The case of Capt. Lawrence P. Rockwood

By Dan Coughlin, in Haiti Progres,
Vol. 12, no. 51, 20 March 1995

The incessant drone of Blackhawk helicopters began blanketing Port-au-Prince well before dawn that day, much earlier than usual. By daybreak, the reason became clear. Thousands of heavily armed US soldiers, backed up by armored vehicles and some two dozen M-551 Sheridan tanks with slogans like Angel of Death painted on their rotating cannons, had taken up key positions in the city -- major intersections, gas stations, hotels, government buildings, and around the bourgeoisie's private property. The message coming from the US high command was unmistakable. They were prepared for the worst, because this Sept. 30, like that three years earlier, promised to be eventful.

It certainly was for Captain Lawrence P. Rockwood, a 36-year-old military counter-intelligence officer with the US Army's 10th Mountain Division, the main force deployed to Haiti on Sept. 19, 1994. He finished his daily intelligence summary and, as usual, clocked off his 12-hour evening shift at eight in the morning. But before getting some rest in a converted warehouse in Port-au-Prince's assembly zone, the principle US Army base in Haiti, Rockwood filed a formal complaint with the division's Inspector General, an investigative body. He charged his immediate commanders with criminal negligence for allowing gross human rights violations, including murder, to continue unabated in the city. For an officer in my position to levy a complaint against his own command was pretty much a career ending move, Rockwood later recalled.

But he felt he had no choice. He worked in the human intelligence section of commander Gen. David Meade's Joint Intelligence Center (JIC). Some 70 reports crossed his desk each day describing abductions, beatings, rapes, robberies and murder in what another intelligence officer noted as very, very graphic detail. Some of these atrocities, Rockwood learned, occurred right in front of US forces. The intelligence reports also made repeated references to rights abuses at some five prisons or confinement areas in and around Port-au-Prince, including Fort Dimanche and Haiti's largest prison, the National Penitentiary.

Feeding his growing concern about the prison conditions was a Sept. 27 account from US Special Forces in Haiti's south. It told of barbaric conditions found in a Les Cayes prison - dozens of emaciated men, some with skin falling off their backs, wasting away from hunger and illness in a tiny 12 x 4 meter cell. The Washington Post reported that several prisoners were only skin and bones, barely able to walk, that one man's testicles were almost rotted off from lack of proper medical care and another's buttocks had all but disappeared from lying unmoved for weeks. One prison guard, Mondelus Norelus, known as Saddam Hussein, made one prisoner cut off part of his ear and eat it. He then carved his initials on the buttocks of the prisoner.

Reading the daily horrors in his intelligence reports and realizing that US forces could easily stop atrocities as in Les Cayes, Rockwood had repeatedly asked his superiors to take some action against the prisons in Port-au-Prince, and, more generally, to stem the wave of attacks on civilians. He even went outside his own direct superiors -- to the chaplain, the command's legal office, the UN Military Observer, the US Special Forces, and the Civil Military Operations Command Center, which launched joint hearts and minds operations with non-governmental organizations and UN agencies. The best that anyone said was that they could do nothing about it. I just don't see any logic to that, Rockwood said. How you can convince anyone that if you have an armed force around a facility [like the National Penitentiary] that you're not responsible for what's going on inside that facility.

Rockwood also discovered that his reports on the deteriorating human rights conditions in Port-au-Prince never filtered up through the intelligence bureaucracy to his superiors. In Haiti, five sections composed the JIC, or J-2, where Rockwood worked: image intelligence such as photographs; signal intelligence, including electronic communications; human intelligence, Rockwood's domain, which sent teams to scour the city; security management which guarded the intelligence gathering and dissemination process; and all source analysis which combined all sections, plus intelligence from civilian agencies like the CIA, into a Daily Intelligence Summary (DISUM) for the military high command.

But much of Rockwood's reporting on human rights violations never made it into the DISUM. Rockwood protested to the DISUM coordinator and to his immediate superior, Lt. Col. Frank Bragg. Although acting sympathetic, Bragg told him to keep things in perspective about Haiti. One hundred percent of what you hear don't believe and 50 percent of what you see don't believe. In other words, the stories of violence and repression were grossly exaggerated, if not false, so they could be fairly well discounted. This was the very same line developed by Brian Latell, the top CIA official who spearheaded the smear campaign against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide during his exile.

