Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 10/5/23 Dan Cohen on the US Deploying Troops to Haiti

Episode Date: October 7, 2023

Dan Cohen of Redacted joined Antiwar Radio this week to discuss the expanding U.S. interventions in Haiti. News broke recently that the U.S. will be providing support for a force of Kenyan soldiers heading into Haiti under the banner of the UN. Cohen, who has traveled frequently to Haiti in the last few years, explains the unrest that is currently gripping the island and how the U.S. establishment is misrepresenting the situation for their own benefit. They then discuss the presence of U.S. special forces on the island. Discussed on the show: Haiti Liberté Documentary Cohen’s interview about US Special Forces in Haiti Dan Cohen is a journalist and co-producer of the award-winning documentary, Killing Gaza. His website is dancohenmedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @dancohen3000. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Pacifica Radio, October the 5th, 2023. I'm Scott Horton. This is Anti-War Radio. All right, y'all, welcome the show. It is Anti-War Radio. I'm your host, Scott Horton. I'm the editorial director of anti-war.com, and author of the book, Enough Already.

Time to end the war on terrorism. And you can find my full interview archive, almost 6,000 of them now, going back to 2003 at Scott Horton.org and at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show and at all the video sites slash Scott Horton Show. And you can follow me on Twitter,

if you dare, at Scott Horton Show. All right, you guys. Next up on the show is Dan Cohen from Redacted. Welcome back to the show. Dan, how are you, sir? Hey, I'm good. Good to be with you, Scott. Great.

Great to have you here. Such important news. USA is re-invading Haiti. Do tell. Yeah, it's only been, what, six years since the U.N. left Haiti after a 13-year mission, so-called peacekeeping mission, in which they carried out a bunch of massacres, impregnated, raped a bunch of children, frankly, is what we should call it. So essentially, what's going on is the U.S. used its diplomatic capital, the U.N. Security Council, to get a resolution authorizing a non-U.N. force to invade Haiti. So, you know, the key difference between the last intervention and this one that's about to happen is this is not going to be UN peacekeepers. This is going to be a force the U.S. is cobbling together with mostly Kenyans

who are going to be on the ground as well as several other countries. And U.S. special forces, the Green Berets, the seven special group of the Green Berets, are already down there. have been down there for about a month and a half cycling in and out, training the police to do raids and captures or kills of what they call gang members. And there are real nasty gangs, criminal groups in Haiti in Porta Prince, but that's not fundamentally who they want to take out. The target of this intervention is an anti-crime armed federation, basically neighborhood self-defense groups.

It's like, you know, imagine if our neighborhoods in, you know, in the U.S., wherever you are, are taken over by criminals. Well, people would take up their weapons and they would organize to kick those criminals out and try to have some semblance of normalcy or order. And that's what they've done in these neighborhoods led by a guy named Jimmy Barbecue Cherizier. And that's the guy that they want to take out, ironically. Well, and we have seen that in Mexico, for example, where the locals say, look, the cops are in on it with the drug dealers. So we're just going to grab our own rifles and provide our own security. It does happen. So, and I know that you.

spent some time in Haiti, Dan, and that you've interviewed Jimmy, Barbecue, Chevalier. Tell us all about him and why you believe that he's not just a gangster like the rest of these guys. Well, so, yeah, I've been in Haiti four times since July 2021 when I first went down there. And I did a documentary with a Haitian outlet called Haiti Liberté, which goes through, you know, our entire argument and the background of what's happening right, what's about to happen right now. It's called, the documentary is called Another Vision inside Hades Uprising, and it centers around Jimmy Cherizier. And basically, he has been the, he has been smeared in the press.

He has been demonized by a National Endowment for Democracy, State Department, CIA disinformation campaign that has paved the way for this intervention. All of, I've gone through meticulously investigated the allegations against him. that he carried out a series of massacres. The main one is called the Lassaline Massacre. And this is like, you know, Iraqi WMDs or Syrian chemical weapons attacks. It's a total pretext. And so he is the guy who's organized his neighborhood. He's the linchpin to this federation of armed groups that's fighting back against criminals and has actually, you know, they provide for their neighborhood. You know, they have, they have like education and clean water and these kinds of things for their

neighborhood where the state basically fails and doesn't exist or attacks them. So he's been totally smeared. And he's, you know, demonized in the media. And, you know, it's the U.S. government that's done it. And it's through a phony human rights group in Haiti called the Haitian National Network for Human Rights and a guy named P.R. Esperance is the biggest disinformation agent in Haiti. He just wrote an article in the New York Times yesterday, you know. So he's he's the U.S.'s man. He's the U.S. Embassy's man in Haiti. And, you know, they're coming to kill not only Jimmy Chirvizier, but, you know, they're going to kill a lot of innocent people, too. All right.

