What they don't tell us about Haiti

Hey everyone, I hope you're doing well. Enjoy the sound of my junior year of high school:

Stereolab - Peng! 33

To distract myself from grad school applications, I did a little follow up on the situation in Haiti since reports of a deadly cholera outbreak have surfaced. Speaking of reporting on Haiti, it's generally been pretty weak. I know, let's talk about it!

So if you know where to look, it was previously reported that Republican Senator Tom Coburn was singlehandedly blocking all of the Haiti aid for reconstruction promised by the U.S. due to a $5 million provision (out of the total $1.15 billion) in the bill, and Jon Stewart also made quite a deal out of it. Now, if I wanted to find some evidence to back up claims that Senator Tom Coburn was holding back over a billion dollars in aid to Haiti, Senator Tom Coburn's website isn't one of the first places I'd visit, but it's a good thing I checked it out. It turns out Coburn is only blocking a bill authorizing $500 million in new spending for FY 2011, an amount to the tune of half of what he was reported to be blocking originally. According to this UN report, the final version of the legislation signed by President Obama on July 29th of this year included a total of $2.93 billion in aid for Haiti, a good chunk of which has already been spent. Here's the good stuff:

As of September, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) reported that more than $1.1 billion of the $1.642 billion for Haiti relief had been spent since the earthquake. But the $1.140 billion for recovery and reconstruction has remained in the US treasury because the vast proportion of this assistance cannot be disbursed until the secretary of state reports to various congressional committees on exactly how the money will be spent and how its oversight will be managed. Senator Coburn has nothing to do with the obstruction of this money.

Ah, so the secretary of state has to report to various committees and speak eloquently about the new homes that will theoretically be built before the new homes can actually be built! That makes sense, actually. It's kind of like at my job: because we use government money, I have to fill out three different vouchers, get three signatures on each one, make copies of two of them, file them in two separate places, and then get verbal approval from one of my supervisors before I can purchase a bed for a refugee.

Anyway, these failures to check facts (as well as the arbitrary hold-up of aid money, but that has nothing to do with the media) are annoying, but that is only the smaller of the two main problems I have with the Haiti coverage. The other, as usual, is the failure to provide readers with proper historical context for the current crises unfolding before our eyes.

What exactly do I mean? Without a doubt, the easiest example to point to is the coverage after 9/11. As per the Five Ws (and one H) of journalism, the who, what, when, where, and how were all covered, but not the why. In fact, any discussion about the why that insinuated anything even remotely deviating from "they hate our freedoms" was immediately silenced by good ol' fashioned "anti-American" accusations. To be more specific, coverage contained few to no details about the decades of U.S. support for brutal, dictatorial regimes and terrorism in the region, something which quite easily explains why a couple of maniacs might want to attack us. Thus, mainstream media (and the larger part of the American public) conveniently avoided dealing with any shred of American culpability.

The same model can be applied to the coverage of Haiti. In fact, you literally cannot talk about any point in the past 200 years of Haitian history without mentioning the U.S. Ever since declaring independence in 1804, Haiti has suffered tremendous abuses at the hands of the United States. In 1806, the U.S. placed a trade embargo on Haiti because they feared that Haitian independence would inspire massive slave revolts in other parts of the world, and they didn't formally recognize Haiti until 1862 (Frederick Douglass was sent as consular minister -- what a badass). In 1915, when the U.S. feared a French or German takeover of Haiti, they invaded and began a 19-year occupation of the country. They probably called it "Operation Haitian Freedom."

During the 20th century, Haiti's economy and political situation suffered under disadvantageous, obligatory treaties, "U.S.-approved" constitutions, and the brutal, corrupt, U.S.-backed kleptocracies of "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his son. A few years after the ousting of Papa Doc's son in a popular uprising in 1986, Haiti saw its first truly democratic elections, which brought Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power in 1990. He was overthrown a year later in a military coup in which the CIA was widely reported to have taken part. The military government ruling in the interim was led by the man chosen by the U.S. to be in charge of security in the 1990 elections and in 1994, a multinational force led by the U.S. forced the military leadership's resignation and reinstated Aristide. Incidentally, that operation was in fact called "Operation Uphold Democracy." I know, I know. Believe it.

This all has a great deal to do with the earthquake because Haiti, probably due in large part to decades of economic and political torture by the U.S., was in no position to deal with an earthquake to begin with, and it certainly isn't now. Homes and infrastructure were unprepared, hospitals were not properly maintained (and are now closing down due to lack of funds and supplies), and the government was financially unequipped to handle such a catastrophe, so the mountains of U.S. aid money still sitting in the Treasury are only part of the story. If media performed their duty properly and at least attempted to report stories like Haiti's in full historical context, the public might know the full extent of the U.S. role in catastrophes like the one currently plaguing Haiti, and then maybe they wouldn't allow such abuses to occur.

Miners, not minors

In honor of both today's story and all the madness in France, here's some definitely non-violent French music played beautifully by a Chilean pianist.

Claudio Arrau performing Debussy's "Reflets dan l'eau"

So, have y'all heard anything else about the Chilean miners recently? Anything besides the fact that a few are getting married or juggling several affairs? Anything with any real weight to it?

If not, check this out: La Jornada reports in Spanish that one of the miners has been hospitalized after suffering severe symptoms of anxiety, while five or six others have been heavily affected by consuming alcohol in excess. Some are also getting sick of their overexposure to the media and one even went as far as to say he "was better off in the mine."

