USA consollidates hold on Haiti with 12,000 troop invasion

[Ed Jewett]

PENTAGON DISASTER RELIEF EXERCISE FOR HAITI WENT LIVE AFTER EARTHQUAKE HIT

January 20th, 2010 Via: NextGov:
As personnel representing hundreds of government and nongovernment agencies from around the world rush to the aid of earthquake-devastated Haiti, the Defense Information Systems Agency has launched a Web portal with multiple social networking tools to aid in coordinating their efforts.
On Monday, Jean Demay, DISA’s technical manager for the agency’s Transnational Information Sharing Cooperation project, happened to be at the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command in Miami preparing for a test of the system in a scenario that involved providing relief to Haiti in the wake of a hurricane. After the earthquake hit on Tuesday, Demay said SOUTHCOM decided to go live with the system. On Wednesday, DISA opened up its All Partners Access Network, supported by the Transnational Information Sharing Cooperation project, to any organization supporting Haiti relief efforts.
Posted in Atrocities, Coincidence?, Environment, False Flag Operations, Florida | Top Of Page

3 Responses to “PENTAGON DISASTER RELIEF EXERCISE FOR HAITI WENT LIVE AFTER EARTHQUAKE HIT”

1. MBerger47 Says:
   January 20th, 2010 at 2:36 pm Are you suggesting a simple connect-the-dots exercise?
   On the day of 9-11, there were military exercises preparing for a terrorist attack where commercial airliners are hi-jacked. Co-incidence?
   On the day before the Haiti earthquake, the military has an exercise where Haiti suffers an enormous natural disaster. Co-incidence?
   This is becoming a pattern where the military is ready for the exact disaster that occurs.
   I just had to spell it out…
   
2. realitydesign Says:
   January 20th, 2010 at 3:27 pm Man these simulations are a life-saver. I remember on 911 old rudolph was able to head down to the outdoor FEMA command post to handle the events as they unfolded that day- where he would have normally headed to his post inside WTC-7. Thank goodness for that BIO drill they were having JUST on that DAY- sheesh, the good lord works in mysterious ways I tell ya’
   (kisses bible and resumes listening to rush limbaugh)
   
3. williamspd Says:
   January 20th, 2010 at 4:11 pm Same story with Peter Power on the 7/7 attacks in London. Are we witnessing a ‘Drill Kill’ trend?
   

[Peter Lemkin]

US State Dept. apparently has said NO Haitians unless they have a U.S. Passport can enter USA - even temporarily [say, for having a life saving operation due to earthquake, etc.]. Still getting back at them for being the first in the Hemisphere to stage a slave revolt, it seems. :flute:

Trivia note: All baseballs used in the USA are made by underpaid labor in Haiti.

[Ed Jewett]

U.S. troops in Haiti to prevent Aristide’s return

Posted on January 19, 2010 by willyloman
by Wayne Madson, Online Journal
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, a 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 supplies 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 him and 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 swollen 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 exiles’ 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 Singh, 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 operation 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.


http://willyloman.wordpress.com/2010/01/...9s-return/

[Ed Jewett]

Former Clinton Official Says The Plan is to Create a “New Haiti”

Posted on January 20, 2010 by willyloman
by Scott Creighton
The truth is out there but you won’t find it on Fox or MSNBC. The corporate media is busily conveying the Washington Consensus talking point that looting and violence in Haiti demands the Obama administration put military ”boots on the ground”. But if you take a little time, if you really listen to what Obama and Hillary are saying, then you start to see that this is becoming another blatant example of disaster capitalism at it’s worst.
The plan is to create a “new Haiti” out of the ashes of the old one. A new Haiti that will open up its markets for U.S. corporations, privatize all remaining public services, and allow for the long-term deployment of U.S. troops who will be used to pacify the general population. In remarkably candid language a former Clinton administration official also suggests a correlation between the final civilian death toll in Haiti and the size of the U.S. aid package to be allocated for reconstruction.
In an interview published on the Council on Foreign Relations website, Mark L. Schneider makes it very clear; like Condi Rice’s “new Middle East” before them, the plan this administration is adopting is to create a “new Haiti”.

A: One thing that’s clear is that there will not be the same Haitian fixed bureaucratic system. They will have to come up with a new system, and hopefully in the process they will incorporate accountability mechanisms that will give you a better shot at getting decent public services as well as strengthening private investment.

You have to look for the key-words in the coded messages that the business elites think only they will understand.
A ”bureaucratic system” to these guys means a public sector (government) looking out for public interests to the detriment of big business. So fixing a “bureaucratic system” is kinda like the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act that removed the “bureaucratic” regulations that kept big banking in check for 6 decades. We see how well that worked out. It didn’t work out so well for 90% of the population but it worked wonderfully for the Wall Street investment banks like Goldman-Sachs.
Fixing the “bureaucratic system” in Haiti means simply “deregulation”.
“decent public services” is code for the privitization of the public sector.
“strengthening private investment” is code for the opening up of Haitian markets and removing limitations on foreign investors buying Haitian companies for pennies on the dollar.

Q: You mean from this disaster to produce “a New Haiti”?
A: Exactly. A year ago there was an agreement about poverty reduction strategy. Now you have to amend that and say we have to first put down a foundation for economic investment, job creation, and recreation of public services.

The kinds of jobs they have created in the past were mainly in the garment industry. Sweat-shops created under Bill Clinton’s guidance that paid approximately $1.70 per day. The imposition of previous free-market reforms pushed by the IMF and the World Bank decimated the agricultural sectors in Haiti forcing many of their rural populations to migrate to the capital where the only work they could find were in these “free-market zone” starvation wage factories. That’s why you have millions of shanties spread throughout the city. But extreme poverty and congested living arrangements has a funny way of breeding dissent. In the hundreds of shanty towns spread throughout Port-Au-Prince, support for the twice ousted President Aristide has risen to remarkably high levels. That’s why the UN “peacekeepers” and the National Police of Haiti have been cracking down in these areas over the past few years.
In order to create a “new Haiti” you have to suppress dissent. This won’t be easy in Haiti. Expect to hear terms like “extremists” and even perhaps “terrorists” being bounced around the corporate media in the next few weeks referring to large sections of the population who resist these changes.
In the long term these reforms will produce a great deal of money for the corporate and banking elites in this nation. But the short term rebuilding prospects also look promising. You see, it takes a lot of money to create a “new Haiti” from the ashes of the old one. Just like with any war, the true wealth potential lies not so much in the skimming off of the public sector money poured feverishly into a few private hands, but in the debt created by that rebuilding process. And the potential debt base this disaster will create promises to be one of record proportions.

