Haiti: The Great U.S. War Machine

He’d have to begin by declaring our whole Haiti military deployment, including the UN armed force, was 100% humanitarian. It won’t make it true.

Meh. Besides a few token children like this….the Haitians have been largely left to fend for themselves. All those sophisticated rescue teams have concentrated around the “nice” neighborhoods where expats, mostly missionaries, have their hotels, NGO compounds, and homes. In many barrios not a single foreigner has been seen since the quake. Dozens of rescue teams are sitting around the airport waiting for a security detail, and others run off and leave victims behind when darkness starts to fall.
But the bar of the Hotel Montana, that’s getting excavated really well.
This is what NOBODY is talking about. And it makes me furious.

Tinwoman, I want to see pictures of what you’re talking about. I completely believe it. Do you have a link to any pictures?

That would be great.. I think Obama must think of that..

Tinwoman:
This: http://michaelkeizer.com/humourless/2010/logistics-questions-around-the-haiti-earthquake/ is an interesting article on the issue you mention, sort of. Basically on the difficulties of organizing relief on this scale, and the need to get things out in the right order in order to be effective. Sending a team of doctors out, if you don’t have a place for them to work, supplies for them to work with, and a way for them to get there, doesn’t do much good.
Keeping the doctors back while the engineers set up field hospitals makes sense – the doctors don’t get in the way of the engineers, so the setup is faster, and when they head out, they are rested and energetic, ready to get to work, with the things at hand needed to do their work. A doctor without supplies is pretty useless.

TOO right, tinwoman. it makes a mockery of triage, as well, when we’re rescuing 70 people (whatever their nationality) while thousands are thirsty and hungry…

BRILLIANT link. Thanks, Ursula!

Nina, almost one hundred elderly, otherwise unharmed residents of a flattened nursing home are dying on the street of dehydration less than ONE MILE from the airport. The nursing home workers have sent messages saying please help us, the streets are quiet and you can come get us. No response. The people are poor; it’s not a “nice” neighborhood. Insisting that you need a huge security detail to rescue some poor people only a few hundred yards away is an excuse. This is genocide by neglect, and it makes me furious.
All the pictures your twisted little heart could desire are at the AOL homepage. Hundreds of newspeople have been reporting that the aid is concentrated in the expat neighborhoods and is not getting out into the barrios. Pay attention, in addtion to all the “heartwarming rescues”, the real information is out there.

I went to the AOL homepage (aol.com) and didn’t find any pictures of Haiti. The ones you’re remembering must have been replaced with other news. Can you please provide specific links?

Thank you so much for posting this link, Ursula. I’ve posted a link to my FB page.

The AP story on the nursing home as reported by WaPo: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/18/AR2010011803319.html

tinwoman, the logistics article points out the fact that rescue workers have a lot of prep that needs to be done for them before they are allowed in country. The fact that these elderly were so long in getting help makes them no different from the rest of the city because all the aid workers were told to wait for orders to go in, which would not happen until there was a certain amount of set-up and security and organization on the ground. This is not only for the protection of the aid workers, who need roads and a base of operations, and sterile and/or fully evacuated environments in which to do their work, but also because an unprotected flood of aid workers would quickly be overwhelmed by crowds of people seeking help, causing more injury to everyone.
While the first priority of individual nations is taking care of citizens, there are also international aid groups who are subject no such prioritizing and yet were held back because of the logistics issue. It’s not to do with helping “nice” neighborhoods first, because I doubt that a bunch of foreigners going into a flattened Port-au-Prince would be able to tell anyway.