Fox To Guard Chickens In Haiti - Clinton To Become Reich Protector

[Peter Lemkin]

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, you wrote another piece at rebelreports.com on Bill Clinton being named as—could be today—the new UN envoy to stabilize Haiti.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. I mean, this would be—this would be humorous for its irony, if it wasn’t so deadly serious. Bill Clinton, as President of the United States, was someone who participated in the systematic destabilization of Haiti.

In a nutshell, what happened was that Aristide was overthrown in a violent US-backed coup—you covered it—under the George H.W. Bush administration. Clinton campaigned on a pledge to stop the cruel treatment of Haitian detainees being held at Guantanamo and also to reverse the Bush administration’s cruel policy in general toward Haiti. Instead, what Clinton did is he kept Aristide in exile for years, until they could squeeze out of Aristide a commitment to uphold US neoliberal economic programs in Haiti and that Aristide would agree not to lay claim to the years he spent in exile as part of his presidency.

He was a democratically elected president. He, fair and square, beat a US candidate. The US violently overthrew him. They butchered Haiti. And then Clinton refused to put Aristide back in power, even though he could have done it with one phone call. And instead, what he did is he implemented a vicious regime of economic neoliberalism inside of Haiti. The Haitian people now are suffering under that neoliberal economic model and the aftermath of this repression force that just terrorized the people of Haiti.

To have Bill Clinton now be sent in explicitly to be the person who’s going to, quote-unquote, “stabilize” Haiti and dabble in the economics of this incredibly poor suffering nation, to me, is just a grotesque act on the part of the United Nations. And I think that anyone who’s about justice for Haiti should rise up and say that Bill Clinton has no business stepping foot in Haiti in any official capacity with the United Nations at all.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill, I want to thank you for being with us. Jeremy’s reports can be found at rebelreports.com. He is a correspondent for Democracy Now!, award-winning investigative journalist.

JEREMY SCAHILL: The piece is at AlterNet. The story I did is at AlterNet, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: And the piece that you wrote was at AlterNet.org.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Haiti is also an offshore laboratory for Big Pharma to test new drugs on human populations, and for other agendas. Below is an excerpt from the transcript of the BBC2 Horizon film entitled "The Human Laboratory". The full transcript is available at the link.

http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/....php?t=620

NARRATOR: Horizon found evidence of problems with other US AID studies of Norplant. Testing was also carried out in Cité Soleil in Haiti, the poorest community in the poorest country in the western hemisphere. Since the mid-80s, there have been 14 coups d'état and 8 changes of government.

CATHERINE MATERNOWSKA: Danger's a difficult concept to define in Haiti. It can come from any direction at any moment. People who stand up and indicate that they have been abused are often punished, attacked at night, raped, hundreds of women in Cité Soleil have been raped by the para-military forces. Often entire neighbour-hoods are razed and burned down. This political instability makes the climate for doing good research absolutely impossible. For many years now I've had copious field notes on side-effects with the Norplant method, but I've had to work essentially in secret and covertly with Haitian women listening to their stories and their difficulties and unable to publish it. The participants in my study could have been in grave danger had the information been let out, the fact that they were talking to me about their woes, about their difficulties with the Family Planning Centre and the Norplant method. Many of the women that I interview come from the countryside where they've lost their land, where they've lost their income, where they've basically taken off in search of life and within months most of them tell me, the little saying (FRENCH) takes a turn and they say (FRENCH), which means in searching for life the essence of life is destroyed. They can't find food, they can't find water, they have no access to health care, so essentially they're looking for life but they find misery.

NARRATOR: It was while studying this community that Catherine Maternowska came across US AID trials of Norplant and was worried at what she found.

CATHERINE MATERNOWSKA: Side-effects in the context of Haitian women's lives are horrible. With the Norplant users they were extremely severe. Bleeding could go on for 18 months and what this means in a Haitian woman's life has enormous impact. In Haiti, women don't have cotex or tampons. That means that they have to use rags. She needs to wash them every morning. Washing is not a simple task at all in Haiti. She has to buy soap which cuts into her finances for her food. To purchase water. A woman who can't actually purchase the water needs to find the water in the nearby gutters which are filthy, polluted and used for defecation among other things. Another bad side-effect was headaches. A Haitian woman is not able to buy aspirin. They live in very noisy, active, polluted, intense communities and the headaches on top of all this were intolerable. Many women collapsed from this method in sheer exhaustion. They couldn't go to work, they felt so ill, they were unable to function.

