As mentioned in this morning's brief, the U.S. has resumed medevac flights of injured Haitians to Florida hospitals. But I'm surprised how little attention pro football's role in the story has gotten: 

The need to be ready for a mass emergency or disaster at the Super Bowl or Pro Bowl played a part in the decision, as did the fact that South Florida hospitals were getting "saturated" with evacuees and that disaster planners had no specific plan for handling the injured at other hospitals, officials said.

The situation "came to a head" Wednesday night, when the state officially requested that federal officials stop sending medical flights to Florida until a plan was presented, said John Cherry, a spokesman for the state Division of Emergency Management.

The suspension of the military's evacuation flights means that the injured and sick will be treated at makeshift hospitals and clinics set up in devastated Port-au-Prince and other towns on the island, health officials said.

In South Florida, a committee preparing for the two pro football bowls at Sun Life Stadium in Miami Gardens had concerns that South Florida hospitals were growing too full with earthquake victims — and local airports too crowded with planes — to handle a major incident at the games.

A spokesman for the U.S. Army's Southern Command also told the Miami Herald that the flights were being diverted "because of the rising numbers of evacuees and the need for the region to be prepared for upcoming events such as might result from the large crowds at the Pro Bowl and Super Bowl.''

The NFL has been touting its contributions to Haiti relief efforts during games and publicizine the Hatian family ties of Super Bowl players like the Colts' Pierre Garcon and the Saints' Jonathan Vilma. The league's efforts are certainly laudable, but it's still embarassing that the Pro Bowl contributed to Haitians not receiving medical care over the weekend. 

A few days ago, I optimistically hoped that Brazil, which led the U.S. peacekeeping operation in Haiti and lost at least 14 citizens in the earthquake would take a leadership role in the relief effort. But Al Jazeera's Gabriel Elizondo reports that things have gotten tense on the ground between the two countries most invested in the effort -- Brazil and the United States:

Nelson Jobim, Brazil’s defence minister just came back from Haiti and made a point of that saying Brazil would not voluntarily relinquish any of its command duties. Essentially, what he was saying was that Brazil, not the Pentagon, would continue to lead the UN forces.

When pressed, Jobim also admitted that the US military doesn’t take orders from foreign forces.[...]

Brazil - like the US, U.N. and France - is in Haiti for the long haul. Jobim said on Saturday that his country would have a major presence in Haiti for at least the next five years.

Brazil is not only shouldering a big part of the UN role in Haiti, but is also leading the humanitarian efforts, sending cargo planes loaded with supplies to Haiti as fast as they can be loaded. It is also taking aid from neighbouring Uruguay and Paraguay, as well as any other country that wants to donate but can't handle the logistics on their own. 

This, too, is a growing issue. Three Brazilian planes loaded with supplies were held up and not allowed to land in Haiti by the FAA (America’s agency that handles air traffic, which is now in control of airspace in Haiti). Celso Amorim, Brazil’s foreign minister, apparently was so upset about it that he put in a call to Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, and asked that Brazilian aeroplanes be given priority over chartered flights.

Tyler Cowen worries that the Obama's presidency may come to be defined by the chaos in Haiti: 

Obama now stands a higher chance of being a one-term President.  Foreign aid programs are especially unpopular, especially relative to their small fiscal cost.  Have you noticed how Rush Limbaugh and others are already making their rhetoric uglier than usual?  It will be a test of the American populace; at what point will people start whispering that he is "favoring the other blacks"?

Just as it's not easy to pull out of Iraq or Afghanistan, it won't be easy to pull out of Haiti.

Maybe you thought health care was a hard problem.  Maybe you thought that cap and trade would make health care look easy.  This may be the hardest problem yet and it wasn't on anybody's planning ledger.  Obama won't have many allies in this fight either.  A lot of Democratic interest groups might, silently, wish he would forget about the whole thing.

Mass starvation wouldn't look good on the evening news either.  What does it mean to preside over the collapse of a country of more than nine million people?  It's Obama who's about to find out, not the increasingly irrelevant Rene Preval.  Everyone in Haiti is looking to President Obama.

Kevin Drum counters that the U.S. operation in Haiti "both in dollar and military terms, is likely to be small enough that it never becomes a big political flashpoint."

To state the obvious, unlike Iraq and Afghanistan,  the U.S. troops in Haiti aren't under attack from the local population and their presence seems to be generally welcomed. Of course it's too much to expect that the U.S. can singlehandedly build a functional Haitian state or prevent humanitarian catastrophe, and other countries will hopefully step up to shoulder some of the burden, but U.S. resources can be used to alleviate an awful lot of human misery in the weeks ahead and I hope domestic politics won't deter this efforts. In an ideal world, this is what U.S. power should be used for. 

