Four years after the killings, Clinton told the Rwandans (and the world) that he had not tried to stop the genocide because he had not known what was truly occurring.
the National Security Archive, an independent, nongovernmental research institute that collects and analyzes government records, recently released a report that provides more evidence for the case that Clinton lied to the people of Rwanda.
Clinton stopped at the airport in Kigali, Rwanda, and issued an apology. Sort of. Speaking of those nightmarish months in the spring of 1994, he said, “All over the world there were people like me sitting in offices who did not fully appreciate the depth and speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.” He acknowledged that the United States and the international community had not moved quickly enough in response to the horrors under way. To emphasize his sorrow, he said, “Never again.”
He had inadequately reacted to the genocide, he said, because he had not really known what had been happening in Rwanda.
National Intelligence Daily (NIDs are distributed to several hundred government policymakers six days a week.) ...The NIDs gathered by the Archive indicate that the administration was aware a genocide was occurring in Rwanda. An April 23 NID referred to a negotiation “effort to stop the genocide, which relief workers say is spreading south.” The April 26 NID item on Rwanda, entitled “Humanitarian Disaster Unfolding,” reported that the “Red Cross estimates that 100,000 to 500,000 people, mostly Tutsi, have been killed in the ethnic bloodletting” and that “eyewitness accounts from areas where nearly all Tutsi residents were killed support the higher estimate.”
But Clinton did not have to depend on the top-secret PDBs or NIDs to learn that there was a genocide transpiring in Rwanda. As the Archive notes, “beginning April 8th, the massacres in Rwanda were reported on the front pages of major newspapers and on radio and television broadcasts almost daily, including the major papers read by U.S. officials and policy elites.” And at that time human rights activists in Washington–who had close relationships with national security adviser Tony Lake and staffmembers of Clinton’s national security council–were pounding on the doors of the White House demanding action and suggesting options.
THE NATION
David Corn
Talk about dishonoring the flag. (BY law, the U.S. is obligated to intervene in cases of genocide.)
Makes me ashamed to be an American
