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January 29, 2010
Oil in Haiti, reasons for the US occupation, Part 2
By Èzili Dantò
An oil company man comes forward in Businessweek to say, suddenly and seemingly unprompted that the Haiti earthquake "may have left clues to Haiti's petroleum reservoirs." HLLN has been documenting for years the reason behind the removal of Pres. Aristide was fear he would nationalize Haiti oil, gas, iridium, gold, uranium, copper, diamond and other resources to elevate the people's living standards.
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I wrote Part 1 of Oil in Haiti as the economic reasons
for the US/UN occupation back in October, 2009. After the earthquake I
questioned whether oil drilling could have triggered the earthquake (Did mining and oil drilling trigger the Haiti earthquake?)
Then suddenly, after spending years hitting myself against Officialdom's colonial rock that kept denying Haiti had significant resources. After being called crazy and un-American for writing that the 2010 earthquake gives the US the perfect disaster-capitalism opportunity to come out from behind the UN and openly occupy Haiti to secure Haiti's oil, strategic location and other riches for the corporatocracy. Just after I wrote about oil drilling causing earthquakes, on the following Tuesday, a veteran oil company man comes forward in Businessweek to say, and one wonders how he can so authoritatively speculate about the area of the faultline without intimate knowledge of the drillings, explorations, Haiti's wellheads and oil map, et al, but nonetheless his sudden, seemingly unprompted REVELATION, is that Haiti lies in an area that has undiscovered amounts of oil, it must have oil and the earthquake "may have left clues" to petroleum reservoirs! Oil that, uhmmm, "could aid economic recovery in the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation, a geologist said." (Haiti Earthquake May Have Exposed Gas, Aiding Economy By Jim Polson, Jan. 26, 2010, Bloomberg.)
Yep, yep he may really mean: "that could aid Haiti's US-occupied economy
recover its strategic oil reserves" for the global elite. No? I could be wrong, but I am
thinking "and the cover up, starts." But I won't say so. Let Stephen Pierce
tell the story:
****************The Jan. 12 earthquake was on a fault line that passes near potential gas reserves, said Stephen Pierce, a geologist who worked in the region for 30 years for companies including the former Mobil Corp. The quake may have cracked rock formations along the fault, allowing gas or oil to temporarily seep toward the surface, he said yesterday in a telephone interview."A geologist, callous as it may seem, tracing that fault zone from Port-au-Prince to the border looking for gas and oil seeps, may find a structure that hasn't been drilled," said Pierce, exploration manager at Zion Oil & Gas Inc., a Dallas- based company that's drilling in Israel. "A discovery could significantly improve the country's economy and stimulate further exploration.
...The Greater Antilles, which includes Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and their offshore waters, probably hold at least 142 million barrels of oil and 159 billion cubic feet of gas, according to a 2000 report by the U.S. Geological Survey. Undiscovered amounts may be as high as 941 million barrels of oil and 1.2 trillion cubic feet of gas, according to the report. Among nations in the northern Caribbean, Cuba and Jamaica have awarded offshore leases for oil and gas development. Trinidad and Tobago, South American islands off the coast of Venezuela, account for most Caribbean oil production, according to the U.S. Energy Department.**************
Valentine successfully claimed $327,304 from the development agency, a sum USAID was itself able to extract from the Haitian government along with $4,396 in interest charges.
According to
Haitian scholar Dr. Georges Michel, the US has known there's oil and
natural gas reserves in Haiti since 1908 and did their explorations in
the 1950s and locked up what they found as "strategic reserves for the
US" to be tapped when Middle Eastern oil became less available. (See, Oil in Haiti by
Dr. Georges Michel) I've been writing for years now that the US has
been trying to get rid of Haiti's democratically elected government
since 1991 so they could get to "their" strategic reserves without any
fear of a populous president nationalizing the oil and gas reserves to
benefit the miserably poor majority in Haiti as has been done in
Venezuela or elsewhere in Latin America. (See, Haiti is full of oil, say Ginette and Daniel Mathurin, where these scientist say there's more oil in Haiti than in Venezuela.) No one has been listening. Not even the white liberals who are such defenders
of Haiti. To the best of my knowledge, other than Haitians, over the
long years before the earthquake, the only non-Haitian observers who
ever paid attention and picked up on our reports and concerns about the
plundering and pillaging of Haiti's riches, were John Maxwell and Chris Scott of CKUT Radio
in Canada.That's it. All the others bought the State Department line
that Haiti was a charity case and had no resources to mention. I
supposed if they acknowleged Haiti could be self-reliant, these
savoirs, wouldn't have a gig to support themselves and their heroic
self-image, right?
Today Haiti has oil and it's all good cause
20,000 troops are down there to secure it and Haiti's other riches
while the vision is to perhaps herd the displaced earthquake victims -
who don't die from their TV-aid - into hastily constructed
pre-fabricated houses and let the ghettos fester as they do in
Kingston, Jamaica, while the areas the whites and Haitian oligarchy
want are developed into tourist havens and all capital is flown out of
Haiti.
Notice where the earthquake fault line is. Its
juxtaposition to the Bay of Port au Prince where the drilling was
taking place and the damage at Kafou Fey's Morne L'Hopital where the
poor built their houses on the mountainside and all around Kafou, near the
epicenter of the earthquake and the Southern coastal towns by the Bay
of Cayes where there's oil according to Haitians and the geologist map
of Haitian resources in the Lavalas white book. Notice how the
earthquake was LOCALIZED to these areas and Port au Prince and never
reached the Dominican Republic and there was no tsunami...
