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Dressed to Kill
2 hours ago
Showing posts with label Haiti. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Haiti. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Station Contest: Spot The US NGO Funds For Haiti
The American Red Cross even?
Click on the map to see it in any scale you'd like @ http://awesome.good.is
(It's an awesome good flash presentation tool)
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Looking for "al Qaeda on Haiti" no doubt... CIA Contractor Drone Over Haiti
"Following the money" for US government Haiti Disaster Relief operations.
Evergreen International Aviation... They do the 'logistics' end of CIA 'renditions' and have a long history of covert ops for the CIA and Pentagon. The Wired article fleshes(sic) it out..
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.”
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.
More @ Danger Room - Wired
Da Buffalo found Evergreen's NGO pricing for "Helicopters to Haiti":
"Bill Doonen, a representative of Evergreen Helicopters (Same Parent Co), said he could take the French team in. But it would cost about $7,000 an hour, with a four-hour minimum.
I'm at a loss for words." More @ OregonLive
The other day, Da Buffalo asked the question amongst friends:
The anti-terrorism operation, according to William Arkin of the Post, is stationed at Homestead AFB, current center of US "relief" operations for Haiti:
"The U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), SOD-G is moving to an airbase in Homestead, Fla., where it will take up contingency counter-terrorism planning responsibilities for the region, seeking to characterize how al Qaeda and other terrorists might exploit drug trafficking routes and patterns or other gaps in American defense to infiltrate into the United States."
So how long could it be until the US finds "al Qaeda on Haiti"?
Someone has an answer:
"...they ‘found’ those links quite a while ago - the occupation forces (Haiti’s current occupation started on 29 February 2004) was accusing Lavalas (Aristide’s party) of beheading members of the Haitian National Police, and doing so in an alliance with Haiti’s tiny (3000) Arab minority. Of course, it has generally been the HNP that has done assassinations, e.g. Abdias Jean, (with MINUSTAH - after MINUSTAH assassinated Dred Wilme in Cite Soleil (early 07/lat 06, if memory serves), kidnappings there went up according to the economist, although they don’t tie the matter to the murder, even though MINUSTAH had been accusing Dred Wilme of being behind the kidnappings), and Lavalas has accused them of beheadings. One UN representative repeated the charges against Lavalas, but neither he nor the HNP can supply the names of anyone beheaded by Lavalas...
...have a look at Kill the Bandits and “Haiti, The Untold Story” by Kevin Pina."
Monday, January 18, 2010
Google Earth... Haiti Quake
[Pop Out Map]
If you would like the KML file, it is HERE
Tags:
Disaster Capitalism,
Disaster Relief,
Earthquake,
Google Earth,
Haiti,
Map
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Gee, I wonder how that happened? "Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere..."
.
For more details, see Historycommons:
"History of US Interventions US-Haiti (1804-2005)"
January 14, 2010
Haitian Earthquake: Made in the USA
Why the Blood Is on Our Hands
by Ted Rall
(Ted Rall is the author of the new book "Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?," an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America's next big foreign policy challenge. He is also a cartoonist of the political persuasion)As grim accounts of the earthquake in Haiti came in, the accounts in U.S.-controlled state media all carried the same descriptive sentence: "Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere..."
Gee, I wonder how that happened?
You'd think Haiti would be loaded. After all, it made a lot of people rich.
How did Haiti get so poor?
Despite a century of American colonialism, occupation, and propping up corrupt dictators? Even though the CIA staged coups d'état against every democratically elected president they ever had?
It's an important question. An earthquake isn't just an earthquake. The same
7.0 tremor hitting San Francisco wouldn't kill nearly as many people as in Port-au-Prince.
"Looking at the pictures, essentially it looks as if (the buildings are of) breezeblock or cinderblock construction, and what you need in an earthquake zone is metal bars that connect the blocks so that they stay together when they get shaken," notes Sandy Steacey, director of the Environmental Science Research Institute at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland. "In a wealthy country with good seismic building codes that are enforced, you would have some damage, but not very much."
When a pile of cinderblocks falls on you, your odds of survival are long. Even if you miraculously survive, a poor country like Haiti doesn't have the equipment, communications infrastructure or emergency service personnel to pull you out of the rubble in time. And if your neighbors get you out, there's no ambulance to take you to the hospital--or doctor to treat you once you get there.
Earthquakes are random events. How many people they kill is predetermined. In Haiti this week, don't blame tectonic plates. Ninety-nine percent of the death toll is attributable to poverty.
So the question is relevant. How'd Haiti become so poor?
The story begins in 1910, when a U.S. State Department-National City Bank of New York (now called Citibank) consortium bought the Banque National d'Haïti--Haiti's only commercial bank and its national treasury--in effect transferring Haiti's debts to the Americans.
Five years later, President Woodrow Wilson ordered troops to occupy the country in order to keep tabs on "our" investment.
From 1915 to 1934, the U.S. Marines imposed harsh military occupation, murdered Haitians patriots and diverted 40 percent of Haiti's gross domestic product to U.S. bankers. Haitians were banned from government jobs. Ambitious Haitians were shunted into the puppet military, setting the stage for a half-century of U.S.-backed military dictatorship.
The U.S. kept control of Haiti's finances until 1947.
Still--why should Haitians complain? Sure, we stole 40 percent of Haiti's national wealth for 32 years. But we let them keep 60 percent.
Whiners.
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