Senior U.S. officials have also intervened to free FRAPH leaders from jail after they have been arrested by Haitian authorities or by field-level U.S. troops. Constant claims that the early, high-profile arrests of FRAPH men were done by U.S. forces "for publicity," and that after being held briefly and released, many of his men were given "a card telling them they were arrested by mistake"; he said he had one of the cards. Nyll Calixte, the chief financier for FRAPH in Haiti's northeast sector, was sprung within a day of his arrest on what the Special Forces were told was a direct order from Washington, according to U.S. sources who saw the message traffic. When I asked the former Special Forces chief for Haiti, Gen. Dick Potter, about Calixte, he said he didn't recall the case. But when asked about FRAPH and attaches, Potter remarked that often "people we had picked up and taken back to [U.S. occupation headquarters in] Port-au-Prince-and they had been reviewed and questioned and so forth-many times they'd show up back in the same villages where we'd picked them up." Asked why this happened, he said "I guess poor evidence," but he said that such decisions are made by higher-level U.S. officials. As to Constant's claim that the D.I.A. was still using FRAPH, Potter-himself a veteran of operations in Laos and northern Iraq-said, "Hell, I wouldn't even comment." On C.I.A. recruitment of FRAPH and attaches, he said, "I think anything's probably possible."
U.S. Army facilitation of FRAPH-particularly with regard to arms-has been established U.S. policy. One Green Beret operations chief, who is still on active duty, says that in early October 1994, just days after many units had arrived in the rural zones, "we started getting message traffic saying, 'Come up off the FRAPH."' His account meshes with that of Col. Mark Boyatt, one of the national Green Beret commanders, who told me last spring, while he was still in charge of a Special Forces Group in Haiti, that "when we first came in we went after the FRAPH real hard"-particularly, he said, searching FRAPH leaders' homes for hidden weapons-"but after that we were told to 'back off."' He said the order came from the Pentagon, down "through the chain of command," and that the Special Forces were told to deal with FRAPH as the "loyal opposition." Colonel Boyatt said he remembered the "back off" order coming in "mid- to late October," but Special Forces documents and interviews with field level commanders suggest that in fact it may have been earlier, in the first two weeks of October.
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Haiti Under the Gun: Allan Nairn
In the face of rising outrage in Haiti that paramilitaries are still armed and at large, the U.S. government has again denied collaborating with the perpetrators, including FRAPH, the hit squad ...
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