The earthquakes may have just been a large hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" operation designed to release the hydrocarbons from isolated pockets so oil and natural gas could be more easily accessed. Or, perhaps drilling at the existing wellheads in Port au Prince some 10 to 20 miles North of the fault line or offshore in the Bay of Port au Prince may have linked up with existing fractures and interconnected to affect the fault-line and cause the earthquake as an unintended consequence. There have been reports of minor earthquakes in Port au Prince these last few years of very small magnitudes. They could have caused damaged that interconnected with the latest fracking to destabilize the fault line, cause the earthquake.
Haiti straddles one of the world's most active geological zones, where the deepwater plates of three huge structures relentlessly rub against one another--the intersection of the North American, South American and Caribbean tectonic plates.
The rubbing against each other of these underwater structures produces the oils, gas and rare strategic minerals and pushes them up fault lines and cracks in the earth to the surface. The convergence of such plates is what makes the Middle East region so rich in oil and gas. Engdahl, writes:
The vast oil reserves of the Persian Gulf and of the region from the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden are at a similar convergence zone of large tectonic plates, as are such oil-rich zones as Indonesia and the waters off the coast of California. In short, in terms of the physics of the earth, precisely such intersections of tectonic masses as run directly beneath Haiti have a remarkable tendency to be the sites of vast treasures of minerals, as well as oil and gas, throughout the world. (The Fateful Geological Prize Called Haiti)Here's the article I wrote, last year documenting that Haiti had oil and that was the reason for the US/UN forced removal of President Jean Bertrand Aristide. I do so hope, this time, to honor the lives lost and really help protect the remaining survivors of Bush the first and Bush the lesser's two regimes changes in Haiti and now this total occupation, that conscious Americans and all decent folks on this earth, are paying attention and will help us stop this latest travesty.
The just thing for now, is to allow former President Aristide who was kidnapped out of Haiti on a rendition plane by the US Special forces and has been practically under house arrest in South African for 6-years, forbidden first by US Secretary of State Condi Rice and now Hillary Clinton from returning hom, to return to his country. He ought to be returned to Haiti so he may assist Haiti's majority at this agonizing time and help in the relief and rebuilding of the nation. (Go to: Part I, Oil in Haiti and Oil Refinery - an old notion for Fort Liberte as a transshipment terminal for US supertankers )
Don't fall for this hoax. The powers-that-be are already drilling
and for years, HLLN has been pointing to the Lavalas' white book
detailing Haiti's resources as part of the reason for removing
President Aristide and putting in Haitian puppets to empire. Now that
20,000 US troops are in Haiti behind the pretext of humanitarian aid,
oh yeah, by the way the EARTHQUAKE "may have left clues to petroleum reservoirs that could aid economic recovery in the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation, a geologist said"!!!
Never
mind that stealth offshore and on-land drilling may have disturbed the
fault line, those Haitians are Black idiots anyway. Just yesterday I
was called CRAZY for saying Haiti had oil and substantial mineral
resources. But today, today, if the white man says it in Businessweek, it must be true!
Don't fall for the empire's latest spin and clean-up job. Two many defenseless people are still dying behind this earthquake
and classquake. Too many long-suffering flesh and blood who won't get
rescue, recovery, relief and rebuilding, but the cold steel of military
occupation.
Ezili Dantò of HLLN
***********************
BACKGROUND INFO
Haiti's Riches
Digging up Haiti
Recommended HLLN Links (Energy and Mining in Haiti): The wealthy, powerful and well-armed are robbing the Haitian people blind
The Fateful Geological Prize Called Haiti by F. William Engdahl, Global Research "Behind the smoke, rubble and unending drama of human tragedy in the hapless Caribbean country, a drama is in full play for control of what geophysicists believe may be one of the world's richest zones for hydrocarbons-oil and gas outside the Middle East, possibly orders of magnitude greater than that of nearby Venezuela...The regions of convergence of such plates are also areas where vast volumes of oil and gas can be pushed upwards from the Earth's mantle."
It
is critical to note that, more than half a century ago, a group of
Russian and Ukrainian geophysicists, working in state secrecy,
confirmed that hydrocarbons originated deep in the earth's mantle under
conditions similar to a giant burning cauldron at extreme temperature
and pressure. They demonstrated that, contrary to US and accepted
Western "mainstream' geology, hydrocarbons were not the result of dead
dinosaur detritus concentrated and compressed and somehow transformed
into oil and gas millions of years ago, nor of algae or other
biological material.[6]
The Russian and Ukrainian geophysicists
then proved that the oil or gas produced in the earth's mantle was
pushed upwards along faults or cracks in the earth as close to the
surface as pressures permitted. The process was analogous to the
production of molten lava in volcanoes. It means that the ability to
find oil is limited, relatively speaking, only by the ability to
identify deep fissures and complex geological activity conducive to
bringing the oil out from deep in the earth. It seems that the waters
of the Caribbean, especially those off Cuba and its neighbor Haiti, are
just such a region of concentrated hydrocarbons (oil and gas) that have
found their way upwards close to the surface, perhaps in a magnitude
comparable to a new Saudi Arabia.[7]
Haiti, a new Saudi Arabia? (The Fateful Geological Prize Called Haiti .)
Human Rights Lawyer, Èzili Dantò is dedicated to correcting the media lies and colonial narratives about Haiti. An award winning playwright, a performance poet, author and lawyer, Èzili Dantò is founder of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network, runs the Èzili Dantò website, listserve, eyewitness project, FreeHaitiMovement, the on-line journal, Haitian Perspectives and Zili Dlo, an Èzili Network project for clean water, renewable power, cultural education and skills transfer for Haiti. In 2018, Èzili was an honoree, Connecticut Women Hall of Fame.