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Like most Americans, I find that I know very little about Haiti. 

I have read C.L.R. James’ seminal book, The Black Jacobins, which traces the country from its original Carib inhabitants, then through the French-sponsored slave trade, and finally to the uprising of its African inhabitants under Toussaint L’Ouverture and the military defeat of the armies led by Napoleon’s brother-in-law by an army composed of former captive Africans. 

I know a little about the brutality of the regimes of the Duvaliers, Papa and Baby Doc, which was swept away in the popular, democratic revolt that led to the first administration of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. 

I once saw the now-and-then former President Arisitde speak at a Berkeley church, in the early ‘90s, in the period of his last exile. I remember him them as a quiet but riveting mystic, with the kind of intensity that one imagines flowed from the great religious-political leaders of history. By great I do not necessarily mean good. I do not know, one way or the other. Like most Americans, I must confess that I did little to follow the policies of his administration while he governed Haiti. I know that he was the democratically elected president of that nation, and little more. 

And I have watched and read as ou r national government and national media, in the course of a day or two, have managed to take this blank slate of Haiti and Aristide and write upon it in such a way that we have come to accept—quite willingly, and before our eyes—our country’s participati on in, if not active orchestration of, the overthrow of a democratically elected government several hundred miles from our border. 

Haiti first got the attention of most of us sometime last week when, with armed rebels suddenly pouring across half the cou ntry like water through a sieve, Secretary of State Colin Powell came on television and suggested that Aristide should resign. Until then, I think, most Americans believed that this was no more than a minor revolt. 

On Monday morning we awoke to find that the Aristide regime was no more. 

“He made the decision to give up power on Saturday evening,” Christopher Marquis wrote in the New York Times, “hours after the White House in a statement questioned his fitness to rule.” Haiti’s crisis, the Bush administ ration wrote in a statement, “is largely of Mr. Aristide’s making.” 

But there was a curiousness to the write-up’s in both the Times and the Washington Post of those last hours of the Aristide government. Lydia Polgreen and Tim Weiner of the Times report ed March 1 that Aristide had “resigned” and “fled” the country, and both the Times and Post articles of that day paraphrased the questions the Haitian President was supposed to have asked in order to facilitate his exile. But even though both papers exten sively quoted individuals who spoke with Aristide in those hours, not a single one quoted Aristide as simply saying, “I wish to resign.” In fact, there were no direct quotations from Aristide at all. 

And the choice of words used by Times and Post reporters to describe those conversations—at second hand—were also interesting. Aristide “meekly” asked American ambassador if his resignation might help, Mr. Marquis wrote. The Times reported those questions as “poignant,” the Post as “plaintive.” Peter Slevin and Mike Allen of the Post wrote that Aristide “ran out of bluster,” with Marquis of the Times gave an editorial opinion that the Haitian President was “signaling [his] disconnection from the violence engulfing his country.” 

Do you think that these “embe dded” characterizations had no bearing on Americans’ rapidly-forming opinion about Aristide? 

Read them again, and think about the image they conjure. A pitiful little man, weak and terrified, unable to understand this sudden turn of events in his fortune, turns, at the very end, for help from the benevolent older brother—the U.S.—for whom he has so long held such scorn. How sad. 

This is all the more important when you come to realize that misters Marquis and Slevin and Allen neither heard these Aristide conversations themselves, nor spoke with anyone from Aristide’s side who might have characterized them in another way. 

Two members of Congress—Maxine Waters and Charles Rangel—as well as the respected Africa expert Randall Robinson did speak by telephon e with Aristide following the president’s ouster. Aristide, they reported, had described a completely different scenario of his departure from Haiti. He denied that he had resigned. Instead, Aristide said that armed U.S. Marines had come to the presidenti al palace, took him and his immediate family at gunpoint to the airport without allowing him to telephone anyone outside the country to report what was happening, and forced him on a U.S. airplane and into exile. 

“That’s nonsense,” Bush spokesperson Scot t McClellan was quoted by the Times. McClellan called that a “conspiracy theory.” 

But if the Secretary of State called for Aristide to leave Haiti—which we know Powell did, because we watched him say it on television—and if U.S. Marines forcibly escorted Aristide out of Haiti within a matter of days, that would not be a conspiracy theory. It would be an order. 

And that leaves aside that we are speaking about characterizations coming from the Bush administration which, one might delicately say, has not been entirely forthcoming to the public in recent months in matters of international activity. 

Meanwhile, on the day after Aristide’s ouster—however he went—the Times was not finished with him. In describing Aristide’s presidency, Tim Weiner of the Times wrote “Aristide rose from his priesthood in Haiti’s slums to his presidency by preaching democracy. But once in power, he dashed the hopes of many who had hailed him as a champion of the oppressed… In the end, the disillusioned say, he could not practice what he had preached.” 

It would be nice if Mr. Weiner had followed this up with some opinion directly from those Haitian oppressed. Instead, he quotes only U.S. sources. “As a politician, [Aristide] reverted to the same authoritarianism he had condemned for so long,” Mr. Weiner quotes former U.S. diplomat Robert E. White as saying. “I don’t believe Aristide had a democratic bone in his body.” 

Thus do we justify the stain on our own hands. Had anyone in the Bush administration made such an observation, I might have replied that this would be like rice calling cotton white.