Interview with lawyer Brian Concannon on orgins of most recent Haitian coup

KPFA Radio
http://www.flashpoints.net
Flashpoints, Thursday, April 1, 2004
Interview with lawyer Brian Concannon on orgins of most recent Haitian coup

Dennis Bernstein: The kidnapping of an elected head of state, apparently
supported at the highest levels of the U.S. government, has sent
reverberations through the hemisphere. Many in this country and abroad
consider the U.S. actions a direct attack on democracy and the will of the
Haitian people.

Joining us to continue our coverage on the situation in Haiti and to
understand the legal battle to restore the will of the Haitian people is our
good friend Brian Concannon. Concannon, as we have said before, is based in
Port Au Prince at the International Lawyers Bureau there. He has been one of
the key players in prosecuting Haiti¹s death squads and former military
killers, representing victims of the 1991 coup. He joins us again in studio.
He now works with President Aristide¹s legal team in various
representations. Brian Concannon, welcome back to Flashpoints.

BC: Thanks for having me, Dennis.

DB: Why don¹t you begin with an overview on the various legal battles and
international battles to restore President Aristide to the Presidency.

BC: Right now the most aggressive are international battles, not really
using courts, but using international law to get to the bottom of what
happened and also to reinstall democracy. As your listeners know, last week
the Caribbean countries called for an investigation at the level of the UN
into the circumstances surrounding Haiti¹s coup d¹etat and the kidnapping
of President Aristide. Their call has been echoed by many legal
associations, a lot of grassroots organizations but also the Africa Union,
and the Africa union has 53 countries, Caricom has 14, so we¹re getting to
about 67Šand there¹ve been several other countries, including south Africa
and Venezuela, that have also called for an investigation.
So I think that there is a mounting groundswell of countries willing to
press this at the UN. I think that what needs to happen is that more
countries get on board and they push it until the UN does act.

DB: Remind people what Caricom is and why that¹s important.

BC: Sure, Caricom is the union of Caribbean CountriesŠ most of them are
English speaking, Haiti is not English-speaking but Haiti¹s by far the
biggest country on the block. And they are countries that have a fairly
solid history of democratic rule, which is why they are extremely concerned
about what¹s going on in Haiti. And part of their organizational structure
is that the countries that are members need to be electoral democracies and
they¹re obviously very concerned because the current leaders of Haiti, the
de facto leaders, are a government imposed by the U.S. and by the Haitian
upper class and have absolutely no electoral or constitutional legitimacy.

DB: Brian Concannon, you are just back from the Dominican Republic. We
talked a little bit about this the other day, but this is such an important
story. First of all, describe your reasons for going to the D.R. at this
time.

BC: We went to the Dominican Republic because we¹d been hearing reports that
the D.R. was used as a staging area for Haiti¹s coup d¹etat, and we were
also concerned that very little investigation in the media had been done
into that.

So we went there in order to get some information and also as a way of
trying to jumpstart some investigations by press in the D.R.

A second objective is we did meet with some Haitian refugees and we wanted
to document the terror that¹s being inflicted on Haitians in Haiti, from
which these Haitians had fled

DB:And the ³we² you¹re talking about?

BC: It was part of a delegation organized by the International Action
Center, which was a center founded by former Attorney General Ramsey Clarke.
We had a total of 5 of us down there.

DB: All right, let¹s talk about the role that the Dominican Republic played
in concert with the U.S. government. We¹re talking about two things, we¹re
talking about weapons and we¹re talking about training. Let¹s start with the
training and then go to the weapons.

BC: We received many consistent and credible reports that there were several
training centers within the D.R. for the Haitian guerrillas. In fact, there
were several witness that said there was one group that was taking a run
every day at 5 o¹clock right along the waterfront in the capital, Santo
Domingo.

There was a cluster of bases up in the mountains not far from the capital.
And there were also people using bases just across the frontier from Haiti,
which they would use as their temporary bases to run attacks across the
border.

DB: Now the people who were being trained, are these some of the same people
who ended up doing the early attacks over the border and then more recently
participated with the U.S. government in the coup?

BC: Yes they wereŠ the leader of the rebellion was a guy named Guy Philippe.
He fled Haiti in October of 2000 because he was caught planning a coup
within Haiti. Since he left he¹s been pretty consistently planning more
coups, and as a preface to that, he¹s organized several murderous attacks on
infrastructure and police stations and one on the national palace in Haiti.
And he keeps doing this, and one of the things that is most shocking about
this is he was actually arrested twice for plotting to overthrow the Haitian
government by the Dominican authorities. He¹s been deported from Ecuador,
he¹s been deported from Panama, he illegally entered the D.R. at least once.
And despite all these things, he was never stopped.

