Obama’s Proposed Cyber Legislation

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Be careful where this proposed legislation may lead. In the recent hack attacks that have been broadcasted in the media including Staples, Target and Sony, most recently CENTCOM had two social media sites hit. The hackers of the CENTCOM sites were not Islamic State but rather, sympathizers of the terror group located in Maryland as determined by the IP addresses.

Additional items are likely to be part of the proposed legislation that included in the text below giving broader and more sweeping access to the FBI and the NSA.

In order to add protectional layers of security to key internet providers, it is likely users may be forced to give up certain protections most especially encryption.  The White House posted the proposed legislation.

SECURING CYBERSPACE – President Obama Announces New Cybersecurity Legislative Proposal and Other Cybersecurity Efforts

“In this interconnected, digital world, there are going to be opportunities for hackers to engage in cyber assaults both in the private sector and the public sector.  Now, our first order of business is making sure that we do everything to harden sites and prevent those kinds of attacks from taking place…But even as we get better, the hackers are going to get better, too.  Some of them are going to be state actors; some of them are going to be non-state actors.  All of them are going to be sophisticated and many of them can do some damage.

This is part of the reason why it’s going to be so important for Congress to work with us and get an actual bill passed that allows for the kind of information-sharing we need.  Because if we don’t put in place the kind of architecture that can prevent these attacks from taking place, this is not just going to be affecting movies, this is going to be affecting our entire economy in ways that are extraordinarily significant.”

 – President Obama, December 19, 2014.

 

Since the start of his Administration, when he issued the Cyberspace Policy Review — the first top-to-bottom, Administration-wide review of cybersecurity — President Obama has led efforts to better prepare our government, our economy, and our nation as a whole for the growing cyber threats we face.

That’s why in 2011 he issued his Cybersecurity Legislative Proposal, calling on Congress to take urgent action to give the private sector and government the tools they need to combat cyber threats at home and abroad.  It’s why he issued the International Strategy for Cyberspace to make clear to nations abroad the foreign policy priority cybersecurity issues have become.  And when Congress failed to pass comprehensive cybersecurity legislation, the Administration pressed forward, issuing an Executive Order to protect critical infrastructure by establishing baseline cybersecurity standards that we developed collaboratively with industry.

Today, at a time when public and private networks are facing an unprecedented threat from rogue hackers as well as organized crime and even state actors, the President is unveiling the next steps in his plan to defend the nation’s systems.  These include a new legislative proposal, building on important work in Congress, to solve the challenges of information sharing that can cripple response to a cyberattack.  They also include revisions to those provisions of our 2011 legislative proposal on which Congress has yet to take action, and along with them, the President is extending an invitation to work in a bipartisan, bicameral manner to advance this urgent priority for the American people.

Specifically, today’s announcements include:

Cybersecurity Legislative Proposal

Enabling Cybersecurity Information Sharing: The Administration’s updated proposal promotes better cybersecurity information sharing between the private sector and government, and it enhances collaboration and information sharing amongst the private sector.  Specifically, the proposal encourages the private sector to share appropriate cyber threat information with the Department of Homeland Security’s National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC), which will then share it in as close to real-time as practicable with relevant federal agencies and with private sector-developed and operated Information Sharing and Analysis Organizations (ISAOs) by providing targeted liability protection for companies that share information with these entities.

The legislation also encourages the formation of these private-sector led Information Sharing and Analysis Organizations.  The Administration’s proposal would also safeguard Americans’ personal privacy by requiring private entities to comply with certain privacy restrictions such as removing unnecessary personal information and taking measures to protect any personal information that must be shared in order to qualify for liability protection.  The proposal further requires the Department of Homeland Security and the Attorney General, in consultation with the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board and others, to develop receipt, retention, use, and disclosure guidelines for the federal government.  Finally, the Administration intends this proposal to complement and not to limit existing effective relationships between government and the private sector.  These existing relationships between law enforcement and other federal agencies are critical to the cybersecurity mission.

