Powell and Aide Questioned on Haiti by Panel's Skeptics

[Dover]

Powell and Aide Questioned on Haiti by Panel's Skeptics

By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS


March 4, 2004


WASHINGTON, March 3 — Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his top aide for Latin America faced fierce questioning on Wednesday from lawmakers who rejected the administration's claims that President Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti had resigned of his own free will.

At a hearing dominated by Democratic members of the Congressional Black Caucus, Roger F. Noriega, the assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, was denounced as insolent and misguided, and faced derisive laughter, as he testified that the United States had not forced Mr. Aristide from office.

"We did not support the violent overthrow of that man," Mr. Noriega told members of a House international relations subcommittee.

Mr. Aristide, who was flown into exile in the Central African Republic aboard an American plane on Sunday, has said he was kidnapped by American officials determined to oust him. Angry Democrats excoriated the administration for effectively carrying out a coup d'état. In the hearing, lawmakers said Mr. Aristide had been coerced into resigning....>>

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/04/politics/04CAPI.html

[Dover]

1. Why Haiti? Why now?

Why Haiti? Why now?


Noriega and Otto REICH up to their eyes in coups as usual.


.. Therefore, it is no surprise Otto Reich’s fingerprints are all over this week’s kidnapping of President Aristide. Otto Reich, you will recall, is the U.S. under-secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere who helped to orchestrate the short-lived kidnapping and ouster of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. That kidnapping was undone when the people rose up and re-installed Chavez, because the perpetrators of that kidnapping had failed to remove Chavez completely from the country. Not to make the same mistake twice.

In an overall strategy that parallels the worldwide concept of the Department of Defense to fight simultaneously one or one and a half wars to extend U.S. imperial power to control energy sources overseas, under the cover of fighting terrorism, hard line, reactionary Cubans within the U.S. diplomatic community have been handed near carte blanche powers to destabilize progressive regimes in the Western Hemisphere.

In addition to Otto Reich, who, as a diplomatic appointee to Venezuela during the Reagan administration, helped to arrange the transferring and releasing to the streets of Miami terrorist Orlando Bosch, mastermind of the 1976 blowing up of the Cuban airliner, is:

Reich’s right-hand man Roger Noriega, a former Jesse Helms protégé who recently served as U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States and now is also with the State Department’s Western Hemisphere Bureau, and....

http://www.sfbayview.com/030304/whyhaiti030304.shtml