The Miami Herald's Douglas Hanks reports that U.S. commercial flights into Haiti are returning to the United States empty:

Though Spirit, American and other major airlines have used
passenger planes to fly cargo into Port-au-Prince since the quake, the
planes almost always return to the States with hundreds of empty seats,
airline spokesmen said.

After the quake, U.S. authorities
banned commercial air travel from the Port-au-Prince airport, citing
the airport's inability to clear passengers for flights. That screening
includes putting passengers through metal detectors and checking them
against federal terrorist-watch lists....

The empty planes could easily be filled as Americans and others
stuck in Haiti before the quake scramble for seats on departing flights
flown by the military and private relief agencies.

"People are always calling us'' for Haiti flights, Spirit spokeswoman Misty Pinson said. "We're inundated.''

But major carriers use computer systems to clear passengers, and
the Port-au-Prince terminal housing airline operations was severely
damaged in the quake. The carriers also fly large jets -- the Spirit
flight Monday had 145 seats -- that would pose a bigger risk if
hijacked.

Given State clearance, Spirit was able to give seats to 41 U.S. college students and Fox News's Geraldo Riviera (go figure) on Monday. 

I understand that security rules can't be compeltely thrown out in the event of a crisis, but surely some workaround could have been found. Couldn't passengers have been patted down in Port-au-Prince rather than put through a metal detector? Couldn't they have been checked against the watchlist after arriving at their destination? In any event, I'm sure all involved would be willing to assume a slightly higher level of hijack risk given the circumstances.

Preventing people (not named Geraldo) from leaving a disaster area because of these security rules seems completely unreasonable.  

When wars unfold or natural disasters strike, few journalists are required to get as close to the action as photographers, whose work can never be done remotely, via phone call or email. Getty Images' Chris Hondros, who is now in Port au Prince documenting the aftermath of the horrific earthquake, sent these thoughts to FP:

Dazed people walking the streets of Port au Prince keep saying the same thing: "Haiti is dead." And on one level that's true -- this small country has just endured one of the most searing natural disasters in history, and death is everywhere.  Death is on sidewalks, on the roads, in rivers, buried in rubble and noticeable only by its smell.  The scale is so unimaginable that the usual human traditions and courtesies for the dead have been suspended: many thousands of bodies have been collected by backhoe and dumped into mass graves with no more ceremony than the rubble that goes into the same pits.

But admidst the carnage and chaos there have been remarkable glimmers of hope and strength, of heroism and selflessness. I'm sleeping in my truck in the parking lot of a hotel; outside the walls thousands of Haitians, with nowhere else to go, are camping out on the streets.  But as night descends the singing starts, jumping voices sounding through the darkness, spirituals and ancient songs sung from those streets late into the night. I listen to this from inside the truck as I drift to sleep; its jarring and achingly beautiful."

Like Bill Easterly, I think David Brooks goes a bit too far here:

Why is Haiti so poor? Well, it has a history of oppression, slavery and colonialism. But so does Barbados, and Barbados is doing pretty well. Haiti has endured ruthless dictators, corruption and foreign invasions. But so has the Dominican Republic, and the D.R. is in much better shape. Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the same island and the same basic environment, yet the border between the two societies offers one of the starkest contrasts on earth — with trees and progress on one side, and deforestation and poverty and early death on the other.

As Lawrence E. Harrison explained in his book “The Central Liberal Truth,” Haiti, like most of the world’s poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social mistrust. Responsibility is often not internalized. Child-rearing practices often involve neglect in the early years and harsh retribution when kids hit 9 or 10.

We’re all supposed to politely respect each other’s cultures. But some cultures are more progress-resistant than others, and a horrible tragedy was just exacerbated by one of them.

"Dictators, corruption and foreign invasions," it seems to me, vastly understates the political turmoil of Haitian history. Haiti has experienced 34 coups in its history -- an average of one every six years. There's simply no way to develop institutions under those conditions.

Brooks' analysis also seems to assume that all dictators are created equal. While the Dominican Republic's late 20th century dictators Rafael Trujillo (who played a not insignificant role in Haiti's tragic history) and Joaquín Balaguer were certainly brutal, they did at least demonstrate some interest in building that coutry's infrastructure, unlike the Duvaliers whose most lasting contribution to Haiti's infrastructure was probably the  98 percent deforestation that makes Haiti's hurricanes so deadly. 

Unlike Haiti, he Dominican Republic has also had a continuous, if flawed, democracy for the last three decades. Haiti's 2004 Hurricane hit just a month after the coup at Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the interim government was in no position to govern under the best of circumstances. Food riots and the four hurricanes of 2008 followed before the earthquake delivered the knockout punch. Skipping immediately to culture and religion while skipping over other factors, particularly political turmoil, seems far too simplistic. 

