Shadow of Tamils for Clinton in US State Dept

By Lucian Rajakarunanayake

(October 24, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The US State Department is not going through its best phase on matters of credibility and accountability just now. Apart from the fact that it is headed by a Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who is fast establishing a world record for “misspoke” which was the preferred word by her campaign managers at the Democratic Primary Campaign last year for falsifying, fibbing, speaking untruths etc, all of which to use the Winston Churchill’s phrase are terminological inexactitudes for lying.

In addition to the proclivity for utterance of untruths by Hillary Clinton, who is in charge of Foreign Affairs for Barack Obama now increasingly embattled on many fronts - especially over Afghanistan and Pakistan; the State Department is now faced with the dealings of its head with Raj Rajaratnam, under arrest for major insider dealing and other frauds and corporate crimes by the New York Police, who was a major contributor to her primary campaign against Obama, and later to the Obama campaign too.

This report by State Department to a committee of Congress also came soon on the heels of the blatant lie that Hillary Clinton said while chairing the UN Security Council gladly lumping Sri Lankan troops are among those who use rape as a tactic of war. It was such a blatant lie, which had obviously not undergone the basic verification required for such an utterance by a person holding such office, and worse still was that she did not have the courage to express her own regret at her falsehood, but had to use another person, an ambassador for women’s and gender affairs in her department for the retraction.

Beginning with her lying over a visit to Bosnia, in the midst of heavy bombardment during the war there, and next trying to fool the world about her role in helping the resolve ‘troubles” in Northern Ireland, to this blatant lie about the use of rape in Sri Lanka, Hillary Clinton has once again been exposed as having lied to the Northern Irish Parliament or Stormont, during her visit there two weeks ago.

She had said that during her visit to a famed hotel there she had been in the midst of the huge damage caused by bombing of the hotel.

It has now been exposed as a lie by the Irish Press, which had said that the hotel concerned, which indeed had been bombed several times by the IRA, had last been so attacked two years before the Clintons came there, occupying it booking 110 rooms, and that the last repair of the hotel, after bombing, been 22 months before her stated visit.

With such an abundance of lies of “misspoke” by its head, the US State Department cannot be taken seriously when it makes pronouncements or reports about anything or issue of importance today. The problems concerning the State Department’s latest report on the conflict in Sri Lanka was seen by the admission of non-verification and non substantiation of facts and statements, assertions and allegations that have been included in the report by the spokesman for the State Department, shortly after it was presented.

Reproduced here is the transcript of the October 22 Press Briefing by Ian Kelly, spokesman of the US State Department on the Report by the State Department to the Appropriations Committee of Congress on the conflict in Sri Lanka. The answers speak for themselves.

Here is the transcript of the press briefing

Q: A question about this report you have about Sri Lanka and the various atrocities that took place there.

Mr. Kelly: Mm-hmm

Q: It’s been - come under criticism from some quarters that it isn’t tough enough in assigning blame and that it’s just sort of a catalog of misery without actually saying who did - who is responsible for this and sort of holding anybody to account. What’s your reaction to that? Why didn’t you take a more stronger public stance about the Government’s indiscriminate shelling of civilians, for instance? And what do you think the - what should the world be reading into this report?

Mr. Kelly: Yeah

Q: What does it mean for where we go forward? What’s it about?

Mr. Kelly: Right, right. Those are all very good questions. This report was mandated by the Appropriations Committee. They requested that the Administration report on - I want to get this right here - report on what happened in Sri Lanka during the fighting in the North there. I think that what this is an attempt to do is to - we wanted to lay out all of these credible allegations of human rights violations.

The report doesn’t attempt to verify all the claims, but we believe that the claims, which are based mostly on reporting by the Embassy, by international organizations on the ground out there, and by media and NGOs - we believe that they are credible. But like I say, we don’t try and verify them.

In terms of what this means is - what we call for is for the Sri Lankan Government in the first instance, to open up the area to international organizations to be able to come in and understand better the facts on the ground, what happened there. So that’s kind of the first step. And then we call on them to develop the kind of mechanisms that can more thoroughly investigate these many allegations, which are laid out in this report, and then ultimately, as appropriate, bring to justice those who are found guilty.

The Sri Lankan Government has said they are determined to establish a reconciliation process with the people of the North. But we believe strongly that a very important part of any reconciliation process is accountability, and so that’s what we recommend in the report that —

Q: Does the U.S. take any position on calls by Human Rights Watch, and perhaps some others, that there should be an international investigation or there should be - rather than assigning the - essentially the victors of the war?

Mr. Kelly: Yeah

Q: The right to investigate their own conduct, that would be more sensible

Mr. Kelly: Right

Q: To have an international body which could perhaps more dispassionately.

Mr. Kelly: Yeah

Q: do this?

Mr. Kelly: Well, as I said in reference to the other issue we were just discussing, that international law, in the first place, places the primary responsibility on the state actor to establish - an investigation and to set up the kind of mechanisms that deal with those who are responsible for these kinds of human rights violations. So that’s - we believe that that’s the first step here, and so we’re - we would first call on the Sri Lankan Government to identify the appropriate institution to set up this kind of mechanism and go from there.

Q: Ian, do you believe that the Sri Lankan Government has been magnanimous as a victor? That was something that you were calling for, or the State Department was calling for months ago, when the conflict ended.

Mr. Kelly: Yeah. Well, this - I mean, this report lays out some real concerns, obviously, that we have about how this military operation was conducted. And we also, of course, are calling on the Sri Lankan Government to allow more access to international organizations.

I will say that we have - we’ve not done this report in a vacuum. We have consulted quite closely with the Sri Lankan Government.

We’ve explained to them the parameters of the report and also went into the kind of recommendations that we have. And as I say, we’ve encouraged them privately as well to investigate these allegations thoroughly and set up this mechanism.

It is obvious that the State Department is only concerned with what is alleged to have happened in the final, stages of the war and that too with heavily tinted glasses,, and is not bothered in the least about all the bloodshed, atrocities and attacks on civilians and property carried by the what this same US Department has described as the “most ruthless terrorist organization in then world” through the entire 25 plus years of its heinous operations.

With Raj Rajaratnam already exposed, and the connections he had with the ‘Tamils for Clinton” and later the “Tamils for Obama” now well known, there can be the least doubt the US State Department is today leaning more in favour of the pro-LTTE Tamil groups in New York and Washington, who are no doubt good donors for campaigns and also possibly good foot soldiers for political work too. These are not forces that are interested in reconciliation or the restoration of genuine peace in Sri Lanka.

The State Department report therefore deserves to be treated with a large degree of doubt and suspicion as to its intent, and thus cannot be considered a credible and reasonable document, that is produced with genuine concern for resolving the problems Sri Lanka faces, as a result of the protracted war against terror, which the country has won for the entire world.

It must also be noted that it seems time form other countries, especially of the Third World to call for and establish their own tribunals to examine the violations of human rights and other crimes or war and against humanity that are widespread today, particularly where the US has a clear hand in their origins and conduct, especially in Iraq, Afghanistan and very sadly in Pakistan today.

-Sri Lanka Guardian