In fact, we spoke with one journalist who had spoken with the president [of
D.R.], Hipólito Mejía, and the journalist had done quite a bit of
investigation on this, and Mejía told him to stop doing the investigation,
he said, look, Aristide is obsessed with Guy Philippe, every time he calls
me I tell him don¹t worry, we have Guy Philippe under control. In fact, part
of the conditions of his staying in the D.R. was that he checked in with the
DNI, the national investigative service, he had to check in with them two or
three times a month to tell them what he was doing, so they knew exactly
what was going on.

Dennis: I bet they did, and of course that¹s another service that was
structured by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, with a very close
relationshipŠ
Guy Philippe also has a record with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency,
correct?

BC: The U.S. Embassy, at least, has accused him repeatedly of being a drug
dealer, he also has a record, the Organization of American States human
rights mission in Haiti, back in, I think it was back in 1999 or early 2000,
listed him for being responsible for massive killings of accused criminals.

Philippe has another U.S. connection: in 1994, he was plucked from the
Haitian army, and this was during the dictatorship, he and about 11 others
were plucked from the Haitian army, and sent to a special training camp in
Ecuador, a U.S. training camp. The idea was to create a corps of former army
officers who could take prominent positions in the new police force and be
loyal to the U.S.

In fact, he and the other people in that Ecuador group all were given
positions of responsibility.
Most of those people have left the force because they were fairly quickly
caught doing some kind of big human rights violation. And Philippe did leave
with a couple other people from the Ecuador crowd and he¹s been working with
them in the D.R. since then. I don¹t want to just beat on the D.R. I think
they certainly have some sympathy for the forces that overthrew AristideŠ
they¹re not the primary responsible party... it¹s the U.S.
You mentioned some guns, but there¹s also training.
There¹s an operation called Operation Jaded Task, it¹s been going on in the
D.R. from, we believe, November or December of 2002 up until fairly
recently. And according to many published reports, there were as many as 200
Special Forces there at one time. One of the members of the delegation was a
26 year army veteran named Stan Goff, who had done a lot of time with the
Special Forces all over Latin America, and he said to have 200 people in a
country the size of the D.R. was absolutely extraordinaryŠ that Special
Forces are set up to work in small units and to not need a lot of support.
You can do quite a bit with teams of 5-10 people. So to rotate two hundred
people through is quite extraordinary and it shows it was an extremely high
priority project

When you look at the D.R. it raises a lot of questionsŠ what possible high
priority projects could the U.S. army have in there? The D.R. has not been
attacked by anybody besides the U.S. in about 150 years, there is no local
guerrilla insurgency or any armed group against the army, it¹s already a
huge army for the size of the country, and it¹s already armed to the teeth.
What contribution the U.S. needed to do, that needed to make such a huge
investment of Special Forces troops, while we¹re in the war on terrorism,
raises quite a few questions.

DB: Just to sum up what we¹re talking about here...we¹re talking about,
obviously, the U.S. government imposing their will, really they could get
the D.R. to do whatever they want, otherwise they sink them like a shipŠ so
we have the U.S. government heavily involved, as you¹re saying, Special
Forces trainingŠ what about the weapons? We¹ve heard about M-16s, we¹ve also
seen these rebels using helicopters, and we know that the Haitian government
didn¹t have any helicopters. So I¹m very interested in all this heavy
equipment that they¹re using.

BC: They¹re seems to be quite a lot of heavy equipment that they have, and
it certainly begs the question where did that heavy equipment come from. A
lot of the guns though, are not necessarily all new. One of the things that
happened during Haiti¹s 1991-94 dictatorship, the Haitian army before that
and during that, was well armed, they also gave out arms, including assault
rifles, to civilians, as a way of extending their repression, and they
created a couple paramilitary forcesŠ and when the U.S. troops came in 1994
to ³restore democracy,² they did not do systematic disarmament. And
disarmament was part of their UN mandate, but they refused to do it. There
were a lot of reasons for it, a lot of them say it was just too dangerous at
the time, but I remember speaking with some Special Forces units on the
ground, and asking them about that and they said that they had good
intelligence as to where the guns were, they said that they could go get
them at zero risk, they were just so much better trained and better equipped
than anybody they would meet that they were confident that there would not
be resistance. And they felt that they could do disarmament, and they kept
doing plans to do disarmament, and they kept sending them to Port au Prince,
and those plans kept getting vetoed. So there¹s a lot of guns left over from
1991, a lot of people that had them just buried them and if they didn¹t use
them in the meantime for common crime, they held them exactly for this type
of event.