The miners, as nice as it is to hear that they are mostly okay (which is almost all you hear in Western media sources), should not be the focal point of the story anymore (nor should they ever have been, in my opinion). As Juan Cole smartly pointed out in a post on his blog a week ago, the mainstream media mostly treated the mine collapse as a human interest story and ignored the labor aspect, refusing to ask important questions about safety conditions in the mine or hold the mine owners accountable in any way.

For me, the interesting thing about La Jornada reporting on the hospitalization and alcohol excesses of the miners is that you can't find those aspects of the story mentioned in Western sources. I searched, and the only other source in which I could find the same story was the Sydney Morning Herald.

Why aren't they reporting it? I know they haven't simply lost interest in the story, because they're reporting on totally frivolous aspects of the aftermath (such as the love affairs mentioned above). It seems more likely that in order to stick with their original narrative, or possibly because they're lazy (and I'm only half joking), they are avoiding the more troubling aspects such as the hospitalizations because it may eventually force them to confront the more difficult questions cited above from Juan Cole's post. Knowing that most mainstream news media (especially cable television) are overwhelmingly owned or supported by big business and corporations, this is a very interesting example of how those interests can conflict with reporting the aspects of a story which may have negative long-term implications for the businesses (and their negligent practices) themselves.

In fact, it seems that simply ignoring the tougher aspects wasn't enough; Wall Street Journal deputy editor Daniel Henninger went as far as to say that due to the different machine parts and equipment produced by innovative companies around the world, the rescue of the miners was actually a "smashing victory for free-market capitalism." Yikes.

Iran and U.S. Terror

"I'll take you just the way you are!"





Brand Nubian - Feels So Good


An interesting story emerged late last night, and it's surprising that it's getting as much coverage as it is, considering the implications it has for U.S. support of terrorism. I was able to find the story from a few major news sources, but I'll go with the LA Times, since this is kind of their 'hood. The story is that Reza Taghavi, an Iranian-American businessman from Tustin, California (a city in Orange County, which itself is home to a large Iranian population -- in fact, I'm there quite often for work) has been released from Evin Prison after being held there for over two years. He was arrested in Iran and accused of providing $200 to the LA-based monarchist organization known as Anjoman-e Padeshahi-e Iran (also known as API or the Kingdom Assembly of Iran, which I will say a bit about in a second), was never formally charged or tried, and claims to this day that he gave the money to the organization unknowingly. He is expected to be back in California sometime next week.


Since $200 would hardly be enough to cater lunch at a bi-weekly staff meeting, you might be wondering what all this API fuss is about. The API, originally founded in LA in the form of a TV station for broadcasting anti-Islamic Republic (and generally hateful anti-Islam) propaganda, is now a vast network of operations made up of loosely-connected (and often conflicting) units, all with the common goal of overthrowing the Islamic Republic of Iran. According to their website, they have tasked Iranians in search of the good ol' glory days of Cyrus the Great to carry out their five stage Tondar ("thunder" in Persian) movement, which first and foremost involves "subversive action." I would link to the website, but I'm a little paranoid about doing so (besides, it's in Persian).


Anyway, the trouble is finding some hard proof that this group is directly or indirectly responsible for terrorism (besides the inflammatory stuff on its website, of course). After the 2006 bombing at the Hosseinieh Seyyed al-Shohada mosque in Shiraz which killed 12 and injured 202, many Western and Iranian news sources reported that the API had claimed responsibility on their website shortly after the attack. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any trace of the statement on the main API website after some heavy searching and the Shiraz bombing Wikipedia article in Persian mentions that the API denied any involvement and cites an interview with Voice of America. Making things even more confusing, spokespeople have denied API involvement in terrorism and in even all but the most peaceful of activities, which contrasts pretty sharply with what's written on their website. In this BBC Persian report, a spokeswoman for the API denies any API involvement in terrorist activity, but in the next paragraph a spokesman from another group calling itself the API claims responsibility for violent subversive action.


Terrorism takes place in Iran and is the work of a variety of different groups with no singular, monolithic goal. There are all kinds of characters to be found across the landscape of Iranian political dissidence: Jundullah (Sunni Islamists, whose handsome leader Iran executed earlier this year), MEK (sort of Islamic socialists, although the organization is self-described as secular), Pejak (Kurdish militants), and Ahvazi Arab groups have all carried out terrorist attacks to upset the regime and all have different visions for the future of Iran. A common thread likely to be found running between them is U.S. financial support, discussed in this Telegraph piece from two years ago and this one from three years ago. In fact, according to the second Telegraph article I linked to, there was actually an open debate in Washington near the end of the Bush presidency about "when" (and not "if") to "unleash" Jundullah against the regime. Additionally, George Bush made an appeal to Congress in 2007 for $400 million to step up covert operations in Iran. Mmmhmm.


Anyway, this is all pretty well-documented stuff and I don't need to go on forever about it, but let's go back to the first story. Taghavi is planning to sue the man who asked him to transfer the money upon his return to the U.S. and is considering suing the API, so perhaps something will come of that. His lawyer, Pierre Prosper, was responsible for securing his release from Evin Prison and was formerly in charge of the State Department's Office of War Crimes Issues under George W. Bush. That's right, friends: George Bush, perhaps without even the slightest hint of irony, had an advisory committee charged with holding other states accountable for war crimes. What a wacky world we live in!


Anyway, my point was that not only has the U.S. been funding terror groups in Iran for decades, but they are allowing them to organize and operate from right here at home. However, this should not be shocking to anyone, as this is consistent with the official U.S. government stance on terrorism: it's not terrorism if it's against our enemies.


As a final, interesting linguistics aside, the word in Persian for terrorism is "terrorism," and the transitive Persian verb meaning "to assassinate someone" or "to murder someone in an act of terrorism" is "terror kardan," literally translating to "to terror(ize) someone."