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News :: Civil & Human Rights : Government Secrecy : International Relations : Regime |
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Haiti Coverage: Mainstream Media Fails Itself |
Current rating: 0 |
by Peter Phillips
(No verified email address) |
04 Mar 2004
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Mainstream media had a credibility problem. Their original story was openly contradicted. The kidnap story could be ignored or back-paged as was done by many newspapers in the US. Or it can be framed within the context of a US denial and dismissed. Unfortunately, the corporate media seems not at all interested in conducting an investigation into the charges, seeking witnesses, or verifying contradictions. Nor is the mainstream media asking or answering the question of why they fully accept the State Department's version of the coup in the first place. |
On February 29, Richard Boucher from the U.S. Department of State released a press release claiming that Jean Bertrand Aristide had resigned as president of Haiti and that the United State facilitated his safe departure. Within hours the major broadcast news stations in the United States including CNN, Fox, ABC, NBC, CBS, and NPR were reporting that Aristide had fled Haiti. An Associated Press release that evening said "Aristide resigns, flees into exile." The next day headlines in the major newspapers across the country, including the Washington Post, USA Today, New York Times, and Atlanta Journal Constitution, all announced "Aristide Flees Haiti." The Baltimore sun reported, "Haiti's first democratically-elected president was forced to flee his country yesterday like despots before him."
However on Sunday afternoon February 29, Pacific News network with reporters live in Port-au-Prince Haiti were claiming that Aristide was forced to resign by the US and taken out of the Presidential Palace by armed US marines. On Monday morning Amy Goodman with Democracy Now! news show interviewed Congresswoman Maxine Waters. Waters said she had received a phone call from Aristide at 9:00 AM EST March 1 in which Aristide emphatically denied that he had resigned and said that he had been kidnapped by US and French forces. Aristide made calls to others including TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson, who verified congresswomen Waters' report.
Mainstream corporate media was faced with a dilemma. Confirmed contradictions to headlines reports were being openly revealed to hundreds of thousands of Pacifica listeners nationwide. By Monday afternoon mainstream corporate media began to respond to the charges. Tom Brokaw on NBC Nightly News, 6:30 PM voiced, "Haiti in crisis. Armed rebels sweep into the capital as Aristide claims US troops kidnapped him; forced him out. The US calls that nonsense." Fox News Network with Brit Hume reported Colin Powell's comments, "He was not kidnapped. We did not force him on to the airplane. He went on to the airplane willingly, and that's the truth. Mort Kondracke, executive editor of Roll Call added, "Aristide, .was a thug and a leader of thugs and ran his country into the ground." The New York Times in a story buried on page 10 reported that "President Jean-Bertrand Aristide asserted Monday that he had been driven from power in Haiti by the United States in "a coup," an allegation dismissed by the White House as "complete nonsense."
Mainstream media had a credibility problem. Their original story was openly contradicted. The kidnap story could be ignored or back-paged as was done by many newspapers in the US. Or it can be framed within the context of a US denial and dismissed. Unfortunately, the corporate media seems not at all interested in conducting an investigation into the charges, seeking witnesses, or verifying contradictions. Nor is the mainstream media asking or answering the question of why they fully accept the State Department's version of the coup in the first place. Corporate media certainly had enough pre-warning to determine that Aristide was not going to willingly leave the country. Aristide had been saying exactly that for the past month during the armed attacks in the north of Haiti. Aristide was interviewed on CNN February 26. He explained that the terrorists, and criminal drug dealers were former members of the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH), which had led the coup in 1991 killing 5,000 people. Aristide believed that they would kill more people if a coup was allowed to happen. It was also well known in media circles that the US Undersecretary of State Roger Noriega for Latin America was a senior aide to former Senator Jesse Helms, who as chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs committee was a longtime backer of Haitian dictator Jean Claude Duvalier and an opponent of Aristide. These facts alone should have been a red flag regarding the State Department's version.
As a former priest and liberation theologist, Jean Bertrand Aristide stood for grassroots democracy, alleviation of poverty, and God's love for all human beings. He challenged the neo-liberal globalization efforts of the Haitian upper class and their US partners. For this he was targeted by the Bush administration. That the US waited until the day after Aristide was gone to send in troops to stabilize the country proves intent to remove him from office.
Mainstream media had every reason to question the State Department's version of the coup in Haiti, but choose instead to report a highly doubtful cover story. We deserve more from our media than their being stenographers for the government. Weapons of mass destruction aside, we need a media that looks for the truth and exposes the contradictions in the fabrications of the powerful.
Peter Phillips is a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and Director of Project Censored, a media research organization.
http://www.projectcensored.org/ |
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Caribbean Calls for Independent Probe of Aristide Ouster |
by Peter Richards
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
04 Mar 2004
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PORT OF SPAIN - Caribbean leaders ended a two-day emergency meeting in Jamaica on Wednesday calling for an independent investigation into the circumstances that led to the removal of former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide from office and into exile.