Modernizing Law Enforcement Authorities to Combat Cyber Crime: Law enforcement must have appropriate tools to investigate, disrupt and prosecute cyber crime.  The Administration’s proposal contains provisions that would allow for the prosecution of the sale of botnets, would criminalize the overseas sale of stolen U.S. financial information like credit card and bank account numbers, would expand federal law enforcement authority to deter the sale of spyware used to stalk or commit ID theft, and would give courts the authority to shut down botnets engaged in distributed denial of service attacks and other criminal activity.  It also reaffirms important components of 2011 proposals to update the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), a key piece of law used to prosecute organized crime, so that it applies to cybercrimes, clarifies the penalties for computer crimes, and makes sure these penalties are in line with other similar non-cyber crimes.  Finally, the proposal modernizes the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by ensuring that insignificant conduct does not fall within the scope of the statute, while making clear that it can be used to prosecute insiders who abuse their ability to access information to use it for their own purposes.

National Data Breach Reporting: As announced yesterday, the Administration has also updated its proposal on security breach reporting.  State laws have helped consumers protect themselves against identity theft while also encouraging business to improve cybersecurity, helping to stem the tide of identity theft. These laws require businesses that have suffered an intrusion to notify consumers if consumers’ personal information has been compromised.  The Administration’s updated proposal helps business and consumers by simplifying and standardizing the existing patchwork of 46 state laws (plus the District of Columbia and several territories) that contain these requirements into one federal statute, and puts in place a single clear and timely notice requirement to ensure that companies notify their employees and customers about security breaches.

White House Summit on Cybersecurity and Consumer Protection

On February 13, 2015, the White House will host a Summit on Cybersecurity and Consumer Protection at Stanford University, to help shape public and private sector efforts to protect American consumers and companies from growing threats to consumers and commercial networks.

The Summit will bring together major stakeholders on cybersecurity and consumer financial protection issues – including senior leaders from the White House and across the federal government; CEOs from a wide range of industries including the financial services industry, technology and communications companies; computer security companies and the retail industry; as well as law enforcement officials, consumer advocates, technical experts, and students.  Topics at the Summit will include increasing public-private partnerships and cybersecurity information sharing, creating and promoting improved cybersecurity practices and technologies, and improving adoption and use of more secure payment technologies.

The Summit is also the next step in the President’s BuySecure Initiative, which was launched in November 2014, and will help advance national efforts the government has led over the last two years with executive orders on consumer financial protection and critical infrastructure cybersecurity. Through keynote speeches, panel discussions, and small group workshops, participants will build on efforts in the public and private sectors to further improve cybersecurity practices at a wide range of companies.

Grants to Historically Black Colleges for Cybersecurity Education

As the President stated in Executive Order 13532, “Promoting Excellence, Innovation, and Sustainability at Historically Black Colleges and Universities” in February 2010, historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have made historic and ongoing contributions to the general welfare and prosperity of our country.  Established by visionary leaders, America’s HBCUs, for over 150 years, have produced many of the Nation’s leaders in business, government, academia, and the military, and have provided generations of American men and women with hope and educational opportunity. Recognizing that HBCUs serve as engines of opportunity, innovation, and economic growth, Vice President Biden will travel to Norfolk, VA on Thursday to announce that the Department of Energy will provide $25 million in grants over the next five years to support a cybersecurity education consortium consisting of 13 HBCUs and two national labs.

This program, part of the President’s jobs-driven training initiative, will help to fill the growing demand for skilled cybersecurity professionals in the U.S. job market at the same time that it helps to grow the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) curricula for HBCUs. The participating schools include two-year colleges, four-year colleges, and research institutions in seven states, plus the Virgin Islands.

JC Chairman Dempsey Not Happy with WH

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Can you list those in those in the Obama administration graveyard? The White House has rarely met with any cabinet secretaries to date during the Obama administration. Then top people have moved on to private business. Like who? Robert Gates, Leon Panetta, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Hagel, John Podesta, Kathleen Sebilius, Janet Napolitano, Jay Carney, Robert Gibbs, James Jones, Anita Dunn, Van Jones, Peter Orzag, Larry Summers,  General McChrystal, General Carter Ham, General David Petraeus, Rahm Emanual, Christina Roemler and there are more.

Now the question is why….perhaps at least one very important reason is micro-managing. In case you need proof, read on.

