The State Department and I

So finally the whole COHA-Haiti drama appears to be over. More than a month after my piece on Préval was published, the article was taken down from COHA's website due to the negative responses to my criticism of the Aristide government. (Remember, the piece wasn't even about Aristide but Préval.) COHA's director (my boss), Larry Birns, wrote an apologetic piece praising the criticism of me and disassociating himself and the organization from my views. Meanwhile, my original piece is all over the internet anyway, which, for better or for worse, cannot be erased. All in all, I'm happy with the ending. COHA did what it believed was necessary to preserve its reputation, and I had the opportunity to stand by my work. There are two sides to any story, and maybe this was the best possible compromise.

Most interesting, however, was NarcoNews' response to Birns' piece. (NarcoNews, if you remember, put out the original criticism of my work.) In the piece--which, overall, was complimentary of Birns' retraction (and COHA itself) but critical of the writing and editing process that goes on at COHA--the writer, Dan Feder, couldn't resist attacking my work again calling it "...another report full of dishonest rhetoric and innuendo better suited to the State Department than a critical organization purportedly committed to the defense of democracy in the Carribean and Latin America."

Talk about a loaded sentence fragment! First, if Feder believes all of my work was dishonest rhetoric and innuendo, then he might as well check the 99% of my article that dealt with my analysis of the current state of democracy in Haiti, which no one at NarcoNews has addressed. And if anyone's guilty of biased rhetoric and innuendo, that would be the radical, ideologically driven folks at Narco and not me.

Second, and most interestingly, was the comparison between my work and that of the State Department and the suggestion that the State Department isn't committed to democracy. As someone who would love to one day work at the State Department to help promote democracy in our own hemisphere and elsewhere, could I have received a better backhanded compliment? Rather than post online ramblings forever (which is what the people Narco seem content to do), I hope to to be in a position in which I can actually impact international society and support both the strengthening of democracy and America's reputation abroad. What better place to do that than in the State Department?

So thanks, NarcoNews. You might not have realized it, but you made my day. It's only a few Metro stops and a quick transfer from COHA's office to the State Department's headquarters so, hey, you never know.