Q: How much do you think this will cost the United States?
A: This assessment hasn’t been completed yet. The United Nations and the World Bank will do an assessment. In 1998, Hurricane Mitch swept Central America. There was an assessment of damage of $6 billion. The international community came up with about $4 billion and the United States provided about $2 billion of that. There were only nine thousand people who died in Hurricane Mitch. We’re talking about one hundred thousand people who have died here, and we’re talking about a multiple of the estimate of that $6 billion in terms of an estimate of the damage. I guess it will be a multiple of the $6 billion in what it will cost over the next five years to begin to reconstruct and give Haiti some hope for the future.

Multiples of 6 billion dollars over the next 5 years created out of thin air by the privately owned Federal Reserve banking system and loaned to the people of the United States, at interest.
The heavy toll of death and human suffering has a fixed multiplier equation already formulated for these people. The higher the pile of bodies, the bigger the interest payments we will have to make to the Federal Reserve banks. It’s almost like a CDO or other kinds of derivatives which are designed to profit from failure. The only difference is that these write-downs are meassured by the size of the mass graves. The bigger the hole, the bigger the profit. Therefore these banks actually benefit from higher fatality numbers that can be used later to beef up aid requests, just like this guy is already talking about. Might explain why relief aid is so slow getting to the people of Haiti. Might explain why doctors and hospitals are being forced to land in the Dominican Republic. Might explain a lot of things.
If you think this is an isolated opinion held by some fringe republican talking head, think again. Not only is Mark L. Schneider a Democrat formerly with the Clinton administration, but during that time he served as the “assistant administrator for Latin America at the U.S. Agency for International Development in November 1993 directing U.S. foreign assistance programs in this hemisphere”. In short, he was one of the key architects of Clinton’s neoliberal assault on Latin America for years. He now serves as Vice President of the International Crisis Group, an organization created by… the World Bank.
But Mark isn’t the only globalist out there pressing for a new Haiti.
As Naomi Klein pointed out on her website, the Heritage Foundation jumped right on board the new Haitian gravy-train while the glasses on the shelves were still rattling in Port-au-Prince. People were literally still gasping and clawing through the rubble trying to escape their concrete tombs while the Heritage Foundation was posting their neoliberal to-do list proudly on their website. Naomi pointed out that as soon as she made mention of their article, they took it off their site. She was partially correct; they simply took it off the front page. These are people whose suggestions have been followed almost to the letter by an opposing political party’s president; the president of “change”. I don’t think they are all that concerned about what negative publicity Naomi Klein might generate.

Congress should immediately expand U.S. trade preferences for Haiti. The 2006 Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement Act, and an extension approved in 2008, helped to create jobs and boost apparel exports and investment by providing tariff-free access to the U.S. market. The apparel sector represents about two-thirds of Haitian exports and nearly one-tenth of Haiti’s GDP.
The U.S. should also establish trade preferences for other manufactures and agriculture commodity exports from Haiti to the U.S. Benefits for both Haitian and American importers and exporters…
The U.S. should therefore do the following:

• President Obama should tap high-level, bipartisan leadership. Clearly former President Clinton, the U.N. special envoy to Haiti, is a logical choice and is already coordinating the international responses with the U.N. President Obama should also reach out to a senior Republican figure, perhaps former President George W. Bush, to lead the bipartisan effort for the Republicans.
  
• Congress should begin work on a package of assistance, trade, and reconstruction efforts needed to put Haiti on its feet and open the way for deep and lasting democratic reforms.
  

Keep in mind that what you read above was written and posted on the Heritage Foundation’s website on the 13th of January this year. The earthquake happened on Jan. 12th and President Obama announced the Clinton/Bush team on Jan. 14th.
The truth is, this is a bipartisan effort to finally subjugate the proud people of a torn nation in order to provide the highest profit margins for a few corporate and banking elites. The plan is to create a “new Haiti”. For those of you with a slightly better than average memory language like this should sound chillingly familiar to that of another globalist secretary of state not that long ago.

Her description of the conflagration in Lebanon as the “birthpangs of a new Middle East” was about as callous as it gets, matched only by Bush’s remark that the conflict represents “a moment of opportunity.” The Progressive 2006

Opportunity indeed.
There is a refrain from a classic Warren Zevon song that goes like this “Send lawyers, guns and money,… the shit has hit the fan”.
In 2005, Mark L. Schneider wrote the following about the deteriorating situation in Haiti;

It’s two minutes to midnight in Haiti. When the clock strikes, the country will implode and become a permanent failed state, right on our doorstep. About the only thing that can stop the clock, let alone start winding it back some, is if the Bush administration commits Marines, money, and diplomatic muscle to help the United Nations Mission there. Mark L. Schneider

Indeed the shit has hit the fan. Send lawyers, guns, and money. It’s always been our plan.


http://willyloman.wordpress.com/2010/01/...#more-8458

[Magda Hassan]

A couple of things from the Spanish language press.
http://www.vtv.gob.ve/noticias-internacionales/28814

Google translation: Haiti: U.S. floating Superhospital only 10 patients treated since his arrival

Those lucky enough to be treated are selected beforehand / The doctors do their "core mission" of "caring for the crew" consisting of 3 thousand 500 people, "in view of preserving our operational capabilities," said the head of the medical unit Vinson, Dr. Alfred ShwayatUn group of earthquake survivors in Haiti, had surgery Tuesday in a medical unit floating art technology reserved only for patients and pre-selected and that was installed on the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson The doctors do their "core mission" of "caring for the crew" consisting of 3 thousand 500 people, "in view of preserving our operational capabilities," said the head of the medical unit of Vinson, Dr. Alfred Shwayat.
The surgery unit is comprised of three operating tables, a radiology and fifty beds, in addition to this, the medical personnel will comprise 55 experts, among which has a surgeon, an anesthetist and a psychologist.
The floating medical unit has treated about 10 patients since their arrival, three U.S. nationals and seven Haitians. Most of them underwent surgery for amputations. One patient, a Haitian of 12 years, underwent surgery by the American neurosurgeon and medical journalist from an international, Sanjay Gupta.

