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Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Bolivian, French and Swiss rescue organisations accuse the US military of refusing landing rights to planes bearing necessary medicines and urgently needed potable water to the millions of Haitians stricken, injured and homeless.
It is reasonable to assume that the militarisation of relief operations will weaken the abilities of the Haitians to rebuild and reinstate the institutions of civilian government which have been destroyed and will also encroach upon the efforts of the international medical teams and civilian relief organisations.
Has the US military come to the rescue of a nation in distress? Or is it an invasion?
It is estimated that the combined SOUTHCOM and MINUSTAH (United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti) forces are 19,095, excluding commitments by France (unconfirmed) and Canada (confirmed 800 troops), (It should be noted that US, France and Canada were "partners" in the February 29, 2004 Coup d'État.)
Is it not likely that the entry of heavily armed US troops, coupled with the activities of local militia could potentially precipitate the country into social chaos?
Have these foreign forces entered the country merely to reinforce MINUSTAH "peacekeepers" and Haitian police forces which since 2004, have been responsible for war crimes directed against the Haitian people, or do they have another agenda?
The 7.0-magnitude earthquake that devastated the desperately poor country on January 12, killing an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 people?.
Venezuelan leader, Hugo Chavez, has accused the United States of causing the destruction in Haiti by testing a "tectonic weapon" to induce the catastrophic earthquake and of occupying Haiti "under the guise of the natural disaster." According to the Spanish newspaper ABC : "the US was "playing God" by testing devices capable of creating eco-type catastrophes",
Venezuelan media have reported that the earthquake
"may be associated with the project called HAARP, a system that can generate violent and unexpected changes in climate."
HAARP, the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Programme, is a study run in Alaska directed at the occasional reconfiguration of the properties of the Earth's ionosphere to improve satellite communications.
Former US Secretary of Defence William Cohen in 1997 expressed concern over countries engaging "in eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes and volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves."
Is it not a strange coincidence that an " Haitian disaster relief scenario" had been envisaged at the headquarters of US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) in Miami one day prior to the earthquake?(Here it is worth remembering que prio to 911 "NRO, had scheduled a test exercise for the morning of September 11 2001. The scenario was of a corporate jet, crippled by mechanical failure, crashing into one of the four towers of the NRO headquarters building in Chantilly, Va, which is about four miles from Washington's International Dulles Airport. No actual planes were to be used in the exercise but plans called for the evacuation most of the 3,000 NRO employees. The exercise, later described as a "bizarre incident", was cancelled when the first plane struck the World Trade Centre - less than an hour before the test was due to begin. ")
The "pre-disaster simulations" pertained apparently to the impacts of a hurricane in Haiti and were held on January 11. The Defence Information Systems Agency (DISA), which is under the jurisdiction of the Department of Defence(DoD), was involved in organizing these scenarios on behalf of US Southern Command.(SOUTHCOM).
There are no details on the nature of the tests conducted on January 11 at SOUTHCOM headquarters. but upon completion of the tests and disaster scenarios on January 11, TISC (The Transnational Information Sharing Cooperation project ) is a communications-information tool which "links non-government organizations with the United States [government and military] and other nations for tracking, coordinating and organizing relief efforts".
On January 13, the day following the earthquake, SOUTHCOM took the decision to implement the TISC system, which had been rehearsed in Miami two days earlier.
The main actors in America's "humanitarian operation" are the Department of Defence, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The military component of the US mission overshadows the civilian functions of rescuing a desperate and impoverished population. The overall humanitarian operation is not being led by civilian governmental agencies such as FEMA or USAID, but by the Pentagon.
The United States military has taken control of Haiti’s four airports and Journalists and international aid organizations have accused the US military of being more concerned with imposing military control, which it prefers to call “security,” than with bringing urgently needed water, food and medicine from the airport sites to the population.
Apparently so many governments and agencies from around the world have responded to the crisis in Haiti that they have overwhelmed the ability of the Port-au-Prince airport to handle incoming relief flights. The Federal Aviation Administration advisory warned that "due to limited ramp space at Port-au-Prince airport," with the exception of international cargo flights, "the Haitians are not accepting any aircraft into their airspace."
A further advisory added that domestic U.S. military and civilian flights to Haiti must be first be cleared by its command centre. Exemptions would be based solely on the basis of ramp space. The agency also starkly warned "there is no available fuel" at the Port-au-Prince airport.
