While it is always possible that pro-Aristide gangs attacked the Haitian National Penitentiary to free jailed members – presumably with the help of guards or even former military to pull it off – this remains an unlikely explanation given the facts known.  Yet it is the most common explanation presented in media reports of the attack and jail break.  Establishment press accounts that don’t directly offer an explanation usually prominently mention the “re-capture” of Prime Minister Yvon Neptune and Interior Minister Jocelerme Privert – top officials of the overthrown elected government – and let the clear implication be that supporters of exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide undertook the attack to free these leaders.

Associated Press reporter Peter Prengaman, alone in the press, denies that any third party removed Neptune and Privert from the prison.  Instead, he continues to report that guards secreted the two top political prisoners to a secure location during the attack.  Prengaman cites unnamed authorities.  In contemporaneous reports a government source even less credible than anonymous officials, police spokeswoman Gessy Coicou, repeats the escape-and-capture line.  "Yvon Neptune and Jocelerme Privert have been apprehended," she told Agence France Press.  In conflict with the escape claims, Reuters reporter Joseph Guyler Delva quoted eyewitnesses in front of the prison who reported seeing Prime Minister Neptune taken from the prison at gunpoint.  The witnesses identified the kidnappers as the attackers, not guards, though Delva's Reuters version is at least conceivably reconcilable with Prengaman AP report.

Agence France Press has proved the worst of the wire services in covering this event.  While none have provided coherent explanations, critical analysis, or key context, AFP has been malevolent in its misrepresentations.  Each AFP article ends with a stock summary that lists year-old allegations against Aristide, including corruption and human rights violations, while mentioning none of the proven crimes of the pro-coup forces and presenting as mutual the constant, one-sided violence against people suspected of supporting the popular president.  AFP repeats government allegations against Neptune and Privert without saying they have not been charged or faced with evidence despite being in jail since June and April, respectively.

AFP consistently claims that the prison attack freed the two Lavalas leaders who were then re-captured.  Details and explanations vary or are left out.  A notable version was a Sunday article titled "Haiti drug gang causes mass prison break-out, former ministers recaptured."  One of AFP’s claims in this article, that Neptune and Privert were captured after calling embassies seeking asylum – and presumably failing to find it, the same libel made against Aristide when he was removed from the presidency at gunpoint one year ago – has already been refuted by Prengaman.  Chilean ambassador to Haiti Marcel Young met with the two Saturday and said “they were only concerned about their security.  Once that was arranged, they asked to go back to the prison."  Prengaman, remember, reported that Neptune and Privert never left government custody.  They certainly have not been able to communicate with supporters; Privert’s wife Ginette has not seen nor heard from him.  ''I've been waiting three hours, and they still won't let me in," she told Prengaman outside the prison on Sunday.

Independent journalist Reed Lindsay, in an article published by the Washington Times, reported from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, details of the prison break not yet recorded by any of the wire services.  The additional information casts further doubt on suggestions, tentatively made by UN and Haitian officials, that Aristide supporters launched the attack.

One senior police official said on the condition of anonymity that he suspected former soldiers were behind the prison break.
    It is not clear how such a massive prison break could have taken place in broad daylight just three blocks from the national palace and police headquarters in downtown Port-au-Prince, where 125 U.N. riot police and dozens of Haitian police officers stand guard.
    Nor is it clear how the handful of assailants — witnesses in front of the penitentiary said they saw only one vehicle and several gunmen — managed to get past about 40 prison guards and free nearly 500 of the more than 1,200 prisoners in the penitentiary — all before the police and U.N. troops arrived.
    Marie-Yolene Gilles, an observer for the National Coalition for Haitian Rights, who had access to the penitentiary yesterday, said six hooded gunmen dressed in black entered the prison. One off-duty prison guard was shot and killed outside the penitentiary, but no guards inside were killed or injured by the assailants.
    Prison authorities refused to allow a reporter to visit the penitentiary yesterday and Claude Theodat, the chief of Haiti's prison system, did not return phone calls.
    In the strongly pro-Aristide neighborhood of Bel Air, one man who claimed to have escaped from the penitentiary said the prison guards opened the cells and told the prisoners to leave.

Marguerite Laurent, in a February 19 e-mail to the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network information list in which she passed on the conflicting Reuters and AP reports of the attack on the prison, hinted her suspicions that the prison break serves the interests of U.S.-installed interim president Gerard Latortue and U.S. Ambassador James Foley.

Lately, it would seems whenever high ranking U.S. official visit Haiti – there are currently three former U.S. ambassadors who are in Haiti right now looking at feasibility of election and assessing "security concerns" for said U.S. elections in Haiti; or, as on Dec. 1, 2004 when Colin Powell was in Haiti – something horrible for the Haitian poor happens at the Latortue/Foley Haitian concentration camp, known as, the National Penitentiary.

 Let us never lose our focus. It is NOT Haitian infighting that has brought Haiti to this precipice, this death trap. But said same US high ranking officials and their policies to destroy democracy in Haiti at any cost, with any Haitian life, so that their corporatocracy may rule Haiti through Washington puppets like Latortue or Bazin, or Apaid, et al.

 They will invent ANY storyline to keep us from focussing on that truth. But we shall not be distracted. The conflicts manufactured into Haiti has cost us way too much blood.

While the failure of law enforcement represented by an armed attack on the prison and the continued freedom of the perpetrators ought to increase scrutiny of the coup government and United Nations forces supporting it, successfully branding the political opposition with the crime could greatly benefit both paramilitaries and the illegitimate government.  It all depends on how the media coverage comes down.  Right now it is still up in the air.

At stake is the world continuing to look into, at long last, extreme and continuing human rights abuses inflicted on the Haitian people by the U.S., France, Canada, and UN-supported government and by the paramilitaries.  A recent investigation by the Center for the Study of Human Rights at the University of Miami law school provides graphic and often horrifying proof of the state-sanctioned violence mostly against the poor majority in Haiti.  More specifically at stake are UN investigations into the possible massacre at the same Haitian National Penitentiary on December 1 and a string of summary executions carried out by Haitian police.