Plus there¹s been other guns that have been shipped in from the U.S. There¹s
an American missionary that was caught about a year ago, bringing in a whole
bunch of things, including assault weapons and ammunition, things that
seemed inconsistent with, or not necessarily needed, to spread the word of
godŠ

DB: Bringing those weapons in where?


BC: Into Gonaive, where the rebellion started, they somehow inspected his
container at the port and found a bunch of concealed weapons and things like
uniforms and I think there was even some kind of remote control plane that
could drop bombsŠ

DB: And the helicopters?

BC: I have not seen where the helicopters came from, I have not heard
anybody give an explanationŠ

DB: But the Haitian government had no helicopters?

BC: I think they had one or two, but they were not this kind of helicopter.
And the helicopters that your listeners have heard reports on, those came
before the coup d¹etat happened in Haiti, and so they were certainly not the
Haitian government coming to buzz that territory. Somehow these guys got
helicopters and there¹s not a lot of possible sources for them and it seems
likely that a wealthy country helped them to get them.

DB: we¹re talking with Brian Concannon, who has been an attorney and a legal
adviser working with victims of Haiti¹s last coup, victims who had the
courage to stand up and talk about who the killers were, point the finger so
that some of these guys could be prosecuted and thrown in jail, of course we
now know that it¹s now the killers that have the keys to the killing fields
and those that have the courage to stand up are in hiding or in exile
already, we¹re going to talk about that in one momentŠand let¹s, perhaps,
get there, Brian Concannon, by talking about Haiti¹s police chief, he was
quoted in the New York Times, he¹s getting ready to make the case against
President Aristide as a thug, a human rights violator, a murderer who
misused Haitian resources for his own purposes. How would you evaluate these
charges by the new police chief, first of all based on their credibility or
their own believability, and based on the people bringing the charges?

BC: My touchstone for that would be the people bringing the charges and
what¹s going on in Haiti. The government in Haiti is an unconstitutional,
unelected government that took power through brutal force. Some of the
people that are part of that government and part of the power structure are
guys like Guy Philippe, who, although he has not been convicted of anything,
has certainly been accused of a whole smorgasbord of illegal activity. But
other people have been convicted, probably the number two person behind Guy
Philippe is a guy named Jodel Chamblain. Jodel Chamblain has been sentenced
twice for murder, once for the assassination of a prominent businessman who
was a pro-democracy supporter, the other time for participating in the
Robiteau massacre, which was a 1994 civilian massacre, a
military/paramilitary massacre against civilians. So he¹s obviously, if
you¹re looking for people to put in jail for being criminals, he¹s a good
start, and you don¹t even need to try him because he already has a court
case against him.

These guys also went around and let out every single prisoner in Haiti,
these include former dictators, people that we had put in jail, three former
members of the military high command, who were all convicted in Robiteau
case so when you have a government that is run by and for people responsible
for massive human rights violations, it¹s somewhat hard to take them
seriously when they talk about suing President Aristide. And one thing
that¹s kind of interesting, there¹s a lot of people jumping on the
bandwagon, within the Haitian opposition right now it¹s very popular to say
³oh, you know, we need to try President Aristide,² and I don¹t think it¹s
going to happenŠ and one of the reasons why I don¹t is that these people
always refuse to use the legal system as a response to their critiques of
Aristide. I have critiques of President Bush, but I do not advocate an
Al-Qaeda attack on Washington. The things that I would do to counter his
policy, I would support the use of the courts. I do support the use of the
courts, I support use of the ballot box, and one of the things that we¹ve
been advocating in Haiti over the last few years is saying, hey look, if
people don¹t like the government, there are ways within the democratic
system to respond to thatŠ and everybody¹s been saying that Aristide¹s a
murderer and a drug dealer, not everyone, the rich people have been saying
that, and it¹s always been a big question for me, if they have this case
against him, why don¹t they use the justice system? Sure the justice system
is not perfect, as it isn¹t in the U.S., but it¹s certainly much less
imperfect than a violent coup. And these people need to use the justice
system, which they didn¹t doŠ so I don¹t really have confidence that they¹re
going to to do anything against Aristide. The other reason why I don¹t think
they will do a legal case against him is that they don¹t want him back in
the country. If they did a legal case against him, they would have to let
him back in to defend himself in court and that would lead to the risk that
the people might decide that they might want their President back.

