What Did The President Know,

What Did The President Know, And When Did He Know It? - A foreign paper reports that the President knew about one of the grisliest, most horrific acts of terrorism in history, but sat on information:

US president Bill Clinton's administration knew Rwanda was being engulfed by genocide in April 1994 but buried the information to justify its inaction, classified documents made available for the first time reveal.

Whoops. President Clinton, I mean.

Senior officials privately used the word genocide within 16 days of the start of the killings, but chose not to do so publicly because the president had already decided not to intervene.

Intelligence reports obtained using the US Freedom of Information Act show the cabinet and almost certainly the president knew of a planned "final solution to eliminate all Tutsis" before the slaughter reached its peak.

It took Hutu death squads three months from April 6 to murder about 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus and at each stage accurate, detailed reports were reaching Washington policymakers.

The documents undermine claims by Mr Clinton and his officials that they did not fully appreciate the scale and speed of the killings.

"It's powerful proof that they knew," said Alison des Forges, a Human Rights Watch researcher and authority on the genocide.

Can you imagine how they'd be howling if it had been Bush?

The National Security Archive, an independent non-governmental research institute based in Washington, went to court to obtain the material.

It discovered that a secret CIA briefing circulated to Mr Clinton, his vice-president, Al Gore, and hundreds of officials included almost daily reports on Rwanda. One, dated April 23, 1994, said rebels would continue fighting to "stop the genocide, which . . . is spreading south".

Three days later the secretary of state, Warren Christopher, and other officials were told of "genocide and partition" and of declarations of a "final solution to eliminate all Tutsis".

However, the administration did not publicly use the word genocide until May 25 and even then diluted its impact by saying "acts of genocide".

Ms des Forges said: "They feared this word would generate public opinion which would demand some sort of action and they didn't want to act."

Many analysts and historians fault Washington and other Western countries not just for failing to support the token force of overwhelmed United Nations peacekeepers but also for failing to speak out more forcefully during the slaughter.

Mr Clinton has apologised for those failures but the declassified documents undermine his defence of ignorance.

On a visit to the Rwandan capital, Kigali, in 1998 Mr Clinton apologised for not acting quickly enough or immediately calling the crimes genocide.

It probably wouldn't have been nuanced enough.

The real question isn't necessarily "why was Clinton so pusillanimous" - they knew there was little US interest in the area beyond humanitarianism. Furthermore, they knew there was very little the military could have done. And they could still smell the smoke from Mogadishu (which only became a fully-realized debacle because they turned tail and fled, but let's leave that aside for a moment). It's not even "was he right or wrong".

The real question is, in these days when the liberal media is spending so much effort to plump up the rapidly-deflating Richard Clarke story, why are we needing to rely on foreign media to get these stories?

Posted by Mitch at April 2, 2004 06:11 AM