and a thumbs down to any return for Aristide.

Note: The editor's book, "Jaded Tasks" is named for the covert Pentagon and CIA coperation that removed Aristide in 2004: Operation Jaded Task. Aristide was presented a signed copy of the book in South Africa with a note that states I hope he is rightfully restored to the presidency in Haiti. Haiti needs Aristide more now than it has ever needed him in the past. People like Obama, Gates, Emanuel, the Clintons, Mills, and Southern Command commander General Douglas Fraser need to step out of the way and allow the legitimate president of Haiti to lead his people out of the rubble of their country, "moving from misery to poverty with dignity," as he said from Oliver Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg awaiting permission for a return to his native country.

Haiti a haven for pedophile peacekeepers
September 17, 2008

A former top aide to ousted Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide told WMR that the plight of Haiti's children, already imperiled after three successive devastating hurricanes -- Gustav, Hanna, and Ike -- has worsened as a result of the benign attitude of the Haitian government of President Rene Preval and the United Nations peacekeeping authorities over sexual exploitation of children by peacekeeping troops and aid workers.

The situation has not improved, according to the source, even after Save the Children issued in June an alarming report titled "No One To Turn To" on the sexual exploitation of children in Haiti and other countries by peacekeepers and aid workers. The stark account of one 15-year old Haitian girl is but one of many documented by Save the Children:

"My friends and I were walking by the National Palace one evening when we encountered a couple of humanitarian men. The men called us over and showed us their penises. They offered us 100 Haitian gourdes (US$2.80) and some chocolate if we would suck them. I said no, but some of the girls did it and got the money."

Another young Haitian girl recounted: "There is a place not far from here where I go to visit my relatives.The men call to me in the streets and they ask me to go with them. But I don’t go. They do this with all of us young girls. I have a few friends that have gone to bed with them. Some of them are asked to give them a lesbian show, and they are paid for that."

Save the Children documented 23 humanitarian, peacekeeping, and security organizations involved with the sexual abuse of children, particularly the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO).

Although the report mentions Britain, Canada, France, and Italy as countering child exploitation by peacekeepers and humanitarian workers, the United States in noticeably absent in the receipt of praise. The U.S. State Department has not only been lax in combating child sexual exploitation but has been actively engaged, with CIA officials, in promoting child prostitution for both the entertainment of visiting Congressional delegations (CODELs) from Washington and entrapping government officials in blackmail. In addition, a number of foreign service personnel have not been investigated for engaging in sex with minors and have been transferred from one diplomatic post to another within areas such as South East and South Asia that are hotbeds for child sexual exploitation. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte's own conflict-of-interest in this matter has been steadfastly ignored by the State Department Inspector General and federal law enforcement. WMR's attempt to obtain a list of all CODELs to South East Asia from 1996 to the present has met with resistance from Congress and the Congressional Research Service.

Haiti: House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair uses shakedown tactics for support
September 11, 2008

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman (D-CA), who is often called the "Representative from Hollywood" because of his strong support for the entertainment industry, has, according to high-level congressional and human rights sources, established a political loyalty operation by which Democratic members of the California House delegation are "shaken down" in order to receive their support for Berman's policies, some of which benefit Berman and his friends financially.

WMR has learned that Berman's brother's consulting firm, Berman & D'Agostino, is influential, through state contracts in California, in congressional re-districting efforts in the state. This influence was, according to our sources, brought to bear on Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA), who represents California's 35th congressional district.

After Waters began supporting the cause of Haiti's democratically-elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was ousted in a February 2004 coup supported by U.S. mercenaries and CIA agents. Aristide claims he was kidnapped by U.S. forces, including his own private security guards, and flown by the United States to exile first in the Central African Republic and then to South Africa. Recently, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez visited Aristide in South Africa and promised him Venezuela's support in reversing the 2004 coup and restore him to the Haitian presidency.

Aristide's former ally, Rene Preval, is now Haiti's president and he has delayed making a decision on allowing Aristide to return to Haiti. Preval's new Prime Minister, Michele Pierre-Louis, is a favorite of Berman's co-ideologue, George Soros.

Interested in maximizing profits for his business friends, Berman, brandishing the re-districting power of his brother's consulting company, communicated to Waters that if she lessened her support for Aristide it would help save her 35th district from gerrymandering that would definitely result in her losing her seat in Congress. Waters' family was also enticed into some lucrative investments, according to our sources, in the Steele Foundation, the private mercenary firm that provided for Aristide's security in a contract worked out with Aristide's predecessor, Preval. It was Steele Foundation security guards who assisted U.S. Special Forces, Canadian troops, and CIA personnel in kidnapping Aristide from the presidential palace in 2004 and flying him and his wife and aides to exile in Africa.

Berman, who replaced Representative Tom Lantos (D-CA), as House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman after Lantos's death earlier this year, has used the Haitian government of Preval to line the pockets of his business friends. For example, after the Clinton administration pressured Aristide, who it restored to power after a first coup against him launched by the President George H. W. Bush administration, Aristide was forced to permit U.S. telecommunications companies to invest in Haiti's state-owned Haiti Telecom.

One of these firms, IDT, Inc. of New Jersey, was fined $1.3 million by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in July for failing to disclose its long distance contracts with Haiti Telecom. IDT's CEO happened to be Jim Courter, a former New Jersey Republican congressman and a national fundraiser for John McCain's presidential campaign. Following the FCC fine, Courter quit the McCain campaign. IDT's PAC donated over $84,000 to McCain's campaign.

