[ During the mid-90s, as the Hutus attempted to eliminate the Tutsis in Rwanda, the Clinton Administration refused to call the genocide ‘genocide’, perhaps because that would have obligated the U.S. to intervene under the 1948 Genocide Convention. Instead, it reprehensibly chose to hide its eyes behind bureaucracy and failed to save hundreds of thousands of lives at relatively little cost. Has the world learned its lesson yet? Samantha Power reports In his [careful, semi-apologetic] 1998 remarks in Kigali [President Clinton] pledged to “strengthen our ability to prevent, and if necessary to stop, genocide.” “Never again,” he declared, “must we […]
Daily Archives: March 24, 2004
4 posts
[ Samantha Power shows in the article below that “the U.S. government knew enough about the genocide early on to save lives, but passed up countless opportunities to intervene.” Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian commander of the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda, says that after the U.S. had effectively lobbied to reduce the peacekeeping forces from 2,500 to just a few hundred, My force was standing knee-deep in mutilated bodies, surrounded by the guttural moans of dying people, looking into the eyes of children bleeding to death with their wounds burning in the sun and being invaded by maggots and flies. […]
March 13, 2004, Knight-Ridder by Tony Pugh WASHINGTON – The nation’s top Medicare cost analyst confirmed Friday that his former boss, Thomas Scully, ordered him to withhold from lawmakers unfavorable cost estimates about the Medicare prescription drug bill. He said the estimates exceeded what Congress seemed willing to accept by more than $100 billion. Richard Foster, the chief actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said Friday night that he received a handwritten note from Scully, then the centers’ administrator, in early June ordering him to ignore information requests from members of Congress who were drafting the drug […]
[ Also check out the follow-up piece. –doclalor ] March 12, 2004, Knight-Ridder by Tony Pugh WASHINGTON – The government’s top expert on Medicare costs was warned that he would be fired if he told key lawmakers about a series of Bush administration cost estimates that could have torpedoed congressional passage of the White House-backed Medicare prescription-drug plan. When the House of Representatives passed the controversial benefit by five votes last November, the White House was embracing an estimate by the Congressional Budget Office that it would cost $395 billion in the first 10 years. But for months the administration’s own […]