Posted on 03/28/2004 8:00:33 PM PST by GrandMoM
The Kerry-Kennedy-Haiti Connection By Cliff Kincaid March 26, 2004
It wasn't a big story when John Kerry said that he would have risked U.S. lives to maintain Marxist Jean-Bertrand Aristide in power in Haiti. And except for columnist Robert Novak, there hasn't been any discussion of why Kerry chose such a controversial course of action. Novak noted evidence of "Aristide's gold-plated U.S. connections." He explained, "He is close to Kerry's influential friends, the Kennedy family of Massachusetts, and is the unconditional favorite of the Congressional Black Caucus."
Novak noted that Aristide spent millions on U.S. lobbyists and lawyers, and that, "Powerful American politicians sit on the board of Fusion Telecommunications International, which Aristide granted an exclusive concession over the country's lucrative long-distance market."
That was documented years ago by the Wall Street Journal, which noted that former Rep. Joseph Kennedy had surfaced as a member of the board of Fusion, and that Fusion's CEO is Marvin Rosen, the finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee during the 1996 Clinton fund-raising scandals. Another board member is Thomas F. McLarty, Clinton's former chief of staff.
(Excerpt) Read more at aim.org ...
Lynn Garrison's book, Voodoo Politics, said reports of contacts between Aristide and Bill Clinton date back to 1992, before the start of the first Clinton term, when Jesse Jackson was a contact between the two men. Garrison said the Clinton administration refused to bring a drug-trafficking indictment of Aristide because of his political and financial connections to the Democratic Party. Aristide, who was alleged to be profiting from the cocaine trade through Haiti, is said to have hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bank accounts.
Aristide had established an "Aristide Foundation for Democracy" with a board of advisors that included Kennedy, former Representative Michael Barnes, and many members of the Congressional Black Caucus. A July 17, 2000, Insight magazine article by Catherine Edwards reported allegations by a Haitian political figure that the foundation was "a front for illegal money laundering." Barnes, a Congressman from Maryland, was reportedly paid $55,000 a month in 1993 to lobby for U.S. action to reinstate Aristide. His campaign to restore Aristide to power was assisted by Randall Robinson of TransAfrica. Former Black Caucus member Ron Dellums became a paid foreign agent of the Aristide regime.
Michael Barnes, it may be noted, participated in the same anti-Contra campaign that involved Kerry's visit to the Sandinistas:
Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill (D-Mass.) and Michael Barnes (D-Md.), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Western Hemispheric Affairs, justified their opposition to President Reagan's contra aid bill on the basis of the WOLA [Washington Office on Latin Affairs] report. . .Just forty-eight hours before the vote, Sens. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) travelled to Nicaragua.
S. Stephen Powell, Covert Cadre: Inside the Institute for Policy Studies, 1987, 226-227
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....more like his own DRUG connections!!!!!
HAITI: MAJOR DRUG TRANS-SHIPMENT HUB
Deposed President Aristide is no innocent lamb forced to leave his country by The United States Marines.
Q. Why did he choose to leave as quickly as he did? A. He was shown documents from the United States Departments of Justice, Secret Service, CIA, and Special Operations Forces. These documents clearly show that he and his Lavalas Party are involved in large trans-shipments of Colombian drugs by planes, fishing vessels, freighters, and fast boats.
In 1997 his top former Police Chief of Port-au-Prince, Michel Francois was charged, along with six others, with smuggling 33 tons of cocaine into the United States over a 10 year period. Francois is now at large believed to be living in Honduras. Some newspapers are claiming that Francois has bankrolled FRAPH (front for the advancement of the Haitian People).
A convicted Haitian drug dealer who was sentenced to 27 years in prison in a Miami court told the court that Aristide is the boss in Haiti's drug business. "He (Aristide) controls the drug trade in Haiti", said Beaudoin "Jacques" Ketant. Much of the information on the drug business in Haiti is from this source.
"It's a one man show. You either pay Aristide or you die." This has been vehemently denied by Aristide but Ketants testimony was used as leverage to get the president to resign.
Guy Philippe the rebel leader, and Gilbert Dragon second in command, are two of several special trained police and intelligence assets which were trained by our Secret Service and CIA to infiltrate the southern drug operations run from Colombia.
They were getting close to Aristide's operations back in the early nineties and were sent into exile to Ecuador and the Dominican Republic.
They were nicknamed the "Latinos" after being sent to Ecuador originally for training in a ten man group. They quickly moved up the ranks when they returned to Haiti and soon began to infiltrate the Colombian drug operations that Aristide controlled.
In 1998, Aristide's hand picked President, Rene Preval had to transfer the nation's inspector general to a diplomatic post in Europe due to an intelligence leak of a shipment of 750 kilograms of cocaine.
As the pressure got worse in 1995 a coup plot by the "Latinos" to oust Aristide was uncovered and they were forced into exile. Now they have come back and ousted a drug kingpin, but NOT before he got away with hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in drug money that was earmarked for the Democratic Elections here in the United States.