By the morning of Sept. 30, when he left work, Rockwood had reached a crossroads. I found it difficult to conclude, he later wrote to Gen. Meade, that the United States Government could not to some degree be held ethically, morally or legally responsible for the human rights violations being carried out . . . by Haitian military police whose activities, under an agreement of 'cooperation,' were being supervised by US forces. He complained to the Inspector General, charging his command with subversion of the President's primary mission intent concerning human rights, and returned to his quarters. After a little sleep, some prayer and meditation, Rockwood decided to act on his own. He left a note on his pillow, saying that he had done everything in his power to correct something that was clearly illegal. Placing an American flag at the bottom of the note, he wrote, Take back the patch, it's got unnecessary blood on it. He loaded his M-16, gathered up his combat gear, dusted off his feet, and headed for the door.

At about 5 p.m., Rockwood left the assembly zone, following the same route through the wire fence that children had been using to sneak in and out of what was now a US military base. He decided to head towards the National Penitentiary, since it seemed the most logical site to inspect for human rights abuses, and the easiest to find.

But Rockwood didn't know that a street alongside the Penitentiary had been the site of a pitched battle earlier that day. Attaches and members of the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH) had fired on marchers commemorating the third anniversary of the coup d'etat, leaving some 10 people dead and dozens wounded. Thus, nobody would take him even near the Penitentiary, and he could only negotiate a taxi ride to the Champs de Mars. He walked in full battle dress from that square toward the prison, but passing the General Hospital, a wounded man came up to him. He was shot through the shoulder and he had a white tunic on, very starched, and his blood was like clay all over his body, Rockwood said. He still had a lot of strength. He grabbed my web gear and picked me up and yelled at me. I was amazed he could do that with a bullet wound in his shoulder.

Arriving at the Penitentiary, Rockwood put his boot in the open front gate where soldiers were talking and told the warden, a major with the Forces Armees d'Haiti (FADH), that he was there to complete an accountability of the prison. The warden claimed that he didn't have the key and couldn't show Rockwood the entire prison until the next morning. But he did lead Rockwood to the military prisoners, who were in relatively good condition. On their way back to the warden's office, Rockwood spotted a dim light at the end of a corridor, and yet more cells. There, in what he was told was the infirmary, Rockwood saw about two dozen emaciated prisoners crammed into a small cell. I could not see if they were tortured because it was too dark and I couldn't get that close to them, Rockwood said. But based on their skeletal condition I assumed they were probably suffering from wasting conditions like tuberculosis.

Alarmed at what he saw, Rockwood told the prison warden that he would wait there until the next morning. In the meantime, he tried to phone his superiors to let them know his location. Unable to reach his command, Rockwood asked the prison warden to have the FADH headquarters tell US forces where he was.

A short time later, Major Roland Spencer Lane, a US military attache at the Embassy, received a call from Col. Antoine Atouriste, the head of the special coordinating staff with US forces. Lane drove to the penitentiary and met with Rockwood and the Haitian prison warden, who spoke English and was trained at the US infantry school in Fort Benning, Georgia. Rockwood said that the two appeared to know each other and talked about their families. Lane eventually ordered Rockwood to leave, and Rockwood returned to his base at the industrial park where he was told to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. On Oct. 2, Rockwood was shipped back to Fort Drum, NY, the home base of the 10th Mountain Division. There, he faced another psychiatric evaluation, which he again passed.

Seventy-two hours after he was back home, his superiors told Rockwood to resign from the Army or face court martial. He refused the deal and now faces charges that he disobeyed orders, left his appointed place of duty, and behaved disrespectfully to a superior officer. If found guilty, he could receive up to 10 years in military prison. Despite what Rockwood saw in the National Penitentiary, the US military failed to inspect the prison until late November.

At about 5 p.m. on Sept. 30th, Capt. Rockwood left US military headquarters located at the Port-au-Prince assembly zone near the airport. He followed the same route through the wire fence that children had been using to sneak in and out of what was now a US military base. He decided to head towards the National Penitentiary, since it seemed the most logical site to inspect for human rights abuses, and the easiest to find.