Joint Chiefs chairman distances himself from Obama promise on Afghanistan

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff doesn’t entirely share his boss’s unbridled optimism about the future of Afghanistan.

President Obama last month vowed that Afghanistan never again will be a breeding ground for terrorist attacks against the U.S., reassuring troops that they accomplished their mission as official combat operations came to an end.               

 

But Gen. Martin E. Dempsey on Sunday distanced himself from that statement.

“You’d have to ask the president how he could say that,” Gen. Dempsey said on “Fox News Sunday” when asked how the president could be sure Afghanistan won’t again become a safe haven for terrorist groups such as al Qaeda.

Mr. Obama made the remarks during a Christmas Day address to troops stationed in Hawaii. The president long has cast the Afghanistan War as a worthy fight and one critical to U.S. foreign policy moving forward, as opposed to the Iraq War, which he has characterized as a mistake.

“Because of the extraordinary service of the men and women in the armed forces, Afghanistan has a chance to rebuild its own country. We are safer. It’s not going to be a source of terrorist attacks again,” Mr. Obama told the troops.

Gen. Dempsey made clear that he believes the new government in Afghanistan will be a cooperative partner with the U.S. He also said he believes Afghan security forces have shown encouraging signs that they are willing to defend their country.     

 

But he stopped short of endorsing Mr. Obama’s blanket vow.

“I personally think there will be pockets inside of Afghanistan that change hands from time to time because that’s the history of the country,” he said. “But I think that we’re in a very good place in Afghanistan in terms of giving them a chance to do exactly what the president said. But we’re going to have to keep an eye on it.”

In the wide-ranging interview, Gen. Dempsey also addressed accusations — some from numerous former Pentagon officials — that the White House micromanages the Defense Department.

The charges have come from, among others, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who unexpectedly resigned in November.

Gen. Dempsey said he believes the Pentagon’s relationship with the White House should be measured by whether he has access to the president and whether top administration officials listen to what he has to say.

“The metric we should be focused on is access and whether my advice influences decisions,” Gen. Dempsey said. “Whether someone wants to characterize the desire, the almost insatiable appetite for information about complex issues as micromanaging, they can have at it. But for me, the metric is access and advice.”

Still, he acknowledged the criticism in a tongue-in-cheek way when first asked the question.

“If you’re asking me if I’m being micromanaged, I don’t know. I’d better go check with the White House before I answer that question,” he said.  *** But what is the issue with Afghanistan you ask?

KABUL—Adherents of Islamic State this weekend declared their intention to step up operations in Afghan territory where the Taliban have long held sway, raising the prospect of battling jihadist groups and rising terrorism in the region.

In a 16-minute video released over the weekend and viewed by The Wall Street Journal, Afghan and Pakistani militants pledged their allegiance to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and unveiled the movement’s leadership structure in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“It’s very significant,” said a Western official who has seen the video. “I think they want to say: ‘This is serious—we are here.’ ”

The activity of new extremist groups could complicate efforts by the government of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to start peace talks with the Taliban insurgency in a bid to end the violence. The groups’ arrival also comes as U.S.-led troops formally ended combat operations in December.

In the video, the Pakistani and Afghan militants publicly reveal the name of their regional leader for the first time: Hafez Sayed Khan Orakzai. Footage shows Mr. Orakzai standing in front of a black-and-white Islamic State banner, flanked by men in black wearing balaclavas and carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles.

The video begins with a procession of men on foot and horseback waving Islamic State flags and ends gruesomely, with the beheading of a man the group says is a Pakistani soldier.

Mr. Orakzai was one of the six commanders of the Pakistani Taliban—formally known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan—who switched allegiance to Islamic State in October.  Shahidullah Shahid, the Pakistani Taliban’s former spokesman, also appears in the video, delivering introductory remarks to a crowd of militants. Mr. Shahid introduces local commanders who will be responsible for territory located on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

“We are gathered here with commanders from 10 units,” Mr. Shahid says. “They all want to pledge their allegiance to the caliph of all believers, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.”

In the video, both Messrs. Shahid and Orakzai speak Arabic, the language of the Quran, instead of their native Pashto.

