DONALD RUMSFELD: The idea that someone was abducted is just totally inconsistent with everything I heard or saw or am aware of. So I think that, that—I do not believe he is saying what you say—are saying he is saying.

COLIN POWELL: He was not kidnapped. We did not force him onto the airplane. He went onto the airplane willingly. And that’s the truth.

JEAN-BERTRAND ARISTIDE: I will not go into details, maybe next time. But as I said, they used force. When you have militaries coming from abroad, surrounding your house, taking control of the airport, surrounding the national palace, being in the streets, and taking you from your house to put you in a plane where you have to spend twenty hours without knowing where they were going to go with you, without talking about details, which I already did somehow on other occasions, it was using force to take an elected president out of his country.

AMY GOODMAN: And was that US military that took you out?

JEAN-BERTRAND ARISTIDE: There were US military, and I suspect it could be also completed with the presence of other militaries from other countries.

AMY GOODMAN: When they came to your house, in the early morning of February 29th, was it US military that came?

JEAN-BERTRAND ARISTIDE: There were diplomats. There were US military. There were US people.

AMY GOODMAN: The Bush administration said that when you—after you got on the plane, when you were leaving, you spoke with CARICOM leaders. Is this true?

JEAN-BERTRAND ARISTIDE: They lied. I never had any opportunity from February 28 at night, when they started, to the minute I arrived in car, I never had any conversation with anyone from CARICOM within that frame of time.

AMY GOODMAN: How many US military were on the plane with you?

JEAN-BERTRAND ARISTIDE: I cannot know how many were there, but I know it’s the plane with fifty-five seats. Among them we had nineteen American agents […] The rest, they were American militaries.

AMY GOODMAN: Were they dressed in military uniform?

JEAN-BERTRAND ARISTIDE: They were not only dressed in—with their uniform, it was like if they were going to war. For the first period of time on the ground, when we went to the plane, after the plane took off, that’s the way they were. Then they changed, moving from the uniform to other kind of clothes.

RANDALL ROBINSON: Well, Haiti was the largest piece of France’s global empire. It was its great profit center, that slave colony with 465,000 enslaved Africans working there, many of whom had been soldiers in African armies before they were brought to Haiti. And in August of 1789—or 1791, rather, 40,000 of those slaves revolted and started a war that lasted twelve-and-a-half years under the leadership of an ex-slave and a military genius named Toussaint L’Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines. And this army of ex-slaves defeated two French armies, first the French army before the completion of their revolution and then another army dispatched by Napoleon under the leadership of his brother-in-law, and then the armies of England and Spain. 150,000 blacks died in that twelve-and-a-half-year war. And in January of 19—1804, rather, they declared Haiti the first free republic in the Americas, because the United States was then a country that held slaves.

During the revolution, Thomas Jefferson said he would like to reduce Toussaint to starvation. George Washington lamented and vilified that revolution. The US imposed an embargo, recognized a new French government, but did not recognize the new Haitian free government and imposed a comprehensive economic embargo on Haiti until the Emancipation Proclamation. In fact, France imposed reparations on Haiti in 1825, and the interest that Haiti had to pay in loans that were American and French loans to service this debt to France, absorbed virtually 80% of Haiti’s available budget 111 years after the completion of their revolution until 1915. It was only in 1947 that Haiti was able to pay off its debt.

AMY GOODMAN: The debt that was incurred as a result of France not having access to the enslaved people of Haiti.

RANDALL ROBINSON: The Haitians had to pay France for no longer having the privilege of owning Haitian slaves. That revolution provoked the end of slavery in the Americas. And so, that’s why it is so important that all African people, people generally in the Americas, because Haiti funded and fought in South American revolutions. That’s why Haiti is so honored in places like Venezuela by people like Simon Bolivar. Haiti was central to all of this. And we’re in Haiti’s debt. But it is for that—

AMY GOODMAN: Simon Bolivar came to Haiti.

RANDALL ROBINSON: Haiti, and was given arms and was given men, was given a printing press, because the Haitians believed that anybody who was enslaved anywhere had a home and a refuge in Haiti. Anybody seeking freedom had a sympathetic ear in Haiti. But because of that, the United States and France and the other Western governments, even the Vatican, made them pay for so terribly long. It’s as if the anger of it never abated. I mean, you can hear Frederick Douglass talking about it in the late 1800s, about this thing in the American craw.

AMY GOODMAN: The US government didn’t recognize Haiti for decades, the Congress, going back to Thomas Jefferson, afraid that the slave uprising would inspire US slaves.

RANDALL ROBINSON: Would inspire US slaves to revolt against him in Virginia, and George Washington, and on and on and on. And so, they opposed everything that was being done in Haiti that won their freedom.

AMY GOODMAN: The US government invaded Haiti in 1915 under Wilson.

RANDALL ROBINSON: Woodrow Wilson invaded Haiti in 1915. And when a Haitian, Peralte, Charlemagne Peralte, organized the Cacos soldiers, these farmers, to fight against this American occupation, the Americans killed him and nailed him to a cross, crucifixion-style, and stood him up, his corpse, in a public place in Haiti to demonstrate to Haitians what would be the price of any defense against the American invasion. The US has played a terrible role in Haiti.

AMY GOODMAN: So even as the US and France were at loggerheads after the US invasion of Iraq, because France opposed the invasion—that was 2003—in 2004, they were working together—

RANDALL ROBINSON: Working very much together.

AMY GOODMAN:—in pushing out, forcing out Aristide and bringing him to the Central African Republic.

RANDALL ROBINSON: As a matter of fact, in 2003, late 2003, Aristide organized a reparations conference, and the result of which was a request to France that it repair Haiti by repaying Haiti the $21 billion in current money that Haiti had paid in reparations unjustly to France. Dominique de Villepin responded by sending his sister.

AMY GOODMAN: The foreign minister of France.

RANDALL ROBINSON: The foreign minister of France sending his sister to Haiti to tell Aristide that it was time for him to leave. And that’s how we have—the Western world, France and particularly the United States—have meddled in Haitian affairs. After the abduction of the president, Bush spoke with Chirac on the phone, congratulating each other about how smoothly the abduction of the president had been carried off by both countries.