Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 12/9/22 Dan Cohen on the Threat of a U.S. Invasion of Haiti

Episode Date: December 10, 2022

Scott talks with journalist Dan Cohen about the volatile situation in Haiti. Cohen recently traveled to the country to report on Washington’s targeting of opposition leader Jimmy Chérizier. Cohen explains how this situation developed, discusses the U.S. government’s goals and reflects on what it was like on the ground in the poorest country in the western hemisphere.  Discussed on the show: Cohen’s reporting from 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; and Thc Hemp Spot. 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: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, you all, it's fun raising time again at the Libertarian Institute. We try not to do this to you too often, but business is business after all. I got a great group of guys and a gal at the Institute, and I got to pay them. So just go to Libertarian Institute.org slash donate to pick your price and help out. We've got some great kickbacks, too, books and shirts. Great ones. That's Libertarian Institute.org slash donate. And thank you all very much. All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton show.

I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new, enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scott horton.4 you can sign up for the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton show aren't you guys on the line i've got dan cohen he's got a new project called uncaptured media and uh welcome back to the show how you doing dan hey good to be back uh been a while but but but happy to be back with you scott i'm good yeah man

Good. And everybody, you remember, Dan, he and Max Blumenthal together did that documentary Killing Gaza about the war in 2014. You've got to see that, man. I know I've recommended it a lot of times, but that's one to show your right-wing brother-in-law, too, because it's just interviews of Palestinians state in their case, and it's one that your right-wing brother-in-law ain't never got to hear before, I promise you. But anyway, I don't want to spend too much time on that, but just to remind you guys the greatness of this guy's work in the past here. Now, and also, I watched 90-something percent of the documentary that you just put out of this

investigator or whatever on scene reporting that you did out of Haiti the other day and I know that all hell's breaking loose there I know there are calls to send in American troops to make everything better and we're going to talk with Daniel Larison later in the show wrote a piece

about why not to go along with that but you know I'll just if it's unfair to anyone I apologize but I'm going to start with the premise that nobody listened knows anything about what's going on there any more than I did before I watched your thing. I just, I know there's been a lot of news.

I just have not been keeping up with it. It's all good. Back burner this whole time. So go ahead and fill us in entirely. Who's the president? Who's trying to overthrow him? Why is America on the bad guy's side, et cetera? I think the easiest place to start is basically July, 2021.

That is when the president of Haiti, Joveno Mouise, was assassinated in his home in the middle of the night by a Colombian gunman. and that has just been essentially an unsolved mystery, though there are clues about the involvement of not only the prime minister who has basically taken power. So the president was assassinated. The prime minister assumes, you know, power. His name is Ariel Henri and the U.S. There's evidence basically implicating them, too.

Or they have not allowed evidence to come out suggesting they're trying to cover up their role. So this president gets assassinated. The U.S. appoints basically installs, annoyance this guy, Ariel Henri, as the unelected prime minister. And he's been in power ever since. He's incredibly unpopular. And the U.S. very much knows that. And currently is in the process of basically transitioning him out and replacing him with the opposition, which is just as dirty and corrupt and are also tools of the U.S.

And that group is called the Montana Accord. Both Ariel Henri, the de facto prime minister and the leader of the Montana Accord were involved in the 2004 U.S. orchestrated coup d'Etat in Haiti against then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. So all of this is in the context of this kind of revolt. among the masses that is growing, led by a former cop named Jimmy Chirizier, his nickname is Barbecue. And if you Google barbecue, you'll see that, you know, he's just the worst guy in Haiti,

you know, according to the New York Times and the Daily Beast and all the mainstream rags, that, you know, he's a mass murderer. He's committed all these massacres. So, you know, considering they're saying that, that suggests that probably not the case. And that is what my documentary that I made with Kim Ives of Haiti Liberté, who has been working in Haiti since before I was born, since the 70s, he and I made this documentary over the past roughly year and a half. Right after the assassination, I got in touch with Kim. We went down there and investigated and took a look at, you know, the allegations against this guy, Jimmy Barbecue Cherise. We interviewed him, toured around his neighborhood that had been attacked, and that's kind of, that's our documentary.