But Rockwood didn't know that a street alongside the Penitentiary had been the site of a pitched battle earlier that day. Attaches and members of the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH) had fired on marchers commemorating the third anniversary of the coup d'etat, leaving some 10 people dead and dozens wounded. Thus, nobody would take him even near the Penitentiary, and he could only negotiate a taxi ride to the Champs de Mars. He walked in full battle dress from that square toward the prison, but passing the General Hospital, a wounded man came up to him. He was shot through the shoulder and he had a white tunic on, very starched, and his blood was like clay all over his body, Rockwood said. He still had a lot of strength. He grabbed my web gear and picked me up and yelled at me. I was amazed he could do that with a bullet wound in his shoulder.

Arriving at the Penitentiary, Rockwood put his boot in the open front gate where soldiers were talking and told the warden, a major with the Forces Armees d'Haiti (FADH), that he was there to complete an accountability of the prison. The warden claimed that he didn't have the key and couldn't show Rockwood the entire prison until the next morning. But he did lead Rockwood to the military prisoners, who were in relatively good condition. On their way back to the warden's office, Rockwood spotted a dim light at the end of a corridor, and yet more cells. There, in what he was told was the infirmary, Rockwood saw about two dozen emaciated prisoners crammed into a small cell. I could not see if they were tortured because it was too dark and I couldn't get that close to them, Rockwood said. But based on their skeletal condition I assumed they were probably suffering from wasting conditions like tuberculosis.

Alarmed at what he saw, Rockwood told the prison warden that he would wait there until the next morning. In the meantime, he tried to phone his superiors to let them know his location. Unable to reach his command, Rockwood asked the prison warden to have the FADH headquarters tell US forces where he was.

A short time later, Major Roland Spencer Lane, a US military attache at the Embassy, received a call from Col. Antoine Atouriste, the head of the special coordinating staff with US forces. Lane drove to the penitentiary and met with Rockwood and the Haitian prison warden, who spoke English and was trained at the US infantry school in Fort Benning, Georgia. Rockwood said that the two appeared to know each other and talked about their families. Lane eventually ordered Rockwood to leave, and Rockwood returned to his base at the industrial park where he was told to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. On Oct. 2, Rockwood was shipped back to Fort Drum, NY, the home base of the 10th Mountain Division. There, he faced another psychiatric evaluation, which he again passed.

Seventy-two hours after he was back home, his superiors told Rockwood to resign from the Army or face court martial. He refused the deal and now faces charges that he disobeyed orders, left his appointed place of duty, and behaved disrespectfully to a superior officer. If found guilty, he could receive up to 10 years in military prison. Despite what Rockwood saw in the National Penitentiary, the US military failed to inspect the prison until late November.

A 15-year Army veteran and scion of a military family stretching back to the US Civil War, Capt. Rockwood is not the type of soldier that would normally break ranks with the military. But from Rockwood's perspective, it was the US Army that was breaking ranks with military history and tradition. On his desk, he keeps photographs of three officers who, for him, define the meaning of military professionalism and, he says, quoting the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the moral attributes common to the ideal officer. One is Chief Warrant Officer Hugh C. Thompson, a helicopter pilot who, during the My Lai massacre in Vietnam on 16 March 1968, ordered his gunner to fire on US forces attacking Vietnamese villagers to prevent atrocities. Instead of being court martialled, the US military awarded Thompson a medal for valor.

The other two photographs are of Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, a Nazi military officer who led an assassination attempt against Adolph Hitler in July 1944, and Col. Georges Picquart, a French intelligence chief. He was court martialled and imprisoned for trying to expose a concerted anti-Semitic effort by the French military, supported by the Catholic Church and monarchists, to railroad Capt. Alfred Dreyfus on espionage charges.

Despite what he calls aberrations in Vietnam and Haiti, Capt. Rockwood sees the US military as the most effective enforcer of human rights this planet has ever known. Much of his unbridled faith in the US Army stems from his upbringing. His father served in World War II, and the young Rockwood was imbued with the post-War ethos of Americans as liberators. His father took him to Dachau, the site of a Nazi concentration camp in southern Germany. My father emphasized to me the role of cynicism and blind obedience to authority played in their creation, Rockwood explained. He told me, 'These camps were created for those whose only crime was to have been born.'