While the military reach of Islamic State has thus far been limited to parts of Iraq and Syria, the defection of Afghan and Pakistani militants to the group raises fears that a new front line could emerge in South and Central Asia.

The rise of Islamic State could pose a challenge to the Afghan Taliban, a movement loyal to its elusive spiritual leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, who hasn’t been seen in public since December 2001.

The Taliban movement is fragmented and, in the absence of visible leadership, some of its members have begun to look to Syria and Iraq for guidance and inspiration. A United Nations report released in December noted “a distinct increase in the activities and the visibility” of extremist groups such as Islamic State in 2014, and said that Afghan militants were beginning to defect to the group.

Members of the Afghan Taliban who joined Islamic State include Mawlawi Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost and Mawlavi Abdul Qahir, according to Mr. Shahid and the U.N. Mr. Muslim Dost, who was once imprisoned in the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is the most prominent former member of the Afghan Taliban known to have joined the movement. Mr. Qahir, a former Taliban commander, was named a unit commander in the video.

Tensions between the Taliban and groups affiliated with Islamic State in Afghanistan have already turned violent. In the southwestern province of Helmand, local officials and residents say the Taliban are battling militants dressed in Islamic State’s signature black uniforms. The new group of fighters, they say, is led by a former Taliban commander, Mullah Raouf Khadim.

Mohammad Jan Rasoulyar, the deputy governor of Helmand, said the fighting started several days ago in the district of Kajaki, where the government has no control. About 30 fighters, including some women, have moved from Kajaki to the neighboring district of Sangin, according to Abdul Raziq Sarwani, a local police commander in Sangin.

The fighting in Helmand suggests that the Islamic State label could increasingly become attractive to local Taliban commanders disillusioned with their leadership. Two journalists based in Helmand who have spoken to locals in Kajaki said Mr. Khadim set up the new armed group after he was fired by the Taliban leadership.

“He established his own armed group in Kajaki and asked Taliban fighters to join him. He says Mullah Omar isn’t alive anymore, and that if he is alive he should join his own group,” one of the reporters said.

Afghan officials have previously raised the alarm on attempts by Islamic State to seek a foothold in Afghanistan, pointing to propaganda material that had been distributed in parts of Afghanistan.

While new information is adding weight to claims that Islamic State is beginning to have an active presence in the region, an Afghan security official played down the extent of its presence.

“We have some reports that show their interest in Afghanistan, but they have no base here,” the official said.

In this deeply conservative country, extremist ideology still thrives. On Friday, hundreds of men took to the streets in a district in the southern province of Uruzgan in support of the men who carried out the deadly attack on the office of the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo, local officials said.

The demonstrators also condemned Mr. Ghani for extending his condolences to the people of France, officials added.

 

 

 

 

CENTCOM Victim of CyberCaliphate

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An unknown network of hackers that are sympathizers of Islamic State hacked CENTCOM’s twitter account and the associated YouTube channel.  So far the response is ‘it does not appear to be anything problematic’. Ah what…problematic? The hackers had some success that for sure is problematic and what is more, data breaches of any sort does not provide anyone in America with internet security confidence.

There is a ‘cybercaliphate’ that no one is admitting.

A screenshot shows the U.S. Central Command Twitter account after it was apparently hacked by people claiming to be aligned with Islamic State militants. The account was shortly thereafter suspended.  

A screenshot shows the U.S. Central Command Twitter account after it was apparently hacked by people claiming to be aligned with Islamic State militants. The account was shortly thereafter suspended. Reuters
By

Julian E. Barnes 

U.S. Probing Apparent Hack of Military Twitter Account by Islamic State Supporters

Account Suspended After Tweets Showed Top Commanders’ Information, Military Scenarios

WASHINGTON—Hackers claiming to be aligned with Islamic State militants took control of the U.S. Central Command’s Twitter and YouTube accounts Monday, posting phone numbers of top military officers and what they said was classified documents.

In the posting, the militants claimed they were working for the Islamic State and a “Cyber Caliphate.”

A Pentagon official said that U.S. Central Command was aware of the hack but had no immediate information about how it occurred.

