Haiti President Jovenel Moïse Assassinated

Word this morning that Haiti's leader, President Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated by armed gunmen in his own home overnight, and that reports are that his wife Martine also succumbed to her injuries.

President Jovenel Moïse of Haiti was assassinated in an attack in the early hours of Wednesday at his home on the outskirts of the capital, Port-au-Prince, the prime minister said.

Mr. Moïse’s wife, Martine Moïse, was also shot in the attack, Prime Minister Claude Joseph said in a statement. Her condition was not immediately clear.

“A group of unidentified individuals, some of them speaking Spanish, attacked the private residence of the president of the republic and thus fatally wounded the head of state,” the prime minister said.

Mr. Joseph said in a telephone interview that he was the one running the country at the moment.

The news rocked the impoverished Caribbean island nation 675 miles southeast of Miami. Haiti has a long history of dictatorships and coups.

The country fought to emerge from one of the world’s most brutal slave colonies, one that brought France great wealth and that the colonial rulers fought to keep.

What started as a slave uprising at the turn of the 18th century eventually led to the stunning defeat of Napoleon’s forces in 1803. More recently, the country suffered under more than two decades of dictatorship by François Duvalier, known as Papa Doc, and then his son, Jean-Claude, known as Baby Doc.

A priest from a poor area, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, became the first democratically elected president in 1990. But in less than a year, he was deposed in a coup.

In recent months, the streets of Haiti have become clogged with angry protests demanding the removal of Mr. Moïse. He had clung to power, ruling by decree for more than a year, with many — including constitutional scholars and legal experts — contending that his term had expired.

Since a devastating earthquake 11 years ago, the country has not rebuilt, and many say it is worse off, despite billions of dollars of reconstruction aid. Armed gangs control the streets and have taken to kidnapping even schoolchildren and church pastors in the middle of their services. Poverty and hunger are on the rise, and the government has been accused of enriching itself while not providing even the most basic services.

Mr. Joseph said that the president had been “cowardly assassinated,” but that the murderers “cannot assassinate his ideas.” He called on the country to “stay calm” and said he would address the nation on Wednesday. He said the country’s security situation was under the control of the police and the army.

But international observers warned that the situation could quickly spiral out of control.

Didier Le Bret, a former French ambassador to Haiti, said he hoped Mr. Joseph would be able to run the country, despite his lack of political legitimacy.

“There is no more Parliament, the Senate is missing for a long time, there’s no president of the Court of Cassation,” Mr. Le Bret said, adding of Mr. Joseph: “Everything will rest on him.”

 

We'll see where this ends up, but it's going to be very tragic all the way around. The international community could finally get off its ass and help Haiti, it's been more than a decade. The earthquake there was a story I covered on ZVTS way back at our start.

Now another earthquake, the political kind, has devastated the place.

We talk about disasters a lot here, but this is definitely one of them.

Sunday Long Read: Canaan Able

It's been more than seven years since the massive earthquake flattened Haiti's capital of Port-au-Prince, seven years since the UN and US showed up vowing to rebuild and help 1.5 million displaced.  What followed was one of the largest humanitarian and foreign policy failures in history, one we would still be talking about today if it wasn't for the magnitude of the Haitian disaster being eclipsed by the other major humanitarian disaster of the Obama era in Syria.  This week's Sunday Long Read examines this legacy this failure as it still stands as a huge favela-like slum city outside Port-au-Prince, the ragtag, sprawling mess of the "city" of Canaan.

A city is made of two parts: the physical and the political. The physical comprises what people need to sustain life in a particular place; the political determines how they live it.

In Canaan, the physical forms each time someone claims a piece of land. If a plot appears unused, he might ask around to be sure. If the land is indeed already claimed, he offers a small amount of money for the rights to it. He hires masons to line the plot’s edges with concrete blocks; iron rebar flowers up from the corners. At that point, construction usually pauses, since most people migrating here lack enough money to build a house all at once. In the meantime, the foundation reinforces the claim until the builder can follow through with an actual home. It’s common to find goats and chickens grazing where bedrooms have yet to take shape, giving some plots the appearance of a sort of cinderblock petting zoo.

One morning, in a sector where a dozen or so of these concrete foundations were taking shape, I met up with Salma Simeus, whom I found walking one of his goats, straining to hold it back as it pulled toward a group that had begun devouring some nearby bushes. Simeus was born in Haiti’s agrarian central plateau, where, as a young man, he became attracted to volunteer work, raising money to help neighborhood kids attend school and organizing seminars to educate people about matters of health and disease. In 2000, he moved to Port-au-Prince to study at a local college, settling with his wife, Marie Celestin, in Tabarre, a sector tucked into the mountain that forms the backbone of the city. When the earthquake struck, he persuaded a nearby NGO to donate such staples as food and soap, which he immediately distributed to his neighbors.