DB: And the opposition did say, as the former death squad leaders and the
former military were heading towards Port au Prince with these heavy
weapons, they did say, well they¹re actually not connected to these guys who
are coming in with the weapons, but we¹ve seen a number of actions since
that time that say they¹re really hand-in-hand, right?

BC: Sure, and we saw actions beforehand. One thing that I found out in the
Dominican Republic which was very interesting is there¹s a guy named Paul
Arcelin, who was the official representative of the Democratic Convergence,
which was the main U.S.-supported opposition group, he was their official
representative in the D.R., which is extremely important because the D.R. is
an important country as sharing the island with Haiti, it¹s also where
Stanley Lucas and the International Republican Institute kept having
meetings with the Haitian Opposition. Every month they¹d have these big
meetings and Paul Arcelin was their go-to guy there. Paul Arcelin was
raising funds for the Convergence in the D.R. and in Florida. He was also
the main fundraiser for the rebels, both in Florida and in the D.R.

DB: So he¹s supporting the killers and he¹s supporting the so-called
³peaceful opposition², raising money for both groups.

BC: Correct.

DB: So that¹s what we¹re talking about in terms of them being connected at
the root.

BC: Yeah, that¹s one of the waysŠ and Arsenal is now, there was an article
about him about a week ago in a Montreal paper, they interviewed him and
he¹s poolside with Guy Phillippe, and he¹s a big power broker in Port au
Prince.

DB: And there have been pretty dramatic stage appearances by representatives
of both groups, eh?

BC: Sure, as you said, they¹re connected at the roots, they¹re also
connected more recentlyŠ a week and a half ago the de facto prime minister
had his triumphant trip to Gonaive, and he was put on some U.S. helicopter
and sent to GonaiveŠ and he got up on the podium with one person, David Lee,
who is the head of the Organization of American States Special Mission to
Haiti, and another person was Jean Tatoune, who¹s someone who¹s been
convicted in the Raboteau massacre, he was identified by victims as having
shot several people, and also pointing out where the army should go and
shoot people and whose houses should be trashed. This guy Jean Tatoune was
up on the podium with ambassador Lee and with the de facto Prime Minster
Latortue, and Latortue hailed these guys as ³freedom fighters²Šand we¹ve
heard the ³freedom fighter² designation before, and last time it wasn¹t for
people who were democratic, nor is it this time.

There were a couple of bizarrely incongruous statements Šthe Minister of
Justice, I¹m not sure if he was on the podium or not, but the same day, he
gave out a statement saying ³all the criminals must be judged,² and it was
bizarre that he was saying that right next to Jean Tatoune, who¹s a criminal
who has been judged, who¹s got a life sentence and was just broken out of
jail. There was also an interview later where David Lee said, ³well, we
don¹t want it to make it look like people are being rewarded for taking
power through force.² Of course, he was doing exactly that. This whole
government is not only corrupt and illegitimate, it¹s also very closely
linked to the violence.

DB: You¹ve mentioned the International Republican Institute, please say a
little more about its origins and why that organization is significant in
this context.

BC: The International Republican Institute was created by Congress, there
are two kind of twin organizations, one is the International Republican
Institute, the other¹s the National Democratic Institute for International
Affairs, and they¹re allied with the respective parties. And both
traditionally had been funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, which
was funded directly by Congress. The NED are very sensitive about this, and
they keep protesting that they don¹t fund IRI in Haiti anymore, apparently
IRI just got too bad for them. NED¹s been accused of doing things that the
CIA was doing 20 years agoŠ

DB: Or a front for the CIAŠ

BC: Yeah, or at least good cop/bad cop kind of stuffŠ but what IRI was doing
was too dirty even for the NED, so they started getting their funding
straight from USAID, which also allows the ambassador on the ground to have
a little closer control over the funds. It¹s hard to find that much detailed
information about IRIŠ you would think that a group that was dedicated to
democratization and openness would have this huge website with all this
information about what they¹re doing. In fact, it¹s very hard to find out
what exactly IRI is doing, although we do know they¹re getting quite a bit
of money, $2-3 million a year, and with nothing to show for it. We¹ve gotten
reports that for a long time they¹ve been flying Haitian opposition
politicians up to Washington to lobby, they had these monthly meetings in
the fanciest hotels in Santo Domingo, where they actually flew over all of
the entire Haitian opposition to Santo Domingo to have meetings and some
strategy sessions and they flew them back.

