It's cold. I made an ass of myself drunk, which was both amusing and stupid. Stumbled home through Chinatown to the Global Village Backpackers at 2AM.

I have had the pleasuer to meet Karis, hang out with her and her friends... very cool people. One of them, named Matt, is a brilliant chef... beyond that, he is an artist of the collonary.

And did I mention - it's bloody cold.

Up for today: meeting Lan Anh, Nick and for the second time Mike and Jen. Also, going to a protest against the Occupation of Iraq...

And the story of how I got here? I'd rather not recall it... needless to say, it took me almost 22 hours to get here through all of my travels and trials.

I hate poems about dark and dreary imagry
Like we could not feel the despair
When we saw the tear dropped stains on the paper.
I hate black clouds and self-centered depression
As if the reflection of a frown upon the page was not enough.
Why write in such dreary terms when sadness is a compliment to that of contentment and hapiness. Fuck your blue skies and your black horizons.
You want me to feel your anguish,
As if I did not have my own.

(This article is to be published tomorrow in the Berkeley Political Review, the Daily Californian and the San Francisco cronicle. I am working on a more indepth report for Berkeley's international affairs journal, Z-magazine and Trent University.)
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By Michael Newton-McLaughlin

“He said he was forced out, that the coup was completed,” Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) said of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Congresswoman Waters and TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson both received secret phone calls from Aristide early morning March 1. The source of the phone calls was from a secluded ‘Palace of the Renaissance’ in the Central Republic of Africa. The phone, Waters reports, was smuggled to him.

The US mainstream media, inaccurately, claims that Aristide has resigned and fled the county. “He did not resign. He was kidnapped and all of the circumstances seem to support his assertion. Had he resigned, we wouldn't need blacked out windows and blocked communications and military taking him away at gunpoint,” says Robinson who spoke with Mr. Aristide and his wife. Robinson further claims that the coup d’etat is not unlike the one that America supported to get Aristide out in 1991.

As the American, Canadian and French militaries beset Haiti to protest their own interests and ostensibly help restore order; the White House gave an adamant denial of the coup. Colin Powell said at a joint US-EU press conference that such allegations of a coup were "absolutely baseless, absurd". If the claim is absurd, one must wonder why it is that a sovereign of a country has to make secret phone calls and is not being allowed to speak publicly or officially resign, if that is his intention.

The history of Haiti does not make for a good bedtime story. It remains the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, and has not been helped by over a hundred years of oppression from domestic and exogenous players- the US included. In the 1950s, with firm US support, the Jean-Claude Duvalier dictatorship took over, a Z-Net article stated. Aristide has been an ardent critic of US foreign and economic policies, even of those he himself employed on the country as a stipend to his return to power in 1994.

Many of the men who lead the armed insurrection of Haiti are well known to veteran Haiti observers and, for that matter, the US intelligence agencies that worked closely with the paramilitary death squads which terrorized Haiti in the early 1990s. People like Louis Jodel Chamblain, the former number 2 man in Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH), Guy Philippe, a former police chief who was trained by US Special forces in Ecuador and Jean Tatun, another leader of FRAPH. The US State Department says that it will not allow any of these people to take control of the country – though with events Monday, one wonders what is going to happen in the next few weeks in Haiti. Washington will most likely try to spin this coup – but it is going to be very difficult. Indeed, the last words that Aristide spoke to Robinson were: “tell the world it's a coup, it's a coup, it's a coup.”