Is the Intelligence Community looking to recover this money or is it unable to get to it because of certain Senate and Congressional members who are tied to it in an embarrassing way?
What about the "come in from the cold" undercover rebel-leaders who have been on both sides of the tracks? And don't be surprised if the Haitian people welcome Baby Doc back with open arms. After Aristide and his communists, plain old crooks look real good!
Of course, now that he's killing people, we don't want to remind people that he's nopt only a Marxist, but a hypocrite too!
Murdering Marxists are good. But hypocrites are bad, therefore, don't mention he's a priest anymore.
Kerry's Dirty Diplomacy
By George Neumayr
Published 3/2/2004 12:07:27 AM
To most sentient observers, Aristide is an obvious Marxist crook and thug. To John Kerry, he is "Father Aristide." That's what Kerry quaintly called the brutal strongman in a 1994 New York Times op-ed, even though Aristide had been sacked from the Salesian order several years earlier after the Vatican grew weary of his preaching in favor of Marxist violence.
In that 1994 op-ed, Kerry played the apologist for Aristide. "Father Aristide may not be perfect (what elected leader is?), but we have never discarded whole democracies because of an individual leader," Kerry wrote. "Moreover, he has already demonstrated his willingness to compromise, agreeing to share power with a broad-based coalition with safeguards for everyone's rights."
Here Kerry was trying to pass off a thug as a conciliatory priest. Aristide was a known inciter of "necklacing," the practice of throwing flaming tires around opponents' heads. He had compiled a voluminous record as an abuser of human rights. Kerry, nevertheless, had a weakness for the defrocked priest.
A dissenting Catholic himself, Kerry sympathized with Aristide's attempts to turn Catholicism into communism under the guise of "liberation theology." Which explains why Kerry even to this day whines about conservative criticism of Aristide's liberation theology. Last week Kerry accused the Bush administration of "a theological and ideological hatred" of Aristide. "It goes back to the liberation theology that he preached earlier in his career," Kerry said. "It's part of the right's attitude about Aristide."
Joseph Kennedy, another dissenting Catholic with a soft spot for liberation theologians, invited Aristide to his 1993 wedding in Massachusetts. Kerry was at the wedding too. Kennedy, then a Congressman, must also have regarded Aristide as still "Father Aristide," as he had the exiled thug deliver one of the wedding readings, according to the Boston Globe.
How did these Democrats manage to overlook Aristide's abuses? In part, because they were too busy looking at his skin color. Kerry ever so subtly played the race card in Aristide's favor in his New York Times op-ed by writing of "deep-seated hatreds between the small, wealthy ruling mulatto elite, which is in league with the military, and the poor, largely uneducated, which make up 90 percent of the population." In other words: Aristide isn't part of that odious "ruling mulatto elite" but a champion of the black underclass, so America has a duty to restore him to power.
Kerry, with great urgency, wrote about the need to restore Aristide to power through U.S. military might -- a stance that appears ludicrous in light of his go-slow diplomacy over the last few years. Was he pandering to the vocal Haitian-American community in Boston? For whatever reason Kerry was in rush-to-war mode on behalf of Aristide, writing that "nothing has worked -- not diplomacy, not tighter sanctions, not a partial naval embargo." Kerry wasn't going to stand for "Haiti's military thugs," who "continue to thumb their noses at the United States." He worried that "our credibility as a world leader is at stake."
Haiti's military leaders, Kerry wrote, "must now be put on notice that we're prepared to take all steps necessary to restore democracy and prove to all renegade elements that we mean what we say." He waived away objections by saying that diplomacy without force is feckless: "Failure to threaten to use force now would significantly increase the probability that diplomacy will fail. In the end, we'd wind up where we are today: unprepared and with a weak hand." He even fended off the "prospect of a Vietnam-like quagmire" by suggesting that after propping up Aristide Haiti wouldn't be America's problem anymore. The international community would nurse Haiti along: "The presence of a neutral, civilized power will allow Haiti to rebuild its political institutions, its schools and its health system, and provide some cooling-off time."
"Father Aristide," no pacifist himself, must have been pleased with this advocacy, especially since Kerry, along with every other Senator briefed by the CIA, knew of his established reputation as a near-demented rabble-rouser. Even as Kerry was writing about "military thugs" in need of an American beating, the CIA (as news reports from that period show) was providing the Senate with evidence that Aristide was a thug himself who, if returned to power, would wreak havoc on Haiti again.
With typical gall, Kerry now blames a crisis he helped create with his pro-Aristide advocacy on Bush. Did Bush call for the restoration of a known inciter of necklacing to power in Haiti? No, Kerry did.
George Neumayr is managing editor of The American Spectator.
http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=6230
....more like his own DRUG connections!!!!!
Most likely. Ted Kennedy and John Forbes Kerry have some of those, too, I'd wager.
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