Officials for a time Monday appeared to be trying to retake control of the Twitter account. Shortly after the first tweets from the hackers appeared, the “Cyber Caliphate” logo and slogan disappeared, replaced by a blue square.

Then shortly after 1 p.m., the Twitter account was labeled as suspended. Moments later, the Central Command’s YouTube account apparently was suspended.

“We can confirm that the U.S. Central Command Twitter and YouTube accounts were compromised earlier today,” said a defense official. “We are taking appropriate measures to address the matter. I have no further information to provide at this time.”

The White House said it was looking into the hack, but had little information and played down the significance of the intrusion.

“There is a significant difference between…a large data breach and the hacking of a Twitter account,” said Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary.

The tweets posted by the hackers included phone number of top military commanders and what the group said were military scenarios for a conflict with North Korea and China.

A senior Pentagon official said the information posted by the hackers on the Twitter account didn’t appear to be highly classified documents.

“It does not appear to be anything problematic,” the official said.

–Felicia Schwartz and Carol E. Lee contributed to this article.

Write to Julian E. Barnes at [email protected]

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WASHINGTON—Hackers claiming to be aligned with Islamic State militants took control of the U.S. Central Command’s Twitter and YouTube accounts Monday, posting phone numbers of top military officers and what they said was classified documents.

In the posting, the militants claimed they were working for the Islamic State and a “Cyber Caliphate.”

A Pentagon official said that U.S. Central Command was aware of the hack but had no immediate information about how it occurred.

Officials for a time Monday appeared to be trying to retake control of the Twitter account. Shortly after the first tweets from the hackers appeared, the “Cyber Caliphate” logo and slogan disappeared, replaced by a blue square.

Then shortly after 1 p.m., the Twitter account was labeled as suspended. Moments later, the Central Command’s YouTube account apparently was suspended.

“We can confirm that the U.S. Central Command Twitter and YouTube accounts were compromised earlier today,” said a defense official. “We are taking appropriate measures to address the matter. I have no further information to provide at this time.”

The White House said it was looking into the hack, but had little information and played down the significance of the intrusion.

“There is a significant difference between…a large data breach and the hacking of a Twitter account,” said Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary.

The tweets posted by the hackers included phone number of top military commanders and what the group said were military scenarios for a conflict with North Korea and China.

A senior Pentagon official said the information posted by the hackers on the Twitter account didn’t appear to be highly classified documents.

“It does not appear to be anything problematic,” the official said.

–Felicia Schwartz and Carol E. Lee contributed to this article.

Write to Julian E. Barnes at [email protected]

Due to Haiti, No White House Run for Hillary

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There are countless reasons to keep the Clintons out of the White House in 2017. Many of them are obvious including sex scandals, Benghazi, Travelgate and Hillary’s most recent declaration that we must come to understand the reasons that militant Islamists have for killing, in short be sensitive to their condition. Yeah sure. But let’s take a look at a matter ignored for many years and that is Haiti.

Hillary’s Half-Baked Haiti Project

Caracol Industrial Park is failing to deliver on the promises made to foreign investors and Haitians.

On the fifth anniversary of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti remains a poster child for waste, fraud and corruption in the handling of aid. Nowhere is the bureaucratic ineptitude and greed harder to accept than at the 607-acre Caracol Industrial Park, a project launched by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with U.S. taxpayer money, under the supervision of her husband Bill and his Clinton Foundation.

Between the State Department and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), which hands out grants to very poor countries thanks to U.S. generosity, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on this park in an attempt to attract apparel manufacturers. But the park is falling far short of the promises made to provide investors with necessary infrastructure. If things continue this way, frustrated investors will look for greener pastures.

Successful industrial parks are built by people who know the business and who demand accountability. This park was put in the hands of State, the IDB and Bill Clinton. The results have been predictable.

I had been warned about Caracol going to the dogs by sources on the ground in Haiti. So last month I traveled east by truck from Cap Haitien, across the poor rural north of the country to see if the alarm was justified. I found a project in trouble. It can be saved, but only if it is handed over to professionals with skin in the game.