Unlike others in Tabarre, the couple’s home wasn’t leveled by the earthquake. But after taking in so many displaced relatives and neighbors, their house became impossibly crowded. Rather than kick anyone out, Simeus and Celestin went looking for land on the eastern edge of Canaan, eventually landing in Onaville, where they moved into a zinc-and-plywood shelter built by TECHO, a volunteer NGO that had arrived after the earthquake. The TECHO structures were insufferably hot and prone to collapsing, but they were better than nothing. Soon enough, Simeus began volunteering for TECHO to create a list of people in need of shelter.

Celestin, meanwhile, began using her training as a nurse to help treat injuries and illnesses, advising people on such things as what medicines to buy, how to manage their diabetes, or how to prevent cholera. When one woman went into labor, Celestin delivered the baby.

Because of his and Celestin’s volunteer work, Simeus became a de facto leader in Onaville. He embraced the role, and began a campaign to beautify the area, which included getting a local artist to paint a mural and organizing residents to make street signs for the neighborhood’s dirt roads and alleyways.

“We wanted Onaville to be a grand village,” Simeus said as we watched a group of masons working on a foundation nearby. The idea was that it would serve as an example for other Haitian communities. “The garbage we throw on the streets here gets washed away to Miami,” he said, gesturing west toward the sea. “People see that, and that’s not the image we want.”

As time went on, international NGOs and agencies began offering funds to help beautify Canaan. The responsibility of trying to direct that money into Onaville fell to Simeus. Eventually he became a volunteer liaison between the NGOs and residents, conferring over one project or another. He became a man of many hats—or more precisely, many shirts: Once, between meetings, he took off his white Habitat for Humanity shirt and replaced it with a blue polo, then untucked a Red Cross lanyard from underneath. “Habitat doesn’t like you to have relations with another NGO,” he said. “I have an Oxfam shirt too.”

As Canaan takes on permanence, so does the corruption and despair revolving around the Hatian government and the NGOs running it...but there is still hope here among the rubble.

For now.

Love And Haiti In The Time Of Cholera

So if Slate writer Jonathan Katz is even remotely correct here, a CDC map in Atlanta on display in the agency's museum actually points out that the epidemiologists there knew full well that the massive cholera outbreak in Haiti following the earthquake there in 2010 was actually caused by a UN peacekeeping mission from Nepal.  Katz has long been on the trail of this story, but the map strongly seems to suggest that the US government was well aware and looked the other way for political expediency.

Which seems to happen a lot these days.

The U.N. soldiers at that base had just arrived from their home country, Nepal, where a cholera outbreak was underway. Thanks to negligent sanitation practices, such as the open dump pits above, there was a multiplicity of ways that their choleraic feces could have gotten from the base into the river, including latrine pipes leaking over a drainage canal that emptied into the river.

However it happened, from that very spot, that cholera strain—the same strain found in Nepal, which had never been seen before in Haiti, ever—spread throughout the country. By January 2011, the date given for the map, it had been well-established—mainly through my reporting and the work of French epidemiologist Renaud Piarroux—that this was the case.

Since the first days of the epidemic, the U.N. has tried to cover up what it did. Everyone from the soldiers on the base to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has been implicated. The Obama administration and the U.S. government did not want the U.N. to be held accountable, because doing so might persuade other people elsewhere to hold U.S. peacekeeping missions accountable—and because the U.S. foots about a quarter of the U.N. peacekeeping budget.

The CDC, a U.S. government agency, discouraged journalists from asking about the epidemic’s origin, telling them that pinpointing the source, Dr. Snow–style, was “not productive,” “not central,” and would likely never happen. Its epidemiologists did provide a key detail early on, when they identified the strain in Haiti as having a recent South Asian origin—meaning it could have come from Nepal and not from South America, Africa, or anywhere else cholera was circulating at the time. But after that, the CDC refused to take environmental samples from around the base or test the soldiers during the small window when doing either would have been worthwhile. All of this detailed in a damning new book by Ralph R. Frerichs called Deadly River: Cholera and Cover-Up in Post-Earthquake Haiti.

In the book, Frerichs also makes a good case that the agency used maps as tools of diversion. In one crucial map distributed in early 2011, he writes, the agency scrambled the order of dates for when cholera arrived in Haiti’s different regions, or départements—making it seem as if the disease had appeared on the coast before showing up near the U.N. base. Citing the CDC’s own manual, “How to Investigate an Outbreak,” which in his words emphasizes the “importance of correctly identifying infectious disease cases and then using a frequency distribution of the onset dates to estimate the outbreak’s start time,” Frerichs writes:

CDC had ignored its own standard procedure by using the “first confirmed case” in its Haiti Cholera Outbreak map of mid-February 2011. It based the onset time on laboratory confirmation, which falsely implied that cholera had first appeared on October 21 in downriver Artibonite département, then two days later in Ouest département, and finally a day after that, October 24, in upriver Centre département—findings entirely different from Piarroux’s and the Haitian public health team’s.

