U.S. Army counter-intelligence officer Captain Lawrence Rockwood attempted to blow the whistle on the military for criminal negligence during 1994-95’s support mission in Haiti. He claimed that US forces not only turning a blind eye toward gross human rights violations (including torture and murder), but were even actively supporting them. Cpt. Lockwood was court-martialed and eventually kicked out of the service, minus 2/3 of his pay, for his trouble. He said, on the day of his sentencing, “More important than my career, I am concerned that the US Army is attempting to marginalize the Nuremberg principles in the most subtle and quiet manner possible. Indeed, during the seven-day trial, the government side insisted that personal and command responsibility for human rights violations is irrelevant for American military personnel.”

 

After Lockwood, other soldiers came forward with similar accounts. One wrote under the pseudonym Michael Valentine, and was first published in university and alternative newspapers in the mid-1990’s. His first-hand account, entitled The Belly of the Beast, is chock full of fascinating details and disturbing anecdotes about U.S. complicity in the abuse of the Haitian people. He includes the first iteration I’ve been able to find of the story that crazy Pat Robertson promoted after the Haitian earthquake–that Haitian leaders had made a deal with Satan to help them overthrow their French slave masters in the 19th century, and were now paying the piper for that decision. Seems there’s a CIA angle to the story; find the rest of the story here:

 

Belly of the Beast

by Michael Valentine

In August of ‘94, just one month before the decision was announced to occupy Haiti, we were instructed to attend an intelligence briefing on Haiti that had been coordinated through the 3rd Special Forces Group staff.

 

This briefing would be the one and only predeployment intelligence briefing we were to receive. For this presentation, the staff had conscientiously avoided using any of the former Haitian nationals that worked and lived in Fayetteville and Fort Bragg. These included a professor of physics at Fayetteville State University, his wife, a Creole instructor at the Special Forces school, and various Haitian-American soldiers on active duty in Fort Bragg.

 

To ensure that we had a reliable source for this one and only predeployment brief, our intelligence gurus selected an expatriate, white, American, fundamentalist Protestant preacher. This gentleman had occupied himself for the last 11 years, in a small community outside of Cap Haïtien, salvaging the heathen souls of some 300 local congregants. He was an emaciated, blepharitic man, tall and thin, in a black suit, reeking of Calvinist austerity and burning with years of besieged righteousness.

 

He began his account with a personal introduction and a brief history of his mission. Then came a brief historical account of the nation of Haiti. The account was perfectly informative as long as it confined itself to events, personalities and dates. What followed his synopsis, however, was a bizarre narrative. He flatly declared that the successful Haitian revolution against the French Army was inaugurated with a bargain. Jean Jacques Dessalines, the Haitian leader of the revolution, according to this preacher, had struck a deal with the devil. With complete seriousness, our intrepid young missionary, explained that Satan himself, disguised as a voodoo deity, contracted with Dessalines to assure him a military victory. In exchange for the victory, Satan was to be given control of the new nation for a period of 200 years.

 

I’m not sure what surprised me the most at that briefing. The outlandish characterization of the first independent black nation in the Western Hemisphere? The fact that an Intelligence Officer on the Group staff had coordinated for his presence? Or the spellbound attention being paid this crackpot by hundreds of allegedly rational grown men who were in the room listening?

 

The problem was this. Most of the Special Forces soldiers there had no previous interest in Haiti. Most of them harbored cultural and racial preconceptions of Haiti. All had been exposed to the drumbeat of skewed media coverage of Haiti. Many were fans of both the CIA and Jesse Helms, both of whom were staging a concerted venture to shape foreign policy on behalf of the Cedras regime, by fabricating rumors about Aristide. Almost all of them were thoroughly ignorant of both the history of Haiti and the dynamics of the current crisis…

 

The takeaway here is that the Pat Robertson tale was probably originated by, and certainly disseminated by, CIA and other US military intelligence as part of an American policy-influence campaign. Over a decade later, the religious right uses the story again to the same desired end.