Maxine Waters: Bush Official a 'Haiti Hater'

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., charged Monday that Bush Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega was a "Haiti hater" who had engineered a "coup d'etat" to depose failed Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

"Mr. Noriega at the State Department ... he is behind the whole plan," Waters told CNN. "He is known as a Haiti hater and he's in charge of this policy."

The flamboyant one-time head of the Congressional Black Caucus complained that Noriega had a long record of "undermining Haiti, of denying them funding."

Waters said the media hadn't been paying enough attention to Noriega, telling CNN: "You guys ought to find out his history and who he is. ... You really need to dig us up some information here."

She said she personally spoke to both Aristide and his wife on Monday and that Aristide had told her he had been driven from power by U.S. diplomats backed by a phalanx of Marine guards.

In a later interview with the Associated Press, Aristide described the group as "white American, white military."

Asked whether she had any reason to doubt Aristide's account, Rep. Waters said she trusted him more than she trusted her own government.

"Listen, I tend to doubt the State Department, and I tend to doubt Mr. Noriega and people who have been in charge of advancing this policy," she told CNN.

"I find that I've been lied to over and over again. ... So I have a lot of questions of my own government at this point."

Bush officials have called the allegation that Aristide was kidnapped "absurd."

Last week, Florida Congresswoman Corrine Brown complained to Noriega that the Bush administration had "a bunch of white men" running its Haiti policy. When Noriega reminded her that he was a Mexican-American, she responded, "You all look alike to me."

Brown's subsequent apology did little to mollify Texas Rep. Henry Bonilla, a key Bush congressional ally of Mexican descent, who is calling for Rep. Brown to resign.

"It is appalling that someone at this level of government would use racist language and not answer for it," Bonilla told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram on Saturday. "If a Republican had made such derogatory, insulting and discriminatory remarks, there would be a firestorm of outrage."

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