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U.S. government called Rwanda killings "genocide" in April 1994
In a visit to Rwanda in 1998, then-president Bill Clinton apologized for not acting quickly to stop the country's genocide four years earlier. The reason, he said, was that he didn't know it was going on.

"It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members of your family, but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror," he said.

But according to newly declassified documents, it seems that wasn't true. Within days of the Hutu death squads' first killings, the CIA's daily briefing was referring to "genocide" in the country. And a state department intelligence briefing to Warren Christopher, then Secretary of State, not only talked about "genocide and partition," but also Hutu declarations of a "final solution to eliminate all Tutsis."

"Diplomats, intelligence officers and systems, and military and defense personnel yielded enough information for policy recommendations and decisions,," says a report from the National Security Archive, which pursued the documents. "That the Clinton administration decided against intervention at any level was not for lack of knowledge of what was happening in Rwanda."

Human Rights Watch has a backgrounder on lessons learned from the genocide. And, in case you missed it, we have several articles on our web site today noting the 10-year anniversary of the mass killings.

"Under God" as birth control?
A headline in The Washington Times this week: "Pledge seen reducing out-of-wedlock births." Turns out it's not about the Newdow case at all.

Breaking the law for Jesus
Hong Kong's famous DVD black market is good for something, says the Catholic web site AsiaNews. "Since early March, many Catholics in various parts of China have enjoyed private "premieres" of [The Passion of the Christ] thanks to the wide availability of DVD copies," the news service says. "These poor quality copies with Chinese subtitles are sold cheaply on streets in some parts of China. … Various Protestant websites enable to the film to be downloaded from another site in China."

The article suggests such actions are justified because the Chinese government is unlikely to allow the film to be shown in the country. But the government has made no such decree yet, and the article doesn't even give a nod to the legal and ethical issues of the church promoting piracy.

Who's the Nazi?
Our Lady of Grace Church in Johnson, Rhode Island, has a statue of the Good Shepherd out front. By it is a plaque that says, "Please pray for an end to abortion."

Last week, someone spray painted the statue and scrawled, "Anti-choice Nazis" by the plaque.

Don't they teach irony in schools any more?

The police, at least, know who's following in the Nazis goosesteps and are investigating the case as a hate crime. They may call in the FBI. "There's no question it's a willful and malicious act," Police Chief Richard Tamburini told The Providence Journal (which labels the vandal as "pro-choice." I tell you, irony is dead.) "This is not a child's prank. We'll do everything we can to prevent this from happening again. We're not letting this just disappear."

Abortion and sexual ethics:

• In Britain, one in five pregnancies ends in abortion | Office for National Statistics report said 36 percent of all pregnancies in women under 20 were terminated, a figure that has continued to rise despite the widespread availability of contraception and the "morning after" pill (The Daily Telegraph, London)
  
  

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March (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48