Wow. 10 whole patients. I am so impressed. Only 7 were actually Haitian. Perhaps by now they may have treated a whole 12 victims. At this rate most victims will be dead before they can be treated. Perhaps that's the mission.
Meanwhile Cuban health professionals were first on the scene and have treated 1,000's
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/788.html

There is also something reported in some of the Spanish language press that the Russian army has condemned the US for causing the quake through HAARP. I am finding it difficult to get confirmation of this in the Russian press though so it may just be an internet meme.

[Peter Lemkin]

Former Clinton Official Says The Plan is to Create a “New Haiti”

Posted on January 20, 2010 by willyloman
by Scott Creighton
The truth is out there but you won’t find it on Fox or MSNBC. The corporate media is busily conveying the Washington Consensus talking point that looting and violence in Haiti demands the Obama administration put military ”boots on the ground”. But if you take a little time, if you really listen to what Obama and Hillary are saying, then you start to see that this is becoming another blatant example of disaster capitalism at it’s worst.
The plan is to create a “new Haiti” out of the ashes of the old one. A new Haiti that will open up its markets for U.S. corporations, privatize all remaining public services, and allow for the long-term deployment of U.S. troops who will be used to pacify the general population. In remarkably candid language a former Clinton administration official also suggests a correlation between the final civilian death toll in Haiti and the size of the U.S. aid package to be allocated for reconstruction.
In an interview published on the Council on Foreign Relations website, Mark L. Schneider makes it very clear; like Condi Rice’s “new Middle East” before them, the plan this administration is adopting is to create a “new Haiti”.

A: One thing that’s clear is that there will not be the same Haitian fixed bureaucratic system. They will have to come up with a new system, and hopefully in the process they will incorporate accountability mechanisms that will give you a better shot at getting decent public services as well as strengthening private investment.

You have to look for the key-words in the coded messages that the business elites think only they will understand.
A ”bureaucratic system” to these guys means a public sector (government) looking out for public interests to the detriment of big business. So fixing a “bureaucratic system” is kinda like the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act that removed the “bureaucratic” regulations that kept big banking in check for 6 decades. We see how well that worked out. It didn’t work out so well for 90% of the population but it worked wonderfully for the Wall Street investment banks like Goldman-Sachs.
Fixing the “bureaucratic system” in Haiti means simply “deregulation”.
“decent public services” is code for the privitization of the public sector.
“strengthening private investment” is code for the opening up of Haitian markets and removing limitations on foreign investors buying Haitian companies for pennies on the dollar.

Q: You mean from this disaster to produce “a New Haiti”?
A: Exactly. A year ago there was an agreement about poverty reduction strategy. Now you have to amend that and say we have to first put down a foundation for economic investment, job creation, and recreation of public services.

The kinds of jobs they have created in the past were mainly in the garment industry. Sweat-shops created under Bill Clinton’s guidance that paid approximately $1.70 per day. The imposition of previous free-market reforms pushed by the IMF and the World Bank decimated the agricultural sectors in Haiti forcing many of their rural populations to migrate to the capital where the only work they could find were in these “free-market zone” starvation wage factories. That’s why you have millions of shanties spread throughout the city. But extreme poverty and congested living arrangements has a funny way of breeding dissent. In the hundreds of shanty towns spread throughout Port-Au-Prince, support for the twice ousted President Aristide has risen to remarkably high levels. That’s why the UN “peacekeepers” and the National Police of Haiti have been cracking down in these areas over the past few years.
In order to create a “new Haiti” you have to suppress dissent. This won’t be easy in Haiti. Expect to hear terms like “extremists” and even perhaps “terrorists” being bounced around the corporate media in the next few weeks referring to large sections of the population who resist these changes.
In the long term these reforms will produce a great deal of money for the corporate and banking elites in this nation. But the short term rebuilding prospects also look promising. You see, it takes a lot of money to create a “new Haiti” from the ashes of the old one. Just like with any war, the true wealth potential lies not so much in the skimming off of the public sector money poured feverishly into a few private hands, but in the debt created by that rebuilding process. And the potential debt base this disaster will create promises to be one of record proportions.

Q: How much do you think this will cost the United States?
A: This assessment hasn’t been completed yet. The United Nations and the World Bank will do an assessment. In 1998, Hurricane Mitch swept Central America. There was an assessment of damage of $6 billion. The international community came up with about $4 billion and the United States provided about $2 billion of that. There were only nine thousand people who died in Hurricane Mitch. We’re talking about one hundred thousand people who have died here, and we’re talking about a multiple of the estimate of that $6 billion in terms of an estimate of the damage. I guess it will be a multiple of the $6 billion in what it will cost over the next five years to begin to reconstruct and give Haiti some hope for the future.

Multiples of 6 billion dollars over the next 5 years created out of thin air by the privately owned Federal Reserve banking system and loaned to the people of the United States, at interest.
The heavy toll of death and human suffering has a fixed multiplier equation already formulated for these people. The higher the pile of bodies, the bigger the interest payments we will have to make to the Federal Reserve banks. It’s almost like a CDO or other kinds of derivatives which are designed to profit from failure. The only difference is that these write-downs are meassured by the size of the mass graves. The bigger the hole, the bigger the profit. Therefore these banks actually benefit from higher fatality numbers that can be used later to beef up aid requests, just like this guy is already talking about. Might explain why relief aid is so slow getting to the people of Haiti. Might explain why doctors and hospitals are being forced to land in the Dominican Republic. Might explain a lot of things.
If you think this is an isolated opinion held by some fringe republican talking head, think again. Not only is Mark L. Schneider a Democrat formerly with the Clinton administration, but during that time he served as the “assistant administrator for Latin America at the U.S. Agency for International Development in November 1993 directing U.S. foreign assistance programs in this hemisphere”. In short, he was one of the key architects of Clinton’s neoliberal assault on Latin America for years. He now serves as Vice President of the International Crisis Group, an organization created by… the World Bank.
But Mark isn’t the only globalist out there pressing for a new Haiti.
As Naomi Klein pointed out on her website, the Heritage Foundation jumped right on board the new Haitian gravy-train while the glasses on the shelves were still rattling in Port-au-Prince. People were literally still gasping and clawing through the rubble trying to escape their concrete tombs while the Heritage Foundation was posting their neoliberal to-do list proudly on their website. Naomi pointed out that as soon as she made mention of their article, they took it off their site. She was partially correct; they simply took it off the front page. These are people whose suggestions have been followed almost to the letter by an opposing political party’s president; the president of “change”. I don’t think they are all that concerned about what negative publicity Naomi Klein might generate.