So right now, the U.S. is in total, like, is pushing transition, it's basically pushing regime change in Haiti. In fact, just yesterday on Thursday, December 8th, a bunch of the most powerful Haitian oligarchs and kind of business associations called for a foreign invasion of Haiti. And the U.S. is very much trying to do that. The problem for the U.S. is that if they send troops in, whether covert or overt, to take out this guy barbecue and the kind of the armed movement that he heads, it's going to be seen as the U.S. coming in and propping up this dictator, what is essentially a dictator, a totally unelected prime minister who has, you know, no popular backing. So that's why the U.S. is like, we got to get these other guys in power who have a cleaner kind of look. You know, they're, and so that's, so that's like the moment we're in right now. So it's almost like, yeah, we got to back South Vietnam, but we got to get rid of this guy DM kind of thing. They want to keep the regime, but replace the puppet, but it ain't going to work.

No, that's a, yeah, that's a really good parallel. I hadn't thought of that. Yeah, no, there's a lot of Vietnam parallels in American Ford policy these days in. And listen, I've got to give you so much credit for going over there. I stay home and do radio, man. And I sure I'm a big fan of you journalists who actually go out there and do all the work that I sponge off of. And here you are, you know, up to your waist walking through gunk in the dirtiest ghetto in Haiti, worse than any part of the United States of America, to go and talk with this guy and see what he's about. And I wouldn't have done it.

So I give you credit for, you know, the courage and the dedication to go and do that work. What? I appreciate that, Scott. You slay neocons, though, so I'll respect to you. All right. Well, I appreciate it. Anyway, but, you know, I think, though, that when the New York Times said this guy so ruthless, throws, slitting killer, like, that's probably, you probably immediately did not believe that. And we're not so scared to go and meet the guy, I bet.

And he certainly doesn't seem that scary, although, you know, he's. He's some kind of warlord or another, although one with very little power, maybe a leader of a very big gang. Not to say he's a criminal. It seems like he's not. But, you know, I don't know his background, but I just, you know, based of what he was telling you, he seemed like an honest guy in at least what he was trying to get across to you there. But now, so one of the major aspects of the current unrest, right, is that they just completely all at once abolish the gasoline subsidy, which includes. the price of fuel X percent fill me in here overnight, which is shut down the entire economy. Exactly. It's, you know, the U.S. has been trying to get rid of these fuel subsidies in Haiti for

several years. And they've done it a few times where they remove these subsidies, but then there are these mass protests and the government is basically forced to reinstate them because, you know, Haiti is the straight up most exploited country, definitely in the Western hemisphere, if not the world. And, you know, usually people say it's the most impoverished, but it's not that there's no wealth there. It's just that it's all hoarded by, you know, a couple of, a handful of people, a tiny, tiny percentage of the population, most of whom don't even, you know, live there. So, um, so in that context, uh, just in, what was it, In September of this year, the U.S. finally gets Ariel Henri, this, this, you know, de facto

unelected prime minister to remove these fuel subsidies and overnight the price of fuel, you know, very similar to here in the U.S., skyrocket. It's doubles, triples, some places, it's, you know, far more. And these people who are just in absolute poverty can't do anything. You know, they can't go, they can't get to the informal markets where they sell little things to survive. They can't send their kid to school. They can't do anything. So they go in protest.

And in the middle of that, this armed group, it's called the revolutionary forces of the G9 family and allies, which is basically, it's a federation of, like, neighborhood self-defense groups led by Jimmy Barbecue Cheriseet says, look, what we're going to do is go in blockade. They put a barricade on the main fuel terminal in the Port of Prince, in the capital of Haiti. And they said, look, if this fuel terminal is only for the ultra, ultra wealthy, and none of us, you know, 95% of the population can't use it, then this is not a fuel terminal for the country. So no one should have this. So they blockade it. And it immediately, you know, then the whole kind of mainstream media in the U.S. and the government and all the oligarchs in Haiti, say, oh, we got to take this guy out.