It's Dan Cohen from Redacted here on Anti-War Radio. And I'd like you to go back to from the time that you spent with this guy, Jimmy Barbecue Chevalier. What has convinced you of his innocence? Like, for example, if you can focus on those massacres that you mentioned that he's been accused of. You have my ears, Dan. I've seen the United States accuse every enemy that they've attacked since Panama 89, you know, at least of all kinds of things that were not true in order to justify their violence. There are no exceptions. So I'm willing to give this guy the benefit of the doubt and presume his innocence. But could you explain what it was that you found out and

how you're so certain? Yeah. So, I mean, there are a series. of massacres that he was alleged to have participated in. The first one was basically when he's actually a former cop. He was a high level, ironically, an anti-gang cop, you know, he was he would be sent on these missions to confront, arrest, whatever, take out real bad guys, bad criminals who, you know, would kill and rape and rob and that kind of thing. And he was sent on a mission abruptly and it went bad because they were not properly briefed. They didn't know what was going on turned into a firefight between him and his men and these gang members. Some of his fellow policemen were killed. The next day, and this is all in the documentary, the next day the police congratulated him

on his efforts and thanked him and honored him. And then two weeks later, the human rights groups get involved that are funded by the U.S. and declare that Jimmy Chirisier carried out a massacre. Now, and they never presented a shred of evidence. They just said, well, there were dead people. Well, there were dead people, but that doesn't mean they weren't gang members that they had killed. That doesn't mean there weren't innocent people caught up in an operation that went awry. So that's the first one. And that basically pushed him out of the police and said and made him say, well, you know, this system is insane.

This is a corrupt system. It has to go. So he started to speak out. And then in 2000, late 2018 is what we have, what is known as the La Saline Massacre. And that was, according to these phony human rights groups, these NED funded disinformation operations disguised as human rights groups, Jimmy Chirizier and the government that planned and carried out a massacre in this slum of La Saline. Now, if you look at, there's like seven different reports and I go through all of them in the documentary, they're all. contradictory. They all make claims that don't make sense with each other, and they don't present any actual evidence. There's no evidence. And so what I found is that, well, and I found

evidence that he was not there. I had testimony from his neighbors saying, no, he was a sleep on the ground when that whole thing was going on. And what it actually was was a fight between armed groups for control of a market. And that stuff happens frequently in a place like Porta Prince, where there is extreme poverty and, you know, basically strong men emerge. So he's, so that one I found no evidence for was totally manufactured. And actually the guy, you know, Pierre Esperance, the head of this human rights group, he played a key role in the 2004 coup against Aristide that the U.S. that the U.S. was behind. So he's playing essentially the same role. He manufactured 2004, the so-called Lasserie massacre, which the U.S.

when special rapporteur denounced, it basically said was not that at all. So he lied about that. And now he's lying about these other maskers in order to pave the way. And so, you know, I'm not going to say that Jimmy Chirizier is an angel. What I do say is that he's not guilty of the crimes that he is accused of and that he is actually trying to change the situation in his country. And he's in a tight spot. He's in a bad spot. I mean, the U.S. is straight up gunning form. They want to, you know, capture a kill. Yeah. Tell us, I mean, what are his sins other than these fake maskers? I mean, on the real level, what is it that America hates about this guy? Is he a communist or he's just hell bent on going after certain of their interests or

what is it? He's not a communist, actually. You know, he, like in our documentary, you know, he's sitting in front of a Che Guevara painting on the wall, but, but he's not like, an ideological communist at all. He's a guy who's shaped up by his experiences and he hates what he calls the corrupt stinking bourgeoisie, you know, the elites, the oligarchy in Haiti who actually fund these criminal gangs to terrorize the neighborhoods, to have insecurity. Because when people aren't organized, when they don't have, you know, when the country doesn't have its sovereignty, when people don't have their own individual sovereignty, it's total chaos. And then, you know, these foreign multinational corporations can come in and have sweatshop labor and the Clinton Foundation can, you know, make sure that people, you know, live in sheer poverty and they just exploit the situation. And so that's fundamentally what he's challenging. And that's why the U.S. does not want him to, you know, succeed. They can't allow him because he wants, he wants to have a revolution. He wants to change the system. So that's the threat he presents. And that's why they,

They smear him. Sorry, hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here for Tennessee Hot Sauce Company. Man, this stuff is so good. They get all different flavors. Garlic habanero, honey habanero, pineapple habanero, Poblano jalapeno, and the Blood Orange Ghost. They're all so good, I swear.