The contradiction between what Rockwood was taught about the US military and what he saw in Haiti, his first operational posting as a soldier, propelled him to act on Sept. 30. But he was also motivated his spirituality. Raised as a Catholic, Rockwood attended a Capuchin-Franciscan seminary as a teenager. Slowly, he began to face a spiritual crisis. I really didn't feel [Christianity] could satisfactorily answer questions like: How did Auschwitz happen? That was a major thing I had to work with in my spirituality and, finally, the concept of evil didn't make sense to me. If you study the lives of people, like the concentration camp commandants, the problem is they are not evil. They're your next door neighbor.

He turned to Tibetan Buddhism, where he found spiritual fulfillment and a world view that could marry his military and moral commitments. Where warfare remains 'humanized,' wrote the Dalai Lama in a passage that Rockwood is fond of quoting, where it remains in touch with true human feelings, it is much safer. When the warrior forgets the suffering of others in order to achieve some small benefit, that is really dangerous.

One day after the UN Security Council vote authorizing a US military intervention of Haiti, Rockwood received orders to begin planning for an intervention in Haiti. He campaigned to put human rights at the top of the 10th Mountain Division's agenda. Many soldiers at Fort Drum were unenthusiastic about a mission to Haiti, but Rockwood was eager. He had not been to Somalia, Saudi Arabia or Panama, like many of his colleagues, and plunged into his work with vigor.

But the intelligence summaries he was getting from the Pentagon were decidedly narrow and misinformed. In some cases, Rockwood had to turn to open sources, like books, newspapers, or magazines. He even read up on voodoo powder in Wade Davis' The Serpent and the Rainbow, and then assured his worried commanders that zombi dust would not require troops to carry gas masks, a move that the Pentagon was seriously considering. Worse still, human rights reports covering the coup period were vague and apparently confused about what was political violence and criminal violence. The reports did not contain any specific or concrete information on human rights abuses by the Haitian army and police, nor their paramilitary allies. By contrast, reports regarding mob violence during Aristide's seven month tenure in 1991 contained great detail, including, Rockwood later joked, everything from the grid coordinates of the alleged assaults to the wind strength at the time.

But even if Rockwood had received accurate intelligence reports, the information was categorized in ways to obscure the nature of the Haitian struggle. For example, Rockwood had to classify intelligence into five categories, or PIRs (Priority Information Requests), one of which was Haitian-on-Haitian violence. The phrase, reminiscent of the expression black on black violence concocted to describe South African violence in the mid-1980s, seeks to equate the two sides of the Haitian struggle (e.g. FRAPH vs. Lavalas) and thereby conceal both the reality of Haiti and the responsibility of US proxies.

In short, Pentagon generals were not concerned about the murder and torture of the Haitian people, and Rockwood met stiff resistance in his attempt follow the Buddhist precept to remember the suffering of others. When he raised the need to prevent putschist arson attacks against the population, like one in Cite Soleil in early 1994, his commanders discounted the worry. Only when he argued that smoke from a fire in Cite Soleil could cut visibility around nearby Port-au-Prince airport and endanger US aircraft was his concern taken seriously. Similarly, on the question of weapons, the US Army command was planning to register guns and give its imprimatur for the FRAPH, Macoutes, and attaches to keep their arms, thereby making them formal extensions of the US military. But Rockwood, joined by colleagues fresh from Somalia where that policy was implemented, protested vigorously. Some US soldiers had been killed by authorized gun holders in the East African country, and the US Navy's Atlantic Command, which was planning the intervention, eventually backed off their proposed weapons registration program.

Once in Port-au-Prince on Sept. 24, Capt. Rockwood found that the US Army refused to do anything about ongoing rights abuses and was, in fact, supporting the Haitian army and police. There was, of course, one caveat - any alleged attacks on the Haitian bourgeoisie received the US military high command's immediate attention. In one case, the US command asked repeatedly for more information on a report that someone from an elite family was abducted or killed in Cap Haitien. But the fact that we were receiving reports that 10 people a night being killed in Cite Soleil was not significant. I was very troubled that the command was indifferent to the lives of the Haitian poor and concerned about the lives of the Haitian rich, Rockwood said.