He's the worst. He's, you know, he's a monster. And they've been, you know, planning this for a while. So, um, the U.S. kind of is trying to figure out how can we get our guys in to go assassinate this guy, overcome this barricade, this blockade on the fuel terminal without, you know, looking like we're going to, you know, we're invading and, and supporting this unelected dictator. And so what they, so they've been trying.

to have like the UN do it. You know, they went to the UN Security Council with two resolutions. One of them was for sanctions on Chirizier, which the U.S. already had Magnitsky sanctions on him over a totally fabricated massacre called the La Saline massacre, which we investigate in our documentary and I've also written about. So they get sanctions, international sanctions on him. And then the U.S. and Mexico actually authored a U.N. resolution calling for the U.N. Security Council to deputize a member state to carry out a military intervention or invasion, more accurately put. And that ran into opposition from Russia and China and kind of sputtered out.

And so now the U.S. is like, okay, we got to figure out how are we going to get this military invasion? So that's why they're like, we got to go with this opposition group, the Montana Accord. And so as they're, you know, kind of shifting towards the Montana Accord, beginning this whole regime change, um, the U.S. and Canada, um, sent armored vehicles to the Haitian national police, which are a very anemic force. And, uh, that allowed the Haitian national police to overcome that barricade. So, um, I think on November 7th, about a month ago, the, uh, barricade was overcome and that fuel terminal, which is one of three in Porta Prince started, uh, flowing again. So that

barricade was overcome, and now it's, you know, back to the, there's no fuel subsidies so people can't afford anything, but the protests have died down. And what's especially revealing is that even after the barricade was overthrown and, you know, a bunch of people got killed in fighting in these really dense, densely packed slums, then the State Department, Ned Price, the State Department spokesperson in a hearing says, yeah, it's good that barricade is overcome, but that's not enough. You know, we still want a military invasion. You know, we still want, uh, you know, what they, you know, we want to stabilize and, uh, we want to, we want to, uh, reinstate security. You know, they use euphemisms. So the U.S. is still intent on carrying out this, uh, invasion is just

trying to figure out how they're going to do it. Yeah. All right. So what is it the Americans want? You say, uh, Haiti has these rich natural resources, like what? Um, there are, um, um, there are, I believe oil, natural, it's either oil or natural gas deposits, big, big deposits. There is, I believe, eridium deposits, which is, you know, very important for, I think, nuclear energy. So there's also bauxite, which is big for, you know, the whole green energy transformation that the U.S. is pushing. And that, so those are the resources that are, that are there.

Aside from the huge amounts of the labor forces that are just so hyper exploited, I mean, for decades, Haiti has really been the picture of, you know, neoliberalism of, you know, the factories that, you know, used to be in the United States, sent abroad, you know, of course, to Mexico and then eventually to China, et cetera, et cetera. Haiti was a place where, you know, where they made baseballs and they made, you know, all kinds of products. And they still do to this day, electronics. And so that's like right, you know, just a couple hundred miles from Florida. That's so much closer than China. And, of course, in the era of great power competition, where there's the bifurcation of the global economy, the U.S. is very much, you know, wants to maintain its grip on Haiti for that reason. for its labor forces, too. Hang on just one second.

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something like that? Yeah, exactly, exactly. And it's important because, you know, depending on, you know, how much a currency is worth in any given place or whatever, but there's a libertarian argument of a good one that minimum wages outlaw labor on the low end. And and prevent people from being able to work at all and make people poor and are counterproductive, this kind of thing. But that's not what Hillary Clinton thinks. She just doesn't want to have to pay these people. And we're talking about the barest of wages, whatever you measure is probably in cents or in, you know, double-digit dollars a week, this kind of thing. So, yeah, we're talking about, well, almost like textbook leftist definitions of capital.

exploitation in a big business combined with big government in the U.S. empire, screwing around with other people's countries. And think about how cynical you got to be, I mean, not just to exploit resources, but to say, we've got to keep these poor people even poorer and off balance so that there's, to prevent any upward pressure on their absolute minimal wages, which is why we're there in the first place. That's mean as hell. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's unbelievable. Look, going into, check out the piece I did for redacted. I don't know if, you know, if your followers know the show redacted on YouTube, on Rumble. It's, it's, you know, they, they commissioned my reporting. I went down there, like, a little more in a month ago. And we went into the slum