The timing of that map was crucial, because a panel of experts appointed, under pressure, by Ban was on its way to investigate the source of the outbreak:

Piarroux suspected that CDC had released the map in anticipation of the UN panel’s arrival in Haiti and was helping the UN shift attention away from the Nepalese peacekeeping base in Centre département. Implying that cholera had started elsewhere served that purpose.

It was the first in a series of online maps from CDC that used the poorest available measure to show when cholera had first appeared in Haiti’s ten départements. The CDC information remained widely circulated through updates in September 2011.

In rare a moment of clarity, as evidence mounted, Scott F. Dowell, then director of the CDC’s global disease and emergency response division, talked openly of political considerations in the agency’s response: “We’re going to be really cautious about the Nepal thing because it’s a politically sensitive issue for our partners in Haiti.”

The map flags the epicenter of the cholera infection, and surprise, it's right at the location of the Nepalese UN peacekeeper camp at the time in late 2010.






So yes, this is something that falls on the shoulders of the UN, and in part the US.  Realpolitik and diplomacy sucks, folks, only in this case thousands have died and hundreds of thousands have been sickened, and the cholera epidemic has been going on in Haiti now for almost six years.

There are a lot of questions that need to be answered by the UN about Haiti.  Quite a lot.

Don't Haiti The Players...

After two years of at best benign neglect and at worst, damaging and deadly neglect, representatives of the UN Security Council are visiting Haiti first hand to take stock of the country's situation after the devastation of the January 2010 earthquake.  They'll find that Hatians on the streets of Port-au-Prince aren't terribly inclined to give them a warm welcome, either.

A new allegation of rape involving Pakistani soldiers and three young Haitian boys in the city of Gonaives has triggered renewed protests and demands from Haitian senators that U.N. soldiers lose immunity and be tried in a Haitian court.

Efforts to replace the 10,581-strong U.N. force with a new Haitian army also persist. And anger over a deadly cholera epidemic, which originated near a U.N. camp and has sickened more than a half-million people and killed about 7,000 people, continues.

"The image of their forces has deteriorated," said Daly Valet, a political analyst and editor of Le Matin newspaper in Port-au-Prince.

At the same time, the delegation led by the United States will find a post-quake nation whose huge problems continue to exceed the limits of the U.N.'s mandate.

Political infighting and deepening polarization and debate have paralyzed the country in recent months, making for a potentially volatile situation.

"The recent two-year anniversary of the tragic earthquake makes this a good time for the council to go there and assess progress and encourage Haitian leaders and U.N. officials to take further positive steps," said Kurtis Cooper, a spokesman for the U.S. mission. "Clearly many challenges lay ahead, especially how to create economic opportunities for the Haitian people. And it is now time for President Michel Martelly and the Haitian government to convert their good ideas into actions."

Haiti continues to face absolute misery, and there's little that either Haiti's new Martelly administration nor the UN seem to be able to do about the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.  While Europe is certainly falling apart and we have problems here in the US, Haiti has largely been ignored.  Hopefully the UN will start to take real action in Haiti and soon.

It would be nice if the rest of the planet did too.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/02/12/138662/un-security-council-heads-to-haiti.html#storylink=cpy

Last Call

It's been a long two years since Haiti's devastating earthquake, and the country is still in shambles despite billions of dollars in aid from around the world...a world that has largely forgotten Port-au-Prince's ongoing humanitarian disaster and still has yet to deliver on billions more in promised assistance.

Two years after Haiti's most horrifying 35 seconds, seeds of progress are evident across this battered nation where a devastating earthquake left 300,000 dead and some 1.5 million homeless in its capital and surrounding cities.

But with more than a half-million people still living in squalid camps, and billions of dollars in promised aid still to arrive, much remains to be done for the changes to take root. And some Haiti experts and Haitians worry that the country could still slide backwards without major efforts to create jobs and economic reforms.

"After two years, what can I say? We're still here," said Yvrose Mongerard, who lives in Corail-Cesselesse, a post-quake planned community north of the capital where tens of thousands of people have since set up makeshift camps. "We are not asking for a handout, but if we were working, we would be able to help ourselves. We are not doing anything here, just looking."

Faius Adonis, 56, who lives in a tarp-covered shack with his wife and five children in the southern city of Leogane, agreed that times remain brutally tough, regardless of the reconstruction that is occurring.

"Hard times are killing us," he said. "The tarp doesn't do anything. Two years after the quake, we're still in the streets."

Even as some worry about the slow progress, the country's new president points to positive steps.

"We're moving into bettering the lives of the Haitian people," President Michel Martelly said in an interview with The Miami Herald. "We're moving into getting them out of the tents."