Jamaican Prime Minister PJ Patterson, who is also chairman of the 15-member Caribbean Community (CARICOM), stopped short of indicating the leaders wanted to suspend or expel Haiti from the Organization, although he did say they were not prepared to "deliberate in any of our meetings with thugs and anarchists".
Aristide fled Haiti on Sunday morning after weeks of violence sparked by demands from opposition forces and armed rebels who had taken control of the northern part of the country that he leave office because of corruption and mismanagement.
In the final days before he left, the United States and France also pressured the former popular priest, who became the country's first democratically elected president since independence 200 years ago, to resign.
On his arrival in the Central African Republic, Aristide telephoned a number of Caribbean leaders, including Patterson, to say he had been forced out at gunpoint by U.S. soldiers and had no idea where he was being taken.
Washington has dismissed the allegation, but Patterson said the Caribbean leaders, who spoke with both Aristide and South African President Thabo Mbeki by telephone, were not convinced the Haitian leader had "voluntarily" resigned.
"Despite what we have heard in public and besides what we have learnt in private, we simply say that the situation calls for an investigation of what transpired and we believe that this should be done under the auspices of some independent international body such as the United Nations, which would clarify the circumstances leading to the relinquishing of the presidency of Haiti by President Aristide," Patterson said.
He added that CARICOM would use its membership in various international bodies, such as the Organization of American States (OAS), to ensure the probe is carried out.
Patterson said what happened in Haiti constituted a "dangerous precedent" not only for Port-au-Prince but for democratically elected governments throughout the world, especially small states in the Caribbean.
He said the region would protest "in the strongest possible term anything which would have the effect of removing by unconstitutional means persons who have been duly elected to office".
The Caribbean leaders said they were astonished at the speed with which the U.N. Security Council had been able to agree Sunday to send peacekeeping troops to Haiti following the departure of Aristide.
On Thursday, CARICOM had urged the U.N. body to help diffuse the situation, warning that any destabilization of Haiti would have an effect on neighboring Caribbean states.
"We cannot fail to observe that what was impossible on Thursday could be accomplished in an emergency meeting on Sunday -- President Aristide having departed from office without any involvement or consultation with any CARICOM country as to the departure and the resolution which was eventually passed," Patterson said.
The leaders said that regardless of what happened in Haiti they were reiterating their commitment to the people of the former French colony, "and our intention to remain constructively engaged in those efforts that will create the conditions that will be necessary for the long-term safety, well-being and progress of the people".
But that did not mean they agreed to work with the armed rebels in Haiti, whose leader Guy Philippe declared himself "military chief" Tuesday.
"The question of Haiti's participation in the Council of CARICOM is a matter which will have to be considered and to some extent it will be contingent on what transpires in Haiti within the next few days," Patterson said.
"In particular, we have taken a collective decision that we are not prepared to deliberate in any of our meetings with thugs, with anarchists and with persons who have a reputation which is contrary to the tenets of civil societies to which we subscribe."
Philippe, a former Haitian police chief and army cadet who fled Haiti after an unsuccessful coup attempt in 2001, has been described as having a "dubious" rights record. His fellow rebel Louis Jodel Chamblain was a leader of the paramilitary group that conducted a reign of terror during military rule from 1991-94.
Some of the Caribbean countries that had indicated a willingness to participate in a peace-keeping force in Haiti will do so, Patterson said, adding the region will be able to make its most meaningful contribution as part of the U.N. stabilization force -- providing humanitarian assistance and helping to rebuild the economy and civil society as well as strengthening democratic institutions.
That force is scheduled to take over from the U.S., French, Canadian and other soldiers now in Haiti in three months.
CARICOM has established a task force to coordinate its work on Haiti, and expects its first report at a previously scheduled meeting Mar. 26 in St. Kitts, added Patterson.
He said the region would meet new week with U.N. Special Adviser on Haiti, Trinidadian national Reginald Dumas, and "we have every intention of facilitating the success of his mission".
Earlier, two political scientists had urged the leaders not to abandon Haiti.
"The political reality suggests that if we have to move forward we have to work with an imperfect system," Trinidadian Derek Ramsamooj told IPS, adding CARICOM leaders might have to "work with whoever it is that we have to at this time as a transition process until we put together a democratic institution in office".
"Haiti is one of our CARICOM nations. There are problems and an expulsion would not resolve any issues inside Haiti. What we need would be for CARICOM nations to work alongside any multilateral force to ensure that we resolve this problem in the next coming years," he added.
Respected Caribbean political scientist Neville Duncan suggested the international community would have to share the blame for the sudden departure of Aristide and the political crisis in the impoverished nation.