On paper Caracol makes sense. Thanks to special trade legislation passed by the U.S. Congress in Dec. 2006, Haitian-sewn apparel enters the U.S. duty free and the manufacturers can use fabric purchased from anywhere in the world. This gives Haiti a big advantage over apparel exporters to the U.S. who have to source the fabric in the U.S. even if they sew overseas. With lower wages than in many Asian markets and proximity to North America, Haitian-based producers have comparative advantages that might offset the country’s low productivity.

The State Department initially promised that the park would be able to support 65,000 direct jobs by 2020. The Clinton Foundation has made similar statements. That means constructing 40 10,000 square-meter buildings for garment assembly. It won’t happen at the current pace.

The total job-creating capacity since the foundation stone was laid in November 2011 is three assembly buildings and a 10-megawatt power plant. A fourth workshop is under construction but is unlikely to be completed before late spring.

This must be tough to take for the anchor tenant, the Korean manufacturer Sae-A Trading Ltd. It has committed to a $78 million investment at Caracol and currently employs some 4,500 Haitians. It says it wants to hire 20,000. To do so it needs another dozen buildings.

A Dec. 12 IDB press release says the Haitian government is approved for a new $70 million grant to construct, among other things, three new production buildings by 2018 with a goal of providing space for 6,800 workers. Bank officials have to know that putting Haitian government officials in charge of such a project is likely to doom it. But let’s suppose I’m wrong and the buildings go up. The Caracol workforce will then be 11,300—a far cry from the State Department’s estimate of 65,000 direct jobs or even the IBD’s forecast of 40,000.

It’s understandable for the IDB to want to lower expectations. But the target should be higher and it shouldn’t take three years to boost capacity. Craig Miller, president of the Boston-based Waterfield Design Group and a consultant for the Haitian apparel sector, told me that “once the materials are on site, a 10,000 square-meter production workshop can be built in six to eight months.”

Apparel manufacturers in Haiti are hungry for production space but my sources say investors were not given an option to build their own workshops in Caracol. The Clinton planners—Hillary at State and Bill at the Clinton Foundation—wanted to retain that responsibility for reasons that can only be guessed. So now the producers have to wait.

This is tragic for the thousands of Haitians eager to get the sewing jobs. Factory workers earn three times the average income in Haiti’s north. Sae-A produces for a wide number of American labels, such as Target and Wal-Mart, WMT +0.48% Wal-Mart Stores Inc. U.S.: NYSE $89.78 +0.43+0.48% Jan 12, 2015 11:44 am Volume (Delayed 15m) : 1.72M P/E Ratio 18.32 Market Cap $287.99 Billion Dividend Yield 2.14% Rev. per Employee $219,905 01/09/15 Toys “R” Us Holiday Period Sam… 01/08/15 Tesco to Cut Prices, Close Unp… 01/08/15 Stocks to Watch: Family Dollar… More quote details and news » WMT in Your Value Your Change Short position and the American companies regularly dispatch auditors to inspect work conditions. Even without the U.S. Labor Department breathing down its back, Sae-A has incentives to care for workers to retain them and boost productivity. Getting a spot on the assembly line opens the door to economic mobility, and that’s unusual in Haiti.

Haiti has a rare opportunity. Investors want to invest, workers want to work, and consumers want to buy. This seems like a good time for government to get out of the way.

But how did all this begin? 

Bill Clinton’s Shameful Haiti Legacy

He may be playing the hero now, but the ex-president’s trip to Haiti is a reminder of the mess his administration left behind. Bob Shacochis on how Clinton wasted a good invasion.
Like many Haitians and not a few Americans who know the island and its history, I had mixed feelings watching the video of former President Clinton step off a plane on to the tarmac at Toussaint Loverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince on Monday afternoon. Bill Clinton, the Second Coming of Hope. The First Coming, the U.S.-led invasion in 1994 adorned with 20,000 American troops, did not turn out so well. By 1996, when the American military decamped, you’d be hard pressed to find a Haitian on the streets of Port-au-Prince who wasn’t suffering miserably from hope. By 1996, Haitians were scratching their heads in bewilderment, asking themselves Why has America come to save us? Who will save us now? Ten years later, by almost every measure, Haiti was worse off than it was before Clinton had “rescued” it from the illegitimate regime of General Raoul Cedras and his gang of terrorist enforcers, known by the acronym FRAPH.

