The news of this winter’s arms shipment to Haiti, ignoring a 13-year embargo that the U.S. itself imposed, has begun to make a few ripples. (The embargo was imposed on the previous 1991-1994 military dictatorship, but was not lifted when democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide returned to power.) If you missed it, our friend Reed Lindsay filed a great report in the Washington Times touching on many of the issues. Last week, Congresswoman Maxine Waters condemned the State Department’s actions:

I am deeply disturbed to learn that, over the weekend, the U.S. State Department admitted that the United States shipped thousands of lethal weapons to Haiti last year, in violation of our government's 13-year-old embargo on arms shipments to Haiti and despite the dreadful human rights record of Haiti's unelected interim government.

I call upon the United States Senate to investigate these arms shipments to Haiti, which occurred while John Bolton was serving as Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs. It is critical that Senators determine why John Bolton allowed the arms embargo on Haiti to be violated before they vote on his nomination to the position of United States Ambassador to the United Nations.

Yesterday, former Haitian government attorney Ira Kurzban published a scathing attack on this arms transfer in the opinion pages of dictator Gérard Latortue’s hometown rag, the Miami Herald.  

Just this week, Amnesty condemned the Haitian police for their “use of lethal and indiscriminate violence” to “disperse and repress demonstrators.”

The Bush administration’s response has been to place more weapons in the hands of these police. During Haiti's democratic administrations, the U.S. government imposed a full-scale arms embargo on nonlethal as well as lethal weapons to the Haitian Police. They could not even buy bullet-proof vests or tear gas to disperse crowds. In November 2004, however, John Bolton, as under secretary for arms control in the Department of State, signed off on providing the current police, under a nondemocratic government, more than 3,635 M14 rifles, 1,100 Mini Galils, several thousand assorted 0.38-caliber pistols, 3,700 MP5s and approximately one million rounds of ammunition, according to the Small Arms Survey, an authoritative resource published by the Graduate Institute of International Studies, located in Geneva.

It is no surprise that Bolton is at the center of this controversy as well. He has been one of the hard-liners in the State Department who sought the overthrow of Aristide and who bullied intelligence analysts on Haiti who were trying to provide a more-balanced picture.

All this came to light as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice traipsed around South America criticizing both Venezuela’s arming of its own military and the countries poised to sell those arms. Venezuela, of course, has a functioning democracy and a public force that has, at least since President Chávez came to power, not killed dozens of people in raids on slums and suppression of political demonstrations. (The State Department has claimed over and over again that Venezuela’s arms purchases could result in weapons and ammunition “ending up” in the hands of Colombian guerrillas, without any evidence of cooperation between Chávez and the rebels, in a revisit of its WMD “big lie” strategy from Iraq.)

The Haiti arms story has major relevance to both Rice’s Venezuela comments and Bolton’s U.N. nomination. However, mainstream media coverage has been very uneven. As far as I can tell, many large U.S. newspapers have not picked up the story, and since it broke not a single question has been asked by reporters at the State Department’s daily press briefing.