"Just looking at how quickly the (U.S.) Marines and France came in this week suggested that it was a condition for them to come in," he told the Caribbean Media Corporation.
Duncan said Aristide had been unable to provide much for his citizens during his term in office because most of the aid promised to the impoverished country had been frozen by the international community.
"So the people suffered because the international community did not like to deal with Aristide, and I think that there is something fundamentally wrong with that because I think that failure to have any improvement in Haiti led to the crisis that Haiti is now experiencing," he added.
Patterson said CARICOM also believed that the freeze on funding and an economic embargo "helped to undermine the process of building democracy in Haiti". He said the leaders were "now anxious to hear what is the rationale for the change in position" if the international community says it is now prepared to provide aid to Haiti.
CARICOM had initially developed a peace plan that would have required Aristide sharing political power with the opposition, and while Patterson did not name Washington by name, he told reporters, "at no time in our discussions did they convey to us that the plan was unacceptable so long as Aristide remained in office".
* Caribbean Community
http://www.caricom.org
©2004 IPS - Inter Press Service
http://www.ips.org |
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Assuming the Right to Intervene |
by Norman Solomon
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
04 Mar 2004
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If Mark Twain were living now instead of a century ago -- when he declared himself "an anti-imperialist" and proclaimed that "I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land" -- the famous writer's views would exist well outside the frame of today's mainstream news media.
In the current era, it's rare for much ink or air time to challenge the right of the U.S. government to directly intervene in other countries. Instead, the featured arguments are about whether -- or how -- it is wise to do so in a particular instance.
It's not just a matter of American boots on the ground and bombs from the sky. Much more common than the range of overt violence from U.S. military actions is the process of deepening poverty from economic intervention. Outside the media glare, Washington's routine policies involve pulling financial levers to penalize nations that have leaders who displease the world's only superpower.
In Haiti, abominable poverty worsened during the first years of the 21st century while Uncle Sam blocked desperately needed assistance.
A former leading zealot for economic shock therapy, Jeffrey Sachs, was insightful when he wrote in the March 1 edition of the Financial Times: "The crisis in Haiti is another case of brazen U.S. manipulation of a small, impoverished country with the truth unexplored by journalists." Among the unilluminated realities: For years, the Bush administration has prevented aid from getting to one of the poorest nations on the planet.
"The U.S. maintained its aid freeze, and the opposition (in Haiti) maintained a veto over international aid," writes Sachs, now an economics professor at Columbia University. "Cut off from bilateral and multilateral financing, Haiti's economy went into a tailspin."
With very little U.S. press coverage of such economic matters -- and, likewise, scant attention to the collusion between the Bush administration and disreputable opponents of the Aristide regime -- media acceptance of the current U.S. military intervention in Haiti was predictable.
Prominent editorial carping hardly makes up for spun-out news coverage. And in this case, the day after the coup that U.S. media typically refuse to call a coup, the New York Times ran a lead editorial about Haiti on March 1 that mostly let the Bush regime off the hook with a faint reproach.
The Bush administration, the Times editorialized, was "too willing to ignore democratic legitimacy in order to allow the removal of a leader it disliked and distrusted." The editorial faulted "Mr. Bush's hesitation" and went on to say "it is deplorable that President Bush stood by" while men such as two convicted murderers and an accused cocaine trafficker "took over much of Haiti." The editorial's last sentence muted the critical tone, referring merely to "mishandling of this crisis."
Even at its most vehement, the Times editorial accused the Bush administration of inaction ("ignore" ... "hesitation" ... "stood by" ... "mishandling"), as though the gist of the problem was a kind of inept passivity -- rather than calculated mendacity in the service of an interventionist agenda.
Meanwhile, also on March 1, the Times front page supplied an official story in the guise of journalism. Failing to attribute a key anecdotal flourish to any source -- while providing Washington's version of instantly historic events -- the newspaper of record reported that Aristide "meekly asked the American ambassador in Haiti through an aide whether his resignation would help the country."
In the next day's edition of the Times, the front-page story about Haiti included Aristide's contention that he'd been overthrown by the United States. The headline over that article: "Haitian Rebels Enter Capital; Aristide Bitter."
Bitter.
Underneath such news and commentary runs powerful deference to Washington policymakers, reinforcing interventionist prerogatives even when criticizing their implementation. A basic underlying assumption that pervades media coverage has been consistent -- the right to intervene. Not the wisdom of intervening, but the ultimate right to do so.
On Wednesday, in Port-au-Prince, a long-unemployed plumber named Raymond Beausejour made a profound comment to a New York Times reporter about the U.S. Marines patrolling the city: "The last time they came they didn't do much. This is not the kind of aid we need. They should help us build schools and clinics and to get jobs."
