Newsgroups: apc.reg.carib

Subject: White House Admits Haiti Cover-Up

Date: 17 Mar 1996 02:11:06

Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Feb. 29, 1996 issue of Workers World newspaper

President Bill Clinton said he sent U.S. troops to Haiti in September 1994 to protect the people from murderous thugs and soldiers of the military dictatorship.

But another story soon came out.

The U.S. forces were ordered to disarm demonstrators, not soldiers. Behind the scenes the Pentagon was packing up and sending back home 150,000 pages of official documents—taken from the headquarters of the Haitian army and the right-wing paramilitary organization FRAPH.

It’s been a year and a half. The generals here are still holding these stolen papers. The Haitian government has asked for their return—several times.

At a White House news conference on Feb. 6, Deputy National Security Advisor Samuel Berger was asked when the United States will return the documents.

“There are some procedures we would like to work out with the government with respect to some of the documents,” replied Berger. “Some, for example, that may have names of American citizens in Haiti that we would like to make sure receive adequate protection.”

That makes it quite clear. The U.S. troops went in to protect not Haitians but U.S. citizens. And exactly who was mentioned in these documents?

The secret U.S. agents who worked with the coup government and its right-wing FRAPH death squads, giving them advice and counseling.

Naturally the Haitian people want these papers back. But shouldn’t it also be a matter of keen interest to the people of the United States to find out the names of those who go from country to country—from Indonesia to Chile to El Salvador to Haiti—dispensing advice on how best to hunt down, torture and kill people in the popular movements?

Union members here would certainly want to know which of these agents pose as trade unionists. Churches would like to know how many pretend to be priests and pastors. Former CIA officer John Stockwell revealed that he posed as a priest in order to conceal his true role in Angola.

These documents must be returned to Haiti—intact, without censorship. And the Haitian government should publish their contents so the world will know what the U.S. government was really doing all that time it was claiming to be for restoring democracy.

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