"... investigators .. observed a boy lying on his back, naked and exposed on a cot in the middle of the emergency room," the report states.  "He was shivering in a pool of his own blood, eyes closed.  When he moved, blood splashed onto the floor."

The boy, Ginel Valbraun, 12, said he had been shot by police.  The report includes pictures of a gaping wound on his right thigh.

"Doctors refused to treat him because he had no money," the report states, adding that investigators paid to get the child medical attention.  "Investigators last saw him on Nov. 21, still alive, but still naked and in a soaked, old bandage."

Some in the media are not letting the prison attack shake their focus.  While the Miami Herald editorializes that the daylight attack shows the need for a "significant presence of U.S. Marines and soldiers," their own metro columnist detailed what the most recent significant U.S. military presence — to manage the coup against Aristide's elected government and install the present government — has wrought.  (The Herald requires free registration to viewe articles, visit BugMeNot to borrow a registration.)

The Herald editorial, aside from ignoring the possibility that the "why worry?" attack was in part an inside job and the fact that few of the "vicious and lawless" prisoners have been convicted of anything, put the big lie in the form of a question: "So what will it take for the United States to step up to the plate? Another wave of boat people?"

If Haitians were able to seek refuge anywhere, thousands would be there now.  The U.S. shut its borders, intercepting boats and sending the desperate refugees back to continued suffering and worse, even during the devastating floods of several months back: when Haitians deserved refugee status not just for economic plight and political persecution, but environmental disaster as well.

The excerpt that introduced this comment comes from today's opinion column by Jim DeFede in the Miami Herald.  The atrocities he quotes come, in turn, from a 51-page report by attorney and human rights investigator Thomas Griffin and University of Miami Law School Center for the Study of Human Rights director Irwin Stotzky.

DeFede interviewed Griffin for his column, which I quote from again below.  Griffin let DeFede know he was angry that the Miami Herald, one of the few media outlets that covered his report -- released a month ago -- used his political alignment to try to discredit it.

"What is happening in Haiti is wrong, no matter what anyone's politics is," Griffin said.

And he is right.

The pictures, the words, the statements by those who are both for and against the return of Aristide speak for themselves in this report, which can be found at www.law.miami.edu/news/368.html.

The United Nations, which has several thousand troops in Haiti, has done little to end the violence and may actually be exacerbating it.

While Lavalas supporters are not entirely innocent, this report suggests, rather convincingly, that there is an ongoing campaign to use the police, along with hired street gangs and former soldiers, to hunt down and kill members of Lavalas, particularly in the city's slums.

"There is a feeling of a truly repressive war against the poor," Griffin said.

The most powerful sections of the report are those that tell individual stories.  Griffin followed the police on a raid in the Bel Air neighborhood on Nov. 18. When the police pulled out, Griffin found bodies littering the street, including that of a middle-age woman the police left to die.

(Thanks to Marguerite Laurent of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network for passing on DeFede's article in real time-- she just caught Reed Lindsay's article on the prison break in Newsday now.)