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/01/11/135536/haiti-experiences-progress-exasperation.html#storylink=cpy

 

The

Then again, given our track record on the cleanup after Katrina, it's not like the US has much room to criticize Haiti on the speed of relocating millions who lost their homes to a natural disaster.  We're pretty damn bad at that sort of thing too.  Replace Port-au-Prince with New Orleans, and America fares as a lousy example.  Parts of the Lower Ninth Ward are still a wreck, and it's been three times as long.

Areas of the Crescent City may never get repaired.  Pretty awful to think about that in America, but we're all told that the time for further sacrifice is upon us as we bravely fight to give more tax breaks to the fabulously wealthy.

How much of America will soon look like the aftermath of Katrina given the rate that Republicans in power at the state level are gutting infrastructure?

Meanwhile In Port-au-Prince...

Haiti goes to the polls today to select a President as the country is still dealing with the aftermath of the January 2010 earthquake.

Haitians will choose between a former first lady and a popular musician Sunday in a pivotal presidential runoff vote for a nation still recovering from a devastating earthquake and political turmoil.


Former law professor and first lady Mirlande Manigat will face singer Michel Martelly in the second round of presidential elections.

Final results of the runoff will be released on April 16, according to officials.

Martelly made a name for himself as a flamboyant carnival musician who sometimes ripped his clothes off onstage.

In early December, the electoral council announced that Manigat had won but lacked the majority of votes needed for an outright victory. Initial results put her in a runoff with government-backed candidate, Jude Celestin.

Haitians responded by charging fraud and burning cars, tires and Celestin's campaign headquarters in Port-au-Prince.

The third-place candidate, Martelly, claimed he had won more votes than Celestin and a review of results by an Organization of American States team supported that contention.

The review suggested that Martelly earned a spot in the runoff.

Oh yes, and former President Aristide is floating around the country too, showing up just days before the runoff, swearing he's not going to get back into politics, either...but I'm sure he'll offer his services as an advisor to Sunday's winner, too.

Meanwhile Haiti continues to languish in squalor as thousands face a massive cholera epidemic that could end up infecting some 750,000 plus people this year...almost ten percent of the population of the country infected by a preventable disease.  Nobody seems to care much, either...and if they do, they're certainly not doing very much about it.

Meanwhile, In Hell

As feared, Haiti's cholera epidemic has spread to the capital, Port-au-Prince.  Doctors are trying to do what they can but the human toll is horrendous.

The death toll has risen to at least 1,344 in the cholera outbreak in Haiti that has sickened nearly 57,000 people, the Haitian government said Monday.

The announcement came as international health officials predicted that the scale of Haiti's cholera epidemic will exceed initial estimates of 200,000 over coming months.

"Having seen how the bacteria is behaving in this environment with these people, having seen just how poor and how hungry the people are, we know we have to revise our numbers up," said Nyka Alexander, a spokeswoman for the World Health Organization, in a phone call with CNN.

Health workers say the Haitian population lacks immunity to cholera and Haitian medical workers lack experience treating the infection because the bacterium has not been detected on the island in more than a century.

The impoverished country's weak health and sanitation systems are only compounding the problem.

"Another factor why this epidemic has spread as far as it has and why it will continue to spread, is dirty water, poor sanitation, no toilets, malnutrition and poor access to health centers," Alexander said. "People have to walk five hours to a health center and if you have diarrhea you're not going to make it.

She added, "The disease is showing the weaknesses in the country."

Hundreds of thousands will become ill, thousands more will die.  Haiti still has no infrastructure, and no real way to defend against this epidemic.  I know we have our own problems in America, and the rest of the world has their own issues too...but it's all the more depressing to get such a powerful dose of perspective.

There's still years of work to be done there.

Haiti Update

Aid workers and doctors in Haiti are scrambling to keep the country's cholera outbreak from reaching the capital, but it will be a difficult task given the widespread squalid living conditions and tightly packed refugees.

It should be possible to keep an outbreak of cholera out of Haiti's capital, but the potentially deadly disease remains a major risk, an international aid worker told CNN on Monday.


"I think we'll be able to contain it fairly well, but it is a risk, it is a major risk," said Jason Erb, deputy country director for the International Medical Corps.

The fast-moving outbreak has claimed at least 253 lives on the impoverished island nation, which has yet to recover from January's massive earthquake. Another 3,015 cases have been reported, according to Haiti's Health Ministry.

Even if the disease can be kept out of the capital, Port-au-Prince, it remains a serious risk in the tent camps that remain home to tens of thousands of earthquake survivors, Erb warned.

"It's a danger because the camps are so crowded and so unhygienic," he said on CNN's "American Morning."

Even if the disease is contained in the areas south of Port-au-Prince, that still means tens of thousands of Haitians risk contracting it, and thousands could die from a preventable disease.

The situation in Haiti will not improve anytime soon, either.  The country still has no real infrastructure.  It's chaos at best, anarchy at worst.  They need significant help.