NARRATOR: Just as in Bangladesh, a pattern emerged where it was sometimes difficult for the women to get the Norplant removed. Catherine Maternowska believed local clinics were under pressure to keep women in the trial to make the data look good.

CATHERINE MATERNOWSKA: One woman came in with an infection in her arm. She was a market woman, she carried heavy loads on her head and when she came in asking to get the insert out, the doctor complained and he complained and he looked at me and he was used to having me in the clinic and he said, 'Oh Cathy, look at this woman, she's an animal, she wants her Norplant out, she's an animal. She has to be in the study and she wants it out now. What's her problem?' They proceeded to throw her literally onto the table, lie her down so that they could do the, take the Norplant insertion out. They threw her head to the side like this and they gave her the anaesthesia but before the anaesthesia had actually taken effect in her skin they started pulling the inserts out and making incisions and pulling the inserts out. Because the infection in her arm it looked painful, it was red, it was swollen, and the muscle and sinew tissue had grown over the implants, they were pulling and she was wailing, she was why, why, and they continued calling her an animal. I think it's a sham, it's disgusting, it appalled me that this kind of research was going on. When someone's looking for help, looking for a solution to their poverty and what they find is something that just makes their poverty worse, it's a huge, huge sadness.

NARRATOR: For health workers in Cité Soleil Norplant is one of a long line of contraceptives that have been tested in Haiti over several decades.

ROSE-ANNE AUGUSTE [SUBTITLED): It is important for us to expose how women in poor countries are used as guinea pigs, especially in Haiti, so that they can test their products. Developed countries may not even use these products because the hormone levels are too high. But they use these in experiments on women in poor countries so that they can regulate the levels. Fundamentally, what appears to us in Haiti is that these people have found a laboratory here a slum laboratory - to do whatever they want. And one of the biggest laboratories for the American government is right here in Cité Soleil.

INTERVIEWER: Why would your research target the poorest and the most illiterate and the least well able to defend themselves group?

NILS DAULAIRE: You'll find that the broad portfolio of research does not target the poorest and the most illiterate and the least able to defend themselves. That in fact the research that's carried out is over a broad spectrum of society because it's important to understand the use effectiveness and the benefits, as well as the disadvantages of certain contraceptive types among a wide variety of groups.

INTERVIEWER: That maybe true for US AID as a whole, but I am talking about the clinical trials of Norplant in the Third World which were in the slums of Dhaka..

NARRATOR: At this point the interview was terminated by a State Department official who asked for further information. Later, Horizon was told: US AID categorically denies that poor Haitian women were being used as human guinea pigs by the United States. They added they were proud of their programme in Cité Soleil and that the clinic there had been widely praised for its quality of care. Norplant was studied in over 40 countries and apart from Bangladesh, there are reports of problems from Indonesia, Brazil and others, so how did the drug get approved by America's Food and Drug Administration? Sybil Shainwald attended the only public hearing in 1989.

SYBIL SHAINWALD: The FDA approve a process In the case of Norplant was ludicrous. It was not the standard approval process. The auditorium was packed and it was like a dog and pony show. There were blond women running around saying I love Norplant, I'm satisfied with Norplant. On the other hand, the advisory committee, which was hearing the testimony, took very little cognisance of the fact that there were problems that had been reported throughout the world.

NARRATOR: This application was later withdrawn due to problems with the data. It was resubmitted and approved 8 months later with no further public hearing.

SYBIL SHAINWALD: This was the fastest approval process that I know of since I have been dealing with the Food and Drug Administration and the purpose was to market this overseas to control population.

NARRATOR: Many researchers do believe that Norplant is of great benefit, but others are critical of the US government's promotion of a long-acting contraceptive overseas.

PROF. BETSY HARTMANN: At the highest levels in Washington, population growth in the Third World has long been perceived as a national security threat. During the Cold War, of course, public fear and paranoia often focused on the nuclear bomb and in the post-Cold War period we're having the population bomb re-emerging as a threat. Now we're fearing these Third World peoples. Does this mean that you promote Norplant like a weapon in the war against population growth? Colleagues and I have looked through declassified documents and have found, much to our horror, that at the highest levels of government this has been an obsession. There is a national security memorandum, for example, which talked about the great need to control population growth in places like Brazil and the big countries and how this population was a definite national security threat.

NARRATOR: Norplant is at least an officially approved contraceptive. But there are other, less regulated methods already in use.

BETSY HARTMANN: It's not just in the United States case the government, but there are also a whole range of private foundations that are funding the building of a population control movement.

NARRATOR: One private organisation is run by two doctors from America's southern states who believe they've found the answer for Third World women in a drug called Quinacrine.