As for why Haiti has never had good governance, there's certainly no simple answer, and I think Tyler Cowen is right to ask, "Is it asking too much to wish for an economics [or political science, or journalism] profession that is obsessed with such a question?"

Countries around the world are frantically searching for their citizens in Haiti, but this week's events have been particularly hard on Brazil, which had a big footprint in the country before the quake. At least 14 Brazilian troops were killed in the quake with four more still missing. Brazil is the leader and largest troop contributor to the UN's MINUSTAH peacekeeping force. The famous Brazilian doctor Zilda Arns Neumann -- sometimes called Brazil's Mother Teresa -- was also killed.

But Brazil has also been on the frontlines of the response. In a telling sign of the priority the country is giving the disaster, Brazilian defense minister Nelson Jobim is on the ground in Haiti with a delegation to assess the situation and devise a recovery strategy. President da Silva has been in communication with President Obama and former President Clinton to coordinate the aid effort. The Brazilian government has pledged $15 million in aid and its military cargo planes are flying in supplies. Additionally, Foreign Minsiter Ceslo Anorim is arguing that MINUSTAH's mandate be expanded to assist with the recovery effort.    

With the already rickety Haitian state essentially dealt a knockout punch this week, the country is going to need an unprecedented level of international assistance in the years to come. The United States is understandably taking the lead in the immediate rescue effort, but given its nation-building commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan and history of frequently occupying Haiti, the U.S. may not be the best candidate for the long-term stabilization effort. 

Brazil, on the other hand, is already involved Haitian security, and as others on this site have written,  has been increasingly looking to act as a global player. The Haitian crisis is an opportunity for the rising superpower to take a leadership role in regional security. And lord knows Haiti will need the help.   

Veteran Tunisian Diplomat Hedi Annabi, chief of the U.N. stabilization mission in Haiti, is among those still missing in the wreckage of the U.N. headquarters in Port-au-Prince. Several official sources have reported him dead. The Wall Street Journal's Dispatches blog reprints  recent comments Annabi made about Haiti's upcoming elections, which would have been the first for the country's legislature. In the context of what's happened since, Annabi's remarks are just heart-breaking:

“Success would allow the country to enter a virtuous circle where stability and development are mutually reinforcing,” Mr. Annabi said.

“Haiti is today at a turning point in its history,” Mr. Annabi said on Jan. 7. “We saw the hope of a new departure emerge on the horizon in 2009. It is now up to the Haitians, and only the Haitians, to transform this hope into reality by working together in the greater interests of their country.”

As always, in the wake of such events, it's lamentable that the international community can mobilize millions of dollars in aid after a disaster stikes, but for years allowed the country to fall into a state of disrepair that made the disaster so much worse. Here's hoping that this time the country stays on the international agenda after the rubble is cleared. Annabi's successors are going to have their work cut out for them. 

The State Department has announced that Secretary of State Hillary is cutting short her trip to Asia  "due to the devastating earthquake in Haiti and its severe aftermath." Clinton gave a speech on U.S. Asia Policy in Honolulu earlier today and was expected to travel to Australia, New Guinea, and New Zealand. 

First-person accounts of the "biblical" disaster in Haiti, in the words of U.S. Secretary Hillary Clinton, are starting to filter out, 24 hours after it occurred.

From The Guardian:

"Please take me out, I am dying. I have two children with me," a female voice pleaded with a Reuters journalist from under a collapsed kindergarten in the Canape-Vert district.

Police and rescue vehicles were absent from many areas. "People are trying to dig victims out with flashlights," said Rachmani Domersant, an operations manager with the Food for the Poor charity.

Aftershocks rocked those buildings that still stood, causing fresh panic, but dwindled in power as the night wore on....

Those who could not save the living started taking dead from rubble, a foot here, a hand there, and lined the bodies side by side under a sheet. Survivors peeked under the covers to see if they were friends and relatives.

"The whole city is in darkness. You have thousands of people sitting in the streets with nowhere to go. The traffic is jammed," one eyewitness, Michael Bazile, told CNN. "Everybody is yelling. They are praying. They are crying." As dawn broke people wandered the streets holding hands. Helicopters whirred overhead – the first sign of aid. Thousands crammed into hospitals with fractures and burn injuries.

From an American couple, to CBS via HuffPo: 

Frank Thorp told CBS's "The Early Show" by phone from Haiti on Wednesday that he drove 100 miles to Port-au-Prince once he learned of the quake, and dug for over an hour to free his wife, Jillian, and her co-worker Charles Dietsch. The two were trapped under about a foot of concrete, he said. "It was absolutely terrifying," Thorp said.

Thorp said he was in an area about 6 hours north of the capital when the temblor struck. He got a quick call from his wife telling him she was trapped, and that was all. So he began his long drive toward the devastation.