Help that will almost certainly be too late for many.

The Clock Just Ran Out In Haiti

News this afternoon that Haiti is suffering an outbreak of disease, which given the housing conditions where hundreds of thousands if not millions are still homeless and are living in refugee camps, this situation there could quickly lead to disaster.

An outbreak of severe diarrhea in rural central Haiti has killed at least 54 people and sickened hundreds more who overwhelmed a crowded hospital Thursday seeking treatment.

Hundreds of patients lay on blankets in a parking lot outside St. Nicholas hospital in the port city of St. Marc with IVs in their arms for rehydration. As rain began to fall in the afternoon, nurses rushed to carry them inside.

Doctors were testing for cholera, typhoid and other illnesses in the Caribbean nation's deadliest outbreak since a January earthquake that killed as many as 300,000 people.

"What we know is that people have diarrhea, and they are vomiting, and (they) can go quickly if they are not seen in time," said Catherine Huck, country deputy for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. She said doctors were still awaiting lab results to pinpoint the disease.

The sick come from across the rural Artibonite region, which did not experience significant damage in the Jan. 12 quake but has absorbed thousands of refugees from the devastated capital 45 miles (70 kilometers) south of St. Marc.

A total of 54 people died and 619 were ill, according to Yolaine Surena, a coordinator for Haiti's civil protection department.

There are reports the outbreak is cholera but this has not been confirmed yet.  Any way you look it it, this is bad...and I'm surprised that something worse hasn't happened earlier given this atrocious conditions that continue to exist.

Part of the reason why there continues to be such horrendous conditions on the ground in Haiti is because of various bureaucratic garbage here in the US.  $1.15 billion has been appropriated for Haiti but little of it has arrived, and the rest of the aid above that is being blocked by GOP Sen. Tom Coburn.

I hope he can sleep well tonight.  No doubt he will.

A Long Overdue Haiti Update

Nine months after January's earthquake, Haiti is still languishing as the tenth circle of hell.

"If it gets any worse," said Wilda, a homeless Haitian mother, "we're not going to survive." Mothers and grandmothers surrounding her nodded solemnly.

We are in a broiling "tent" with a group of women trying to raise their families in a public park. Around the back of the Haitian National Palace, the park hosts a regal statute of Alexandre Petion in its middle. It is now home to five thousand people displaced by the January 2010 earthquake.

Nine months after the quake, over a million people are still homeless in Haiti.

Haiti looks like the quake could have been last month. I visited Port au Prince shortly after the quake and much of the destruction then looks the same nine months later.

The Associated Press reports only two percent of the rubble has been removed and only 13,000 temporary shelters have been constructed. Not a single cent of the US aid pledged for rebuilding has arrived in Haiti. In the last few days the US pledged it would put up 10% of the billion dollars in reconstruction aid promised. Only 15 percent of the aid pledged by countries and organizations around the world has reached the country so far.

With other human rights advocates from CCR, MADRE, CUNY Law School, BAI and the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, I am huddled under faded gray tarps stamped US Aid. Blue tarps staked into the ground as walls. This is not even the hot season but the weather reports the heat index is 115.

And this is the future of disaster response when the global economy is all but destroyed.  In an era where the super-wealthy control 84% of America, what hope does Haiti and its people have?

We can't even afford to fix our own roads because we have to cut taxes for the top 2% of the country above all other priorities.  You thought the world was going to help Haiti?

We're a third world economy as it is these days.  Unless Adam Smith's invisible hand picks up a hammer and nails, this country's ruined for a long, long time.  And a lot of people are going to continue to die.

Haiti: One Month In

It's hard to believe it's been a month since the Haiti earthquake.  Death toll numbers are upwards of 200,000 and a full third of Port-au-Prince's 3 million are homeless.  Today, the people of Haiti gathered to mourn as relief organizations shift into the next stage of the assistance efforts.

Relief operations are improving day by day, a spokeswoman for the International Rescue Committee told CNN on Friday.

"Things [supplies] are moving now, and they are arriving to populations. The bottleneck has really, really decreased," Aisha Bain said.

"About a month ago, when this quake destroyed the infrastructure of Haiti, it was very complicated to get aid in," she said. Now, "the ports and airports aren't at full capacity, but things are arriving and getting to populations. There is much more to be done, but food is coming in."

Food distribution areas are set up around the capital, she said.

Haiti's rainy season is approaching, and the hurricane season will begin June 1. Bain said the organization is gearing up to provide sufficient sanitation.

"We ... are working on a large-scale buildup of providing clean water, latrines, showers, hand-washing stations, which affect not only the livelihoods of basic survival but, really, health. There's a massive concern of the possible outbreak of disease, and so we are working to combat that quickly."

Again, the outlook here is of months and years, not weeks and days.  We will be in Haiti for a very long time.