Cita Solet, which, you know, was created in the 70s by, they just took farmers from the countryside. And by the way, I should say here, Dan, before I get lynched by all the libertarians, my solution is abolish the state not capitalism but anyway go ahead okay all right well so you so like the the conditions in this slum seat to so lay are like worse than anything i could have imagined you can't the roads are inaccessible because it's flooded with sewage all of the sewage that comes down the hill from the rest of port of prince goes down these canals that are all clogged up with garbage and plastic and the state the government the NGOs don't do anything to dredge these canals. And so sewage literally just fills up. And so you have half a million people

living in a lake of sewage and then you get cholera, you get dysentery, you get malaria, all the like, you know, predictable diseases that are easy, that just don't exist in the United States. But that's like the situation that the ultra wealthy that are tied to the U.S. keep Haiti in. And yeah, of course, you know, they don't want to, they don't want to give people a fair wage, you know, whatever your ideological perspective is, it's just undeniable that these people live in the worst conditions and that the U.S. has actively prevented them from getting a fair wage. Well, the U.S. tied oligarchs just make huge amounts of money.

They live in the U.S. in France, in Canada, and Haiti is just a piggy bank. They don't actually care about the country at all. It's really bad. And listen, I want people to go look at it. If you can, everybody. It's a special report. Threat of U.S. invasion of Haiti and the West's puppet government redacted news on YouTube and go and watch Dan Cohen in the worst ghetto.

Like if you think of the Save the Children commercials about the poor Palestinians and the refugee camps in Syria or whatever, it's like that. It's like the worst ghetto in the world, as he says, the sewage everywhere and all of this, and absolutely desperate people. and those with the capital and or the authority not doing a damn thing. And I think, as you've established, deliberately so. You know, there's another weakness of where libertarians can be kind of blinded to the evils of the neoliberals, you know, who pervert our ideology and implemented in this evil imperial fashion. And people say, well, listen, you know, sweatshops are bad, but it's better than child prostitution. are these kids like digging in a garbage dump to survive. So you got to start somewhere and that kind of thing.

And that is fine as long as we're just talking about theory and we're talking about, yeah, mankind, all of us are coming up from nature right here, you know. We've got to start somewhere. But you always have to ask, what did Uncle Sam do to keep that country so poor and those people so desperate that these are the choices they're making? America is not the good guy around here. And, you know, you look at not just the invasions, but take, like, for example, the coup d'etat in, what, 75 or whatever in Indonesia. They play Suharno with Sukarno, Sukarno, whatever. And he just immediately goes to war, starts destroying his own population and all of this stuff.

And now you're going, hey, they're better off in a sweatshop than a garbage dump. It's like, yeah, but that's all Gerald Ford's fault. And you have to start with that, you know? Right. Yeah. I mean, maybe the, you know, I think an important thing to understand about why Haiti is not only important, you know, in itself, but it's kind of the U.S. sees it as a model for the world in a way because in 2019, the Trump administration passed, I mean, this is really the deep state, you know, that this isn't just Trump. It's something called the Global Fragility Act. And this is all in the, in the era, in the context of great power competition and the, you know, 20 was it 2017 national security national defense authorization act national security strategy and the the global fragility act is all about shoring up u.s. control and you know not seating it

to russia or china in the era of like you know great power competition and they've the the the u.s has a list and this is public of several countries that it wants to apply this global Fragility Act, which basically just means, you know, Obama-style covert operations, and Haiti is the very first one. So Haiti is like kind of, you know, at risk of being lost from U.S. control. And so they're like, all right, we're going to try it in Haiti. And then we also, they also want to try it in Libya. Of course, we all know what happened with a NATO-led regime change in Libya.

And then a handful of other African countries. And then Papua New Guinea is the other country. So Haiti is the first bite of the apple. And so, you know, what happens in Haiti is really going to determine how U.S. Empire functions in a lot of kind of the neo colonies and, you know, smaller countries that it controls around the world. That's another reason it's really important to, you know, pay attention to what's going on. And, you know, honestly, the anti-imperialist movement or whatever you could call you, whatever you want to call it, I think has really not been following Haiti that well. And that's one of the reasons I've been following it so closely. So, so, you know, props to you, Scott, for, for having, you know, having me on and carrying about this issue.