Congress should immediately expand U.S. trade preferences for Haiti. The 2006 Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement Act, and an extension approved in 2008, helped to create jobs and boost apparel exports and investment by providing tariff-free access to the U.S. market. The apparel sector represents about two-thirds of Haitian exports and nearly one-tenth of Haiti’s GDP.
The U.S. should also establish trade preferences for other manufactures and agriculture commodity exports from Haiti to the U.S. Benefits for both Haitian and American importers and exporters…
The U.S. should therefore do the following:

• President Obama should tap high-level, bipartisan leadership. Clearly former President Clinton, the U.N. special envoy to Haiti, is a logical choice and is already coordinating the international responses with the U.N. President Obama should also reach out to a senior Republican figure, perhaps former President George W. Bush, to lead the bipartisan effort for the Republicans.
  
• Congress should begin work on a package of assistance, trade, and reconstruction efforts needed to put Haiti on its feet and open the way for deep and lasting democratic reforms.
  

Keep in mind that what you read above was written and posted on the Heritage Foundation’s website on the 13th of January this year. The earthquake happened on Jan. 12th and President Obama announced the Clinton/Bush team on Jan. 14th.
The truth is, this is a bipartisan effort to finally subjugate the proud people of a torn nation in order to provide the highest profit margins for a few corporate and banking elites. The plan is to create a “new Haiti”. For those of you with a slightly better than average memory language like this should sound chillingly familiar to that of another globalist secretary of state not that long ago.

Her description of the conflagration in Lebanon as the “birthpangs of a new Middle East” was about as callous as it gets, matched only by Bush’s remark that the conflict represents “a moment of opportunity.” The Progressive 2006

Opportunity indeed.
There is a refrain from a classic Warren Zevon song that goes like this “Send lawyers, guns and money,… the shit has hit the fan”.
In 2005, Mark L. Schneider wrote the following about the deteriorating situation in Haiti;

It’s two minutes to midnight in Haiti. When the clock strikes, the country will implode and become a permanent failed state, right on our doorstep. About the only thing that can stop the clock, let alone start winding it back some, is if the Bush administration commits Marines, money, and diplomatic muscle to help the United Nations Mission there. Mark L. Schneider

Indeed the shit has hit the fan. Send lawyers, guns, and money. It’s always been our plan.


http://willyloman.wordpress.com/2010/01/...#more-8458

Ah, we did a 'great' job in 'creating a new' Chile back with old-man Augusto! Repeat performance? Hey, NO NATION 'left behind'. While the earthquake's death and destruction, misery creation was instantaneous, I predict our 'help' following it will do as much damage...slowly....but that is the way we do things now...'torture....slow torture'. In fact, most of Haiti's woes now are due to the US's exploitation; and most recently our support for their thug death squads and two major coups - along with quite a few other lesser or older ones. Bring Aristide Back and kick the ****ing U.S. out of N.A. [or the Planet!]. Shock Doctrine is on the mark...sadly.

[Ed Jewett]

CIA Contractor Now Flying Spy Drone Over Haiti (Updated Again)

• By Noah Shachtman
  
• January 19, 2010 |
  
• 5:15 pm |
  
• Categories: Drones
  

A controversial CIA contractor has found new work in Haiti, flying drones on disaster recovery duty.
When last we heard from Evergreen International Aviation, the Oregon-based firm was offering to post sentries at local voting centers during the 2008 election, ”detaining troublemakers” and making sure voters “do not get out of control.”
Join Reddit’s Haiti relief fundraising drive with Direct Relief International.

Now, company vice president Sam White tells Aviation Week that the firm is flying at least one ScanEagle surveillance drone over Haiti. ”The company has a fleet of 747s and a fleet of large and small choppers, and has begun ferrying in supplies to Port au Prince,” the magazine’s Paul McLeary notes. “White wouldn’t say who the company is moving cargo for, saying only that ‘we’re working with different agencies, and we have one plane coming in tomorrow full of humanitarian supplies.’”
Over the years, Evergreen has had all sorts of interesting clients over its five-plus decades in operation. Back in the late ’80s, the company “acknowledged one agreement under which his companies provide occasional jobs and cover to foreign nationals the CIA wants taken out of other countries or brought into the United States.” In 2006, Evergreen’s parent company flew Bill O’Reilly into Kuwait in 2006, according toSourceWatch. Last April, the company won a $158 million contract to supply the Air Force with helicopters in Afghanistan.
Haiti wouldn’t be Evergreen’s first disaster-response mission, however. In September, the State of California chartered Evergreen’s 747 supertanker, to help put out forest fires there.
UPDATE: Brian Whiteside, executive vice president of Evergreen Unmanned Systems, denied that his company is flying drones for the earthquake recovery operation. “We have no UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] in Haiti — nothing currently in Haiti, and nothing in the region,”he tells Danger Room. Whiteside acknowledged that “we do have teams over there that are trying to help.” But Whiteside isn’t sure what, exactly, they’ve been able to accomplish. “We don’t have very good comms with them.” And when I asked him which government agency or charity Evergreen was trying to support, he ducked the question, and referred me to his spokesperson.
UPDATE 2: McLeary went back and posted the quotes he got from Evergreen’s Sam White. “We also have some UAVs here that we’re bringing in to, uh, probably work with the press to help out downloading live video links and aerial shots of the devastation,” he said. “We also have 747 cargo airplanes, and so we’re working with different agencies there and uh, we have a plane landing here tomorrow to bring in a lot of humanitarian supplies. So we’ll be here for quite some time.”
So which Evergreen exec is telling the truth?
Photo: Evergreen Unmanned Systems