Haiti Update, Part 4

The good news, Big Dog is now helping to run the UN reconstruction effort in Haiti.

The bad news?  The death toll from last month's quake is now up to the 200,000 mark and rising.

We will be rebuilding Haiti for years.  That is just fact.

Last Call

Is there anything Dr. Sanjay Gupta can't do?

Star CNN medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta -- a practicing neurosurgeon -- performed brain surgery on a 12-year-old Haitian girl Monday aboard a US military ship.

The girl, whose name was not released, was injured in last week's devastating earthquake, and was diagnosed as having a 1.2-cm (0.4-inch) chunk of concrete embedded in her skull.

The ship's surgeon called for a neurosurgeon, which are in short supply in the region amidst the mammoth and often chaotic rescue and recovery operation.

"With the help of a CNN producer, we called CNN in Atlanta who then patched us through to Doctor Gupta in Port-au-Prince," said the Vinson's Deputy Public Affairs Officer Erik Schneider.

"Someone got a hold of our international desk," 40-year-old Gupta later recalled. "They said there was an urgent call from the Carl Vinson. So I put a call in to them and there was something about a head injury."

Assisted by Los Angeles surgeon Henri Ford and the ship's surgeon Kathryn Berndt, Gupta pulled off the surgery between his multiple reports for the international news network on the massive quake that hit the Caribbean nation.

Gupta and Ford said they anticipate the girl making a full recovery.

In the end it's good to remember that there's still some decency in the universe, and that one person really can make a difference every now and again.

Das Boot And Applying Too Big To Fail To Haiti

Over in Commentary's web site, Max Boot takes the argument for getting rid of Too Big To Fail banks (that there needs to be a mechanism to unwind them and place them into receivership) and...applies it to Haiti (emphasis mine)

The New York Times wonders what the American role in Haiti is going to be after the current disaster is dealt with. The sad reality is that it’s hard to imagine a better future for Haiti absent a great deal of American involvement, but it’s equally hard to see what strategic calculation could justify such a stepped-up American presence.

Now...I actually agree with Boot here.  Like it or not, Haiti is now a major problem that requires us to fix it, and we are...but we do have to admit to ourselves that unless we're committed to nation-building here, Haiti will always be a basket case.  The good news this time is that we do have the support of the UN and the world.   But then Boot goes back to being Max Boot again:

Unfashionable though it may be to say so, some of Haiti’s best years — the years when it was most free of violence and turmoil — were between 1915 and 1934, when the country was occupied by U.S. Marines. They did not run Haiti directly, but they provided support for local elites who with American backing were able to impose more stability and freedom than Haiti has enjoyed before or since. But the reason for the American takeover was not altruism; it was fear that if the U.S. did not intervene, Germany or some other hostile power would, thereby creating a base that could threaten the Panama Canal and other vital American interests. After the onset of the Great Depression, the Roosevelt administration lost interest and pulled out. This lack of American involvement allowed the rise of a string of tinhorn dictators, most famously the father and son duo of Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier.

(More after the jump...)

Zandar's Thought Of The Day

This week's Bobblespeak Translations are up with Dubya and Big Dog on Haiti:

Gregory: Bush what’s your biggest concern
right now?

Bush: them Cowboys have no defense!

Gregory: Bill?

Clinton: the Haitian police force is on the job
- with no uniforms or weapons

Gregory: ok - should the US colonize Haiti?

Clinton: oh no - just an agreement allowing the
US temporary control of the area

Native Americans: uh oh

Bush: I’ve been through crises but people will
forget after a while

Gregory: like how you were president on 9/11?

Bush: no there were no attacks when I was President - just ask Saint Rudy

Clinton: I believe Haiti will be back and better
than ever!

Gregory: jesus you’re an optimist

Clinton: look at my life - wouldn’t you be?

Never get tired of these guys.  The BT take on John Yoo vs. Jon Stewart made my sides hurt.

Haiti Update, Part 4

The U.S. is sending in 10k troops to Haiti to help keep order and distribute aid.

Admiral Mike Mullen, the top military chief, said that up to 10,000 US troops would be either in Haiti or offshore on six Navy vessels that will arrive by Monday.

"It looks like between 9,000 and 10,000 with the arrival of the Marines and the three ships that are associated with that," Mullen, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, told reporters.

Mullen said that about 1,000 troops were already in Haiti including members of the 82nd Airborne brigade, who arrived late Thursday and were already delivering water from helicopters.

The US military has also sent the nuclear-powered USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier, which will serve as a "floating airport" to bring in supplies and rush out victims as Port-au-Prince's airport struggles to function.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the security situation remained "pretty good" but that supplies needed to be delivered urgently.

"The security situation remains OK," Gates told the news conference.

"The key is to get the food and the water in there as quickly as possible so that people don't, in their desperation, turn to violence," Gates said.