Meanwhile, the woman's father said, other colleagues were feverishly working to dig the two out as she directed them where to focus the search. Arriving at the destroyed house, Thorp said he saw his wife's hand from under the rubble and heard her tell him to keep it together and just get her out.

"We had to pull bricks and bricks and bricks and wood and doors and metal away for at least an hour before we were able to get her and her co-worker out," he said.

And in CNN: 

Robert Poff, director of disaster services for the Salvation Army in Haiti, added: "Words cannot begin to describe the devastation that has taken place in Port au Prince, Haiti.

"When the earthquake struck, I was driving down the mountain from Petionville (just outside the capital). Our truck was being tossed to and fro like a toy, and when it stopped, I looked out the windows to see buildings "pancaking" down, like I have never witnessed before.

"Traffic, of course, came to a standstill, while thousands of people poured out into the streets, crying, carrying bloody bodies, looking for anyone who could help them. We piled as many bodies (as possible) into the back of our truck, and took them down the hill with us, hoping to find medical attention.

"All of them were older, scared, bleeding, and terrified. It took about 2 hours to go less than 1 mile. Traffic was horrible, devastation was everywhere, and suffering humanity was front and center."

Stories such as these emphasize the importance of today and tomorrow. Disaster experts describe the first 24 to 72 hours as the most crucial to save lives. The United States, United Nations, and other countries and bodies are racing to send emergency search-and-rescue teams to the country -- but the infrastructure was so scant before and so damaged now, it makes it much harder. 

Haiti's president himself seemed bewildered by the devasation when speaking on CNN today -- he mentioned that, with his palace destroyed, he had no idea where he would sleep tonight.

Fox News has the story that the Obama administration is considering housing Haitian refugees at Guantanamo Bay, the detention facility and Naval base the U.S. military keeps in eastern Cuba. The United States has already moved some Americans who were in Port-au-Prince to the island.

It sounds crazy -- but actually isn't the worst idea. Gitmo is the closest U.S. base to Haiti, just 200 miles from Port-au-Prince. The United States has spare capacity, and Haitians desperately need the help.

Plus, in a strange historical recurrence, the detention facility at Gitmo was actually built up to house Haitian refugees during the 1991-1994 Aristide crisis.

Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive says that more than 100,000 might have died due to the earthquake and its aftershocks, calling the death toll "unimaginable."

Emergency services are on the ground and on the way. The United States might move ships, and is sending urban search and rescue teams in a trial for the new, young USAID administrator, Rajiv Shah. President Obama has promised humanitarian support.

Seismologists have predicted the quake in Haiti for years, even if there hasn't been one for more than two centuries -- some even saying it was overdue. Seismologist Roger Musson describes the quake as "the big one." A Haitian newspaper in 2008 published a warning about the possibility of earthquakes in Port-au-Prince; a 2007 study foresaw the earthquake as well.

Reports suggest that a majority of buildings in Port-au-Prince have suffered damage or fallen. Very few of the buildings in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, were up to Western-standard building codes.

Haiti-native Joel Dreyfuss over at our sister publication The Root has an excellent meditative essay on his country, which starts with the withering line, "Some countries are just not lucky." James Ridgeway at Mother Jones has a good article on Bush administration policy towards the country, and criticizes the Obama administration for doing too little as well.

Reuters has an excellent breaking news feed on Haiti; here is a good Twitter feed from people on the ground in the country. Chris Sacca has a good list of ways to help by donating.  

Very troubling reports out of Haiti this morning. The earthquake struck near the country's main population center, Port-au-Prince, and its surrounding suburbs and slums. Elisabeth Debrosse Delatour, the first lady, said much of Port-au-Prince is destroyed. Cell phone service is available on just one of the major networks; the other remains out, as do landlines and electricity. Hospitals, including the Doctors Without Borders surgical center and many other medical facilities, and essential-service plants were severely damaged in the quake.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon calls it a "humanitarian emergency," and countries around the world are racing to deploy emergency aid to the estimated 3 million impacted by the quake -- a 7.0 on the Richter scale, with 13 serious aftershocks (the largest of which was a 5.8). 

The quake also reportedly severely damaged the five-story U.N. mission headquarters in Port-au-Prince. As of this morning, there are reports of five U.N. staff dead and more than one hundred missing, many presumed dead, as the quake struck during the workday.  Hedi Annabi, the U.N. Haiti chief, a Tunisian, is feared dead.  The hotel in which much of the U.N. staff lived was also destroyed.

Update: I've seen this misreported in a few places, so just to clarify. The U.N.'s peacekeeping chief on Haiti, Alain Le Roy, is safe and speaking with the press. The U.N.'s mission chief, Hedi Annabi, has died.