And for a limited time, Tennessee Hot Sauce Company is featuring official Scott Horton hotter than the sun thermonuclear hot sauce. It's full of Carolina Reapers, Scorpion Peppers, Dr. Pepper, hydrogen isotopes, and all kinds of things that'll burn your tongue clean off. Seriously, it's really good. Get yourself a hot sauce subscription. Spend $40 or more and use promo code Scott to get a free bottle of hotter than the sun hot sauce. That's tnhot sauceco.com.

Hey, y'all got to check out these awesome busts of our hero, the great Ron Paul. They're made by the renowned sculptor Rick Casale. They're 13 inches tall hand-painted bronze resin based on Casale's brilliant original. You may have seen mine in the background on my bookshelf in some recent interviews. The thing is unbelievable. Check out this incredible piece of art at Rick Casale.com slash Ron Paul, and you'll see what I mean. Use promo code Horton, and you'll save 25 bucks, and this show will get a little kickback, too.

That's Rick Casale.com slash Ron Paul. Casale is C-A-S-A-L-Rick-Casali.com slash Ron Paul. And there's free shipping, too. Light Pictures presents The Roses, only in theaters, August 29th. From the director of Meet the Parents and the writer of Poor Things, comes The Roses, starring Academy Award winner Olivia Coleman, Academy Award nominee Benedict Cumberbatch, Andy Sandberg, Kate McKinnon, and Allison Janney, a hilarious new comedy, filled with drama, excitement, and a little bit of hatred, proving that marriage isn't always a bed of roses.

See The Roses, only in theaters, August 29th. Get tickets now. all right so now you mentioned the clinton foundation there i know a little bit about that but let's assume that the radio audience in l.A. has never heard of such a thing as some scandal involving Hillary clinton's foundation and the island nation of Haiti what would you tell them well Haitians you know hate the clintons maybe you know more than even trumpers in the u.s do the clinton Foundation, particularly in the wake of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, which killed something like, I mean, my understanding is it killed about 80,000 people. Then the U.S. and its proxies did this humanitarian operation to raise billions of dollars. And that was like 98% of that money

that was supposed to go to Haiti was pillaged back into the coffers of Washington contractors. and the Clinton Foundation played a huge role in that. So the Clintons are kind of like the modern slave owners of Haiti in a lot of ways. They just profit immensely and make sure the people live in misery. So they're just reviled there. And then wasn't there some State Department cables published by the hero Julian Assange that showed Hillary Clinton and her interests in keeping the minimum wage at what, 24 instead of 25 cents an hour, some horrible thing yeah exactly it was I think it was like three two dollars an hour or sorry a day

not a yeah something like three dollars a day instead of five dollars a day they did the yeah the Clinton state department directly intervened to make sure people couldn't you know uh earn earn enough to live and there was some factory that they had built that was like oh look we're helping the people by building them this textile factory but then it was just some miserable sweatshop pseudo slave labor as you were saying there, right? Yeah. And if you, you know, you can see people coming in and out of those sweatshops every day if you go down to Porta Prince. And that was, you know, the big thing that they that they built right after the earthquake to have economic recovery and rebuild Haiti. And, you know, there's these photos of Bill and Hillary, you know, with, with these Haitians and oh, it's going to be

great. And it's just a total sweatshop labor. Yeah. Well, look, I mean, I think we can all understand how somebody in college might be convinced that, oh, the, baby blue flag in the humanitarian mission. And, you know, the U.S. can be a mean old right-wing imperialist. But when the U.N. comes to help the people, that's when peace breaks out and everything is okay, right, Dan? Ha, if only, I mean, the, you know, the, the, the, the, the UN force from 2014, 2004 to 2017 was just absolutely horrific. They brought cholera, for example, which killed many Haitians, the UN so-called peacekeepers defecated in the water supply. And by many Haitians, you mean little babies and toddlers. That's who dies of cholera. Right, right, right, exactly.