ALSO:

• U.S. Diverts Spy Drone from Afghanistan to Haiti
  
• Tweets From the Front Lines of Haiti Relief
  
• Haiti Update: Reporter Tweets, Troops on the Streets
  
• Earthquake-Hit Haiti Still Offline; Military, Relief Agencies Rush …
  
• Rescue Ops in Haiti: ‘The First 72 Hours Are Critical’
  
• Top General: Despite ‘Pockets of Violence,’ Haiti Remains …
  
• After Massive Quake, Military Stands By to Aid Haiti (Updated …
  

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/01/...z0dH9AMnHL

[Ed Jewett]

Disaster Relief 2.0: Tech Tools Help Focus Haiti Resources

• By Nathan Hodge
  
• January 20, 2010 |
  
• 12:01 pm |
  
• Categories: Info War
  

During a large-scale humanitarian crisis, information is key. Coordination among relief agencies is essential, so that efforts are not duplicated and resources go where they are most needed.
Join Reddit’s Haiti relief fundraising drive with Direct Relief International.

With collaborative tools, disaster-response teams and relief workers can identify risk zones and emerging threats more rapidly. Courtesy of a tech community “SitRep” (situational report) created and shared by Luke Beckman of the nonprofit group InSTEDD, we have some insight into how humanitarian organizations, aid groups and the military can tap information to help in the relief effort.
For instance, OpenStreetMap, a free wiki world map, offers an excellent depiction of the situation on the ground, as volunteers mark the locations of aid stations, tent camps and working hospitals. The data is available as web maps, as well as Garmin images for use in handheld GPS devices. OpenStreetMap tools are available for download.
As we noted here before, U.S. Southern Command has created a portal for civil-military coordination. In addition, the military command has a restricted, but unclassified, site for government agencies involved in the effort; it has also shared imagery from an RQ-4 Global Hawk surveillance drone.
Google is hosting satellite imagery files made available by GeoEye, which agreed to provide the data, free of charge, for use by relief organizations. The images were captured by the GeoEye-One satellite one day after the Jan. 12 earthquake. The files are intended for use by professionals with GIS mapping software, but readers interested in viewing the images can use the available Google Earth Haiti files.
The Crisis Commons Wiki has a great list of resources available, including situation maps, links to partner organizations on the ground, and contact info for volunteer networks at home. My favorite tool is provided by Ushahidi, which has set up an easy-to-use way to report incidents and emergencies. Incidents can be reported by sending a text to 4636 (locally), sending an e-mail to haiti@ushahidi.com, or sending a tweet with the hashtags #haiti or #haitiquake
According to the InSTEDD report, an open-source collaboration team is working with the State Department and a wireless operator to open up access to a public number (4636) for text messages. The SMS feed can then be routed to relief agencies that have access, and the goal right now is to get the word out to the public in Haiti.
On the more retro side: ARRL, the national association for amateur radio, has encouraged ham radio operators to be aware of the emergency operations on the following frequencies: 7.045 and 3.720 MHz (IARU Region 2 nets), 14.265, 7.265 and 3.977 MHz (SATERN nets), and 14.300 MHz (Intercontinental Assistance and Traffic Net). The International Radio Emergency Support Coalition is also active on EchoLink node 278173. Last week, members of the Radio Club Dominicano and Union Dominicana de Radio Aficionados crossed over to Haiti to install an emergency radio communications station and a mobile station. Not long after they arrived, however, the hams had to turn back to the Dominican Republic after their convoy was fired on.

InSTEDD was one of the first projects of Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google. It was created so public health and relief workers could have access to the most up-to-the-minute information, including satellite imagery, sensor data and media reports.
Lin Wells, former Pentagon chief information officer, told Danger Room that Beckman’s SitRep reflected “exceptional capabilities assembled from volunteers, from Japan to Sri Lanka to Latin America to Northern Europe, not to mention in the U.S. and on-the-ground in Haiti.” Just a few years ago, that kind of information would have be unavailable to government or the international relief community. But thanks to collaborative efforts like InSTEDD, STAR-TIDES, Crisis Mappers and others, Wells added, we’re starting to see some results.
The challenge now, Wells said, is to “figure out how to institutionalize the approach for the long haul in Haiti, ensure these capabilities (and other prototypes) get fielded rapidly in the next contingency, wherever it may be, and apply comparable approaches to support stabilization and reconstruction in Afghanistan, and to other theaters. Lessons learned from Haiti already are being developed.”
Photo: U.S. Department of Defense


Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/01/...z0dH9XOy4B

[Ed Jewett]

Pentagon’s Social Network Becomes Hub for Haiti Relief

• By Noah Shachtman
  
• January 21, 2010 |
  
• 7:54 am |
  
• Categories: Info War
  

After three years of development, the military was done developing a new crisis-response communication tool. All that was left to do was to test the new communications and collaboration system in its element—disaster scenarios. The test, scheduled for this summer, was a simulated hurricane in the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
Join Reddit’s Haiti relief fundraising drive with Direct Relief International.

