Try Bush as a Global Pirate

The Bush men have the Madness Touch. Their very presence warps conventional notions of reality.

Thus, the new “prime minister” of Haiti appears as surprised as the rest of his countrymen when conveyed the title by an “eminent” rump of persons chosen by the occupying power. The man picked for the job on Tuesday, business consultant Gérard Latortue, doesn’t even arrive in Haiti from his home in Boca Raton, Florida, until Wednesday. U.S. Marines believe they have killed Haitian gunmen in battle, but seem unconcerned as to their identities. Half a world away, the constitutional head of state, elected with overwhelming popular support in a process deemed free and fair by the entire international community, is held captive by an African military dictator after being kidnapped by the world’s superpower in cahoots with the former colonial master of his country.

The world searches for terminology to describe the high crimes of the Bush regime in Haiti and the Central African Republic, and of course, Iraq – even as endless additional criminal contingencies take shape in the planning rooms of the Pentagon. The Bush men seem determined to methodically teach the planet that Washington is a threat to the very concept of international order – that they are Pirates.

Evidence that George Bush is leader of a rogue, pirate state accumulates daily, for the world to examine in the raw. Yet the racist cabal (and its Black operatives) seem not to understand that Haiti’s President Jean-Bertrand Aristide cannot be demonized like Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. The nightmare image is seared into the global retina: the frail ex-priest and his wife, kidnapped from their home and delivered to the tender mercies of coup-making African generals.

If the Bush men are on an international consciousness raising mission, they are succeeding. Whatever perverse logic guides their actions – and we have seen such logic at work in the world, before, when small groups of men tested their “will” against the survival instincts of the planet – they are in fact summoning a future “tribunal” whose mandate must expand to match the crimes of the American perpetrators. There will be a response to this avalanche of atrocities that “are so harmful to international interests that states are entitled – and even obliged – to bring proceedings against the perpetrator, regardless of the location of the crime or the nationality of the perpetrator or victim,” to borrow the words of Mary Robinson, former United Nations high commissioner for human rights.

Crime in full view

The Bush men repeatedly overreach in their quest for world hegemony, perceiving that the domestic price for dealing death and humiliation to darker peoples is cheap. A poll shows that only one-third of Floridians are opposed to U.S. actions in Haiti. The terrifying odyssey to which Mildred Aristide – a Black First Lady and American citizen! – has been subjected does not resonate in a society that, nonetheless, agonizes over the prospect of Martha Stewart doing a short stretch in prison. Yet outside the white American bubble, the Aristides’ ordeal is seen as the toying of a mouse by a cat: brutish, cruel and – because Bush is not a cat, but a man – evil. Black America is reminded of the nature of the all too familiar beast.

“If you tell Charlie Rangel that my wife and children are gonna die unless I go with you, that is a kidnapping,” said the Harlem Congressman at a taping of the local television program, Like It Is. Rangel framed the issue as a no-brainer at congressional hearings on the Haiti coup:

When the victim is a head of state, and his country is the booty, the crime is piracy on a superpower scale.

Piracy is not strictly a crime of maritime or aviation hijacking. International law began as a collective response to piracy. Legal scholar Louis Sohn wrote that “the first breakthrough” in punishing international crime “occurred when international law accepted the concepts that pirates are “enemies of mankind” and that piracy is “an offense against the law of nations.” Mexican General Santa Anna routinely referred to the slave-holding Texans as “land pirates.” The Bush regime flouts “the law of nations” as a matter of policy – an all but self-proclaimed pirate state.

Betrayed and utterly disrespected, the Caribbean community of nations refused to take part in the U.S.-led occupation of Haiti. Caricom is “extremely disappointed” at the involvement of “Western partners” in the removal of Aristide, said Jamaican Prime Minister P.J. Patterson. Having invaded Grenada in the lesser Antilles in 1983, the U.S. now shows an appetite for the greater Antilles, as well. The Pirates have returned to Caribbean waters with a vengeance. “The situation calls for an investigation of what transpired and we believe that it should be done under the auspices of some independent body such as the United Nations,” said Patterson, speaking for 14 Caricom countries. (Haiti is also a member.)

Pirates are no respecters of national sovereignty, by definition. “I imagine that [Caribbean heads of state] are very much aware that if it can happen to Aristide, it can also happen to them or any other small country,” said veteran Jamaican journalist and educator John Maxwell. This is doubtless the message that Secretary of State Colin Powell and his boss intended to transmit – a threat to once again violate “the law of nations.”