The fact that the IRI doesn¹t have any information on its website, the fact
that they need to ship the entire opposition out of the country because they
don¹t want anybody to know what they¹re doing in a democratization
initiative, I mean obviously these things are highlyŠ

DB: And it¹s origins, of the organization? Is that Jesse Helms?

BC: Well, Jesse Helms has long been influential, especially in the Haiti
program. I think that both the IRI and NDI were started by congress, I
believe about 15-20 years ago. But, yeah, Jesse Helms is always very active
in Haiti, and he played a large role with IRI¹s activities in Haiti.

DB: All right Brian, I want to spend a few minutes on something that
Flashpoints has watched very closely and that is the impact on the ground
and specifically the attacks on pro-democracy people -- former Lavalas
people, officials, poverty workers. This new government has declared a large
swath of the population as illegal and it has to do with their participation
in democracy. Could you talk a little about the problems your former clients
are facing, the people you represented when they had the courage to step
forward and point a finger at the killers?

BC: Sure, they¹re facing the same problems they faced in the last
dictatorship, from 1991-1994. It¹s certainly not surprising that the same
people that were in charge then, now that they¹re in charge again, are up to
the same tricks. As early as December of 2003, the victims in the Raboteau
massacre had to go underground. Jean Tatoune was out of jail and he was
making up for lost time, he was punishing people for testifying against him.
On January 1, which was the 200th anniversary of Haitian
independenceŠindependence started in Gonaive, that¹s where independence was
declared, and for years, I¹ve been going to Gonaive for the past nine years,
all the time people were saying, oh will you be back here, will you be back
for Jan.1, 2004, because this was a huge source of pride, they call it the
City of Independence.

And this year they did plan a huge celebration, but not that many people
showed up. I asked people there why no one was showing up and they said,
Œcause they¹re afraidŠthe terrorists had been saying that anyone who shows
up at the celebrations was going to pay. That worked to keep people away,
and the people that didn¹t keep away got punished. There was one Raboteau
victim that I was speaking with at the celebration, and his house was burned
down while he was at the celebration.

Several other people had their houses burned down, both victims and the
chief prosecutor in the case. I have not yet heard of anybody being killed,
and I hope that¹s going to stay, but we haven¹t been able to keep in contact
with people because they¹ve been underground now for four
monthsŠcommunication with Gonaive is very difficult, we really don¹t have
any final view.

I got an e-mail from a police officer who said a good friend of his was
killedŠhe just went to a taxi to run an errand, he was picked up and
executed. They found his body in the morgue the next day. There¹ve been
reports of people pulled out of their houses in the afternoon, in the
morning they show up in the morgue with bullets in their heads. There¹s a
fairly consistent, and systematic campaign of terror in Port au Prince, in
the North, in the South, pretty much all over Haiti.

DB: You¹re listening to Flashpoints on Pacifica Radio, that¹s Brian
Concannon, he has been working with the legal team that represents President
Aristide, now in Jamaica, and we are talking about the various battles to
restore the Presidency and democracy to Haiti.

Is there any doubt in the mind of President Aristide or the people who
represent him that this was in fact a coup, that it was the culmination of a
multi-year destabilization campaign, and that what happened on Feb.29 was
clearly a coup, a forcing out of democracy from Haiti?

BC: No, there¹s no doubt. President Aristide says that he was almost
physically bundled on the plane. He says that he was told he was being taken
to a press conference, and instead they took him to the airport and they
said if you don¹t get on the plane you¹re going to be killed right here.
They didn¹t say they were going to kill himŠthe U.S. embassy denies that
they said that Aristide asked to go to the airport, but even if you¹re going
to believe the State Department this time, it¹s still a distinction without
a difference because the reality is even if Aristide did ask for U.S.
assistance to get out of the country, which I don¹t believe he did, the
reason he did that is you had this U.S.-supported insurgency that would
continue to kill more of his supporters, so that is certainly something that
was done under duress and illegal, and in fact the O.A.S. has its charter
and it has its convention,which is called the inter-American convention, and
the whole purpose of the convention, and of the charter is one of collective
security, and collective support for democracies in the hemisphere. And
those documents require neighboring countries, other members of the OAS, to
come to Haiti¹s aid when its democracy is threatened. Haiti put out the
call, asked for some assistance, and the only country that responded,
actually, was South Africa. Which was why the coup happened on February 29,
because South Africa had sent a planeload of police supplies that landed in
Jamaica just a couple of hours after President Aristide was whisked out of
Haiti. And had he been able to stay in for another four or five hours, those
supplies would have arrived and the police would have been able to
adequately defend the city.