It's that "turning to violence" part that's the immediate problem this weekend.  As horrific as things are now, they soon will be exponentially worse for the survivors, and the efforts to aid them are being severely hampered by the damage.  It's been 96 hours almost since the earthquake hit.  Those still trapped in rubble and debris are not going to survive much longer.  The window on saving and reaching those in need is closing.  By Monday, we're looking at some scenario out of an apocalypse movie.  We're going to be seeing casualties out of Port-au-Prince for weeks and months, and the total numbers will be six figures, easily.

And even if aid does reach them in time, in the long term Haiti is a parking lot.  There is no economy, no government, no police, no infrastructure, no trade, nothing.  It's over.  Haiti is no longer a country, but a nightmare scenario in anarchy.

While short-term aid is vital, long-term we need to consider that rebuilding Haiti and repatriating its people may be a decade-long project or more.

Haiti Update, Part 3

Jibing with what I said yesterday, one of Josh Marshall's readers points out that Haiti is now effectively our new Afghanistan (emphasis mine):

We're talking about providing forces in the short term, and funding and training forces in the long term, to provide security in a state that has not functioned in a generation. This will require a willingness to exercise force, and yes, a willingness to accept casualties. We're talking about an ongoing presence measured not in months, but in years. We're talking about a commitment of funds and resources that makes the initial figure of $100 million seem trivial. We're talking about the longterm resettlement of population, reconstruction of institutions and infrastructure, and rethinking of the basic fabric of a state. We've just seen how difficult and costly it can be to build a state in Iraq and in Afghanistan - I don't see how to avoid the conclusion that we have just found ourselves again committed to reconstructing a state.

Even if we do not accept the moral burden, even if we hew closely to the cold calculus of realism, we are obliged to act. It is difficult to imagine that desperation will not force thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, to take to the ocean on anything that will float. Many will drown, but many will reach our shores. If we are too callous to provide aid where it is needed, the disaster will wash up on our shores where we cannot avoid it. ...

I know that it seems to soon to think of this tragedy as perhaps the most important political event of the last year. But we're going to be enmeshed in Haiti at least as long as we are in Iraq or Afghanistan - there's no avoiding that. How this response unfolds, how we structure our responsibilities, whether we choose to assume them alone or through international institutions, what sort of future we design for Haiti - these are vital questions. Ultimately, they are also political questions that will be decided by political actors. And the answers they provide will shape and constrain a wide array of seemingly unrelated policies. It's not to soon, I think, to make that point.

What 7 years of war have done to Afghanistan and Iraq was done to Haiti on one idle Tuesday afternoon.  We are now committed to rebuild Haiti from the ground up.  It will require a coalition of the willing, and billions of dollars and millions of manhours in rebuilding.  Haiti has no infrastructure, no government, no hope at this point.  They are off the map right now.

If we don't rebuild, we will deal with the blowback:  a hostile and angry nation of millions who feel we have abandoned them and left them to die.  We already have a few of those on our hands these days.  The difference is this particular nation won't be 8,000 miles away, but a few hundred.

Guess what?  Whether we like it or not, the stability of Haiti just became the top foreign policy and national security priority of the United States of America in this hemisphere.  We have to make sure Haiti prospers or unafirly or not, we have another Afghanistan on our hands.

If I'm a non-state actor and I wanted to spread anti-Americanism, I'm heading for Port-au-Prince right about now, ya dig?

Rushing Over A Bridge Too Far

The oldest axiom in the book on Wingnuts like Limbaugh and Beck is that "there's basically nothing they can say that goes too far."  Steve Benen goes over this on El Rushbo's truly hideous commentary on Haiti.

I wonder the same thing, but it simply never happens. On the other side of the ideological divide, when a Democratic lawmaker works with MoveOn.org or appears at Netroots Nation, there's ample criticism from the right about Dems associating with "liberal extremists."

And yet, no matter how loathsome a figure Limbaugh becomes, top Republican officials not only reach out to the right-wing talk-show host, but effectively treat him as the de facto head of their political party. Indeed, in the rare instances in which a Republican actually offers subtle disapproval of Limbaugh, they invariably apologize to him and kiss his proverbial ring.

The GOP effectively lets Rush Limbaugh call the shots, and when he says disgusting things, Republicans don't dare disagree with their boss.

But I'm going to argue that this might finally be a bridge too far for Republicans.  Witness the Village pillaging of El Rushbo on Morning Joe Thursday:

This morning, the MSNBC Morning Joe crew took their turns ripping Limbaugh:

– Chuck Todd: “Rush Limbaugh I think lives in South Florida. … Very large Haitian community in South Florida. You would assume he’d have a little more compassion about all of this.”

– Joe Scarborough: “The insensitivity is stunning, the words are deplorable. … [It's] indefensible.”

– Pat Buchanan: “They’re deeply insensitive, no doubt about it. I think the President of the U.S. speaks for the country when he stands up there. … I think Rush’s comments were cynical.”