Yeah. You know, listen, Justin Romano was great on it, but he's dead and gone. And, you know, Daniel Harrison, as I said, he's not libertarian. He's a conservative. He wrote a great thing about it for the Quincy Institute. But it's, you know what? It's just complicated and got to learn all new names and all these things. It's a whole project.

And it can be very difficult. And that's my cheat sheet is this great radio show. get to interview all you guys who are experts and all the stuff and pick up the most important points from this wide variety of experts. But one thing to end up here, and we almost got to go, but it's so important to note that it was the United Nations baby blue helmets back in what the W. Bush years that introduced this cholera epidemic into Haiti that persist to this day. And what that doesn't mean people are sick, that means babies dying of diarrhea and vomiting.

That's what it means. Just like what Bill Clinton and H.W. Bush did to Iraq with the sanctions and the bombing of their water supplies and all that, Colin Powell. The same thing that Obama, Trump, and Biden have been helping the Saudis, UAE, and al-Qaeda do to the people of Yemen. This is what the baby blue helmets did in Haiti in the name of saving them. And you're talking, what, tens of thousands of deaths. I just saw a thing about this the other day where the, I'm sorry, it wasn't Doctors Without Borders, but it was some. doctor NGO lady talking about the absolute levels of grief created here. And here we are talking about almost 15, 20 years later, something like that. It's still going on there, huh? Yeah, yeah. I went to a Doctors Without Borders Clinic in Incite Solet that's only accessible by going on a motorcycle

through knee-deep sewage water. And yep, there's still cholera and it's a totally predictable result of all that sewage water that they're living in. That's how you get caught. That's how you get cholera it's not like a mystery but you know the international community in the u.s doesn't want to get rid of that garbage or clean up that neighborhood or provide anything they just want those people to be basically like slaves in the sweatshops so and then and then when the you know when there's a cholera they can say oh there's a cholera outbreak and it's because of that bad guy jimmie barbecues shrizzier so we have to send the troops in to stop him that's it that's incredible man yeah um part for the course though and look i mean you and i disagree on

some things politically right uh i'm a libertarian and you're a left is and i'm not i'm not sure i'm not sure anymore but all right well well okay that's a different conversation but i'll just say this it like um just all other things being equal and i don't get to live in an kapistan here um it seems like some corporation or some government could come in there and spent a measly few million dollars to pave those roads, put concrete in those ditches, and, you know, make this place barely livable for these people at least. And this is, and they just have absolutely no capital whatsoever themselves to do it. These are the most desperately poor people in the world, pretty close. And, and yet, you know, never even mind on the other side of the border there

in the Dominican Republic, but just as you show in your, in your footage here, there's a ton of wealth inside Haiti. And a lot of it expropriated right away, as you document as well. But, you know, we're spending $100 billion on Ukraine. You just spend $1 billion on saving these people from cholera and you could probably do it. You know, come on. Exactly. And you know what? After the 2010 earthquake, the international community, the so-called international community, like raised something like $13 billion, to to help Haiti rebuild, and you know how much of it went to actual Haitians? Like 1%. It was a giant scam. So it's like even when they say, oh, we're going to, we're going to help them.

We're going to do something good. They still screw them. It's just the most cynical, dirty stuff. And, you know, that's just our system. By the way, I'm going to email you and we're going to talk a little bit about libertarianism. All right. I'm game. I mean, I'm, yeah, no, I'm, I'm happy to talk. I'm, you know, I'm open-minded. That's how I live, man. Great. Well, listen, man, I got the greatest respect for your work, Dan. Appreciate you so much. Thank you. No, absolutely. It's mutual, Scott. Thanks a lot. All right, you guys. That is Dan Cohen. He's at Redacted. Check him out on YouTube. Special Report. Threat of U.S. invasion of Haiti and the West's puppet government.

He goes, he talks to the guy. Shurizier, they say you're the devil. Tell me your story. And he tells him his story and it's great and you've got to look at it. The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.