The Hypocrisy of Clinton's United Nations Speech on Drugs Is Award-winning
Drug Users in the White House Were Accepted as Top Employees
By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Conservative Net
If there were an annual award or oscar given for hypocrisy, Bill Clinton's performance at the United Nations yesterday on the drug problem surely would have won it for 1998. Addressing a special summit-level session of the General Assembly convened to discuss ways to counter drug trafficking and use, Clinton said that pointing fingers has not advanced the fight against drugs. "It does not dismantle a single cartel, help a single addict, prevent a single child from trying and perhaps dying from heroin," Clinton said.
This sanctimonious comment from the man who, as governor of Arkansas for more than a decade, somehow never noticed that his state was a major port-of-entry for illegal drugs. In fact, one pilot, Barry Seals, before his untimely death in a hail of bullets, claimed to have brought in more than a couple of billion dollars worth (in street value) of drugs into a small airport 160 miles from Little Rock.
During Governor Clinton's administration, in fact, drugs, especially cocaine, seemed to have been abundant in and around the capitol, involving his own brother, his best friends, several Arkansas State Departments, a number of people who contributed to his political campaigns and numerous employees. Funny he never noticed that.
And, then, when he became president in 1992, according to FBI Agent Gary Aldrich, illegal drug use was rampant in the White House. One of his earliest appointments was Joycelyn Elders as Surgeon General, who commented, about the time her son was arrested in Arkansas on serious drug charges, that the best solution to illegal drug use was to simply make them legal. That didn't go over too well with the American people.
David Watkins, who came in with the Clinton Administration as assistant to the president for Management and Administration, appeared to believe part of his job was covering up drug abuse of other Clinton friends and staff inside the White House. David Watkins was in charge of such matters as firing the entire Travel Office Staff and, apparently, in evading FBI questions about his background.
As Gary Aldrich put it in his book Unlimited Access "David Watkins was a good example of what we were up against. Watkins was an FOB, or 'Friend of Bill,' a person who had been hand-picked for his job at the White House by the president. He was also a good example of the 'quality' of staff that Bill and Hillary Clinton deemed suitable. Watkins was a long-time close personal friend of the Clintons and the FBI SPIN was supposed to establish the good character of Watkins so that he could obtain a security clearance and obtain permanent access to the White House."
Aldrich went on to outline the problems the FBI faced in trying to determine whether or not Watkins, and other "old friends" of Bill Clinton could get security clearance. Watkins was soon identified in the "mainstream media as a Clinton Campaign official who had been accused of sexual harassment in 1992 at about the same time Bill Clinton's alleged affair with Gennifer Flowers surfaced. It was also reported that the victim of the harassment, an accountant from Little Rock, was illegally given $37,000 of campaign funds to keep her mouth shut."
Watkins was eventually ousted when he used the presidential multi-million-dollar helicopter, Marine-One, as a golf cart, and the military crew as caddies.
Aldrich described several incidents in his efforts to check backgrounds for security clearances of staff at the White House. He noted, in talking about the standards of White House employment, "The White House staff did meet some standards. They met the standards that the Clintons set. If those standards were low, if they reflected the morality of the counterculture, then the Clintons are the only ones who can be blamed. This was proven to me, beyond a reasonable doubt, by the individuals Hillary chose to run the background adjudication process of the Counsel's office - Bill Kennedy, Craig Livingstone, and their respective staffs.
Associate Counsel Bill Kennedy was responsible for keeping persons of questionable character away from the White House. However, he did not appear to think hard drug use reflected upon one's character. When one of the FBI agents told him that a middle-aged man who had been using hard drugs, not just marijuana, should be gotten out of the White House complex "immediately", Kennedy "thanked Saunders and said he wouldn't deny the staffer access or clearance. 'I can hardly fire somebody for being honest to the FBI now, can I?"'
In 1996, Aldrich said in his book, that staffer was still at the White House. Another familiar name, Craig Livingstone, who left the White House after it was revealed that he had requested and had in his department 900 FBI files of Republicans, also directly addressed drug use issues. He told Aldrich that he had informed a student intern that she probably would not be able to get a job with the FBI, or Drug Enforcement, because they are "very straight" and would require a full disclosure about her background.
"I told her," Livingstone said to Aldrich, "that she could not hide her past. I mean, it isn't like the White House, where you can use drugs before, and skate past other indiscretions and still work here.
Early in the Clinton Administration David Watkins had slashed the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) to less than 25% of its former size. "The Clintons had changed the direction of the drug war from prevention and prosecution to treating drug abuse as a mental disorder," Aldrich wrote.
In yesterday's speech before the United Nations, it was obvious that his "soft of drugs" policy, which resulted in a sharp rise in illegal drugs on the streets, is being advocated as a worldwide policy. In his address, Clinton said his administration will request an anti-drug federal budget exceeding $17 billion for next fiscal year, of which $6 billion will be earmarked for reducing demand. In announcing several smaller initiatives, he said he would ask Congress to extend a new advertising campaign to discourage children from using drugs. The program got under way last fall with an initial $195 million budget, but Clinton promised to expand this to a $2 billion campaign through 2002, with part of the money donated by the private sector.
However, at the United Nations not everyone was buying the Clinton package. President Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico, said Monday that while a overwhelming part of the world's demand for drugs comes from "countries with the largest economic capacity," Zedillo said, "the human, social and institutional costs in meeting such demands is paid for by the producing and transit countries. "It is our men and women who die first in combating drug trafficking," he said. "It is our communities that are first to suffer from violence, our institutions that are first to be undermined by corruption. It is our governments that are the first to have to shift valuable resources needed to fight poverty to serve as the first bulwark in this war. 'I
The president of the Dominican Republic, Leonel Fernandez, said the problem was rooted in the law of supply and demand. "The demand is what makes the existence of the market possible," Fernandez said, explaining that the illegal trade it creates is highly profitable and attractive. He cited an intelligence estimate that 33 percent of the drugs smuggled into the United States from South America passes through the Caribbean, and 15 percent specifically through the island of Hispanola, which is shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Prominent among other voices pressing to reduce demand was Britain's deputy prime minister, John Prescott, who spoke on behalf of the European Union. "It is no use stopping opium cultivation in one place just to see more grown elsewhere," Prescott said. "We gain nothing by closing one trafficking route to see another opened."
While the American people may see nothing wrong with a president who says he smoked marijuana but "didn't inhale" and who has been accused of being a hard drug user himself, people in other countries don't seem to agree. In fact, it would appear that presidents of other nations are not in the mood to be lectured to by Bill Clinton, given his soft on drugs history.
President Zedillo is right. If it were not for the demand for the drugs in the United States, there would be no "cartels." There would be no market for the products produced from coca. Spending the taxpayers' dollars for an advertising campaign on drugs will do little or nothing to stop the drug flow. Most high school kids are more knowledgeable about drugs, their uses and their specific mood-altering capabilities than do their parents.
It says something about both the American people and the world we are living in that most of the media reported Clinton's hypocritical UN speech with a perfectly straight face.
The Reagan Information Interchange
HotTopics Online Preprocessor
Back to The Clinton Legacy Page
Back to Home Page