And that, and that still exists to this day. You know, there are cholera clinics down there that I've been to. They carried out massacres. You know, they're just going into slums and just shooting all over the place, just unloading. And these are not like, you know, these are people from all over the world. What they do is actually they get poor, poor cops from poor countries or soldiers from poor countries who are like, hey, we'll pay you more if you go and, you know, do this in Haiti. And so they go along with it because that's the only way they can get by. They can survive. And so, you know, actually, I know from a source close to the Haitian national police that Kenya, which is going to be the main, the country that contributes a thousand special

ops police officers, they were bribed with $50 million to send their police. So, you know, this is just, this is just a big scam. It's just, you know, there's nothing humanitarian about this. This is just dirty business. But, you know, yeah, the UN peacekeepers have been horrible for Haiti. But this time, it's, it's only the UN has given its blessing. So it's not even going to be, you know, under UN control. It's just the UN signed off on it. So it's going to be fundamentally a U.S. operation. The U.S. is totally in control of this. Well, I don't know what your problem is. The Kenyans have done a fantastic job in Somalia. No, I'm sorry. I don't know what I'm thinking. All right, listen, it's KPFK, anti-war

radio. I'm talking with Dan Cohen. And, man, we're so out of time here. And we buried the lead. You have a single source, but he's on camera named credible source explaining the degree of the American Special Operations Command deployment to Haiti so far. And what they're doing. You got a minute or two, please, to hit us with that. Yeah, well, so far, what I know is that they've been down there for 30 to 45 days cycling in and out. I spoke to a former Air Force Special Operations Command member who, you know, came to me and told me about this because basically those are his buddies who are down there. And he's Haitian American and he's not real thrilled with it. So that's why he came to me. And basically, they're training not

only the general kind of police in the Haitian national police, but also elite squads to be able to carry these out, these operations out. And so it's not just, you know, they're going to tell them what to do. They're going to be embedded with them. You know, they'll be in the truck and they'll say, okay, go do this. And they'll get out and probably participate. So the U.S. and the Biden administration has really sought to make this not seem like it's a U.S. operation. They've even called it like, you know, solidarity among from a black country, you know, it's like pan-African solidarity, what Kenya is doing. But this is straight up a U.S. operation to go in and kill people and, you know, I mean, you're talking about incredibly poor, exploited people living in very,

very dense, in a densely populated area. And so when those bullets start flying, I guarantee you, there are going to be a lot of innocent civilians, you know, that suffer the consequences. So, you know, if there's any, like, organized protests, you know, this is, this is, this is, this is not very popular, you know, nobody, nobody really wants this. So if you can get to protests, you know, to call your elected official, whatever, to push back against this. And look, you know what, motives aside to, people got to understand that this can't work. America and other whatever allied nations coming in with their armed force to remake Haiti in a way that now

it's a workable thing, you know, is impossible. They have on a very basic level a knowledge problem where they can't tell a gangster from an anti-gangster or which one they should be backing. And they can't tell their own interests from the interests of the people of Haiti,

which they don't even apprehend at all, right? So I understand how appealing it can be to look at poor desperate people and think, we just need to send the infantry in there to make everything okay, but that's not how you make everything okay. Exactly. And, you know, think about, I mean,

the problems that we have in the United States, we have all kinds of violence, we have all kinds of killings. Do we want a foreign country to send its military in to intervene and just start shooting into neighborhoods randomly? No, it's a, you know, there's problems. but it's that those have to be solved internally domestically uh you know there has to be ways

to solve it so you know the idea of some foreign force coming into our country we would all reject it just like Haitians will yeah all right you guys that is dan cohen he is a correspondent for redacted with natalie and clayton moors you can find that on youtube and go and look at their recent piece and you will see his interview with this special operations source this extremely credible special operations source talking about the green berets deployment to haiti already before we officially even get started here very important stuff and really appreciate your time on the show down absolutely thank you scott all right shone that is anti-war radio for today i'm your host scott horton i'm the editorial director of antiwar dot com and the author of enough already time

to end the war on terrorism find my full interview archive at scott horton dot org and follow me on Twitter, if you dare, at Scott Horton's show. I am here every Thursday from 23 to 3 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A. See you next week.