It should be remembered that two days after the aborted coup, Kissinger partner Thomas "Mack" McLarty, the Vice Chairman of Kissinger McLarty Associates, and former President Bill Clinton's top adviser on Latin America, penned an op-ed piece that issued a stern warning to Brazilian leftist Luiz Igacio Lula da Silva: "[W]hat happened in Venezuela could be perceived as a sign that messianic solutions, as opposed to genuine reform measures, lead to disaster. It bodes well for those in the region who advocate for open markets in the region. I don't think this is a net positive for Lula's candidacy."

It's obvious that Aristide's expulsion offered Jacques Chirac a long-awaited chance to restore relations with an American administration he dared to oppose over the attack on Iraq.
What happened in Haiti is not that a leader who was once reasonable went mad with power; the truth is that a broadly consistent Aristide was never quite prepared to abandon all his principles.
As Noam Chomsky has said, the "threat of a good example" solicits measures of retaliation that bear no relation to the strategic or economic importance of the country in question. This is why the leaders of the world have joined together to crush a democracy in the name of democracy.

As we now know, the attempted coup in Venezuela, endorsed by the Washington Post and the New York Times, was orchestrated by former Reaganistas Otto Reich and Elliot Abrams.

According to officials of the California based Steele Corporation, the private security firm protecting Aristide, quoted in a Miami Herald story for March 1st, they were told by Bush administration officials to refuse Aristide's request for protection.

Powell's stepin-fetchit apologetics on behalf of this lawless administration at the UN and now in defense of the Hait coup prove if nothing else he's a seperate but equal asshole in the Bush mansion.


After bagging the five Central American countries with the CAFTA trade deal, Zoellick now seeks to take out the rest of Latin America systematically, country by country. The US trade representative gets his imperial way by behind-closed-doors arm-twisting and public doublespeak. He can depend on his colleagues in the State Department and the CIA to intimidate waverers by destabilising uncooperative potential partners, as they are currently doing in Venezuela.

The problem, however, ain't a misunderstanding and it ain't due to poverty. It's the interventions, stupid; it's the harm we do to those people.

In June, 2003 the Pew Research Center released the results of polling in 20 Muslim countries and the Palestinian territories which revealed that while people interviewed had much more "confidence" in Osama bin Laden than in George W. Bush, "the survey suggested little correlation between support for bin Laden and hostility to American ideas and cultural products. People who expressed a favorable opinion of bin Laden were just as likely to appreciate American technology and cultural products as people opposed to bin Laden. Pro- and anti-bin Laden respondents also differed little in their views on the workability of Western-style democracy in the Arab world."

"I will strengthen the capacity of intelligence and law enforcement at home and forge stronger international coalitions to provide better information and the best chance to target and capture terrorists even before they act." -- As if the United States was not already wiring, tapping, bugging and surveilling every institution in the known world and every creature that moves across the earth, and summarily imprisoning them by the thousands. It sounds like a remark Kerry threw in, as with many of his other remarks, hoping to demonstrate a nonexistent difference between his foreign-policy views and those of the Bush administration.

"Jesus looked a lot more like an Iraqi, like an Afghani, like a Palestinian, like an Arab, than any of the paintings which grace the walls of American churches from sea to shining sea."

"How could white people hate people of color if they were taught Jesus would pass for black if he were to rejoin us today?"