The 53-nation African Union, whose member states are regularly hectored by France, Britain and the United States to respect the rule of law, this week joined Caricom in calling for a UN investigation of Aristide’s ouster, which “set a dangerous precedent for duly elected persons.”

“The African Union has decided to undertake immediate consultation with both CARICOM and eventually the United Nations in order to discuss the conditions for a quick return to constitutional democracy” in Haiti, said the AU.

A matching set of conspirators

Buoyed by the continental support, Aristide’s lawyers began preparing a broad legal counter-assault, based on the assumption that, although the Bush Administration rejects the rule of law, most the rest of the world does not. In recognition of the American-French imperial partnership, Aristide teams drew up a list of defendants in both countries. According to Australia’s Herald Sun newspaper, chief Aristide lawyer Ira Kurzban charges “Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega and Luis Moreno, the deputy chief of mission of the US Embassy, were behind Aristide’s February 29 removal and forced him and his wife into exile in the Central African Republic.”

In Paris, Aristide counsel Gilbert Collard charged four luminaries with “complicity in abduction”: Thierry Burkard, France’s ambassador to Haiti; Yves Gaudel, the former ambassador; envoy Regis Debray; and Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin’s sister, Veronique. She and Debray visited Aristide in December to demand his resignation, said attorney Collard, indicating the French end of the conspiracy was in full swing prior to Haiti’s bicentennial celebrations.

To cover all the legal bases, Ira Kurzban also sent U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft a formal request for an investigation of the Presidential couple’s abduction, noting that Mildred Aristide is a U.S. citizen.

Captors claim to speak for Aristide

The rush of activity came on the heals of bizarre events in Bangui on Sunday and Monday, as the Central African Republic’s military government attempted to simultaneously act as French client, prison warden, and gracious host – an impossible task for a gaggle of coupsters.

Reporters were told to expect a Sunday press conference featuring President and Mrs. Aristide. Instead, heavily armed soldiers burst into the conference room demanding the cameras and recorders be turned off. Then Mrs. Aristide was brought in and made to sit in a corner in silence, looking “very distressed,” according to a CNN reporter on the scene. President Aristide never appeared. “A Government spokesman read a statement, supposedly from President Aristide, in which he thanked the CAR for their kindness. Mme. Aristide was then taken away,” said the CNN guy, who filed only one report describing the madness before his network sanitized the whole affair.

On Monday morning President Aristide was allowed to hold a press conference at the Central African Republic’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in which he gave details of the “political kidnapping” by the United States and declared, “I am the democratically elected president and I remain so. I plead for the restoration of democracy” in Haiti.

“Aristide spoke with reporters despite a pointed, public request by Foreign Minister Charles Wenezoui that he avoid talking about Haitian politics or unidentified “friendly countries,” the Associated Press reported. “Aristide said he had been ‘well looked after’ by his Central African hosts, backtracking on his lawyers’ statements that he was ‘a prisoner’ in Bangui.”

But a prisoner he clearly was. In a 30-minute interview with Pacifica’s Democracy Now! program, Aristide said the U.S. “preferred the Haitian people to move from coup d’etat, to coup d’etat.” Nevertheless, “I pay tribute to the government of Central Africa for the way they welcomed us. It was gracious, human, good, and until now, this is the kind of relationship which we are developing together. I thank them for that once again.” Then he was told to get off the phone. “Now, time is gone. Unfortunately I need to stop because they just asked me to leave.”

The real news emerged after Aristide met with a delegation of supporters that had been turned away the day before. The group included representatives of former Attorney General Ramsey Clark’s International Action Center, the Haiti Support Network, Aristide lawyer Brian Concannon, and Kim Ives, a Creole-speaker with the publication Haiti-Progress. Ives offered this extraordinary account of the March 8 conversation:

So, did the Bush men lie so badly in the aftermath of the coup because they were forced to plot in haste? Or is it that they don’t really give a damn about public opinion? New York Rep. Charles Rangel tends to think the latter: “Regardless of the question their response will be, ‘What difference does it make? We got rid of Aristide.’”

The traveling President of Haiti

The confusion regarding South Africa’s willingness to grant asylum to Aristide stems from disinformation straight from the lips of Colin Powell – the best liar in the administration, given the material he has to work with. In the days after the abduction, Powell and his subordinates attempted to depict South Africa as reluctant to accept Aristide, as if he were an international albatross. The Haitian President, of course, had had no intention of leaving Haiti and, therefore, never thought to ask any nation for asylum before being bundled away to Bangui.

Danny Schecter, the respected News Dissector of the web site of the same name, reported that it was Colin Powell who tried to book Aristide to South Africa.