I had heard the Haitians saying of the U.S. after the American troops went home: “Lave men ou, siye li a te. It looks like you wash your hands and dry them in dirt.”

It’s the proper time, of course, to ask what is the legacy of American foreign policy in Haiti, a beleaguered neighbor that we have invaded and occupied twice in the 20th century, the first time to preempt German influence there during and after World War I, the second time during the early years of the Clinton administration, an 18-month long intervention which I reported on for Harper’s magazine.  

Looking at the images pouring out of Haiti these days, what comes immediately into focus is the near-sighted, irrational nature of what is out of focus in American foreign policy since the Marshall Plan worked its miracles on a shattered planet. I think that we can all agree that Haiti has finally found its bottom, but the descent, lubricated by man-made folly, was not inevitable.

To be sure, Haiti brings out the cynic in me. Perhaps I should express that sentiment with more precision: The United States’ two-faced relationship with Haiti stirs a cynicism within me that I’d rather not claim.

The U.S. Army came ashore in September 1994 locked and loaded to do battle with a military dictatorship composed of a tiny dysfunctional army and roving bands of FRAPH’s homicidal thugs, who threatened to send America’s sons and daughters back home in coffins. Essentially an absurd boast but from a genuine enemy. Colin Powell’s brinkmanship defused the potential for bloodshed on the eve of the invasion, yet the fact remained—our soldiers would be liberating villages, towns, and cities controlled by a terrorist organization that had brutalized the population.

Early on, there were shootouts between U.S. soldiers and FRAPH. Special Forces hunted down FRAPH leadership in the countryside, captured them and shipped the detainees to headquarters in Port-au-Prince, where, to general dismay, they were invariably released. One night, hunkered down with a detachment of Green Berets in the mountains south of Cap Haitien, I listened in alarm to a radio transmission from Col. Mark Boyatt, the overall commander of Special Forces in Haiti, telling his commandos to begin regarding FRAPH as Haiti’s “loyal opposition,” as if the terrorists, overnight, had become Haiti’s equivalent to the Republican Party, rehabilitated patriots eager to remake Haiti into a modern democratic nation.

Months later, when I challenged Colonel Boyatt on this highly counterproductive order to his troops, he clammed up on me. For the next two years, I tried to track down who in the chain of command had told Boyatt to whitewash the terrorist organization FRAPH. The trail finally led to the American Embassy in Port-au-Prince, and then it jumped to the mainland, Sandy Berger, and the White House.

Legacy No. 1: We left the poison in the system. The result: A Haiti rendered ungovernable by our heedless self-interest. The only Devil in Haiti is to be found in the deals we cut with the worst elements in that society. Sound familiar?

On March 31, 1996, the United States handed over Operation Restore Democracy to the United Nations and a peacekeeping force that has been there ever since. Early in the Clinton administration’s intervention in Haiti, the word came down to the boots on the ground from the White House: You have not been deployed to conduct nation-building. The mission turned out to be foolishly attenuated: Restore Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide, to the National Palace. Hold elections that will remove the troublesome Aristide from the National Palace. Go home.

Ultimately, the mission ended up profoundly disillusioning not only the Haitians but the American troops as well. Back at Fort Bragg, I asked a Special Forces Master Sergeant if he was glad he went to Haiti. “Tough question,” he said. “No carpenter likes to build a house and see it crooked and leaning and ready to fall down the day he leaves. But if he builds a nice house, he’s happy about it, it’s something he’ll be proud of the rest of his life.”

“You don’t think you have anything to be proud of?” I asked.

“No.”

“That’s sad,” I said.

“It is,” said the Master Sergeant. “It is.”

I told him what I had heard the Haitians saying about the United States after the American troops went home. Lave men ou, siye li a te. It looks like you wash your hands and dry them in dirt.

Legacy No. 2: In Haiti, America wasted a perfectly good occupation. Call our post-earthquake presence there anything you want, but let’s hope it works out better this time around. Good luck, Bill. And remember, merry are the builders.

Bob Shacochis, a professor at Florida State University, is the author of The Immaculate Invasion, a chronicle of the 1994 U.S. intervention in Haiti.