Then, last Tuesday, real disaster struck, rocking Haiti and sending relief organizations, governments, and people all over the world into crisis mode. Money and people have poured into Haiti to help address the devastating circumstances.
But with much of Haiti offline, from airports to ports to basic phone lines, communication, internally and externally, has been extremely tough. Without the ability to communicate with air traffic control or relief workers, it’s been hard to gauge what’s really going on in Haiti, to communicate what is needed, or to make sure aid goes where the need is.
That’s the problem the military geeks at DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency) are supposed to untangle. DISA’s job is to make sure the military always has active communication and the ability to collaborate and share information, across borders and organizations. So they put their still-untested communication and collaboration tool, into active duty.
TISC (”the Transnational Information Sharing Cooperation”) is a new iteration of APAN, the All Partners Access Network, which was developed by the Defense Department a few years ago. Initially, the military was using APAN to communicate across borders, particularly in countries without sophisticated communication technology. Even in third-world countries, Internet connection seemed to be frequently accessible, so the APAN system was built to work over the Internet, to facilitate the sharing of classified files, as well as things like coordinating calendars.
The system is designed to be as simple as possible, and is as easy to use as a site like Facebook, says Ty Wooldridge of the U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii. It uses file-sharing applications, wikis, blogs, and calendaring tools, among other things, to coordinate information and action among people, no matter where they are. Though there are obvious military implications to that kind of network, its first battlefield test is ongoing, on the ground in Haiti.
Without another way of collaborating, the TISC platform has become one of the de facto standards for communication among the relief effort in Haiti.There are more than 1700 different users in Haiti, most of them relief organizations of various size and specialty looking for how to get involved, and to coordinate efforts to maximize results. It’s operating on a larger scale than DISA had originally planned, but it’s scaling well, says Jean Dumay, one of DISA’s leads on the TISC project. “The test came early, and it became very real, but we were ready for it.”
The simplicity of TISC is the reason for its explosion of adoption, and is a great strength of TISC and APAN, says Wooldridge. It’s also an intentional one: a few years ago, when he was in Thailand, teaching Thai officers how to use the military’s communications tools, he had them set up passwords including special characters. After hours of trying, one soldier admitted than none of the Thai officers knew what a special character was. “That was when we realized we needed a simpler solution.”
In addition to TISC, DISA is coordinating a number of other communications-related solutions in Haiti. When relief organizations come in to a country in droves, Anderson told me, their communication frequencies often overlap, creating a crisis even among those who brought their own means of communication. To stabilize the situation, as DISA is accustomed to doing for the military, DISA’s Defense Spectrum Office is now in Haiti, “trying to deconflict the electro-magnetic spectrum. These needs aren’t only for the U.S. military, but for all the NGOs to operate so that we can work together.” Super High Frequency communications are being provided to the military, in particular the US Navy ships that are arriving to provide medical care, security, and more.
TISC, one of a number of high-tech initiatives being used in the relief effort in Haiti is helping military and relief efforts alike, Dumay tells Danger Room. The applications allow for groups to communicate within Haiti—groups are using it to point out water shortages, direct gas trucks to where generators have run out, and more—as well as to report back to the US, reporting needs so more aid can be sent.
Haiti’s communication infrastructure, Anderson says, was essentially broken by the earthquake, and without a way to pass information reliably and easily, aid and relief come at a much slower pace. If it works, the TISC-type social network might become the disaster-communication means of the future, and make relief efforts that much more effective.
– David Pierce is a intern at WIRED magazine in New York. This is his first post for Danger Room.
[Photo: Southcom]


Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/01/...z0dH9oAMwP

####### ######## ######


Ed says the last three posts fall under the aegis of "bouncing the propaganda", but sometimes you gotta look and see what they are selling...

[Ed Jewett]

Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, In Haiti, Words Can Kill
Posted by Rebecca Solnit at 10:18am, January 21, 2010.



Just before Haiti was devastated by the most powerful earthquake to hit the island in more than 200 years, when, that is, it was only devastated by the hemisphere’s worst poverty, there were but one or two full-time foreign correspondents in the country. No longer.
Within days, the networks, CNN, and Fox had more or less transferred their news operations (already slimmed down by years of attrition) onto the island. CNN’s Anderson Cooper made it first on Wednesday morning. Katie flew in later that day. By the time Diane made it out ofKabul and into Port-au-Prince, Brian had already long since hit “the tarmac.” (All but Anderson were gone again by the weekend.) Along with them, in a situation in which resources were nearly nonexistent, went at least 44 CNN correspondents, producers, and technicians, a crew of 25 from Fox, and undoubtedly similar contingents from CBS, NBC, and ABC. Other than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Los Angeles Times, this was “the biggest U.S. television news deployment to an international crisis since the 2004 Southeast Asian tsunami” -- at a cost that can only have been obscene.
In the process, as happens on our obsessionally eyeball-gluing, single-event, 24/7 media planet, “world news” essentially became Haiti with the usual logos, tags, and drum rolls (“Earthquake in Haiti”). The three networks even briefly expanded the length of their half-hour news shows to an all-Haiti-all-the-time hour, with just bare minutes leftover for the rest of the planet. In a sense, as the earthquake had blotted out Haiti, so the news coverage blotted out everything else with an almost religious fervor and the language to match.
In place of the world came endless stories of a tiny number of riveting rescues from the rubble (“miracles”) by international rescue teams -- less than 150 saved when possibly tens of thousands of buried Haitians would not be dug out and conceivably up to 200,000 had died. Along with this went the usual self-congratulatory reporting about American generosity and the importance of American troops (they secured the airport!) in a situation in which aid was visiblynot getting through, in which people were not being saved.
And of course, with the drama of people pulled from the rubble went another kind of drama: impending violence -- even though the real story, as a number of reporters couldn’t help but notice, was the remarkable patience and altruistic willingness of Haitians to support each other,help each other, and organize each other in a situation where there was almost nothing to share. It might, in fact, have been their finest hour, but amid the growing headlines about possible “violence” and “looting,” that would have been hard to tell.
The coverage has been beyond massive, sentimental, self-congratulatory, and not anyone’s finest hour -- and a month or three from now, predictably, Haiti will still be utterly devastated and there will be but one or two foreign correspondents on hand. Anderson, Diane, Brian, Katie? They’ll be somewhere else, 24/7. Of course, much of what happened might have been far better prepared for, if any of the anchors or correspondents had read Rebecca Solnit’s revelatory book, A Paradise Built in Hell, which offers news from the past on what people, again and again, in the worst of times, actually do without the help of the authorities. The answer: generally, they take care of each other in remarkably creative ways. Tom

When the Media Is the Disaster
Covering Haiti
By Rebecca Solnit
Soon after almost every disaster the crimes begin: ruthless, selfish, indifferent to human suffering, and generating far more suffering. The perpetrators go unpunished and live to commit further crimes against humanity. They care less for human life than for property. They act without regard for consequences.
I’m talking, of course, about those members of the mass media whose misrepresentation of what goes on in disaster often abets and justifies a second wave of disaster. I’m talking about the treatment of sufferers as criminals, both on the ground and in the news, and the endorsement of a shift of resources from rescue to property patrol. They still have blood on their hands from Hurricane Katrina, and they are staining themselves anew in Haiti.

