Occupation in Humanitarian Clothing | CommonDreams.org

by Jesse Hagopian

Everything you need to know about the U.S. aid effort to assist Haiti in the wake of the catastrophic earthquake can be summed up by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's touchdown in Port-Au-Prince last Saturday: they shut down the airport for three hours surrounding her arrival for "security" reasons, which meant that no aid flights could come in during those critical hours.

If there was one day when the Haitian people needed aid to flow all day long, last Saturday was it because the people trapped under the rubble on Tuesday evening couldn't survive beyond that without water.

Defenders of Clinton will say that her disimpassioned, monotone, photo-op speech was needed in Haiti to draw attention to the plight of the Haitians. But no one north of hell can defend her next move: according to airport personnel that I spoke to during my recent evacuation from Haiti, she paralyzed the airport later that same day to have a new outfit flown in from the Dominican Republic.




Occupation in Humanitarian Clothing | CommonDreams.org