Haiti has a longstanding history of US military intervention and occupation going back to the beginning of the 20th Century.
In 1994, following three years of military rule, a force of 20,000 occupation troops and "peace-keepers" was sent to Haiti. The 1994 US military intervention "was not intended to restore democracy. Quite the contrary: it was carried out to prevent a popular insurrection against the military Junta and its neoliberal cohorts."
US and allied troops remained in the country until 1999. The Haitian armed forces were disbanded and the US State Department hired a mercenary company, DynCorp, to provide "technical advice" in restructuring the Haitian National Police (HNP).
Since the removal of Aristide in 2004, Haiti has been an occupied country, with a dubiously-elected President, Rene Preval, a controversial follower of IMF privatization mandates and reportedly tied to the Chimeres or Haitian oligarchs who backed the removal of Aristide. Notably, the US State Department refuses to permit the return of Aristide from South African exile.
In the months leading up to the 2004 Coup d'Etat, US special forces and the CIA were training death squadrons that crossed the border from the Dominican Republic in early February 2004 and were responsible for mass killings of civilians and political assassinations during the CIA sponsored 1991 military coup, which led to the overthrow of the democratically elected government of President Jean Bertrand Aristide with the support of France and Canada..
The unspoken mission of US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) with headquarters in Miami and US military installations throughout Latin America is to ensure the maintenance of subservient national regimes, namely US proxy governments, committed to the Washington Consensus and the neoliberal policy agenda. The renewed US military presence in Haiti will be used to establish a foothold in the country as well as to pursue America's strategic and geopolitical objectives in the Caribbean basin, which are largely directed against Cuba and Venezuela.
What lies behind the smoke, rubble and unending drama of human tragedy in the hapless Caribbean country?
Leaving aside the relevant question of how well in advance the Pentagon and US scientists knew the quake was about to occur, and what Pentagon plans were being laid before January 12, another issue emerges around the events in Haiti that might help explain the bizarre behavior to date of the major ‘rescue’ players—the United States, France and Canada.
A US military occupation of Haiti under the guise of earthquake disaster ‘relief’ would give Washington, and the private business interests tied to it, a geopolitical prize of the first order. Control of what geophysicists believe may be one of the world’s richest zones for hydrocarbons - oil and gas - outside the Middle East,
The huge new oil finds off Cuba being exploited by Russian companies, with clear indications that Haiti contains similar vast untapped oil as well as gold, copper, uranium and iridium and with Hugo Chavez's Venezuela to the south of Haiti , the return of Aristide or any popular leader committed to developing the resources for the people of Haiti, would be a devastating blow to the world's sole superpower. The fact that in the aftermath of the earthquake, UN Haiti Special Envoy, Bill Clinton, joined forces with Aristide's foe, George W. Bush, to create something called the "Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund" ought to arouse suspicion.
Haiti, and the larger island of Hispaniola of which it is a part, straddles one of the world’s most active geological zones, where the deepwater plates of the North American, South American and Caribbean tectonic plates intersect. Below the ocean and the waters of the Caribbean, these plates consist of an oceanic crust some 3 to 6 miles thick, floating on top of an adjacent mantle. Haiti also lies at the edge of the region known as the Bermuda Triangle, a vast area in the Caribbean subject to bizarre and unexplained disturbances.
This vast mass of underwater plates are in constant motion, rubbing against each other along lines analogous to cracks in a broken porcelain vase that has been reglued, moving at a rate of 50 to 100 mm annually in relation to one another, they are the origin of earthquakes and of volcanoes. The regions of convergence of such plates are also areas where vast volumes of oil and gas can be pushed upwards from the Earth’s mantle. The geophysics surrounding the convergence of the three plates that run more or less directly beneath Port-au-Prince make the region prone to earthquakes.
The vast oil reserves of the Persian Gulf and of the region from the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden are at a similar convergence zone of large tectonic plates, as are such oil-rich zones as Indonesia and the waters off the coast of California. Thus, it is in those areas where tectonic masses intersect, as they do beneath Haiti, where there is every likelihood to find vast treasures of minerals, as well as oil and gas,
In 2005, a year after the Bush-Cheney Administration de facto deposed the democratically elected President of Haiti, Jean-Baptiste Aristide, a team of geologists from the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas began an ambitious and thorough two-phase mapping of all geological data of the Caribbean Basins. The project is due to be completed in 2011 and is all about determining as precisely as possible the relation between tectonic plates in the Caribbean and the potential for hydrocarbons - oil and gas.