Another firm that was leveraged into Haiti was Fusion Telecommunications. The Chairman of Fusion is Marvin Rosen, a former finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee. WMR has learned that Fusion received the same favorable treatment from Haiti's Preval as had IDT -- essentially meaning that every cell phone call made in Haiti, one of the world's poorest countries and one that was recently battered by three successive hurricanes, funnels money into the coffers of two telecommunications companies, one tied to the McCain campaign and GOP and the other linked to Democrats, including Hillary Rodham Clinton and her brother Hugh Rodham, who plied Haiti during the U.S. military occupation in the 1990s looking for lucrative contracts. WMR learned that he found one in the cellular telecommunications sector with the assistance of Brazil's then-ambassador to Haiti.

Fusion's Rosen was a major contributor to Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign. It was Rosen who came up with the idea in 1996 of rewarding six-figure Clinton donors with overnight stays at the White House in the Lincoln Bedroom and White House coffee receptions. 

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), led by former California Republican Congressman Christopher Cox, has shown no inclination to investigate either IDT or Fusion.

Haiti has also been largely "re-colonized" by Republican and Democratic exploiters through rice exports. Haiti was once a net exporter of rice. Now it depends on rice from the United States for survival. The major firm now handling the export of rice to Haiti is American Rice, Inc. of Houston, Texas, with major holdings in Arkansas. American Rice, owned by a Spanish company, is also tied politically to Hillary Clinton. In essence, poor Haitians, including farmers who could, once again, grow rice to become self-sufficient and even exporters, are asked to subsidize American agri-business rice growers in Arkansas and Texas. American rice is the most expensive in the world today. To make matters worse, American rice, stripped of most of its nutrients during processing, has caused a vitamin B deficiency in Haiti and cases of beri-beri are now common. The high cost of rice resulted in food riots in Haiti in April, unrest that toppled Prime Minister Jacques Alexis. Alexis was eventually replaced by a disciple of the global vulture capitalist Soros.

Howard Berman is one of the most pro-Israeli members of Congress having once joked that he was a Zionist long before he was a Democrat. Berman also supported the Iraq war and supports U.S. intervention in the Darfur crisis. Berman was an early endorser of Barack Obama, perhaps taking his cue from Soros, the global "democracy manipulator" who pays politics like the stock market, hedging his investments on all sides.

CIA rendition aircraft used to fly Haitian president into exile
January 25-27, 2008 

The Bush administration used a Boeing airliner that has been used to ferry renditioned prisoners around the world to fly democratically-elected Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide into forced exile in Africa.

Aristide was kidnapped from the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, on the evening of February 28, 2004. On February 29, Aristide was flown to Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic. Eventually, Aristide was granted political asylum in South Africa. The United States installed a pro-U.S. regime in Haiti. Still in exile in South Africa, Aristide maintains that he is still the legitimate president of Haiti and that he was deposed and kidnapped by the United States.

According to Aristide's personal bodyguard, U.S. Marines and American mercenaries working for the Steele Foundation, escorted Aristide and his party from the palace to a white plane with no other markings except for an American flag on the tail. The plane left Haiti and landed at Vere C. Bird International Airport in Antigua where plans were being made to fly the ousted President and his party to South Africa. The US aircraft departed Antigua for Ascension Island, a British territory in the South Atlantic where the US maintains a military base. After South Africa rejected Aristide's first request for asylum, the aircraft departed Ascension for the Central African Republic. Steele personnel accompanied Aristide, his wife, and his party from Haiti to Antigua and Ascension and finally to Bangui.

According to the Antiguan media, the US aircraft that arrived in Antigua on February 29 at 9 am local time for a one hour stop was a Boeing 707 with the tail number N145CA. However, N145CA has also been identified in Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) records as a CIA rendition aircraft that has flown in and out of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Aristide was not permitted to leave the aircraft and no Antiguan official met the plane and passengers, even though Haiti and Antigua were both members of the Caribbean Common Market (CARICOM).

It now appears that the Boeing 707 had its tail number painted over with the tail number N145CA. As of January 24, 2003, N145CA has been registered to a Eurocopter rotorcraft. The registered owner is Wells Fargo Bank Northwest NA Trustee in Salt Lake City. On May 1, 2006, WMR reported: "A Boeing 737, tail number N368CE, registered to a shadowy company called Premier Aircraft Management and incorporated in North Las Vegas, Nevada, has been sighted in Frankfurt, Germany, Luxembourg, Baghdad, and Kabul in recent months. The Boeing is ostensibly owned by Wells Fargo Bank and was based in Wilmington, Delaware until 2004." Wells Fargo Bank Northwest NA is also the registered owner of another CIA rendition plane, a Raytheon Hawker 800XP, tail number N168BF.

However, the FAA database lists N145CA as a Boeing 757 (and twice as a non-existent Boeing 752, however the International Civil Aviation Organization designator for a Boeing 757-200 is a Boeing 752). The following itinerary for N145CA is given for the time period that the Boeing 707 was flying Aristide to Africa:

European sources who have investigated CIA rendition aircraft believe that the CIA filed false flight information with the FAA showing that N145CA flew between Puerto Rico, Florida, and Guantanamo on February 29 when it was actually flying from Port-au-Prince to Antigua, Ascension, and Bangui on the same day.

Moreover, after the February 29 flight, there are no further FAA records of N145CA, the Boeing aircraft, ever flying again.

The Bush administration maintains that rendition of prisoners is carried out against terrorism suspects. However, the use of such an aircraft in Haiti in 2004 points to the first example of the CIA kidnapping program being used to rendition a sitting chief of state of a nation from the presidential palace at gun point to another country.