Within days of the Haitian earthquake, for example, the Los Angeles Times ran a series of photographs with captions that kept deploying the word “looting.” One was of a man lying face down on the ground with this caption: “A Haitian police officer ties up a suspected looter who was carrying a bag of evaporated milk.” The man’s sweaty face looks up at the camera, beseeching, anguished.
Another photo was labeled: “Looting continued in Haiti on the third day after the earthquake, although there were more police in downtown Port-au-Prince.” It showed a somber crowd wandering amid shattered piles of concrete in a landscape where, visibly, there could be little worth taking anyway.
A third image was captioned: “A looter makes off with rolls of fabric from an earthquake-wrecked store.” Yet another: “The body of a police officer lies in a Port-au-Prince street. He was accidentally shot by fellow police who mistook him for a looter.”
People were then still trapped alive in the rubble. A translator for Australian TV dug out a toddler who’d survived 68 hours without food or water, orphaned but claimed by an uncle who had lost his pregnant wife. Others were hideously wounded and awaiting medical attention that wasn’t arriving. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, needed, and still need, water, food, shelter, and first aid. The media in disaster bifurcates. Some step out of their usual “objective” roles to respond with kindness and practical aid. Others bring out the arsenal of clichés and pernicious myths and begin to assault the survivors all over again.
The “looter” in the first photo might well have been taking that milk to starving children and babies, but for the news media that wasn’t the most urgent problem. The “looter” stooped under the weight of two big bolts of fabric might well have been bringing it to now homeless people trying to shelter from a fierce tropical sun under improvised tents.
The pictures do convey desperation, but they don’t convey crime. Except perhaps for that shooting of a fellow police officer -- his colleagues were so focused on property that they were reckless when it came to human life, and a man died for no good reason in a landscape already saturated with death.
In recent days, there have been scattered accounts of confrontations involving weapons, and these may be a different matter. But the man with the powdered milk? Is he really a criminal? There may be more to know, but with what I’ve seen I’m not convinced.
What Would You Do?
Imagine, reader, that your city is shattered by a disaster. Your home no longer exists, and you spent what cash was in your pockets days ago. Your credit cards are meaningless because there is no longer any power to run credit-card charges. Actually, there are no longer any storekeepers, any banks, any commerce, or much of anything to buy. The economy has ceased to exist.
By day three, you’re pretty hungry and the water you grabbed on your way out of your house is gone. The thirst is far worse than the hunger. You can go for many days without food, but not water. And in the improvised encampment you settle in, there is an old man near you who seems on the edge of death. He no longer responds when you try to reassure him that this ordeal will surely end. Toddlers are now crying constantly, and their mothers infinitely stressed and distressed.
So you go out to see if any relief organization has finally arrived to distribute anything, only to realize that there are a million others like you stranded with nothing, and there isn’t likely to be anywhere near enough aid anytime soon. The guy with the corner store has already given away all his goods to the neighbors. That supply’s long gone by now. No wonder, when you see the chain pharmacy with the shattered windows or the supermarket, you don’t think twice before grabbing a box of PowerBars and a few gallons of water that might keep you alive and help you save a few lives as well.
The old man might not die, the babies might stop their squalling, and the mothers might lose that look on their faces. Other people are calmly wandering in and helping themselves, too. Maybe they’re people like you, and that gallon of milk the fellow near you has taken is going to spoil soon anyway. You haven’t shoplifted since you were 14, and you have plenty of money to your name. But it doesn’t mean anything now.
If you grab that stuff are you a criminal? Should you end up lying in the dirt on your stomach with a cop tying your hands behind your back? Should you end up labeled a looter in the international media? Should you be shot down in the street, since the overreaction in disaster, almost any disaster, often includes the imposition of the death penalty without benefit of trial for suspected minor property crimes?
Or are you a rescuer? Is the survival of disaster victims more important than the preservation of everyday property relations? Is that chain pharmacy more vulnerable, more a victim, more in need of help from the National Guard than you are, or those crying kids, or the thousands still trapped in buildings and soon to die?
It’s pretty obvious what my answers to these questions are, but it isn’t obvious to the mass media. And in disaster after disaster, at least since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, those in power, those with guns and the force of law behind them, are too often more concerned for property than human life. In an emergency, people can, and do, die from those priorities. Or they get gunned down for minor thefts or imagined thefts. The media not only endorses such outcomes, but regularly, repeatedly, helps prepare the way for, and then eggs on, such a reaction.
If Words Could Kill
We need to banish the word “looting” from the English language. It incites madness and obscures realities.
“Loot,” the noun and the verb, is a word of Hindi origin meaning the spoils of war or other goods seized roughly. As historian Peter Linebaugh points out, “At one time loot was the soldier's pay.” It entered the English language as a good deal of loot from India entered the English economy, both in soldiers’ pockets and as imperial seizures.
After years of interviewing survivors of disasters, and reading first-hand accounts and sociological studies from such disasters as the London Blitz and the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, I don’t believe in looting. Two things go on in disasters. The great majority of what happens you could call emergency requisitioning. Someone who could be you, someone in the kind of desperate circumstances I outlined above, takes necessary supplies to sustain human life in the absence of any alternative. Not only would I not call that looting, I wouldn’t even call that theft.
Necessity is a defense for breaking the law in the United States and other countries, though it’s usually applied more to, say, confiscating the car keys of a drunk driver than feeding hungry children. Taking things you don’t need is theft under any circumstances. It is, says the disaster sociologist Enrico Quarantelli, who has been studying the subject for more than half a century, vanishingly rare in most disasters.
Personal gain is the last thing most people are thinking about in the aftermath of a disaster. In that phase, the survivors are almost invariably more altruistic and less attached to their own property, less concerned with the long-term questions of acquisition, status, wealth, and security, than just about anyone not in such situations imagines possible. (The best accounts from Haiti of how people with next to nothing have patiently tried to share the little they have and support those in even worse shape than them only emphasize this disaster reality.) Crime often drops in the wake of a disaster.