DB: So the U.S. government seized the moment to force him out of the
country?

BC: Exactly, because they knew that the time was running outŠand when he was
put on the plane, this was a classic case of kidnappingŠagain, even if you
believe the statements of the U.S. that he did go to the airport on his own
volition, once he was put on the plane he was not allowed to communicate
with anybody. And this is a highly specialized plane, with all sorts of
sophisticated communications equipment, they probably could have called
anywhere in the whole world from that plane. And he was not allowed to
communicate with anybodyŠeven when they stopped for refueling, they kept all
the shades down and no one was allowed to even look out the window. They did
not let him decide where he was going, or even tell him where he was going.
So it was clear it was a kidnapping under international law, and under
Haitian law.

DB: Where does this go now? President Aristide is now in Jamaica. Is it true
that the U.S. government is putting intense pressure on Jamaica to get him
the hell out of the region? Is this being led by Condoleezza Rice, who is it
that¹s pressuring him, and what is he going to do, what does it look like
now?

BC: In terms of the pressure, they certainly are pressuring not just Jamaica
but the entire Caribbean community. At the Caricom meeting last week many
top officials were really angry and really upset about the kind of pressure
that had been happeningŠand Caribbeans tend to be very polite, much politer
than Americans, but in one report, one foreign minister resorted to shouting
expletives back at whoever was on the other line. I don¹t know if that was
Condi Rice, or who it was, but it was certainly someone who was putting a
lot of improper pressure on the Caricom governments to be mean to Arisitide.

In terms of who¹s doing it, certainly Condoleezza Rice is involved,
certainly Colin Powell is involved. I don¹t know who elseŠtraditionally the
people who have been running Haiti policy, as with policy in the rest of
Latin America, are a lot of people who are deemed to be too dirty for the
Reagan Administration, they kind of left public office with their tail
between their legs after the Iran-Contra scandal. But now they¹re backŠ

DB: A bunch of them, like Roger Noriega and Otto ReichŠOtto Reich is a real
gemŠwe¹re not going to spend a lot of time on thatŠso what happens now, what
is Aristide thinking about, what are those who represent him thinking about,
is he going to be able to stay in Jamaica, is he going to accept Hugo
Chavez¹s offer to go to Venezuela, South Africa is a possibilityŠ

BC: I¹m not sure what he¹s thinking. One of the conditions of his stay in
Jamaica is that he¹s not allowed to speak freely. Certainly he¹s not made
any announcements about what his plans are. On the plane on the way over he
said I¹m going to wait and see what the Haitian people say. It¹s hard to
gauge this because the news in Haiti is not being reported in an even-handed
manner but it seems like there are still continuing demonstrations in favor
of Aristide¹s return, so that appears to be the position of the Haitian
people, that they want democracy back. In terms of where President Aristide
will go, my belief is that he will be in Jamaica at least for the next
couple of weeks, but I think that Jamaica¹s a poor country, very vulnerable
to U.S. pressure and it can only hold out so long, and I¹m not confident
Jamaica will be able to hold out to the end of the month of April, so my
guess is that sometime in the next two to three weeks President Aristide
will be moved along, I don¹t know where. Certainly Venezuela has been
discussed, President Chavez did issue that invitation. My understanding is
South Africa has also been discussed but I don¹t have any details on that.

DB: All right, if people want more information, if they want to follow this
case very closely, the situation very closely, what do you recommend?

BC: Listen to Flashpoints. Second would be to check the website of the Haiti
Action Committee, http://www.haitiaction.net??Haiti Action Committee has both a
bunch of good news articles, so it¹s a way of wading through the coverage
and getting to the best news articles, it also has urgent action alerts, so
it can tell you what you can do if you are outraged, as many Americans are
at our role in thisŠHaiti Action Committee can help you hook up with other
people who are taking action on it.

DB: We¹ve been speaking with Brian Concannon, Concannon is an attorney
working with President Aristide, who¹s also based in Port Au Prince at the
International Lawyer¹s Bureau. Concannon has been one of the key players in
prosectuting Haiti¹s death squads and former military killers from the 1991
coup, and he is just back from the Dominican Republic.
Brian Concannon, thanks for being with us on Flashpoints.

BC: Thank you, Dennis.