NOVANEWS
A Parting Human Rights Crime
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR and ALEXANDER COCKBURN
If ever there was a couple
who left a sour taste in the mouth by the manner of their parting it was surely
Bill and Hillary Clinton. From time to time, against our better judgment, we’ve tried to summon some sympathy for them, and time after time they’ve brusquely brought us back to Earth
with some bleak reminder of their all-round rottenness.
Try Colombia. Less than 48 hours before Bill Clinton quit the White House, with a legal deal covering his own ass, his administration announced that it would employ a highly questionable legal interpretation of “Plan Colombia”–the $1.3 billion in aid going mostly to the Colombian military. The interpretation allowed the administration to dodge entirely any certification or waiver of human rights conditions attached to the aid, thus circumventing the whole certification process in providing money to the Colombian government.
Now, these human rights certifications were the object of fierce lobbying by human rights groups all through the year 2000. After the certification was added, proponents of the plan tried to undermine human rights stipulations by adding the “waiver” option to the aid. You can argue that the experience of similar lobbying in the 1980s over aid to Central America should have instructed the groups in the folly of expecting any administration to honor such commitments, but this doesn’t diminish the squalor and cynicism of what the Clinton team did in its dying hours.
In August of 2000, Clinton waived four of the five human rights criteria laid out by Congress to release the first chunk of $781.5 million. A certification or waiver was also required for the second installment of $56.4 million. Two Democratic senators, Paul Wellstone and Tom Harkin, called on Clinton as late as last week to reject a waiver for the second slice because the Colombian government had “failed to make significant progress” on human rights.
But the State Deptartment’s Richard Boucher said the Clinton administration had decided that because the second slice of aid was not included in “regular funds,” but rather in an emergency spending bill, the certification and waiver process did not apply.
With virtually no opportunity for the human rights community to respond, the Clinton administration effectively created a way to avoid the whole question of human rights in Colombia.
As Jack Laun of the Colombia Support Network said bitterly, “This unilateral interpretation trivializes the role of Congress in allocating funds and undermines the work of countless human rights organizations that have testified time and again to the need to consider human rights abuses in Colombia.”
There’s bipartisanship for you, in the deeper sense. George Bush the Elder left office in 1993, having signed Christmas pardons for Reagan-Bush era officials who’d broken the law by breaching congressional prohibition on aid to the Nicaraguan Contras. Here we have Clinton and Madeleine Albright doing a last-minute end run around a modest congressional roadblock against sending U.S. dollars destined in considerable part to Colombia’s paramilitary death squads.
One final parting shot, taken while no one was watching, just to show you where they really stand.
This is a fragment from a book project that Alex and I had been working on about the lingering influence of the Clintons after the White House years, tentatively titled Clintons in Exile, that may yet see the light of day.
Try Colombia. Less than 48 hours before Bill Clinton quit the White House, with a legal deal covering his own ass, his administration announced that it would employ a highly questionable legal interpretation of “Plan Colombia”–the $1.3 billion in aid going mostly to the Colombian military. The interpretation allowed the administration to dodge entirely any certification or waiver of human rights conditions attached to the aid, thus circumventing the whole certification process in providing money to the Colombian government.
Now, these human rights certifications were the object of fierce lobbying by human rights groups all through the year 2000. After the certification was added, proponents of the plan tried to undermine human rights stipulations by adding the “waiver” option to the aid. You can argue that the experience of similar lobbying in the 1980s over aid to Central America should have instructed the groups in the folly of expecting any administration to honor such commitments, but this doesn’t diminish the squalor and cynicism of what the Clinton team did in its dying hours.
In August of 2000, Clinton waived four of the five human rights criteria laid out by Congress to release the first chunk of $781.5 million. A certification or waiver was also required for the second installment of $56.4 million. Two Democratic senators, Paul Wellstone and Tom Harkin, called on Clinton as late as last week to reject a waiver for the second slice because the Colombian government had “failed to make significant progress” on human rights.
But the State Deptartment’s Richard Boucher said the Clinton administration had decided that because the second slice of aid was not included in “regular funds,” but rather in an emergency spending bill, the certification and waiver process did not apply.
With virtually no opportunity for the human rights community to respond, the Clinton administration effectively created a way to avoid the whole question of human rights in Colombia.
As Jack Laun of the Colombia Support Network said bitterly, “This unilateral interpretation trivializes the role of Congress in allocating funds and undermines the work of countless human rights organizations that have testified time and again to the need to consider human rights abuses in Colombia.”
There’s bipartisanship for you, in the deeper sense. George Bush the Elder left office in 1993, having signed Christmas pardons for Reagan-Bush era officials who’d broken the law by breaching congressional prohibition on aid to the Nicaraguan Contras. Here we have Clinton and Madeleine Albright doing a last-minute end run around a modest congressional roadblock against sending U.S. dollars destined in considerable part to Colombia’s paramilitary death squads.
One final parting shot, taken while no one was watching, just to show you where they really stand.
This is a fragment from a book project that Alex and I had been working on about the lingering influence of the Clintons after the White House years, tentatively titled Clintons in Exile, that may yet see the light of day.
