Same old CIA.

• Position: U.S. Central Intelligence Agency smear campaign against Jean-Bertrand Aristide - Editorial

In the days of gunboat diplomacy, the U.S. Government conducted its foreign interventions with fetching simplicity. We had the Monroe Doctrine, which unilaterally asserted our absolute right to meddle at will in the affairs of any nation in this hemisphere. So if Cuba or Guatemala or the Dominican Republic stepped out of line, we sent in the Marines and installed a government more to our liking. And that was that.

The advent of the Cold War called for new, more subtle tactics even as it widened the arena of U.S. contention in the world. As our Government wrestled with the Soviet Union's for the hearts and minds of people everywhere, we could no longer jeopardize our "democratic" image by imposing our will at bayonet-point, so the new intelligence establishment born in World War II was pressed into covert action. When the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, threatened the interests of the United Fruit Company, the CIA arranged to have him overthrown by military coup. And so it went when Mohammed Mossadegh menaced U.S. oil interests in Iran, and when Salvador Allende proved in Chile that a socialist government could be installed by popular demand.

With the end of the Cold War and the proclamation of a New World Order presumably devoted to democratic values, there was reason to hope that our spies would cease their international meddling. After all, a nation that would send its armed forces to defend nationhood and self-determination in Kuwait would surely refrain from having its secret agents subvert nationhood and self-determination in, say, Haiti.

Or would it?

The recent disclosures about Haiti show how the CIA - despite the end of the Cold War, despite the advent of a new Administration in Washington - is still plying its old tricks. Even as the Clinton Administration put on a show of restoring the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the rightfully elected president of Haiti, the CIA was maneuvering behind the scenes to undermine Aristide and aid the military junta that had ousted him.

Late in October, Brian Latell, a high-level Latin America specialist in the CIA, presented selected members of Congress with a classified report on Aristide that depicted the Haitian leader as a murderer and a psychopath. The report was false, but it was immediately pounced upon, of course, by such stalwart champions of democracy as North Carolina's Senator Jesse Helms, who demanded that Secretary of State Warren Christopher come up with proof that the CIA was mistaken. Meanwhile, the allegations against Aristide were leaked to the press and made headline news everywhere.

In Haiti, the military junta that had overthrown Aristide and was blocking his return made the most of the propaganda coup presented by the CIA. The Haitian officers are, after all, themselves veterans of CIA training and were (and perhaps still are) on the CIA's payroll - a practice that drew this curious endorsement from Representative Robert G. Torricelli, a New Jersey Democrat who sits on the House Intelligence Committee: "The U.S. Government develops relationships with ambitious and bright young men at the beginning of their careers and often follows them through their public service. In includes people in sensitive positions in the current situation in Haiti."

Christopher Hitchens, writing in The Nation, quoted a member of Aristide's entourage: "All the world knows there has been a military coup in Haiti. But who would...