The Disaster
Within The Disaster: Its Time To
Investigate the Aid Fiasco Haiti remains a death trap, with an aid program that has sat by and watched thousands die without relief. The International Red Cross describes the situation there as a catastrophe while the American Red Cross reports raising more than $100 million dollars thanks to texting technologies and backing from the White House. Raising money is their specialty; delivering aid is not. The New
York Times noted: The contributions come despite
well-publicized controversies over the Red Crosss
performance and financial accountability after other
major disasters.
These are the people we are trusting with our money! Meanwhile, Haitians are trying to get out of the apocalypse in Port au Prince while the US Navy warns that anyone trying to flee this hellhole will be caught and returned. Thanks a lot! This is
reminiscent of the early 90s when anti-communist
Cuban boat people were welcomed in I recall
covering a rally at the statue of Another
memory comes to mind as we hear heart-warming tales of
Americans welcoming Haitian orphans. The Governor
of Pennsylvania flew to Many
Americans may not know that economically stressed Haitian
mothers give up their children because they have no way
of supporting them thanks to the dreadful poverty that
has been allowed to fester for decades. Even worse, some
of these children are forced to become slaves or
restevics for the Haitian elite. Sexual abuse and
exploitation is common. To my knowledge there were few
earlier rescues of these exploited children
by well-funded But the flashback that has me sleepless is an earlier memory that dates to the end of the Vietnam War when a US government backed OPERATION BAYBLIFT sought to make Americans feel like saviors after our military and politicians had devastated that country with B-52s, napalm and Agent Orange. Then as now, cuddly sympathetic orphans were used to touch our hearts as orphanages were emptied even though in that case many families left their children with orphanages run by Catholic Sisters for protection, on the clear understanding they would retrieve them when the war ended. Many were, in fact, not orphans. It
didnt matter. Plans were rushed to send a
huge C5A to Tragically,
its huge cargo door blew off in flight, and the plane
crashed. Half of the children died and the other half, we
later learned, were brain damaged by the explosive
decompression. So much for our desire to show the world
how compassionate we could be. Later it would turn
out that some of these kids were given to families that
were not vetted, including a sexual predator. Some
Vietnamese parents later fled to the I know about this in detail because I produced a story on it for ABCs 20/20. It won a big award but only one newspaper was interested in the more detailed report I did on a preventable tragedy involving corporate greed by the manufacture and government negligence/propaganda that many would prefer to forget. Many
Americans are not compassionate at all, and not just Rush
Limbaugh. Bill OReilly polled his viewers on
whether they would donate to How much
money supported the suffering children of Haiti BEFORE
this recent disaster. How many Americans even know the
history of our yeara of beneficent
military interventions into How many knew that many kids were surviving by eating mud pies? Even as TV correspondent after correspondent reports on crippling aid shortages, the overall frame of the coverage remains upbeat. There will be a celebrity telethon on Friday night but no one seems to be investigating how this all went so badly and who is responsible. Who will get the reconstruction contracts? My guess: big American companies. How much are the executives for relief agencies paying themselves? There
has been criminal negligence here, not just mistakes. It
is worse than bottlenecks. Who will blow the
whistle? Who will condemn it? Already this debacle
is being compared to the great job President
Bush did after Katrina devastated It is
time to speak up and speak out about a charade that
promised so much and delivered so little, at all the
preventable deaths and suffering caused by a massive
screw-up. Could it have been deliberate? Our good
intentions are now being buried in a mass grave in
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