[a4a: Please note: this is only one example out of many. Please research on your own. Clip articles that catch your eye and keep a file on them. Every time a story comes up in your area of interest, clip it and save it. Then periodically review the collection. You'll be surprised at what you learn. Watch how the "free press" spins the news and distorts reality . Any emphasis added to the following articles is my own doing.]
Washington--The Clinton administration signaled strongly Sunday that it expects Haiti to hold presidential elections as scheduled next month and President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to step down in February.
"We expect him to leave," said National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, responding to indications from Aristide that he would consider the requests of his followers to say in power for another term.
U.S. troops entered Haiti 14 months ago to restore Aristide to power under the assumption that the former Roman Catholic priest would not seek re-election and would cede power when his term ends in February....
Two senators said Aristide must keep his promise to leave office. "We risked a lot of lives down there," Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.) said. "If he doesn’t support democracy, we shouldn’t support him."
If he violates the agreement that led to his return, said Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), "we should demand that he step down."
The former paramilitary leader, Emmanuel Constant, now jailed in a Maryland detention center on immigration charges, said published reports linking him to the CIA were true. He made his admission in a videotaped interview to be broadcast on Sunday on the CBS News program "60 Minutes," which provided transcripts to other news organizations.
"I was meeting with the CIA on a regular basis," said Mr. Constant, whose group, known as Fraph, is accused of murdering, raping and beating hundreds of supporters of Haiti's President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. "We had an understanding. We had an alliance."
Mr. Constant said he was given a code name, "Gamal," a sophisticated walkie-talkie and $700 a month in cash by the CIA's station chief in Haiti, with whom he met regularly, sometimes daily.
The meetings, he said, usually took place during long drives in the station chief's car. He said he provided derogatory information about Mr. Aristide sought by the CIA, discussed his own aspirations to be Haiti's president -- which, he said, the station chief encouraged -- and gave full accounts of his political and paramilitary activities.
"They knew exactly what I was doing," said Mr. Constant, who entered the United States illegally last year and is fighting a Federal court order that he be deported to Haiti, where he faces criminal charges.
His relationship with the CIA, he said, started shortly after a right-wing military junta overthrew Mr. Aristide in September 1991 and ended shortly before Mr. Aristide's return to Haiti under the protection of United States troops last year.
It has already been reported that leaders of the junta were on the CIA's payroll from the mid-1980's until at least the early 1990's. It also has been reported that the agency had set up a Haitian intelligence service whose members attacked Mr. Aristide's supporters, as did Mr. Constant's paramilitary organization, the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti.
A CIA spokesman, Mark Mansfield, had no comment on the agency's relationship with Mr. Constant. He said the "CIA had no role in creating, funding, or guiding the Fraph organization" or in supporting "anti-democratic activities" in Haiti.
Port-Au-Prince, Haiti--The Clinton administration and its Republican opposition were divided Monday on whether Haiti's presidential election was a milestone for democracy or too incomplete to be reliable.
A White House observer team praised the peaceful voting to replace Jean-Bertrand Aristide...but low voter turnout led election observers...to question the legitimacy of Sunday's election, which many Haitians ignored and nearly every major opposition party boycotted.
The White House hopes that on Feb. 7, one elected leader will transfer power to another for the first time ever in Haiti, capping what the Clinton administration has billed as one of its biggest foreign policy triumphs.
"Yesterday was a crucial milestone in Haiti's progress toward an enduring democratic order," the White House delegation said in a statement read by Brian Atwood, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
"Although voter turnout was apparently low, human rights were respected throughout the campaign," Atwood said.
But...the estimated voter turnout of just 25 to 30 percent could weaken the next president's mandate. In comparison, nearly 100 percent of voters participated in the 1990 elections won by Aristide.
A short, 16-day campaign period, and uncertainty over whether the election would be held at all, may have contributed to voter apathy.... And many Haitians who didn't vote Sunday said they wanted Aristide to remain in office.
In the weeks before the vote, Aristide, barred by law from serving consecutive terms, encouraged his supporters to demand that he be allowed to make up the three years he spent in exile after a military coup in 1991.
Sunday's vote was peaceful. In 1987, an attempted presidential election ended in a military-led bloodbath. Violence also barred the 1990 campaign.
"We are pleased that Preval has requested an extension of the UN mandate to maintain security and stability..."
...along with 400 civilians who have been training the Caribbean nation's new police force.
U.S. troops have been in Haiti since September 1994, when nearly 20,000 began an occupation that led to the restoration to power of democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in October 1994.