It's customary for news media to ignore Americans who unequivocally oppose U.S. military interventions in -- to use Twain's phrase -- "any other land." Journalists are inclined to dismiss such views as "isolationism." But the choice is not between iron-fist actions and economic blackmail on the one hand and self-absorbed indifference on the other. A truly humanitarian foreign policy, offering no-strings assistance like food and medicine on a massive scale, is an option that deserves to be part of the media discourse in the United States.
Norman Solomon is co-author of "Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You." |
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From His First Day in Office, Bush Was Ousting Aristide |
by Jeffrey D. Sachs
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
04 Mar 2004
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If the circumstances were not so calamitous, the American-orchestrated removal of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from Haiti would be farcical.
According to Aristide, American officials in Port-au-Prince told him that rebels were on the way to the presidential residence and that he and his family were unlikely to survive unless they immediately boarded an American-chartered plane standing by to take them to exile. The United States made it clear, he said, that it would provide no protection for him at the official residence, despite the ease with which this could have been arranged.
Indeed, according to Aristide's lawyer, the U.S. blocked reinforcement of Aristide's own security detail. At the airport, Aristide said, U.S. officials refused him entry to the airplane until he handed over a signed letter of resignation.
After being hustled aboard, Aristide was denied access to a phone for nearly 24 hours, and he knew nothing of his destination until he and his family were summarily deposited in the Central African Republic. He has since been kept hidden from view. Yet this Keystone Kops coup has apparently not worked entirely according to plan: Aristide has used a cellphone to notify the world that he was forcibly removed from Haiti at risk of death and to describe the way his resignation was staged by American forces.
The U.S. government dismisses Aristide's charges as ridiculous. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has offered an official version of the events, a blanket denial based on the government's word alone. In essence, Washington is telling us not to look back, only forward. The U.S. government's stonewalling brings to mind Groucho Marx's old line, "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?"
There are several tragedies in this surrealistic episode. The first is the apparent incapacity of the U.S. government to speak honestly about such matters as toppling governments. Instead, it brushes aside crucial questions: Did the U.S. summarily deny military protection to Aristide, and if so, why and when? Did the U.S. supply weapons to the rebels, who showed up in Haiti last month with sophisticated equipment that last year reportedly had been taken by the U.S. military to the Dominican Republic, next door to Haiti? Why did the U.S. cynically abandon the call of European and Caribbean leaders for a political compromise, a compromise that Aristide had already accepted? Most important, did the U.S. in fact bankroll a coup in Haiti, a scenario that seems likely based on present evidence?
Only someone ignorant of U.S. history and of the administrations of George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush would dismiss these questions. The United States has repeatedly sponsored coups and uprisings in Haiti and in neighboring Caribbean countries.
Ominously, before this week, the most recent such episode in Haiti came in 1991, during the first Bush administration, when thugs on the CIA payroll were among the leaders of paramilitary groups that toppled Aristide after his 1990 election.
Some of the players in this round are familiar from the previous Bush administration, including of course Powell and Vice President Dick Cheney. Also key is U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega — a longtime aide to Jesse Helms and a notorious Aristide-hater — widely thought to have been central to the departure of Aristide. He is going to find it much harder to engineer the departure of gun-toting rebels who entered Port-au-Prince on Wednesday.
Rarely has an episode so brilliantly exposed Santayana's famous aphorism that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
In 1991, when Congressional Black Caucus members demanded an investigation into the U.S. role in Aristide's overthrow, the first Bush administration laughed them off, just as this administration is doing today in facing new queries from Congressional Black Caucus members.
Indeed, those who are questioning the administration about Haiti are being smeared as naive and unpatriotic. Aristide himself is being smeared with ludicrous propaganda and, most cynically of all, is being accused of dereliction in the failure to lift his country out of poverty.
In point of fact, this U.S. administration froze all multilateral development assistance to Haiti from the day that George W. Bush came into office, squeezing Haiti's economy dry and causing untold suffering for its citizens. U.S. officials surely knew that the aid embargo would mean a balance-of-payments crisis, a rise in inflation and a collapse of living standards, all of which fed the rebellion.
Another tragedy in this episode is the silence of the media when it comes to asking all the questions that need answers. Just as in the war on Iraq's phony WMD, wherein the mainstream media initially failed to ask questions about the administration's claims, major news organizations have refused to go to the mat over the administration's accounts on Haiti. The media haven't had the gumption to find Aristide and, in failing to do so, to point out that he is being held away from such contact.
With a violence-prone U.S. government operating with impunity in many parts of the world, only the public's perseverance in getting at the truth can save us, and others, from our own worst behavior.
Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute (http://www.earth.columbia.edu/) at Columbia University, is a former economic advisor to governments in Latin America and around the world.
Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com |
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