The US has appointed LTG P. K. Keen to head the Haiti mission.
Lt. Gen. P. K. Keen, the deputy director of the military's Southern Command, has been tapped to lead a new joint task force devoted to Haiti. Gen. Keen, who is already in the country, will be charged with managing the half-dozen large ships and roughly 8,000 military personnel who will soon be in or near Haiti, which was devastated by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake that may have killed tens of thousands of people.
Gen. Keen will take his orders from Kenneth Merten, the American ambassador in Port-au-Prince. State Department officials said the U.S. troops that are deploying to Haiti will work closely with the 9,000-member United Nations security force there but remain solely under American command.
The Americans aren't the only ones coming in to help, either. The Canadians are inbound, too.
Nine firefighters from Canadian Forces Base Trenton arrived Thursday in Port-au-Prince and were told to prepare to begin the searches. Military medical personnel, who had so far focused on the Canadian embassy in the battered capital of Haiti caring for injured Canadians and transporting them to the airport for flights back home, were also getting ready to venture out into the city to sift through the shattered buildings.
The preparations come as Canadian officials try to grapple with the exact number of missing or unaccounted Canadians. Foreign Affairs estimated that there were about 6,000 Canadians living in Haiti at the time of the earthquake.
By: Brant
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