The sponsors of the multi-million dollar research project are the world’s largest oil companies, including Chevron, ExxonMobil, the Anglo-Dutch Shell and BHP Billiton. Given the immense, existing oil production off Mexico, Louisiana, and the entire Caribbean, as well as its proximity to the United States – not to mention the US focus on its own energy security – it is surprising that the region had not been mapped earlier. However it now emerges that major oil companies were at least generally aware of the huge oil potential of the region long ago, but apparently decided to keep it quiet.
In October 2008 a consortium of oil companies led by Spain’s Repsol, together with Cuba's state oil company, Cubapetroleo, announced the discovery of one of the world’s largest oilfields in the deep water off Cuba. It is what oil geologists call a ‘Super-giant’ field. Estimates are that the Cuban field contains as much as 20 billion barrels of oil, making it the twelfth Super-giant oilfield discovered since 1996. The discovery also probably will make Cuba a new high-priority target for Pentagon destabilsation and other nasty operations.
No doubt to the dismay of Washington, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev flew to Havana one month after the Cuban giant oil find to sign an agreement with acting-President Raul Castro for Russian oil companies to explore and develop Cuban oil.
Medvedev’s Russia-Cuba oil agreements came only a week after the visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao to meet the recuperating Fidel Castro and his brother Raul. The Chinese President signed an agreement to modernize Cuban ports and discussed Chinese purchase of Cuban raw materials. No doubt the mammoth new Cuban oil discovery was high on the Chinese agenda with Cuba. On November 5, 2008, just prior to the Chinese President’s trip to Cuba and other Latin American countries, the Chinese government issued their first ever policy paper on the future of China’s relations with Latin America and Caribbean nations, elevating these bilateral relations to a new level of strategic importance.
It is notable that, more than half a century ago, a group of Russian and Ukrainian geophysicists, working in state secrecy, confirmed that hydrocarbons originated deep in the earth’s mantle under conditions similar to a giant burning cauldron at extreme temperature and pressure. They demonstrated that, contrary to US and accepted Western ‘mainstream’ geology, hydrocarbons were not the result of dead dinosaur detritus concentrated and compressed and somehow transformed into oil and gas millions of years ago, nor of algae nor other biological material.
The Russian and Ukrainian geophysicists then proved that the oil or gas produced in the earth’s mantle was pushed upwards along faults or cracks in the earth as close to the surface as pressures permitted. The process was analogous to the production of molten lava in volcanoes. It means that the ability to find oil is limited, relatively speaking, only by the ability to identify deep fissures and complex geological activity conducive to bringing the oil out from deep in the earth. It seems that the waters of the Caribbean, especially those off Cuba and its neighbor Haiti, are just such a region of concentrated hydrocarbons (oil and gas) that have found their way upwards close to the surface, perhaps in a magnitude comparable to a new Saudi Arabia.
It explains why two Bush Presidents and now special UN Haiti Envoy Bill Clinton have made Haiti such a priority. As well, it could explain why Washington and its NGOs moved so quickly to remove - twice - the democratically elected President Aristide, whose economic programme for Haiti included, among other items, proposals for developing Haitian natural resources for the benefit of the Haitian people.
In March 2004, a Haitian writer, Dr. Georges Michel, published online an article titled ‘Oil in Haiti.’ He wrote:
: … ."It has been no secret that deep in the earthy bowels of the two states that share the island of Haiti and the surrounding waters there are significant, still untapped deposits of oil. ..... in 1908 Messrs. Alexander Poujol and Henry Thomasset, reported a major oil reservoir in Haiti near the source of the Rio Todo El Mondo,... Despite the promising 1979 results in Haiti, the big multinational oil companies operating in Haiti pushed for the discovered deposits not to be exploited.”
Marguerite Laurent ("Ezili Dantò"), president of the Haitian Lawyers’ Leadership Network (HLLN) who served as attorney for the deposed Aristide, notes that when Aristide was President, his plans included , for the first time, a detailed list of known sites where the resources of Haiti were located. Aristide’s plan was to implement a public-private partnership to ensure that the development of Haiti’s oil, gold and other valuable resources would benefit the national economy and the broader population, and not merely the five Haitian oligarchic families and their US backers, the so-called Chimeres or gangsters.