Justice scorned in Haiti

 When the Bush administration pushed for the ouster of Haiti's democratically elected president earlier this year, one of its main complaints was his reliance on armed political gangs to sustain his rule. Now the new government that Washington helped install in Jean-Bertrand Aristide's place has permitted a scandalous judicial exoneration of one of Haiti's most notorious political gangsters, Louis-Jodel Chamblain. Chamblain just happens to have been a leading force in the February rebellion that helped force Aristide from office. Chamblain's violent history goes back more than a decade. Under the military government of the early 1990s, he was one of the leaders of a death squad that is alleged to have murdered thousands of people. [more ]