The presumptive Democratic nominee for President next time around, Hillary Clinton, expressed her outrage last week at the kidnapping of over 200 Nigerian schoolgirls by the terrorist group Boko Haram. Among other things, she called the attack “abominable,” “criminal,” and “AN ACT OF TERRORISM.” All of which it is. Unfortunately, when she was Secretary of State, and could actually have done something about disrupting Boko Haram, her actions tell an entirely different story.
Boko Haram is an extremist Islamic terrorist group with scores of violent terrorist attacks to its credit, including the bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria. The FBI, the CIA, and the Justice Department were clamoring to have the State Department name Boko Haram to the list of designated terrorist organizations, but Hillary Clinton refused to do so.
It’s speculated that this was at least partly due to the fact that the leftist organization MoveOn.org opposed the terrorist designation. Why? Their convoluted thinking was that naming Boko Haram a terrorist group would be “counterproductive,” since it would allegedly give them more visibility and more credibility.
Well, if that was the case, why would any group ever be put on the terrorist organization list? It would just give them more visibility and more credibility.
The whole point of putting a group on the list is that it helps U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies to combat them more effectively with additional tools. For example, designating a group a terrorist organization makes it illegal for U.S. entities to do business with them. It further cuts off that terrorist organization’s access to the U.S. financial system, and hopefully, at least to some degree, isolates and stigmatizes the terrorist group , arguably making them less effective and less dangerous. The goal is to encourage other nations friendly to the United States to take similar measures against the group.
Of course, when Hillary last week expressed her outrage at Boko Haram’s actions, she didn’t bother to mention that she’d blocked their designation as a terrorist organization when she had the power to do so. (Fortunately, her successor as Secretary of State, John Kerry, did designate Boko Haram as a terrorist organization last November.)
You probably also saw that the First Lady got into the act last week when she tweeted her solidarity with the Nigerian schoolgirls (see photo below) and her husband, the President, stated: “In the short term, our goal obviously is to help the international community and the Nigerian government as a team to do everything we can to recover these young ladies. But, we’re also going to have to deal with the broader problem of organizations like this that can cause such havoc in people’s day-to-day lives.”
However, let’s not forget that he’s the one who appointed Hillary Clinton Secretary of State, making her the chief agent of his foreign policy regime. When Hillary Clinton was blocking Boko Haram’s terrorist designation, she was acting on his behalf.
In conclusion, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama deserve to be to roundly criticized for their naive handling of a dangerous terrorist group. When the three a.m. call came, neither one of them was up to the task.