Elsewhere in Haiti Wednesday, police opened fire during a protest, killing a 10-year-old girl and wounding three others, a radio station reported.
The shooting occurred during a demonstration by peasants in L'Estere, 80 miles north of Port-Au-Prince. The girl, identified as Eva Pierre, was struck by a bullet while inside a home, Radio Metropole reported.
Peasants were demonstrating to demand electricity when police intervened....
Haiti's new civilian police force has been accused of brutality in responding to past demonstrations.
...a legislator reported receiving a death threat, two days after a fellow lawmaker was shot and wounded. A senator blamed the shooting on sympathizers of the former army regime.
...they were angry that Parliament is considering a constitutional amendment to abolish the army...
The new president takes office Wednesday without the overwhelming popular support enjoyed by his predecessor and with widespread frustration over the government's inability to relieve grinding poverty.
"We'll give the new government a month. If nothing changes, then we'll show them," said Jean Junior, 31, an unemployed mechanic trying to hustle a job washing a car at a downtown street market.
"We'll protest," others shouted.
It was a sorry mood for the first peaceful transition of power from one popularly elected president to another in the 192-year history of Haiti, the world's oldest black republic.
The current president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, will retire to his walled-off, newly refurbished mansion in a Port-Au-Prince suburb with his new Haitian-American wife.
Aristide says he'll return to doing charity work for street children and try to resume his role as a "voice for the voiceless." But many suspect he also will be a major force guiding his successor, the man he once called his twin.
Preval, a 52-year-old agronomist, has his work cut out for him.
He will need foreign aid to appease a hungry and angry people. But such aid is tied to stringent economic changes that would cut thousands of jobs in a nation where two-thirds of the work force is already underemployed or unemployed. Aristide's government rejected those conditions, but Preval has indicated he will adopt the austerity measures.
He may have little choice. But if protestors take to the streets, they could overwhelm the new National Police, an ill-equipped force hurriedly trained by U.S., Canadian and French instructors and which has been accused of being trigger-happy and abusive.
Acknowledging those concerns, Preval has asked the United Nations to keep peacekeepers in Haiti for six months after the current UN mandate expires Feb. 29.
Aristide remains Haiti's most popular figure, but by law he could not seek a second term.
"Every single one of you who served in Haiti can say with great pride: Mission accomplished," he told several thousand troops and their families.
Citing a "reign of terror" by Haiti's military rulers and a "democracy stolen from its people," Clinton praised the professionalism of the troops in forcing out the dictators and keeping the peace.
He said they had made history and proved "when America acts on behalf of its values and interests, it gets the job done."
Clinton extolled the virtues of free trade, reminding that in a speech 34 years earlier President John F. Kennedy "told our nation we had a choice--to trade or to fade."
and you thought I'd forgotten? Heh...
If confirmed by the Legislature, Jacques-Édouard Alexis, 50, will be Haiti's first Prime Minister since Rosny Smarth resigned in June 1997 to protest what he called President Préval's complicity in tainted legislative elections last year that were unfavorable to Mr. Smarth's majority party.
Mr. Préval had nominated a replacement for Mr. Smarth three other times. But Congress, dominated by Mr. Smarth's party, rejected them.
Mr. Alexis's chances of approval appear better. In a significant breakthrough, President Préval and Mr. Smarth's party agreed on July 8 to set up a panel to organize new legislative elections.
Without a Prime Minister in Haiti, foreign donors have shied away from the country, withholding hundreds of millions of aid dollars.
The United States, which invaded Haiti to restore a democratic Government in 1994, had repeatedly urged the nation's leaders to break their stalemate. Early this month, an American congressional delegation warned that aid might be cut off is a new Government was not installed.
President Clinton is seeking to double American aid to haiti, to $140 million from $70 million. Republicans in Congress have objected.
United States officials have urged Haiti to organize new elections.
Jean Leopold Dominique, director and owner of Radio Haiti Inter, was fired on as he arrived at work on Delmas Street, one of the main thoroughfares in the capital of Port-au-Prince.
Dominique, a longtime political activist, was taken to a hospital where he died shortly after the shooting, Radio Metropole said.
The motive for the shooting was unknown. The attack comes amid rising tensions and almost daily street demonstrations protesting the Preval government's failure to hold elections.
Preval has ruled by decree since January 1999, when he dissolved parliament to end an 18-month political stalemate and installed a new prime minister and cabinet.
Haiti has not held legislative elections since a 1997 ballot was annulled because of widespread fraud. Previously, Haiti suffered under decades of dictatorship and foreign intervention.