The media are another matter. They tend to arrive obsessed with property (and the headlines that assaults on property can make). Media outlets often call everything looting and thereby incite hostility toward the sufferers as well as a hysterical overreaction on the part of the armed authorities. Or sometimes the journalists on the ground do a good job and the editors back in their safe offices cook up the crazy photo captions and the wrongheaded interpretations and emphases.
They also deploy the word panic wrongly. Panic among ordinary people in crisis is profoundly uncommon. The media will call a crowd of people running from certain death a panicking mob, even though running is the only sensible thing to do. In Haiti, they continue to report that food is being withheld from distribution for fear of “stampedes.” Do they think Haitians are cattle?
The belief that people in disaster (particularly poor and nonwhite people) are cattle or animals or just crazy and untrustworthy regularly justifies spending far too much energy and far too many resources on control -- the American military calls it “security” -- rather than relief. A British-accented voiceover on CNN calls people sprinting to where supplies are being dumped from a helicopter a "stampede" and adds that this delivery “risks sparking chaos.” The chaos already exists, and you can’t blame it on these people desperate for food and water. Or you can, and in doing so help convince your audience that they’re unworthy and untrustworthy.
Back to looting: of course you can consider Haiti’s dire poverty and failed institutions a long-term disaster that changes the rules of the game. There might be people who are not only interested in taking the things they need to survive in the next few days, but things they’ve never been entitled to own or things they may need next month. Technically that’s theft, but I’m not particularly surprised or distressed by it; the distressing thing is that even before the terrible quake they led lives of deprivation and desperation.
In ordinary times, minor theft is often considered a misdemeanor. No one is harmed. Unchecked, minor thefts could perhaps lead to an environment in which there were more thefts and so forth, and a good argument can be made that, in such a case, the tide needs to be stemmed. But it’s not particularly significant in a landscape of terrible suffering and mass death.
A number of radio hosts and other media personnel are still upset that people apparently took TVs after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005. Since I started thinking about, and talking to people about, disaster aftermaths I’ve heard a lot about those damned TVs. Now, which matters more to you, televisions or human life? People were dying on rooftops and in overheated attics and freeway overpasses, they were stranded in all kinds of hideous circumstances on the Gulf Coast in 2005 when the mainstream media began to obsess about looting, and the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana made the decision to focus on protecting property, not human life.
A gang of white men on the other side of the river from New Orleans got so worked up about property crimes that they decided to take the law into their own hands and began shooting. They seem to have considered all black men criminals and thieves and shot a number of them. Some apparently died; there were bodies bloating in the September sun far from the region of the floods; one good man trying to evacuate the ruined city barely survived; and the media looked away. It took me months of nagging to even get the story covered. This vigilante gang claimed to be protecting property, though its members never demonstrated that their property was threatened. They boasted of killing black men. And they shared values with the mainstream media and the Louisiana powers that be.
Somehow, when the Bush administration subcontracted emergency services -- like providing evacuation buses in Hurricane Katrina -- to cronies who profited even while providing incompetent, overpriced, and much delayed service at the moment of greatest urgency, we didn’t label that looting.
Or when a lot of wealthy Wall Street brokers decide to tinker with a basic human need like housing…. Well, you catch my drift.
Woody Guthrie once sang that “some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.” The guys with the six guns (or machetes or sharpened sticks) make for better photographs, and the guys with the fountain pens not only don’t end up in jail, they end up in McMansions with four-car garages and, sometimes, in elected -- or appointed -- office.
Learning to See in Crises
Last Christmas a priest, Father Tim Jones of York, started a ruckus in Britain when he said in a sermon that shoplifting by the desperate from chain stores might be acceptable behavior. Naturally, there was an uproar. Jones told the Associated Press: “The point I'm making is that when we shut down every socially acceptable avenue for people in need, then the only avenue left is the socially unacceptable one.”
The response focused almost entirely on why shoplifting is wrong, but the claim was also repeatedly made that it doesn’t help. In fact, food helps the hungry, a fact so bald it’s bizarre to even have to state it. The means by which it arrives is a separate matter. The focus remained on shoplifting, rather than on why there might be people so desperate in England’s green and pleasant land that shoplifting might be their only option, and whether unnecessary human suffering is itself a crime of sorts.
Right now, the point is that people in Haiti need food, and for all the publicity, the international delivery system has, so far, been a visible dud. Under such circumstances, breaking into a U.N. food warehouse -- food assumedly meant for the poor of Haiti in a catastrophic moment -- might not be “violence,” or “looting,” or “law-breaking.” It might be logic. It might be the most effective way of meeting a desperate need.
Why were so many people in Haiti hungry before the earthquake? Why do we have a planet that produces enough food for all and a distribution system that ensures more than a billion of us don’t have a decent share of that bounty? Those are not questions whose answers should be long delayed.
Even more urgently, we need compassion for the sufferers in Haiti and media that tell the truth about them. I’d like to propose alternative captions for those Los Angeles Times photographs as models for all future disasters:
Let’s start with the picture of the policeman hogtying the figure whose face is so anguished: “Ignoring thousands still trapped in rubble, a policeman accosts a sufferer who took evaporated milk. No adequate food distribution exists for Haiti’s starving millions.”
And the guy with the bolt of fabric? “As with every disaster, ordinary people show extraordinary powers of improvisation, and fabrics such as these are being used to make sun shelters around Haiti.”
For the murdered policeman: “Institutional overzealousness about protecting property leads to a gratuitous murder, as often happens in crises. Meanwhile countless people remain trapped beneath crushed buildings.”
And the crowd in the rubble labeled looters? How about: “Resourceful survivors salvage the means of sustaining life from the ruins of their world.”
That one might not be totally accurate, but it’s likely to be more accurate than the existing label. And what is absolutely accurate, in Haiti right now, and on Earth always, is that human life matters more than property, that the survivors of a catastrophe deserve our compassion and our understanding of their plight, and that we live and die by words and ideas, and it matters desperately that we get them right.
At the dawn of the millennium, three catastrophes were forecast for the United States: terrorists in New York, a hurricane in New Orleans, and an earthquake in San Francisco. Rebecca Solnit lives in San Francisco with her earthquake kit and is about to make her seventh trip to New Orleans since Katrina. Her latest book, A Paradise Built in Hell, is a testament to human bravery and innovation during disasters.
Copyright 2010 Rebecca Solnit


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