In an article today maliciously titled Aristide Says He Was Duped By U.S. Into Leaving Haiti, Wines claims that a telephone interview he conducted with the exiled legitimate President of Haiti...

...did little to clear up the question of whether Mr. Aristide willingly fled Haiti that morning, as the United States insists, or whether he was forced into exile against his will, as he implied.

That is a knowingly dishonest statement by Wines. All sides of the dispute, including US government officials, admit that they told Aristide that if he did not leave Haiti immediately on February 29th that paramilitary gunmen would come to kill him, his family, and "thousands" of people all over Haiti, and that U.S. troops would do nothing to protect him from the small band of mercenaries.

That precisely defines being "forced into exile against his will." What is Wines' problem? On what semantic point does he seek to hang his definition of the matter? Wines doesn't tell us, he just repeats the big lie.

Twice!:

Despite Mr. Aristide's accusation that he was duped, the extent to which the United States actually forced Mr. Aristide from office remains unclear.

(The choice of the word "duped" is also yellow journalism at its highest. Aristide is not quoted as using that highly-charged word. But Wines uses it, obviously, to hang the deception onto the person deceived, and shield the deceivers. His story says "Aristide is a dupe" and not "US officials lied" when the latter is the real story, the only story, the newsworthy one.)

And yet, in Wines' own article, he includes a fact that makes a lie of his own deceptive wording:

The United States has said that Mr. Aristide chose to go into exile after being told that his refusal to go could lead to innocent deaths.

If that is not "forcing him from office," what is?

Buried farther down in Wines' article are the only three paragraphs he could scrawl truthfully:

Mr. Aristide said that he and his wife have been housed in a spartan two-room apartment in the palace, a 1960's-modern concrete structure largely hidden behind a tall white fence crowned with barbed wire.

It was not clear why republic officials would not allow Mr. Aristide to be interviewed in person rather than by telephone. A senior government official said that security at the palace was too extensive to accommodate impromptu guests, but one American acquaintance of Mr. Aristide has been allowed to visit him this week without difficulty.

Officials of this government, which took power in a military coup almost a year ago, have been sensitive about press coverage of Mr. Aristide, perhaps because people here are heavily dependent on foreign aid.

The questions not asked (or not reported) are the most revealing, by their ommission:

 * Is Aristide free to come and go as he pleases from his barbed-wire enclosed cell?

 * What does Aristide think of the untrue "translation" of his letter by the US Embassy that falsely claimed he had "resigned" when he did not?

And, the most obvious question that any first year journalism student would have known to ask:

 * Is the fact that the Central African Republic keeps him under armed guard and refuses to allow reporters to interview him face to face part of an orchestrated campaign to limit what he can say in public?

I don't know Michael Wines, but someday I hope I get the pleasure of confronting him, face to face, in public, and with witnesses, on the willing role he just eagerly played in a disinformation campaign and an ongoing coup d'etat. For he is just as much complicit in that coup as the dictator in the Central African Republic and the US Ambassador to Haiti.