Another concern Rockwood had was that the 10th Mountain Division was heading inexorably toward a major confrontation with the Haitian people. Even before US forces entered Haiti, it was an open secret that US policy makers were more alarmed about what the Haitian masses would do rather than the possible hostile actions of their erstwhile allies - the Haitian Army, the CIA-created FRAPH, and assorted attaches and Macoutes. Indeed, the US was worried about preserving the Haitian army. According to the Feb. 23 Wall Street Journal, a classified US Political-Military Operations Plan discussed ways the US would woo back defeated or deserting Haitian troops. And writing before the US intervention, journalist Allan Nairn reported that US planners were alarmed about the possibility of US troops confronting organized slum dwellers, an encounter that would have 'obvious consequences' for the unarmed Haitians. Moreover, US planners, worried about their ability to use their power to maintain street-level dominance, considered banning demonstrations and detaining civilians en masse.

As Sept. 30 approached, more and more people hit the Port-au-Prince streets, threatening US power. US military officials were, according to Rockwood, very, very concerned about the demonstrations on Sept. 29th and 30th. For his part, Rockwood was horrified with the US military's planned response, which was, in short, a massacre. I did not understand what the rationale was for US forces to engage a mass of Haitians with the use of force, Rockwood later recalled. What thing on the ground in Port-au-Prince was worth an incident of that historical significance to happen? What was the criteria for us using that type of force, of American forces opening fire on Haitian civilians?

The grenade attack on La Saline Boulevard on Sept. 29, though, was a pivotal event. Leaving at least eight Haitians dead, and nearly 70 wounded, the attack guaranteed that the Sept. 30th demonstration would be much smaller and, therefore, not pose a substantial threat to US military objectives. (Given the effect of the attack and that some of the alleged perpetrators picked up by the US military were released, one might speculate about US foreknowledge of and role in the incident.) Furthermore, Rockwood argues that the attack woke up some in the US high command to the danger posed by the Haitian army and their paramilitary allies. By chance, US forces were near the grenade assault, and US commanders reasoned that if a similar assault reoccurred, US casualties might result. Only then did the 10th Mountain Division move to somewhat restrict the possibilities of such attacks.

Nevertheless, the main goal of the US military was to avoid casualties and protect Haitian government installations, the Haitian army, and the rich quarters of Haiti. Thus on Sept. 30, the US virtually evacuated downtown Port-au-Prince. Whether the move was a set-up, or simply a desire to stay out of the way when the Duvalierists would attack the march commemorating the coup, is not yet clear. What is clear is that US forces allowed the massacre to happen. As the FRAPH gunmen were shooting dozens of marchers, a US patrol appeared on one of the chaotic streets. As the demonstrators cheered the arrival of the peace keepers, the patrol quickly turned around and sped away from the scene.

Such hypocrisy was what pushed Captain Lawrence Rockwood to the edge that day in Port-au-Prince. The gulf between rhetoric and reality of the US mission became too wide for him to take. His challenging of the lie is what the US Army cannot tolerate, not his alleged insubordination.

Rockwood is emblematic of an ideological crisis facing the US military in the post-Cold War period. Without the Soviet Union, the US strategists must improvise crusades against new bogeymen, who usually were once in their employ. But today's arguments to justify war, like humanitarian intervention, are not convincing for US soldiers, their families, or the American people in general. With soldiers who are unwilling to die, the US has an army which cannot really fight or take casualties, whether in Haiti, Somalia, Kuwait, or Panama. Thus, though on the offensive, US imperialism is very weak, and a challenge like Rockwood's weakens it further. One Rockwood can be punished, but what if there are two, three, or four?

The threat that Rockwood poses to the US military is not lost on Ramsey Clark, the former US Attorney General, who is Rockwood's lawyer. You have to assume that the military was embarrassed that a US Army officer would act to protect human rights, Clark notes. At a Feb. 22 pre-court martial hearing in Fort Drum, NY, Clark argued the point before a military judge. This is a case of enormous importance for the US Army, he said, urging, like many of the solidarity activists that packed the courtroom that cold winter day, the US military to drop the case. Does the army really want to be identified with court martialling a man who made a personal effort to protect human rights in a country that has one of the worst human rights records in the hemisphere over the past 30 or 40 years?

Indeed, the trial of Captain Rockwood is the trial of the US military. Like David before Goliath, Rockwood's courage and honesty to challenge the duplicity of the US humanitarian intervention, no matter what the cost, offers a lesson about the power and value of standing on principle, and shows the quandary such an act presents to even the most powerful military on earth.