John Harwood then decided to falsely equate Limbaugh’s “mean-spiritedness” with criticism from those on the left. “It’s not just on the right, it’s on the left as well,” Harwood said. Scarborough enthusiastically agreed: “Hate from the left, hate from the right."

Now, losing Chuck Todd and Joe Scarborough is one thing.  But if Pat Buchanan thinks you're an insensitive asshole, you've lost the game, kids.

Honestly.  If Democrats were even remotely intelligent, they would say "Hey, Scott Brown, as a potential U.S. Senator, what do you think about Rush Limbaugh's comments on the President and Haiti?"  He then doubled down on his comments yesterday afternoon:

RUSH: No, I’m not evading it at all. If I said it I meant to say it, and I do believe that everything is political to this president. Everything this president sees is a political opportunity, including Haiti, and he will use it to burnish his credentials with minorities in this country and around the world, and to accuse Republicans of having no compassion. [...

CALLER: [A]re you implying that the Huffington Post as the one and only resource that I [read]? I even watch Fox News once in a while.

RUSH: No, no, no, no, no. I’m not implying that. … What I’m illustrating here is that you’re a blockhead. What I’m illustrating here is that you’re a closed-minded bigot who is ill-informed. … And if you had listened to this program for a modicum of time you would know it. But instead you’re a blockhead. You’re mind is totally closed. You have tampons in your ears. Nothing is getting through other than the biased crap that you read.

Really.  Somebody ask Scott Brown if he thinks that.  Hell, ask any Republican that.  Go on.  Please.  I want to see Republicans defending Rush Limbaugh's comments.  Really.  I do.

Haiti Update

Yggy has some frankly brilliant ideas on helping in Haiti.

The US is reportedly sending a few thousand more soldiers to Haiti, to join the already-extant UN forces there. Since Haiti is a relatively small country you could imagine the international community undertaking an effort to send many more forces than that and essentially run the country on an interim basis. Countries like France, Canada, Belgium, and Switzerland can, in principle, offer well-trained soldiers who can communicate easily with the local population which would make such an undertaking more feasible than a lot of other population security missions.

But the real problem is again what to do with millions of Haitians in a country with basically zero infrastructure:

Short of that, it’s worth thinking about the extent to which generous immigration policies could do enormous good for Haiti’s population. In the short-term, what’s most needed is immediate assistance to save as many lives as possible. But Tyler Cowen’s guess that “the country as a whole is currently below the subsistence level and will remain so for the foreseeable future” seems very plausible. The most likely alternative to mass immiseration and death for the survivors seems to me to be large-scale emigration to the developed world. Otherwise you’re going to have millions of people with no means of supporting themselves.

Who will step up to take in these Haitians?  The size and the scope of this disaster is off the charts, as BooMan says:

It's probable that Haiti will need to become a protectorate of some sort, if not in letter then in fact. And very clever people will have to devise economically sound plans to rebuild. For example, temporary housing could actually be semi-permanent, with an option to buy equity and have eventual ownership. The Department of Agriculture could encourage the planting of fruit trees rather than attempting reforestation that will be used for timber. Of course, having first-world corporations swoop in and begin making profits off this misery will bring about charges of imperialism and exploitation. But, really, what are the alternatives? Without some profit-motive, there will never be enough aid to keep Haiti at a sustenance level of existence.

And that's the size and the scope we need to be considering.  Aid to Haiti is not going to cut it.  The country is no longer a going concern at this point.   The government is non-functional, and at this point unless we see large-scale disaster relief on a holistic level accounting for millions of survivors and soon, they're no longer going to be categorized as survivors, dig?

A fantastic, unprecedented, massive and comprehensive effort will have to be mobilized here to get Haiti up from face down on the mat.  Yes, it's going to have to involve corporations, as BooMan said.  The alternative is tens of thousands of people who survived the initial earthquake only to die from lack of basic infrastructure.  The fact is putting up enough infrastructure to serve Haiti will take far longer than the people of Haiti have.  It's a complete meltdown there.

The entire world is going to need to chip in here.

Haiti The Players, Not The Game

Steven D. over at the Frog Pond catches Florida GOP candidate for the state legislature Sheridan Folger making this political statement about the Haiti earthquake relief efforts:

This shows how Republicans are once again the party of action and compassion, while the Democrats are the party of wanton neglect and disregard. Aside from the on-the-spot effort planned and coordinated last night by Bernard, Tom and myself, the only three congressmen to express concern were our three Republican members from Miami. This should demonstrate how Democrats once again pander to and use minorities to further their ends and throw them under the bus in the time of need. The D now stands for Desolate Destruction while the R stands for Repair, Renew and Reinvigorate.

Is there anything Republicans won't turn into a political attack ad against the Dems?

And as Steven says, any Republican making this statement after Katrina should be laughed at publicly.